Amelia Earhart search missions begins: five others that failed

An expedition to search for the lost aircraft of Amelia Earhart leaves Hawaii Tuesday with high hopes. But many have tried, and failed, to find conclusive evidence before.?

By Peter Grier,?Staff writer / July 3, 2012

The University of Hawaii ship Kaimikai-O-Kanaloa, seen here anchored at harbor in Honolulu, is set to leave for of a month-long voyage Tuesday to attempt to find plane wreckage from Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra, which disappeared over the South Pacific 75 years ago.

Oskar Garcia/AP

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What happened to Amelia Earhart??That?s one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th?century.

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On July 2, 1937, the famed aviatrix and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared after missing their intended destination of Howland Island, a speck of coral in the vast blue of the central Pacific. A massive sea and air search conducted by the US government found no trace of the pair or their Lockheed Electra 10E.

Ever since researchers, scientists, history buffs, and plain dreamers have longed to succeed where Uncle Sam failed and find evidence ? a wing, traceable equipment, perhaps an entire aircraft ? which uncovers the story of her fate.

The latest search for Amelia planned to leave Hawaii on Tuesday, bound for the remote Pacific archipelago nation of Kiribati. The $2.2 million expedition has been organized by The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). Previous TIGHAR trips have located debris which hints at the possibility that Earhart and Noonan ended up marooned on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island that today is part of Kiribati, after a forced landing.

Now the group will used sophisticated underwater gear to search a spot where they believe tides and ocean currents may have deposited Earhart?s plane some 75 years ago.

?Everything has pointed to the airplane having gone over the edge of that reef in a particular spot and the wreckage ought to be right down there,? said Ric Gillespie, TIGHAR founder, according to the Associated Press. ?We?re going to search where it ? in quotes ? should be. And maybe it?s there, maybe it?s not. And there?s no way to know unless you go and look.?

Among the evidence TIGHAR says it has accumulated from Nikumaroro is a zipper from 1930s clothing, a cosmetic bottle which resembles those used by an anti-freckle cream sold in that era, and human bone fragments. But it?s important to keep TIGHAR?s work, however promising, in context. Many searches for Earhart have come up empty over the years.

The first search. The official search began only an hour or so after the last recorded Earhart transmission. The US Coast Guard cutter Itasca searched north and west of Howland Island, on the theory that Earhart and Noonan had simply missed their landing spot by a short distance.

?Itasca searched throughout the day to the northward of Howland Island and during the night of 2-3 July with searchlights, extra lookouts posted and all hands on the alert,? reads a Coast Guard report of Itasca?s mission.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/A6CHAgXT5Jw/Amelia-Earhart-search-missions-begins-five-others-that-failed

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