An expedition has reached a remote island in the South Pacific where it believes Amelia Earhart’s lost plane may have landed when the famed female pilot disappeared nearly 90 years ago.
A group of researchers with the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University arrived Tuesday at the island of Nikumaroro, the university announced in a press release. The crewmembers will then hike their way toward a lagoon where an anomaly was spotted on satellite images.
Earhart mysteriously vanished in the summer of 1937 while flying around the world, hoping to be the first woman to accomplish such a feat. But on the morning of July 2, 1937, the U.S. Coast Guard ship lost contact with Earhart and her navigator as they attempted to fly to Howland Island.
The last transmissions from the two-person crew was Earhart reporting unexpected cloudy weather before she told the Coast Guard crew that she could not find them and that her plane was running out of a fuel.
She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were never heard from again.
It’s believed that Earhart crashed-landed but a weekslong search by the U.S. government at the time found no trace of the plane. Nearly a century later, the historic female aviator’s disappearance remains one of the world’s great mysteries.
The island of Nikumaroro is very close to where Earhart was at the time of her last radio transmissions. It’s an uninhabited island that’s part of the Phoenix Islands belonging to the Republic of Kiribati.
Some artifacts have been found on the island that indicate Earhart and Noonan’s plane may have landed there, including glass bottles from the 1930s and a woman’s makeup compact.
It’s expected to take the crew at least three weeks between travel and searching the island before they return home, according to Purdue University.
The project is a “huge logistical feat,” according to Steve Schultz, senior vice president and general counsel at Purdue University. He is one of three members of the crew from Purdue and noted last week that moving more than a dozen people with large amounts of equipment has become its own obstacle.
“Even when you think you’ve done enough planning and preparation, everything has to fall into place once you’re underway,” he said. “The amazing thing is that it has been a series of small victories.”
Now that they’ve reached Nikumaroro, they’ll have to hack through heavy vegetation as they make their way to the lagoon and then attempt to identify the object as Earhart’s lost Lockheed Electra 10E. The journey is further complicated by very large crabs that inhabit the island, preventing the crew from camping on the land. Each night, the crewmembers will have to return to their boat and sleep in pods below deck.
The expedition is being led by Richard Pettigrew, executive director of the Archaeological Legacy Institute. He said in a statement prior to the team embarking on the journey that the project comes with “an array of strong feelings.”
“I feel truly lucky to be in a position to possibly solve one of the greatest mysteries of all time, whether or not that happens,” Pettigrew said.
If the crew does end up finding Earhart’s plane, Purdue University’s research foundation hopes to raise money to excavate the aircraft and bring it back to Indiana.