The new expedition to find Amelia Earhart’s plane

A team of researchers has arrived at a remote, crab-infested island to inspect possible plane wreckage of the famed aviator Amelia Earhart, who vanished in 1937.

The “mystery of what happened” to the pioneering Earhart has “captivated historians and conspiracy theorists for nearly 90 years”, said The Telegraph. Now, nearly 90 years later, one of aviation’s greatest mysteries might be solved.

Crash landing

Born in 1897, Earhart became passionate about flying and determined to prove that women could achieve great things in aviation. In 1928, she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air as a passenger. She also championed greater opportunities for women in aviation, and helped establish the organisation known as the Ninety-Nines, which supported female pilots.

In 1937, she attempted to fly around the world with navigator Fred Noonan, but on 2 July, they disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while travelling towards Howland Island. Despite extensive searches, neither they, nor their aircraft, were ever found.

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The official explanation is that the plane suffered communication problems and ran out of fuel before crashing into the ocean, but some think that Earhart and Noonan “crash-landed on or near” a coral-ringed atoll and “perished as castaways there, hundreds of miles from their intended refuelling stop”, said Reuters. It is there that the new searches will focus on.

Crabs and El Niño

Supported by Purdue University, Indiana, an institution “long affiliated with Earhart ​and her legacy”, the researchers will work to locate an item that’s been named the Taraia Object, first spotted on the edge of a lagoon off Nikumaroro island in satellite imagery in 2020.

They will aim to discover whether it’s the wreckage of Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10-E aeroplane. Sceptics doubt that it is an aircraft at all. Some believe it’s simply a collapsed tree.

The search crew from the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University arrived at Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific Ocean on Monday and their work is expected to take five days.

The project faces two main challenges: giant land-dwelling crabs, and the El Niño climate phenomenon. The coconut crabs, also known as robber crabs, “emerge at night” on the “hunt for small mammals and seabirds”, and their presence will “force the search crew to spend nights on their ship for their own safety”, said the BBC.

Two previous attempts to locate the plane’s wreckage ‌in the surrounding ⁠ocean “proved fruitless”, reported Reuters. Whether this one is a success remains to be seen, but Earhart’s place in aviation history is secure.