US aviator Earhart and her navigator vanished halfway through an attempt to fly around the world along the equator in 1937
Air crash investigators may have found the wreckage of the plane piloted by the revered US aviator Amelia Earhart in her failed attempt to fly around the globe.
Expedition leaders from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar) said they had spotted an object that looked like the fuselage of a Lockheed Electra off an island in the South Pacific.
Earhart and her navigator vanished on 2 July 1937 after they took off from Papua New Guinea in a twin-engined Electra en route to Howland island. They were more than halfway through an unprecedented bid to circle the globe along the equator.
Earhart was already a sensation in the US after flying solo across the Atlantic in 1932, and smashing a number of altitude and air-speed records. "At the time she was alive, Amelia Earhart mattered to people. They lived their lives differently because of the example she set. She was an inspiration," said Ric Gillespie, executive director of Tighar.
Last July the group chartered a research ship from the University of Hawaii to scour the seabed around an uninhabited atoll called Nikumaroro where Earhart and her navigator may have crash-landed after losing their way. The expedition used robotic underwater vehicles to map the seabed but found no sign of the plane.
The story changed in March this year, when a member of the public noticed an object in a sonar picture that the expedition had made public. It amounts to no more than a golden streak on a grainy image taken in 180-metre-deep water, but the seven-metre-long object matches surviving parts of fuselage from other Electra accidents, said Gillespie.
He believes Earhart crash-landed on the atoll and survived for a while as a castaway after the plane was swept into the ocean by rising tides. From the edge of the island the seabed drops off sharply, reaching a depth of 7,000m in parts.
"Our minds tend to make things be what we want them to be, we know that. Maybe it's a fishing boat that nobody knew about. Maybe it's an unusual coral reef. But it's the right size, the right shape, and it's in the right place to be part of the Electra," Gillespie said.
Tighar, a non-profit organisation, has been hunting for Earhart's wreckage for the past 25 years. The group hopes to return to the atoll in 2014 with a tethered remote underwater vehicle that can film video footage of the mysterious object.
"We will go back. We do not give up," Gillespie said.
Adrian Furnham, a psychologist at University College London, who wrote a paper last year on conspiracy beliefs around the disappearance of Earhart, said: "It is quite feasible that aeroplane wreckage has been found that could have been hers. The question is what is this team's history of success, and what is their motivation? It's one of the most interesting aircraft wreckage mysteries in history. There cannot be a more exciting case to solve."