Is it her plane? New Amelia Earhart expedition begins - USA Today

An expedition began on Oct. 2 as researchers left Purdue University on a mission that hopes to find the lost plane of aviator Amelia Earhart, who went missing along with her navigator Fred Noonan in 1937.

Three members of the Taraia Object expedition, a joint effort among the Indiana-based university, Purdue's Archaeological Legacy Institute and the Purdue Research Foundation, then traveled from Los Angeles to meet others in the 17-person team. Next, they'll travel to Fiji and Kiribati in the South Pacific in search of the Lockheed Electra 10-E flown by Earhart nearly 90 years ago.

On Oct. 7, the entire group will travel to Nikumaroro, a remote Pacific island between Australia and Hawaii, where a popular theory suggests Earhart and Noonan landed after failing to complete their journey to circle the globe at the equator.

“I am feeling very confident about this,” lead archaeologist Richard Pettigrew previously told USA TODAY. "I'm pumped."

The search, one of countless efforts to locate the lost aviator since her disappearance, centers around the “Taraia object,” a visual anomaly discovered through satellite imagery in the island’s lagoon.

The mission, originally set for October 2025, was delayed due to weather conditions. Permission from Kiribati's government was also a factor; Kiribati is the island nation that controls Nikumaroro, and has now allowed the mission to proceed.

"My conscious focus is on the execution of our fieldwork plan,” Richard Pettigrew, executive director of the Purdue Archaeological Legacy Institute, said in a news release a few weeks before the expedition. “...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.”

Earhart was already a famed pilot when she and Noonan set out from Lae, Papua New Guinea, toward Howland Island, where a U.S. Coast Guard cutter waited to refuel the Lockheed Electra 10-E. They'd begun their around-the-world journey on May 21, 1937 in Oakland, California, but disappeared on July 2 as they neared the end of the trip, which would have been the first time anyone had flown around the world at the equator.

Earhart messaged the Coast Guard to say she was almost out of fuel, but neither she nor Noonan knew Morse code, so there was no two-way contact, according to the Smithsonian Institution's analysis of government records of the incident.

Nikumaroro is about 400 miles southeast of Howland Island, where Earhart and Noonan planned to land on the third-to-last leg of their attempt to circumnavigate the world around the equator. The U.S. government conducted what was at the time its largest-ever search for a lost aircraft, but after two weeks, with no trace of either Earhart, Noonan or their plane, the search ended. On Jan. 5, 1939, both were declared legally dead.

One current theory is that Earhart and Noonan landed on Nikumaroro, but later died there. That theory is based on satellite imagery of the unidentified object in a lagoon on the island that came into view in 2015, as well as radio bearings that converge there, human bones discovered on the island that resemble Earhart's measurements and artifacts including a woman's shoe, a jar of freckle cream and a medicine vial that date to the 1930s, according to the Purdue Research Foundation.

The expedition will start with video and still images of the site before any work on the site begins, followed by remote magnetometer and sonar. The team will then use an underwater hydraulic dredge to expose the object so it can be identified, and a walk-over survey of nearby land surfaces to check for any debris that might be washed up onshore.

Pettigrew called the possibility of finding and identifying Earhart's lost aircraft "the discovery of a lifetime," and confirming the wreckage of a plane "the smoking-gun proof" of theories that placed her and Noonan on Nikumaroro.

The Purdue Research Foundation originally funded the Lockheed Electra “Flying Laboratory” through the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research, so the institution hopes to return the plane or its remnants to Purdue, citing what it called "her intention to return it to the university."

The Purdue Archaeological Legacy Institute said in a news release that "additional work and further conversations with Kiribati would still be needed to make that a reality, but we feel we owe it to her legacy at Purdue to try to find a way to bring it home if we find it."

In the same release, Purdue quoted a Kiribati official who said the island of Nikumaroro is "part of our heritage," and noted that nation's "responsibility to protect and better understand it."

“For Kiribati, Nikumaroro is much more than the possible setting for one of the world’s great historical mysteries,” said Mikarite Temari, head of Kiribati’s Ministry of Line and Phoenix Islands Development. The nation is happy to work with Purdue, Temari added. "We also see this expedition as an opportunity to build a lasting partnership that can help support important priorities such as regenerative tourism, cultural preservation, education, advances in aviation technology and economic development for our people.”

Phaedra Trethan is a national correspondent for USA TODAY, writing about history and Americana. Contact her by email at ptrethan@usatoday.com, on X @wordsbyphaedra, on BlueSky @byphaedra, or on Threads @by_phaedra.