Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 17, 1992 TAG: 9203170268
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
At a packed news conference here, an investigator with a non-profit group asserted that his organization's four-year search had solved a mystery that has puzzled and fascinated the world since Earhart and her navigator disappeared during their 1937 attempt to circle the globe.
"For 55 years her fate has been a mystery," said Richard Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, of Wilmington, Del., as he stood near a glass case containing the group's evidence. "Today that mystery is solved."
Other experts remained unconvinced, however.
Gillespie's group turned its evidence over to the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes. While it found nothing inconsistent with Gillespie's theory, officials also found no absolute proof that the debris substantiates it.
And Thomas Crouch, chairman of the aeronautics department of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, said he doubted that Gillespie's evidence would end the long-running controversy. The proof is circumstantial and lacks any irrefutable evidence, such as the serial numbers that appear on so many aircraft parts, he said.
Gillespie's theory presumes that after leaving Lae, New Guinea, Earhart failed to find her destination of Howland Island and instead headed for Nikumaroro Island, 1,600 miles southwest of Hawaii.
When they reached the atoll, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan made a safe landing on a flat dry reef that was temporarily exposed because of low tide, he said.
Then a punishing storm smashed their Lockheed 10-E Electra aircraft and swept it over the edge of the reef into deep water, according to Gillespie's theory. Within days, the pair probably died from exposure and lack of fresh water, Gillespie theorized.
Perhaps the most important piece of evidence, Gillespie said, was a 23-inch-by-19-inch scrap of fuselage "skin" that the investigators believe was ripped from the belly of the aircraft when it was pounded by the storm.
The scrap, recovered last year amid beachfront vegetation, is made of the same aluminum alloy that was used to repair the underside of Earhart's plane after it was damaged during an abortive takeoff in an earlier attempt to circle the globe. Two letters, "AD," that appear on the scrap identify it as coming from the manufacturer's lot that was used on the aircraft.
The letters also establish that it was made before World War II and thus did not come from any wartime military aircraft. Earhart's craft was one of only three planes that are known to have flown in the region, Gillespie said.
He said a 34-inch copper antenna wire also found on the island was of the type used on the Electra aircraft.
Gillespie said examination of a Cat's Paw brand rubber heel found on the island showed it was made as a replacement for a woman's shoe, probably a size nine. He showed 1937 photographs of Earhart wearing a Blucher-style oxford shoe of a kind he said would use such replacement heels.
Another piece of key evidence was in the threaded top used on a medicine bottle that the William R. Warner Co. used on two kinds of stomach medicine and one kind of laxative.
He said that although Nikumaroro Island has all the beauty of a South Seas island, it also has the harsh conditions that would have probably killed Earhart and Noonan within days. Temperatures on the beach rise as high as 120 degrees, he said, noting also that the island got less than three-quarters of an inch of rain that year.
Other theorists have argued that Earhart simply lost her way in the Pacific and crashed into the ocean when she ran out of gas. Another school contends that she drifted to the northwest and was shot down by the Japanese soldiers occupying a Pacific Island.
by CNB