A Purdue-led team has reached Nikumaroro’s lagoon to dredge for Amelia Earhart’s lost Electra, nearly 90 years after the famed aviator vanished.
A 17-member expedition from Purdue University and the Archaeological Legacy Institute arrived Oct. 12 at the western edge of Nikumaroro, an uninhabited coral atoll in Kiribati, and will scour the island lagoon for a submerged feature labeled the Taraia Object on satellite images, USA TODAY reported.
The crew plans to use a hydraulic dredge to remove sediment from the object with care. If the largest sections of a Lockheed Electra 10E turn up, the fuselage and wings, the team will not enter the wreckage. It will return the following year for a full-scale excavation and eventual removal to the United States.
The effort is the 20th organized search for the plane Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan flew on their July 2, 1937, attempt to circle the globe. They left Lae, Papua New Guinea, bound for Howland Island and never arrived. The Coast Guard cutter Itasca, waiting near Howland to refuel them, took voice messages from Earhart saying the plane was almost out of fuel. Neither Earhart nor Noonan knew Morse code.
Nikumaroro lies about 350 miles southeast of Howland and about 2,100 miles southeast of Hawaii. Howland itself is a speck smaller than New York’s Central Park. The island is the center of the long-running theory that Earhart and Noonan landed on the reef, then watched the plane wash into the sea.
Radio bearings recorded in 1937 by the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard, and Pan American World Airways converge on the atoll. Photographs show the Taraia Object in the same lagoon location since 1938. A photographic anomaly known as the Bevington Object, captured on the reef about three months after the disappearance, appears to some researchers to show one of the plane’s landing gears.
Human bones turned up on the island in 1940. A 2018 analysis of those measurements suggested a woman of Earhart’s stature. Artifacts recovered over the years, a woman’s shoe, a compact case, a freckle cream jar, a medicine vial, date to the 1930s. The Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue say the Taraia Object findings from satellite imagery were revealed in 2020.
Steve Schultz, senior vice president of Purdue University, said the school is discussing an agreement with Kiribati to entrust Purdue with custody of any wreckage. Kiribati maintains control of the island. Identification, if metal is found, would rest in part on rivet spacing and geometry in the aluminum aircraft skin.
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, known as TIGHAR, has driven the Nikumaroro theory since 1988 and ran a dozen expeditions between 1989 and 2017. Its conclusion is blunt.
TIGHAR has stated that
"whatever remains of the Electra lies in deep water off the island’s west end."
That judgment has not stopped new attempts. In 2019, explorer Robert Ballard and National Geographic spent 18 days, from Aug. 7 to 25, mapping 2,164 square miles of seafloor around the island with the ship E/V Nautilus and remotely operated vehicles. They found no Electra wreckage and no remains.
Deep Sea Vision ran a sonar survey from September to December 2023 across 5,200 square miles roughly 100 miles from Howland, at depths near 16,000 feet. In January 2024 the group announced a plane-shaped object. By November 2024 it said the object was a plane-shaped natural rock formation.
The first hunt was the largest. After the disappearance, the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard searched for 16 days, July 2 to 18, 1937. Seven government ships and Navy aircraft covered 262,281 square miles. Planes overflew the Phoenix Group, including Nikumaroro, but conducted no ground searches. Officials concluded the Electra ran out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific. They found no evidence.
By 1937 Earhart was already one of the most famous Americans alive. In 1922 she broke the women’s altitude record with a 14,000-foot flight. In 1928 she published her first book, “20 Hrs., 40 Minutes,” and visited President Calvin Coolidge at the White House. In 1932 she became the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic, leaving Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, and reaching the area near Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in about 15 hours in a Lockheed Vega 5B. That same year she became the first person to fly solo nonstop across the United States.
She was the third person, and the first woman, to fly solo across the Atlantic after Charles Lindbergh in 1927 and Bert Hinkler in 1931. On April 20, 1933, she and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt left a White House dinner, drove to Hoover Field, and took an unplanned flight to Baltimore. President Franklin Roosevelt was not along. In 1935 she flew solo from Honolulu to Oakland, another first, and became a visiting professor at Purdue, serving as a career counselor for women and an adviser to the university’s Department of Aeronautics. Purdue later named a terminal at its airport for her.
The country kept her memory in ordinary ways. The Postal Service issued an 8-cent airmail stamp on July 24, 1963, what would have been her 66th birthday. Mattel released a Barbie in her image in 2018. LEGO issued an Amelia Earhart Tribute set in March 2021. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum displays her Vega 5B and has reviewed the government records on the final flight.
The current team will spend several days on the lagoon work. No result has been announced. Prior searches found no Electra. The Taraia Object remains a satellite label and a target, not a confirmed airframe. Purdue’s custody talks with Kiribati are discussions, not a signed deal. The rivet-pattern test is a plan for metal that has not yet been raised.
Still the expedition is on the water. A major American university and a field archaeology group have put people, a dredge, and a year-two excavation pledge on the line at the same atoll that has drawn radio bearings, bones, 1930s personal items, and decades of failed sonar. The plane has been missing since July 2, 1937. The search has not stopped.
American pioneers built this country’s reach. When one of them vanishes on the job, the decent habit is to keep looking until the facts are settled, not to shrug and move on.
