There’s a new lead in the nearly nine-decade-long search for Amelia Earhart’s plane, which disappeared without trace during her ill-fated attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world in 1937.
A photograph from a 2009 expedition in the Pacific Ocean around Nikumaroro Island, a remote atoll between New Zealand and Hawaii, appears to show an engine cover buried underwater that may have been part of the aviator’s plane that crossed borders, it reported. the Daily Mail on Saturday.
“There is an object in the photo that appears to be the cowling of a Lockheed Electra engine,” Ric Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), told the outlet.
A forensic imaging specialist is analyzing the photo, according to Gillespie, whose group has led the Earhart Project, which has been investigating the disappearance of Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan in 1937, since 1988.
“The similarity to an engine cowl and driveshaft was not noted until years later and the exact location was not noted at the time, which meant that attempts to relocate the object were unsuccessful,” Gillespie added.
Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, right, pose next to their plane with gold miner FC Jacobs just before their ill-fated last flight in 1937.AP
Amelia Earhart, seen before taking off from Lae, New Guinea, on July 2, 1937, en route to Howland Island. She never arrived. EPA
Experts are analyzing a photograph taken near a remote Pacific island that appears to show an engine cover buried underwater in the hope that it may be linked to Earhart’s plane.AP
If tests reveal that the engine cover was from Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed Model 10E Special Electra, it wouldn’t explain why the plane crashed in the ocean, but it would dispel Gillespie’s theory that Earhart and Noonan crash-landed and ultimately died on Nikumaroro.
To support their stance, Gillespie’s group cites the locations of transmissions they believed only she could have sent, and a photograph taken of the coastline in 1937 that the group believes could include Electra’s landing gear.
A year after the disaster, Britain colonized the island, and newcomers reported seeing plane parts, glass bottles from the 1930s, and bones next to the remains of a campfire that investigators determined might have belonged to a woman. of Earhart’s constitution, according to National Geographic.
However, no hard evidence has ever been found to confirm that the duo landed on the uninhabited atoll.
The most recent “breakthrough” came late last year, when scientists at Penn State’s Center for Radiation Science and Engineering found never-before-seen lettering on a metal plate that was recovered on the island in 1991.
The panel had rivet punctures that were similar to those on Earhart’s plane, but experts later determined they were “not an exact match” and were likely part of the wreckage of a World War II plane that crashed several years later.
The official US position is that the plane ran out of fuel on its way to Howland Island and crashed into the ocean, according to National Geographic.
Howland Island is about 400 miles from Nikumaroro Island and was meant to be Earhart’s last refueling stop before she flew to California to finish her historic 29,000-mile journey.
A possible lead in the case emerged last year when investigators found rivets on a metal plate that was recovered on Nikumaroro Island in the 1990s, but it was later discovered that the artifact was probably the ruins of a Navy plane. Second World War.
Large-scale expeditions to the waters surrounding the small island have found no evidence of his plane.
A third theory was that Earhart and Noonan landed in the Marshall Islands and were taken hostage by the Japanese.
Some believers in this conspiracy theory believe that they ultimately returned to the United States under false names.
Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and in 1931 set a world altitude record of 18,415 feet.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn