Suspected Location of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E NR16020

 place with historical importance, aircraft crash site

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The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) suspects remains of Earhart's Lockheed Electra are located here based on former Phoenix Islands colonist testimony of seeing plane wreckage north of the SS Norwich City in 1940, and a 1937 photograph showing what may be plane wreckage. It is also theorized that this stretch of reef could have been used as a rough emergency landing field, as the Electra's tires were of a type that could handle unimproved landing fields. If true, the plane wreckage was washed off the reef many decades ago and would now be scattered in this general area.

TIGHAR has found many tantalizing remains on the island from the 1930s such as a size 9 Cat's Paw woman's shoe heel similar to those seen on shoes worn by Earhart, the broken remains of a glass hand lotion bottle, improvised tools, and a piece of shaped Plexiglass that may have come from a Lockheed Electra. In 1940, skeletal remains were found on the southeastern part of the island. When the now-misplaced bones were analyzed in Fiji in 1941, it was concluded the bones belonged to a male. Later analysis of the 1941 bone measurements performed in 1998 by forensic anthropologists concluded that the skeleton was from a "tall white female of northern European ancestry."

An underwater search of this site performed in July 2012 revealed an "anomaly" object lying in roughly 600ft of water off the reef shelf of Nikumaroro's Northwest coast, which when cross-analyzed for shape and location appears to fit the dimensions for wreckage of a Lockheed Electra. TIGHAR further identified a piece of aluminum found on land to match a riveted patch placed over a navigation window on Earhart's Electra during a nine-day stopover in Miami in 1937. These two discoveries are forming the basis for fundraising efforts for TIGHAR's return trip to Nikumaroro to further explore the site, presently scheduled for 2015.

tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Overview/AEhypothesis.html
news.discovery.com/history/us-history/aluminum-fragment...