Researchers launch new expedition to find Amelia Earhart's plane on Pacific island

A ship carrying researchers is cutting across the Pacific toward one of aviation's most enduring mysteries. The team from the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University departed Kiribati on Wednesday and are expected to reach Nikumaroro Island by Monday—an 830-mile voyage aboard the Marin Mainiku, a vessel operated by Kiribati's national shipping line. They are traveling to investigate what they believe could be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's Electra, the twin-engine aircraft that vanished nearly ninety years ago while she attempted to fly around the world.

Earhart disappeared on July 2, 1937, while en route from Papua New Guinea to Howland Island, a small coral atoll in the Pacific where she planned to refuel before continuing to Hawaii and then California. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had already completed the most difficult legs of their journey—crossing from California through South America, Africa, and Asia. But somewhere over the ocean between Lae and Howland, radio contact was lost. The official account holds that communication failures prevented her from locating the island, and she eventually ran out of fuel and crashed into the sea. No wreckage has ever been recovered, and no bodies were found. The mystery has spawned decades of competing theories, from simple mechanical failure to more elaborate claims of wartime interference.

The current expedition centers on what researchers call the Taraia Object—a shape visible in satellite imagery taken in 2020 that appears to sit in shallow water at the edge of a lagoon off Nikumaroro. Purdue University has confirmed that the same object is visible in aerial photographs dating back to 1938, just a year after Earhart's disappearance. Images of the formation show what could be aircraft wreckage in shallow waters. Richard Pettigrew, who heads the Archaeological Legacy Institute and is leading the expedition, has called finding Earhart's plane "the discovery of a lifetime."

But skepticism runs deep. Ric Gillespie, a specialist in recovering historic aircraft wrecks, told Reuters that the object looks like a tree that has fallen from the atoll into the water, not an airplane. "I'd love to find that airplane. It ain't gonna happen," he said. Gillespie has his own theory: that Earhart's plane broke apart on impact and its fragments were carried into the deep Pacific long ago, beyond recovery. Notably, the researchers traveling to Nikumaroro credit Gillespie with earlier discoveries—evidence of human presence on the atoll in the 1930s and forensic analysis of skeletal remains found there in the 1940s—that they say support their theory that Earhart may have ditched her plane on the island and died there as a castaway.

Previous searches have yielded nothing. In 2024, researchers using sonar imaging reported they may have found the Electra lying nearly 16,000 feet below the surface near Howland Island, but the object was later confirmed to be a rock formation. An expedition in 2019, led by the marine archaeologist who discovered the Titanic wreck, investigated a photograph that appeared to show landing gear protruding from the water near Nikumaroro. That search also failed to locate anything.

The team will face practical challenges when they arrive. Nikumaroro is a remote atoll with no permanent population—the last inhabitants left decades ago. The researchers will need to navigate through a narrow gap in the reef that was created by the British in 1963, the last time the island was actively occupied. Once there, they will attempt to examine the Taraia Object directly, to determine whether it is aircraft wreckage, and if so, whether it belongs to Earhart's Electra. The expedition represents another chapter in a search that has consumed researchers, amateur historians, and aviation enthusiasts for nearly a century, with no certainty of resolution.