Amelia Earhart Plane Fragment May Have Been Identified

After decades of looking, researchers say they may finally have found a bit of wreckage from Amelia Earhart's plane. The aluminum fragment was recovered in 1991 on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean about 2,000 miles southwest of Hawaii. Some believe Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, lived there as castaways after being forced to land during their 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe. “This is the first time an artifact found on Nikumaroro has been shown to have a direct link to Amelia Earhart,” Ric Gillespie, executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), the non-profit group that made the identification, told Discovery News. The aluminum fragment found on Nikumaroro, which may be a piece from Amelia Earhart's plane. Researchers initially had little interest in the piece because its size and shape didn't seem to match any part of Earhart's Lockheed Electra aircraft. But earlier this year, Gillespie and his colleagues spotted a shiny patch near the tail of Earhart's aircraft in a photo taken in Miami shortly before she took off on her second try at flying around the world on July 1, 1937. According to TIGHAR, the patch was placed where a window had been, an "expedient field modification," before her plane disappeared over the Pacific on July 2. After an exhaustive re-analysis of the patch's size, shape, and rivet hole patterns, the TIGHAR researchers decided it was a match. "The patch was as u...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news