ATTN BROOMSTICK (Amelia Earhart remains found?)

[Chardok]

From Yahoo! News

NORMAN, Okla. – The three bone fragments turned up on a deserted South Pacific island that lay along the course Amelia Earhart was following when she vanished. Nearby were several tantalizing artifacts: some old makeup, some glass bottles and shells that had been cut open.

Now scientists at the University of Oklahoma hope to extract DNA from the tiny bone chips in tests that could prove Earhart died as a castaway after failing in her 1937 quest to become the first woman to fly around the world.

"There's no guarantee," said Ric Gillespie, director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, a group of aviation enthusiasts in Delaware that found the pieces of bone this year while on an expedition to Nikumaroro Island, about 1,800 miles south of Hawaii.

"You only have to say you have a bone that may be human and may be linked to Earhart and people get excited. But it is true that, if they can get DNA, and if they can match it to Amelia Earhart's DNA, that's pretty good."

It could be months before scientists know for sure — and it could turn out the bones are from a turtle. The fragments were found near a hollowed-out turtle shell that might have been used to collect rain water, but there were no other turtle parts nearby.

Earhart's disappearance on July 2, 1937, remains one of the 20th century's most enduring mysteries. Did she run out of fuel and crash at sea? Did her Lockheed Electra develop engine trouble? Did she spot the island from the sky and attempt to land on a nearby reef?

"What were her last moments like? What was she doing? What happened?" asked Robin Jensen, an associate professor of communications at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., who has studied Earhart's writings and speeches.

Since 1989, Gillespie's group has made 10 trips to the island, trying each time to find clues that might help determine the fate of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan.

Last spring, volunteers working at what seemed to be an abandoned campsite found one piece of bone that appeared to be from a neck and another unknown fragment dissimilar to bird or fish bones. A third fragment might be from a finger. The largest of the pieces is just over an inch long.

The area was near a site where native work crews found skeletal remains in 1940. Bird and fish carcasses suggested Westerners had prepared meals there.

"This site tells the story of how someone or some people attempted to live as castaways," Gillespie said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press. "These fish weren't eaten like Pacific Islanders" eat fish.

Millions of dollars have been spent in failed attempts to learn what happened to Earhart, a Kansas native declared dead by a California court in early 1939.

The official version says Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and crashed at sea while flying from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, which had a landing strip and fuel.

Gillespie's book "Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance," and "Amelia Earhart's Shoes," written by four volunteers from the aircraft group, suggest the pair landed on the reef and survived, perhaps for months, on scant food and rainwater.

Gillespie, a pilot, said the aviator would have needed only about 700 feet of unobstructed space to land because her plane would have been traveling only about 55 mph at touchdown.

"It looks like she could have landed successfully on the reef surrounding the island. It's very flat and smooth," Gillespie said. "At low tide, it looks like this place is surrounded by a parking lot."

However, Gillespie said, the plane, even if it landed safely, would have been slowly dragged into the sea by the tides. The waters off the reef are 1,000 to 2,000 feet deep. His group needs $3 million to $5 million for a deep-sea dive.

The island is on the course Earhart planned to follow from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, which had a landing strip and fuel. Over the last seven decades, searches of the remote atoll have been inconclusive.

After the latest find, anthropologists who had previously worked with Gillespie's group suggested that he send the bones to the University of Oklahoma's Molecular Anthropology Laboratory, which has experience extracting genetic material from old bones. Gillespie's group also has a genetic sample from an Earhart female relative for comparison with the bones.

The lab is looking for mitochondrial DNA, which is passed along only through females, so there is no need to have a Noonan sample.

Cecil Lewis, an assistant professor of anthropology at the lab, said the university received a little more than a gram of bone fragments about two weeks ago. If researchers are able to extract DNA and link it to Earhart, a sample would be sent to another lab for verification.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That's why we're trying to downplay a lot of the media attention right now," Lewis said. "For all we know, this is just a turtle bone, and a lot of people are going to be very disheartened."

Under the best circumstances, the analysis would take two weeks. If scientists have trouble with the sample, that time frame could stretch into months, Lewis said.

"Ancient DNA is incredibly unpredictable," he said.

Other material recovered this year also suggested the presence of Westerners at the isolated island site:

• Someone carried shells ashore before cutting them open and slicing out the meat. Islanders cut the meat out at sea.

• Bottles found nearby were melted on the bottom, suggesting they had been put into a fire, possibly to boil water. (A Coast Guard unit on the island during World War II would have had no need to boil water.)

• Bits of makeup were found. The group is checking to see which products Earhart endorsed and whether an inventory lists specific types of makeup carried on her final trip.

• A glass bottle with remnants of lanolin and oil, possibly hand lotion.

In 2007, the group found a piece of a pocket knife but didn't know whether it was left by the Coast Guard or castaways. This year, it found the shattered remains of the knife, suggesting someone had smashed it to extract the blades. Gillespie speculated a castaway used a blade to make a spear to stab shallow-water fish like those found at the campsite.

Following Earhart's disappearance, distress signals picked up by distant ships pointed back to the area of Nikumaroro Island, but while pilots passing over saw signs of recent habitation, the island was crossed off the list as having been searched, Gillespie said.

In 1940, a British overseer on the island recovered a partial human skeleton, a woman's shoe and an empty sextant box at what appeared to be a former campsite, littered with turtle, clamshell and bird remains.

Thinking of Earhart, the overseer sent the items to Fiji, where a British doctor decided they belonged to a stocky European or mixed-blood male, ruling out any Earhart connection.

The bones later vanished, but in 1998, Gillespie's group located the doctor's notes in London. Two other forensic specialists reviewed the doctor's bone measurements and agreed they were more "consistent with" a female of northern European descent, about Earhart's age and height.

On their own visits to the island, volunteers recovered an aluminum panel that could be from an Electra, another piece of a woman's shoe and a "cat's paw" heel dating from the 1930s; another shoe heel, possibly a man's, and an oddly cut piece of clear Plexiglas.

The sextant box might have been Noonan's. The woman's shoe and heel resemble a blucher-style oxford seen in a pre-takeoff photo of Earhart. The plastic shard is the exact thickness and curvature of an Electra's side window.

The body of evidence is intriguing, but Gillespie insists the team is "constantly agonizing over whether we are being dragged down a path that isn't right."

[Broomstick]

As they said - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, though I think it's pity they aren't using samples from Noonan - given the fragmentary nature of the recent finds I'm not sure that they can be ruled as Noonan's. If you find either Noonan or Earhart you know that the other landed nearby, too.

I'd like them to find out once and for all what happened to those two in order to end the speculation. There were, unfortunately, a number of things about that flight I considered to be wrong, or at least less than ideal and I wish Earhart hadn't attempted it as I'm not sure she was up to the trip (at least she had the good sense to bring along someone who was a better navigator than she was, or else the trip might have ended even sooner).

Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Broomstick, what, may I ask, would you consider wrong about the voyage?

[Broomstick]

Well, for starters she chose a route longer than strictly necessary, a total of 29,000 miles (Earth circumference being 24,000 miles at the equator) or 47,000 km. Personally, I'm not sure that was the smartest move.

Earhart was not the world's best navigator - during her 1932 solo flight across the Atlantic she intended to land in Paris, replicating Lindbergh's flight. She wound up in Ireland. Yeah, a bit of a miss. Bad enough to do that when crossing the Atlantic, crossing the larger Pacific, particularly having to locate small islands in the vast ocean, it was a much more dangerous proposition. That's why she had Noonan along for her round-the-world trip - he had developed most of Pan Am's North America to Asia routes and had considerable experience in that area. Smart move.

Her first attempt at the flight ended in Hawaii - after the airplane required maintenance Earhart ground looped it on take off and damaged the airplane, which was then sent back to California by boat for repairs. Now, granted, even an experienced pilot can ground loop a tailwheel airplane, but it did not bode well for the trip. Rescheduling was a smart move.

Noonan was well skilled in celestial navigation - hence the use of a sextant - but in addition the airplane was equipped with a direction-finding loop antenna which had to be carefully adjusted to pick up radio navigation signals. It was a new technology at the time, and the early set ups were touchy at best. It's an open question just how well either of the two people on board could use that device. It was not like modern digital radio equipment where you just punch in a frequency - you had to carefully turn the controls, meanwhile you're in a small airplane that might be jounced around in wind and weather.

There was a possible lack of time synchronization between the Coast Guard ship Itasca, which was supposed to be listening for Earhart's communications, and Earhart herself. This time difference might have been as great as a half an hour. This was not a good thing and should have been clarified beforehand to make sure both parties were using the same time zone (I'm not entirely sure, but this may have been before all airplane operations were standardized to Greenwich Mean Time)

The radio frequency she was using, and the antenna she was using, were not optimized for long-distance transmission. Need less to say, this could be a problem over the Pacific. One of the antennas on the airplane was reported as damaged by an observer at a previous take off. These were not good factors.

After they were listed as overdue there were reports of faint radio signals for several days - attempts were made to use Morse code, as that can be used to transmit information over frequencies when the transmission/reception are not good enough for voice but are still sufficient to send a signal. The problem is, Earhart did not know Morse Code. At the time, it was a very common thing in use, and it was viewed as a lack that she had not bothered to learn it.

After the flight, it was found that the location of Howland Island, their intended destination that day, was incorrect, though being off only about 10 km they should have been able to find it by air - should, but as the island was low in the ocean and small it was probably harder to spot than you might think, and smoke signals sent up by the Itasca may have been confused with scattered cloud cover in the area - which might have also interfered with looking for a small island. Gardner Island/Nikamuroro (same island, different names) was considered a possibility for an emergency landing - but again, it was incorrectly charted, wrong shape and location on the maps they were using. In other words, they were working with inaccurate maps. This was more common than people these days would suppose, and map errors were frequent before the days of satellite mapping technology.

A search was conducted, but search and rescue techniques were not nearly as well developed in that era.

Most likely she and Noonan ran out of gas and wound up in the ocean simply because there's so much more water than land out there. However, existing as a cast away isn't an outrageous possibility.... provided there is evidence. People have been washing up on various Pacific islands since people first started sailing those oceans, it's not that unusual to find human artifacts on uninhabited islands.

That doesn't mean her attempt was a fool's errand, nor does it mean it was doomed to failure - plenty of record-setting and endurance flights have had to deal with major problems. For example, the 1986 non-stop no-refueling circumnavigation of the Earth by the Rutan Voyager started off with the wingtips drooping so much that about a foot (30 cm) of each wingtip was entirely abraded away by contact with pavement on take off - in other words, the plane was damaged on take-off yet went on to safely circle the planet. This sort of shit happens on oddball flights. On the other hand, navigation across the Pacific is deadly serious business, and it wasn't just one thing going wrong, it was several (navigation, time coordination, possible damage to radio equipment, possible insufficient skill in its use). Earhart had flown California to Hawaii more than once, but that was still different that crossing the entire Pacific. Even at the time there were questions about whether she really had the skills to do such a flight safely. After all, she didn't have to do this flight, she was already in the record books, and there has always been speculation that there had been some pressure for her to do this flight.

[Thanas]

I think that the fact that TIGHAR can claim that the local residents had access to plane wreckage and that apparently a picture shows an unidentified object (remains from the plane?), plus the discovery of the skeleton makes for pretty strong circumstantial evidence.

This is their page.

[Sea Skimmer]

Well, for starters she chose a route longer than strictly necessary, a total of 29,000 miles (Earth circumference being 24,000 miles at the equator) or 47,000 km. Personally, I'm not sure that was the smartest move.

As far as I can see no shorter route could exist that was within the range of her aircraft; and didn’t involve flying over and landing upon the Japanese Mandates. Japan kept those islands pretty well closed off by the late 1930s. The route also seems to have had more stops then strictly necessary, which is a good thing.

[Broomstick]

I think that the fact that TIGHAR can claim that the local residents had access to plane wreckage and that apparently a picture shows an unidentified object (remains from the plane?), plus the discovery of the skeleton makes for pretty strong circumstantial evidence.

Strong, but not proven. As I noted, human artifacts and bones are common finds one Pacific islands. It is even possible the bones found over the years are from more than one, or even more than two, individuals. I sincerely hope some conclusive DNA can be recovered from the recently found bones to settle the controversy.

Well, for starters she chose a route longer than strictly necessary, a total of 29,000 miles (Earth circumference being 24,000 miles at the equator) or 47,000 km. Personally, I'm not sure that was the smartest move.

As far as I can see no shorter route could exist that was within the range of her aircraft; and didn’t involve flying over and landing upon the Japanese Mandates. Japan kept those islands pretty well closed off by the late 1930s. The route also seems to have had more stops then strictly necessary, which is a good thing.

I'm not going to claim to be any sort of authority on trans-ocean navigation, but people I know and respect who are capable of such navigation (some of whom have actually flown small airplanes from Asia, Australia, and New Zealand to North America) have shared their opinions with me that there were better routes. My limited knowledge on ocean crossing is limited to the customary route for crossing the Atlantic in a small prop-driven airplane, which is Nova Scotia to Greenland to Iceland to Ireland and then on to the rest of Europe, or, if you are starting in Europe, the reverse route of that. Earhart seemed determined to follow the equator on her journey, although certainly not all round the world trips do so. Of course, it's always easy to second-guess someone after the fact, and it's hard for us sitting here in 2010 to mentally recreate the circumstances of the 1930's. There mere fact that our navigational maps are far more accurate than those of the 1930's makes such ocean crossings much safer these days even in the same sort of airplanes, along with our much improved weather reporting and forecasting.

Given that the Japanese also participated in the search for Earhart and Noonan it's possible that they might have allowed an overflight for a such a flight, as Earhart was a well known figure at the time. It is not unknown for nations to make exceptions for aeronautical feats. I don't know if she even attempted to gain permission. If she had asked and been refused that's one thing, if she didn't try that's another.

Finally, while more stops than the minimum is, on a certain level, a good thing it is not true that adding simply more and more is a better thing. Take offs and landings are the riskiest portions of a flight, and all the going up and going down burns more fuel and takes more time than a straight and level flight and adds to pilot fatigue. There is a range of optimum numbers of stops, and going below or above that is not an improvement.

[Terralthra]

This news story is not news. The bones, glass, sextant case, etc., were all found in 1940, only a few years after her disappearance. Gillespie's been trying for years to find something that will make skeptics believe the most parsimonious theory: that the bones of the woman, most likely of european descent, found with cosmetics and a sextant case are, well, Earhart's.

A woman's shoe, an empty bottle and a sextant box whose serial numbers are consistent with a type known to have been carried by Noonan were all found near the site where the bones were discovered.

Again, 1940.

[Broomstick]

There will always be skeptics, though, unless you produce DNA or the actual airplane.

I think some folks prefer to think she and her navigator perished relatively quickly at sea, rather than spending time as castaways futilely awaiting rescue. Personally, I don't see where drowning in the Pacific is preferable to being stranded on an island, but whatever.

[Thanas]

I think that the fact that TIGHAR can claim that the local residents had access to plane wreckage and that apparently a picture shows an unidentified object (remains from the plane?), plus the discovery of the skeleton makes for pretty strong circumstantial evidence.

Strong, but not proven. As I noted, human artifacts and bones are common finds one Pacific islands. It is even possible the bones found over the years are from more than one, or even more than two, individuals. I sincerely hope some conclusive DNA can be recovered from the recently found bones to settle the controversy.

Note how I explicitly said strong and not proven?

[Broomstick]

Yes, I noted it. Was just adding an additional comment, not intending to contradict you.