Amelia Earhart last flight video :
this writer was unable to vet the following
video as part of Earhart’s final flight, but it’s definitely footage of
Amelia and her navigator, Fred Noonan.
Many notable names of the 20th century have faded with the passage of
time.
Not so with aviatrix Amelia Earhart.
The pioneering female pilot
disappeared while flying over the Pacific Ocean in 1937, but people
still wonder what happened to her.
In fact, the
Amelia Earhart mystery
is generating global buzz right now, and the world can thank Ric
Gillespie and Thomas King of The International Group for Historic
Aircraft Recovery’s Amelia Earhart Project for that.
On October 1, 2016,
Nature World News made the announcement
that the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery has
recovered and is touting conclusive evidence that proves where and
possibly how Amelia Earhart and her flight navigator, Fred Noonan,
perished
nearly 80 years ago.
Although no real evidence was ever presented that could prove or
disprove it, the U.S. government declared the official cause of
Earhart’s and Noonan’s deaths to be an airplane crash.
In theory, a
plane crash into unknown Pacific waters makes sense.
She had, after all,
crashed while piloting a plane at least twice before.
In reality, the
demise of Amelia Earhart and her trusty navigator may be a far more
grisly tale.
According to The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery,
or TIGHAR, Amelia knew she was running out of fuel and could not find
her planned destination of Howland Island, so she landed her plane on a
relatively flat coral reef on the western edge of an atoll then known as
Gardner Island. She used the last of her fuel to send distress calls
for several nights.
A week after Earhart’s final radio transmission, the
U.S. Navy sent a fleet of search planes to find Amelia.
By then,
Earhart’s Lockheed Electra had been swept off the tiny reef and into
very deep water, so no wreckage was seen from above.
Search pilot Lt.
John O. Lambrecht did report seeing “signs of recent habitation” on the
beach, but he assumed there were natives living on the island and did
not send a rescue team.
Finding Amelia with Hard Facts and Sound Science :
Powerpoint presentation given by TIGHAR Executive Director Ric Gillespie
at The Collider in Asheville, NC on August 5, 2106
What in the world happened to Amelia Earhart?
As the official story goes, Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E “flying
laboratory” was equipped with aviation gear that was state of the art
for the time.
Biography.com
notes that although Amelia was a competent pilot, she was not a very
good navigator.
She flew more by instinct than by instruments, which may
or may not have contributed to her disappearance on June 2, 1937.
Other
factors that came into play that fateful night were the overcast skies
that blocked Noonan’s ability to navigate by the stars and the fact that
the charts used by Noonan and Earhart were outdated and placed 6,500
feet long, 1,600 feet wide Howland Island, which was their destination,
at least five miles from its actual location.
Amelia’s plane circled the
region, looking for Howland Island and its tiny landing strip as they
radioed a U.S. Coast Guard vessel called the Itasca with the following
message.
In the days following Amelia’s disappearance, at least 100 people
around the planet reported hearing distress calls that originated from
Earhart’s radio, reports
The Vintage News.
Among those who described calls were a shortwave operator in Texas who
said that Amelia claimed to have made a partial water landing.
Another
radio listener reported hearing Earhart say she was injured, but that
her navigator was in worse shape than she.
Anecdotal evidence is
fascinating, but not enough to prove that Earhart and Noonan survived
their aviation mishap long enough to fire up the radio and send distress
calls.
Things that can prove the doomed duo survived a crash and died some
time later are the “hard facts and sound science” presented by
Ric Gillespie
at The Collider in Asheville, North Carolina, on August 5 of this year.
Nikumaroro with the GeoGarage platform (Linz nautical chart)
According to Gillespie, Earhart landed her Lockheed Electra on the
western reef slope of the South Pacific coral atoll of Nikumaroro, some
1,800 nautical miles southwest of Hawaii, 700 nautical miles south of
Samoa and 1,000 nautical miles north of Fiji.
As Gillespie describes it,
Nikumaroro atoll is in “the middle of nowhere.”
Nikumaroro with the GeoGarage platform (NGA nautical chart)
And the middle of nowhere is precisely where a 19 inch by 23 inch
rectangle of aluminum was found by TIGHAR researchers in 1991.
Since
that time, TIGHAR researchers have unearthed several other bits of
conclusive evidence on Nikumaroro, including a pot of freckle cream, the
heel of a woman’s shoe that matches contemporary photos of Earhart and
several small bones.
Scientists surmise that the rest of Earhart’s and
Noonan’s bones may yet be discovered in old crab burrows.
This excerpt form the Discovery Channel documentary Finding Amelia explains TIGHAR's theory about how how Earhart landed on the reef at Gardner Island (Nikumaroro)
Scab patch as proof that Amelia landed on Nikumaroro atoll.
When the aluminum slab was first discovered, some pooh-poohed it as
not matching Earhart’s Elektra airplane.
In 1996, the metal was tested
by an independent lab and was found to be essentially identical to the
24ST Al-clad aluminum used as the skin of Earhart’s plane, NR16020.
Recently, the TIGHAR team found a
Miami Herald photograph that
clearly shows the same piece used as a “scab patch” to cover a broken
window on the plane that became a part of the Amelia Earhart mystery
more than seven decades ago.
Gillespie notes that “the patch was as
unique to her particular aircraft as a fingerprint is to an individual
and that the aluminum matches that fingerprint in many respects.”
Video summary of NAI'A's 2015 expedition to Nikumaroro in the Phoenix Islands in support of TIGHAR's search for Amelia Earhart.
Between 2001 and 2010, Gillespie and the TIGHAR team visited
Nikumaroro Island several times, finding artifacts and evidence of
long-ago meals, leading scientists to conclude that Earhart may have
survived for several months before dying of malnutrition or illness.
Whatever the cause of her death, the brave aviatrix who flew through the
Pacific sunset and into the history books perished shortly before her
40th birthday.
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