Purdue University expedition to look for Amelia Earhart’s plane begins this month
A long-planned Purdue University expedition to possibly solve a 90-year-old mystery will set sail next week.
Purdue’s quest to find Amelia Earhart’s lost plane started in 2020, when satellite photos discovered the “Taraya Object,” believed to be the wreckage of the aircraft.
Expedition lead Rick Pettigrew says after a delay last year, the journey is now set.
“There’s a lot of evidence, you know, supporting this hypothesis. Knowing what we know, we can’t turn our backs on it. We can’t. We can’t avoid going there.
Purdue alum and technology specialist Siricha Bandla says it’s a privilege to join the expedition.
“To be a part of a team that is attempting to answer one of the most talked-about questions in aviation in in history, and to be a part of this incredible crew that’s going out there to do this.”
In 1937, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan are speculated to have been marooned on Nikumaroro Island in the South Pacific after their plane ran out of fuel.
Nikumaroro is a small island in the Pacific Ocean about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. Previously, it was believed Earhart’s plane crashed into the ocean, but researchers said there is a “vast amount of circumstantial evidence” suggesting she landed on Nikumaroro after her disappearance in July 1937, including satellite imagery, radio transmissions and artifacts recovered from the island.
Bandla says the expedition plans to gather data on the island in the nation of Kiribati by leaving technology.
“To look at the Taraya Object, but leave behind potential technology that will allow the communities in that area to get better weather and water level data for the future. ”
Earhart was hired as a visiting aeronautical engineering faculty member and women’s career counselor at Purdue in 1935. The university then established the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research, which sponsored her mission to fly around the world and funded her Lockheed Electra 10E airplane.
