A piece of an aluminum aircraft discovered on an uninhabited atoll in the southwestern Pacific has been identified as belonging to the twin-engine Lockheed Electra of U.S. aviator Amelia Earhart, according to Discovery News.
The fragment was located on Nikumaroro, in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati in 1991.
Researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery say the metal was part of a patch installed on Earhart’s plane in Miami, where she stayed for eight days on her mission to circumnavigate the globe.
“The Miami Patch was an expedient field repair,” Ric Gillespie, executive director of the group, told Discovery News. “Its complex fingerprint of dimensions, proportions, materials and rivet patterns was as unique to Earhart’s Electra as a fingerprint is to an individual.”
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared 77 years ago on their journey around the world. The Nikumaroro fragment could prove that Earhart and Noonan did not crash into the Pacific Ocean after running out of fuel as some believe, but instead made a “forced landing” on the atoll’s coral reef, and then lived on the atoll as castaways before eventually dying, Discovery News reports.
• Jennifer Pompi can be reached at jpompi@washingtontimes.com.
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