By JULIAN RYALL
Ric Gillespie has been chasing the same woman for more than 12 years. Now he reckons he knows where she is. If he's right, then one of the longest-running mysteries in the history of aviation has been solved.
Gillespie believes he knows what happened to pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart, and that the expedition his foundation is planning for next year will prove it.
Since July 2, 1937, when Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific on her second attempt to circle the globe close to the equator, there have been dozens of theories as to what happened after the pair took off from Lae, New Guinea.
For many years the accepted wisdom was that their Lockheed Model 10E Special Electra had simply run out of fuel and crashed in the ocean as they searched for Howland Island, their final refuelling stop before flying on to Honolulu and completing the journey in California.
And that was what the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar) also believed. At first.
"It seemed most likely that she simply got lost, ran out of gas and crashed into the ocean," says Gillespie, executive director of the foundation.
"It wasn't until I learned about the navigational logic that suggested it should have been possible for her
to reach land that I became interested in seeing if that could be investigated."
In 1988 Tighar set out to find her. The group has mounted five expeditions to a speck of land called Nikumaroro, south of Howland Island, and Gillespie is confident that a fresh expedition next year will provide the final piece of the 63-year-old puzzle.
But scouring a deserted atoll 3.2km long and 1.6km wide for proof that could be as small as a single shirt button or human tooth is a daunting undertaking.
"We have to look at the available evidence and make guesses, knowing that there are other possible explanations," he says.
The plan for the expedition is to hire a ship out of Fiji and take a team of about 12 people for 10 days.
Previous expeditions have not turned up identifiable pieces of the aircraft on the atoll, so the next step is to put divers on the ledge of the surrounding reef, and on a sandbar at the mouth of a passage into the lagoon, where it is believed wave action is likely to have deposited aircraft debris.
Then there is the question of what Gillespie refers to as "crew debris." And it is here that members of the team have already proved their worth.
In 1997 Tighar researchers discovered a file in the national archives of the Republic of Kiribati — to which Nikumaroro now belongs — containing 16 items of official British colonial correspondence.
The documents detail the discovery, in September 1940, of human remains — including a skull, parts of a woman's shoe, a Benedictine bottle and other artefacts — beside the remains of a campfire. The bones and artefacts were sent to British headquarters in Fiji for examination and the matter was declared "strictly secret."
Modern forensic analysis of the bone measurements concluded that the individual was probably a white female of northern European extraction who was 1.7m tall. Which pretty much describes Earhart.
Unfortunately, what may well have been the remains of Earhart have since disappeared, possibly in the confusion of the Second World War as it swept through the Pacific a few months later.
Extensive examination of clues in the documents has narrowed the places where the bones might have been found down to three sites, and the next expedition will focus on one of them, called the "Seven Site" because of its shape from the air.
An earlier expedition had considered the area but had been disappointed that artefacts found there — including a water tank, scraps of corrugated metal and the base of an unusual-looking light bulb — were clearly associated with the British colonial settlement, while a partly collapsed hole, it was initially surmised, was the remains of a well.
But the documents proved that an organised search of the site where the bones were found was conducted by the resident colonial officer and the debris found was the remains of that search.
Tighar now believes that there are two layers of clues on top of one another, and what they took for a well may be the shallow grave dug for a skeleton that was found and later exhumed and sent to Fiji.
And the evidence they are looking for? Ideally, Gillespie says, a shard of bone or a single tooth from the excavated grave that can be compared to DNA samples taken from Earhart's descendants.
The trail the group is following, the result of more than a decade of pulling together scraps of information, has led to a hypothesis:
With between three and four hours of fuel left, Earhart and Noonan have been unable to make visual or radio contact with Howland Island.
They choose the only option that will minimise the chance of having to ditch the aircraft at sea, proceeding south-east on a heading of 157 degrees (in the last radio message from the Electra, Earhart said she was flying on a 157/337 navigational line of position).
Shortly before noon, Earhart lands the plane on reef flats of uninhabited Gardner Island, now known as Nikumaroro, just north of the wreck of the SS Norwich City, which ran aground on the reef in 1929.
The same evening the aircraft's radio is used to transmit distress calls. The signals are heard by a searching US Coast Guard vessel, the Itasca, on the frequency Earhart said she was switching to in an earlier transmission. A radio station on Nauru also hears "fairly strong signals, speech not intelligible, no hum of plane in background, but voice similar to that emitted from plane in flight last night."
Experts agree that for the aircraft to be sending signals it must be on land and able to operate the generator-equipped engine to recharge its batteries. Over the next few days further transmissions are heard, leading the Navy to concentrate its search on the islands of the Phoenix group.
As the search continues, rougher seas and increased surf on the reef force Earhart and Noonan to abandon the aircraft, which is obscured at high tide. They shelter in the bush and come across a cache of provisions left by the SS Norwich City's survivors. When search planes from the USS Colorado are heard overhead on July 9, Earhart and Noonan are unable to reach the open beach in time to be seen.
A photo taken by the searching aircraft in 1937 shows a high tide, which would have obscured the aircraft on the reef, but one of the pilots reports: "Here, signs of recent habitation were clearly evident," despite the fact that Nikumaroro was officially uninhabited.
Literally marooned on a desert island, Earhart and Noonan survive for a time but eventually succumb to any number of possible causes, including injury or infection, food poisoning or simply thirst. Noonan dies not far from the site of their landing, Earhart dies at a makeshift camp near the shore of the lagoon on the south-east of the island.
These theories are supported by several reports, including one in October 1937, of "signs of previous habitation" by a small party that briefly came ashore from a British ship, and accounts by subsequent residents and an American serviceman of the discovery of the remains of a man and woman.
More compelling are British Government records which came to light in 1997 confirming the discovery in 1940 of the partial skeleton of a castaway who perished before the island was settled in 1939.
The conclusion to the theory is that the aircraft is destroyed by surf action and the debris scattered across the reef, along the shore and into the lagoon.
During the years the island is inhabited, between 1938 and 1963, colonists recover and use bits of wreckage. The locals report the material came from "an aeroplane that was here when our people first came."
The Tighar foundation's Niku I expedition, in October 1989, turned up a navigator's bookcase and some strips of aluminium. Some of the items could immediately be ruled out as being incompatible with the Electra but there was enough initial evidence to plan more expeditions.
In October 1991 the Tighar foundation was back on the atoll, where searchers discovered a broken thermometer and a threaded metal cap dating from the 1930s. Then a member of the team was changing his boots as a crab scuttled by, knocking aside a leaf and revealing a shoe heel.
The area was cordoned off and examined meticulously. The remnants of two shoe heels, a sole, leather fragments and a brass eyelet were discovered.
One of the shoes has been identified, with the help of an American shoe company, as a woman's blucher oxford, size 8 or 9 narrow, that the firm manufactured in the mid-1930s. Earhart was photographed wearing an identical shoe 10 days before her final flight. She had size 8 or 9 feet.
The discovery fits perfectly with the oft-repeated story of how, in 1938, the first work party to land on Nikumaroro came upon the skeleton of a white man and woman on the same part of the atoll where the shoe fragments were found 53 years later. According to the story, the woman's skeleton was wearing American shoes, size 9 narrow.
The next expedition, in 1996, discovered some lengths of 1930s-era aircraft cable as well as shards of Plexiglass that, according to the Winterthur Museum Analytical Laboratory, exactly match the curvature, material and thickness of the window in the Electra's fuselage.
The most recent visit to the island, in July last year, was a preliminary fact-finding trip ahead of next year's planned expedition.
"As a result of last year's field work we may now be able to figure out where to look for the pieces that will conclusively solve the case," says Gillespie.
Despite what some might see as an obsession with the most famous woman aviator in history, Gillespie says the task at hand is simply to find out what happened to her.
"It's not Earhart, it's the legend she has become," he says. "Part of that was the result of careful promotion by herself and her husband during her career, the rest is the lure of the mystery surrounding her disappearance."
If they do find incontrovertible evidence that lays the legend to rest, then the real work will begin, he says.
"We will have identified an archaeological site which could require years of investigation to determine, to whatever degree possible, what it was that actually happened."
More missing planes to find
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