Expedition hopes to find aviator Amelia Earhart's plane on remote island

A team of researchers are on their way to a remote island to inspect what they think could be the wreckage of famed aviator Amelia Earhart's plane.

The group, from the US-based Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI) and Purdue University, are expected to arrive at Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific Ocean by Monday in the hopes of solving the mystery of her disappearance.

The American pioneer vanished while attempting to circumnavigate the globe in 1937, spawning decades of speculation on her fate.

The team are aiming to find what has been called the Taraia Object, first spotted sitting on the edge of a lagoon off Nikumaroro in satellite imagery in 2020.

Purdue University said the object had since been confirmed to have been visible in aerial photography of the area dating back to 1938.

The researchers are currently roughly halfway through their journey to the remote atoll aboard the Marin Mainiku, a Kiribati National Shipping Line vessel.

They departed the capital of Kiribati on Wednesday to begin the 830-mile journey to Nikumaroro, which is also part of the multi-island country.

When they eventually arrive, they will have to navigate through a narrow gap created in the atoll's reef by the British in 1963 - the last time the island was inhabited.

"Finding Amelia Earhart's Electra aircraft would be the discovery of a lifetime," Richard Pettigrew, head of the ALI and the expedition lead, said.

Archaeological Legacy Institute

Earhart had already successfully flown from California across South America, Africa and Asia in her Electra twin-engine plane when she arrived in Lae, Papua New Guinea on 2 July 1937.

From there, she and her navigator Fred Noonan had planned to travel towards Hawaii and then finally back to California.

But her plane vanished without a trace while trying to reach Howland Island, a remote, uninhabited coral island near Nikumaroro, to refuel.

Earhart's disappearance spawned numerous theories - from a simple crash due to fuel exhaustion to more elaborate claims of interference.

The official explanation is that the plane suffered communication problems while the two struggled to find the island, and Earhart eventually crashed into the ocean when she ran out of fuel.

While this version of events is largely accepted, no physical evidence has ever been recovered.

Getty Images

One theory is that Earhart unintentionally navigated to Nikumaroro, where she ditched her plane and died a castaway.

Images of the so-called Taraia Object show what could be the remnants of a small aircraft sitting in shallow waters.

But some - including rival explorers - have expressed scepticism that this could be a plane, let alone Earhart's.

Ric Gillespie, who specialises in recovering historic aircraft wrecks, told news agency Reuters that the object looked like a tree that had fallen from the atoll into the nearby water.

"I'd love to find that airplane. It ain't gonna happen," he said.

The researchers en route to the island credit Gillespie with previously finding evidence of a human presence on the atoll in the 1930s and forensic analysis of skeletal remains found there in the 1940s they say lend credence to their theory.

But Gillespie suspects Earhart's plane had likely broken apart and its fragments carried into the depths of the Pacific long ago.

Previous attempts to find her Electra have also come up short.

In 2024, a group of researchers said they may have found it lying around 4,877m (16,000ft) below the surface near Howland Island through sonar imaging - but this was later confirmed to be a rock formation.

Similarly, an expedition in 2019, conducted by the marine archaeologist who discovered the Titanic wreck, to investigate a photograph of what might have been a landing gear protruding from the water near Nikumaroro also failed to find anything.