A Pilot Is Pretty Sure He Found Amelia Earhart’s Plane

Here’s what you’ll be taught when you read this article:

• A pilot perusing Google Earth could have stumbled across the remnants of Amelia Earhart’s aircraft.

• Inspired by a documentary on the Earhart’s closing flight, Justin Myers in contrast the measurements of anomalies in a Google Earth image to the elements of her aircraft.

• So far, no major establishments have made any effort to examine his claims.

This story is a collaboration with Popular Mechanics.

What would you do if you thought you’d cracked an unsolved thriller, but no person needed to pay attention?

That’s the predicament pilot Justin Myers presently finds himself in. With practically a quarter-century in the air himself, he believes he’s uncovered the reply to one of aviation’s most enduring mysteries: Where is the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E, the ultimate aircraft she ever flew? All it took was Google Earth and a little curiosity.

Unlike some who have tried to discover the wreckage from Earhart and Fred Noonan’s ill-fated closing flight in 1937, Myers was not a life-long Earhart obsessive.

“To be totally honest,” Myers told Popular Mechanics, “my interest started after watching a documentary on the National Geographic Channel. It was the next day when curiosity about Nikumaroro Island took me to looking on Google Earth.”

Nikumaroro Island is often posited as a closing resting place for, if not Earhart and Noonan themselves, than at least the Electra they had been flying in. As Biography beforehand famous, “This theory is based on several on-site investigations that have turned up artifacts such as improvised tools, bits of clothing, an aluminum panel and a piece of Plexiglas the exact width and curvature of an Electra window.”

When Myers first appeared up Nikumaroro, he wasn’t initially wanting for a aircraft at all. “I was just putting myself in Amelia and Fred’s shoes,” he told PopMech. But as he stared at those overhead photographs, he began to make use of his own expertise as a pilot, to suppose about “where I would have force landed a light twin aircraft in their position, lost and low on fuel.”

That’s when Myers observed what he felt had been some anomalies on the map. He detailed his observations in a weblog post: “I picked an area which would probably have been what I thought to be best considering the circumstances. I zoomed in and there was a long sandy-looking shape… I measured the sandy section, which was over 50ft long, looked up the specifications of the Electra, and that measured 39ft.”

Next to the sandy part, however, was a darkish, straight object that was precisely 39 ft long. “It looked man-made,” Myers famous as he continued to study the article, “it looked like a section of aircraft fuselage.”

As Myers poured over the photographs more, he made out what appeared to him to be even more airplane particles, including what appeared like a partially uncovered radial engine, and his approximate measurements all aligned with the scale of the corresponding elements of the Lockheed Electra 10E that Earhart and Noonan had flown.

But if these airplane elements may very well be seen from Google Earth photographs, why hadn’t anybody seen them before? Myers advised to PopMech that “there was an element of luck in spotting that aircraft debris, as Mother Nature had revealed what had been buried on the reef for a long time. I managed to catch some photos before being covered over again by passing weather systems.”

So, Myers assembled his photographs and his measurements, and was prepared to current his findings. But just who do you current such a case to?

“I didn’t know really where to go with this,” Myers wrote in his weblog post. “I wrote to the NTSB in the U.S., and they emailed me back saying it was not there [sic] jurisdiction, it was the ATSB, Australian Transport Safety Bureau. So, I filed an official report with the air crash investigation team in Brisbane.”

But in the years since, there was no real motion to take Myers’ idea past the theoretical. “I did have some communication with an expedition company in California,” Myers said to PopMech. “However, I haven’t heard anything in a long time. I also contacted Purdue University a few years ago and recently, but unfortunately they never responded.”

So if Myers has discovered the answer to an enduring aeronautical quandary, why isn’t anybody inquiring additional? Well, in the case of Purdue University, it’s not as though they’re not pursuing solutions to Earhart’s disappearance at all. PopMech reported in July that that they had announced their own expedition to examine an anomaly recognized as the Taraia Object, often speculated to be the downed Electra.

But it’s also an obstacle to Myers’ outreach efforts that he’s hardly alone in pondering he has discovered the ultimate piece of the proverbial puzzle.

If you had a greenback for every particular person who claimed to have discovered Amelia Earhart’s aircraft, you’d in all probability have enough money to fund an expedition to strive and discover it. Hopes for solutions have hinged on every little thing from outdated pictures to the promise of modern-day technology. In the method, some people with wildly different theories have develop into outstanding figures in the plane recovery group, which has resulted in bitter feuds and sometimes even lawsuits.

And of course, there’s the risk of getting it fallacious.

In 2024, photographs from underwater drones operated by Tony Romeo’s Deep Sea Vision confirmed “contours that mirror the unique dual tails and scale” of the Lockheed Electra. At the time, Romeo had confidently said that “you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that this is not an airplane and not Amelia’s plane.”

But after another expedition was launched to more intently study that anomaly, Romeo found that it was not an airplane but quite an peculiar rock formation. “I’m super disappointed out here,” Romeo remarked after the fact, “but you know, I guess that’s life.”

For his half, Myers isn’t difficult others to persuade him he’s fallacious, though he does really feel assured, based on his measurements, that what he’s discovered is more than just a naturally occurring phenomenon.

“The bottom line is,” he told PopMech, “from my interests from a child in vintage aircraft and air crash investigation, I can say that is what was once a 12-metre, 2-engine vintage aircraft. What I can’t say is that is definitely Amelia’s Electra.”

And if it isn’t Amelia’s place, PopMech requested, would Myers be disenchanted?

“If this is not Amelia’s Electra 10 E,” he said, “then it’s the answer to another mystery that has never been answered. This finding could answer some questions to someone who disappeared many years ago.”

If Myers discovered Amelia Earhart’s aircraft, it might carry him acclaim. But if it’s a different downed aircraft he’s discovered, it might at least carry closure to the household of whoever piloted it.

Only time will inform if anybody with the funds to launch a search will take the leap of religion to see if there really is a aircraft there at all.

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