Latest Amelia Earhart search falls short
This undated file photo shows Amelia Earhart. A group of scientists and historians have launched a $2.2 million expedition to find out what happened to the famed aviator who went missing over the Pacific Ocean 75 years ago. / AP Photo
(AP) HONOLULU - A $2.2 million expedition that hoped to find wreckage from famed aviator Amelia Earhart's final flight is on its way back to Hawaii without the dramatic, conclusive plane images searchers were hoping to attain.
But the group leading the search, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, still believes Earhart and her navigator crashed onto a reef off a remote island in the Pacific Ocean 75 years ago this month, its president told The Associated Press on Monday.
"This is just sort of the way things are in this world," TIGHAR president Pat Thrasher said. "It's not like an Indiana Jones flick where you go through a door and there it is. It's not like that - it's never like that."
Thrasher said the group collected a significant amount of video and sonar data, which searchers will pore over on the return voyage to Hawaii this week and afterward to look for things that may be tough to see at first glance.
The group is also planning a voyage for next year to scour the land where it's believed Earhart survived a short while after the crash, Thrasher said.
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Thrasher maintained touch throughout the search with TIGHAR founder Ric Gillespie, her husband, and posted updates about the trip to the group's website. The updates tell of a search that was cut short because of treacherous underwater terrain and repeated, unexpected equipment mishaps that caused delays and left the group with only five days of search time rather than 10, as originally planned.
During one episode, an autonomous underwater vehicle the group was using in its search wedged itself into a narrow cave, a day after squashing its nose cone against the ocean floor. It needed to be rescued.
"The rescue mission was successful - but it was a real cliffhanger," Gillespie wrote in an email posted online last week. "Operating literally at the end of our tether, we searched for over an hour in nightmare terrain: a vertical cliff face pockmarked with caves and covered with fern-like marine growth."
Thrasher said the environment was tougher to navigate than searchers expected.
The U.S. State Department had encouraged the privately-funded voyage, which launched earlier this month from Honolulu using 30,000 pounds (13,608 kilograms) in specialized equipment and a University of Hawaii ship normally used for ocean research.
Quest to solve the Amelia Earhart mystery
The group's thesis is based on the idea that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan landed on a reef near the Kiribati atoll of Nikumaroro, then survived a short time.
Previous visits to the island have recovered artifacts that could have belonged to Earhart and Noonan, and experts say an October 1937 photo of the shoreline of the island could include a blurry image of the strut and wheel of a Lockheed Electra landing gear.
The photo was enough for the State Department blessing, and led to the Kiribati government to sign a contract with the group to work together if anything is found, Gillespie said at the start of the voyage.
A separate group working under a different theory plans its third voyage later this year near Howland Island.
Earhart and Noonan were flying from New Guinea to Howland Island when they went missing July 2, 1937, during Earhart's bid to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.
Learn more about the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery and their mission in the video below
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After twenty years of escorting gullible thrill seekers to Gardner Island in the Pacific, the "IGHAR" organization has yet again come away from their fantasy island empty handed.
After making monumental fools of themselves back in May and June with their usual brand of self-serving hyperbole and claims of "evidence" of finding Amelia Earhart, "TIGHAR" as it pompously calls itself, has begun their voyage of shame back to the U.S., and, also in their now predictable pattern, they are saying little about their colossal failure, as they begin the months of preparations for what one could be forgiven for predicting will be yet another issuance of claims of "evidence" followed by the announcement of, yes, another fantasy expedition to "Nikkumororo" after bulking up on financial contributions.
In late spring, as they began breathlessly hyping their latest exploit to the news media, the IGHAR posted a plea on their website for more money, promising, this time, to really, really, really, really bring home the definitive evidence that Amelia Earhart landed and died on "Nikkumororo," leaving her Lockheed Electra lying upside down with its landing gear sticking up out of the Gardner Island lagoon in plain sight of any of the scores of people who have lived on or visited Gardner in the last seventy-five years to see. (There were, of course, no reports).
In the highly unlikely event that anyone has been on a truly deserted island or for some other reason not read a newspaper or watched a television news program in the last twenty years, I will spell it out for you in plain, if rather exaggerated bold-faced type for emphasis:
AMELIA EARHART DID NOT LAND ON OR ANYWHERE NEAR, BY A FACTOR OF HUNDREDS OF MILES, GARDNER ISLAND. THERE IS NOT AND NEVER HAS BEEN ANY EVIDENCE THAT WOULD CAUSE A REASONABLE PERSON TO BELIEVE THAT AMELIA EARHART AND HER NAVIGATOR FREDERICK NOONAN ALIGHTED ON GARDNER ISLAND, OR ANYWHERE WITHIN HUNDREDS OF MILES OF THAT LOCATION.
One thing is certain, she didn't land on Gardner Island or anywhere else in the Phoenix Islands. Period. That should be the end of it.
Randall Brink
www.randallbrink.com
Am sure that money could have been put to much better use than looking for a 75 year old trashed plane. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery sounds like a group of spendthrift morons.
I'm sure the terrain will be better next year...