Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9509010024
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: G-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID ARNOLD THE BOSTON GLOBE
DATELINE: WILMINGTON, DEL. LENGTH: Long
Earhart, an aviation pioneer and American hero, had seemed within grasp of a record-breaking, 28,595-mile flight around the globe. The U.S. Coast Guard had stationed the cutter Itasca near Howland to help guide Earhart's twin-engine Lockheed Electra in; in those early days of radio navigation, they would take a course bearing from the signals.
Shortly before she disappeared that morning, Earhart sent several radio messages to Itasca indicating the plane was close-by but unable to hear the cutter's signals. Two stand out for their understated desperation:
7:41 a.m.: ``We must be on you but cannot see you. Been unable to reach you by radio.''
7:50 a.m.: ``We are circling but cannot hear you.''
Fifty-eight years later, Richard Gillespie believes he knows why she did not hear the Itasca's response: Her plane had lost the antenna that would have enabled her to receive voice transmissions.
More importantly, he also has a hunch that the hulk of the plane itself lies hidden in a particular woody stretch on the southeast shore of Nikumaroro, an uninhabited Pacific island about 420 miles from Howland.
He thinks Earhart and Noonan headed southwest, toward a known group of islands that included Nikumaroro, when they were unable to find the tiny speck that was Howland.
``Just when you'd think this mystery has been beaten to death, along comes another piece of the puzzle,'' said Gillespie.
Four years ago, Gillespie and several associates found an old shoe sole and a dinner tray-sized shred of aluminum on Nikumaroro. Gillespie traced the sole, which carried manufacturer's markings from the 1930s, to a woman's 10-eyelet oxford that would have been compatible with Earhart's shoe size. About the aluminum, Gillespie does not equivocate. After painstaking examination of Lockheed records and the rivet pattern on the piece, he says, he is certain it came from the skin of the Electra's underbelly.
His labor has earned the praise of critics.
``He deals in hard evidence, not rumor,'' said Mark Peattie, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University who has also studied the Earhart disappearance. ``If Rick has a hunch, there's probably something to it.''
Gillespie's evidence about Earhart's inability to hear radio communications emerged from a study of film images. At his request in July, Jeffrey Glickman of Photek, a company in Champaign, Ill., that specializes in photographic analysis, digitized and ``cleaned up'' a filmed sequence of Earhart's takeoff on the ill-fated, longest leg of the easterly flight: 2,500 miles from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island.
The Electra was laden with 6,600 pounds (1,100 gallons) of gasoline, 50 percent above the factory-recommended maximum. Gillespie says the film shows precisely where the antenna wire, which ran the length of the plane's belly, snapped off as Earhart accelerated down the bumpy grass runway.
Earhart basically was radio-deaf from that point on, but she never knew it - and thus, as she neared Howland the next morning, she could not hear the Itasca's responses to her pleas for a signal that would guide her safely to the island.
The second new piece Gillespie offers to the Earhart puzzle may ultimately prove to be the big one; for the moment, it's only what he calls a ``working hypothesis.''
Several aerial photographs were taken of Nikumaroro shortly after Earhart disappeared and during World War II; the first was on July 8, 1937, as the Navy did a quick flyby of islands in the vicinity looking for wreckage from the Electra.
In all those photographs, Gillespie says, there appears a roughly cleared strip approximately 600 feet long on a stretch of the island not covered during his search expeditions in 1989 and 1991. In later aerials, the strip has disappeared under new growth. Earhart would have required 600 feet to take off. One scenario, according to Gillespie, is that Earhart and Noonan landed safely on the island, cleared a makeshift runway and then sometime later attempted a takeoff.
An analysis by the National Transportation Safety Board of the aluminum sheet Gillespie found in 1991 suggests that it may have been ripped from a plane's fuselage during an explosion. Because the rivet pattern places the sheet under the extra fuel tanks, Gillespie speculates the plane may have exploded during a warm-up or attempted takeoff because of a gasoline leak.
The hunch is strong enough to prompt him and a volunteer search team to plan a third trip to Nikumaroro next fall.
Gillespie and Pat Thrasher, his wife, founded the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery a decade ago to lend more professionalism to the search and recovery of historic aircraft. To date, the group's finds include several planes, including some World War II relics. The organization also has made the most exhaustive search for the White Bird, a French bi-plane that almost beat Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic, and probably crashed in Newfoundland.
But the big find still eludes him; to some, the shoe and aluminum sheet are not enough.
``Still out there is the `any idiot artifact' that will convince everyone,'' he said.
No every one agrees with him. Among the skeptics is Tom Crouch, chairman of the aeronautics department at the Smithsonian Institution.
``This mystery is far from solved. I still see nothing conclusive in Gillespie's research,'' Crouch said.
Gillespie remains undaunted.
``We tell our TIGHAR members to not get their hopes up, that it's the small finds that may reveal the story,'' he said. ``But just maybe this time around we could be staring at the remnants of an entire airplane.''
|n n| Gillespie had never intended to get drawn into the Amelia Earhart mystery. In a 1992 Life magazine article, he called it ``a sensationalized circus.'' Theories about what happened to ``AE'' have filled at least 30 books; a favorite is that she was an American spy captured by the Japanese. A story published 20 years ago claimed that she was alive and well and living in Teaneck, N.J.
The infatuation is driven because Earhart was an aviation pioneer, a rare woman in a man's field whose well-publicized exploits captured the nation. Her feats included the second solo crossing of the Atlantic, in 1932, and the first flight from Hawaii to California, in 1935. At 38 years old, she was flying around the world when most women would not consider driving an automobile.
``Aviation had been the domain of thrill-seeking barnstormers. She made it a respectable form of transportation,'' said Dorothy Cochrane, an aeronautics curator at the Smithsonian Institution.
Gillespie got hooked on the mystery in 1988. A former airport risk manager and commercial pilot with 4,000 hours logged, he was sitting in his office when two retired military aviators walked in and started talking about the Earhart mystery, speculating about how navigator Noonan might have reacted during the crisis.
Although Noonan was the senior navigator for the fledgling Pan American Airlines, locating Howland without radio help was something akin to an archer's hitting a deck of cards at 200 yards in a crosswind. Noonan may not have known of Nikumaroro (then called Gardner), but he certainly knew of the Phoenix group of islands to which Nikumaroro belonged, a two-hour flight to the southeast. Gillespie has computed from flight records that the Electra had four hours of gas to spare.
Unable to spot tiny Howland Island and with no voice communication from the Itasca to aid with navigation, Noonan would have followed standard procedures for the time: Using celestial navigation tables and an octant, he would have positioned the Electra on the imaginary line intersecting the Phoenix Islands and Howland, then instructed Earhart to ``fly the line'' until they could spot a site to make an emergency landing.
This would explain her last transmission to the Itasca, at 8:45 a.m.: ``We are on the line 157/337. ... We are running on line.''
The numbers refer to opposite compass points. Gillespie believes Earhart flew 337 degrees to Nikumaroro - which, he then learned to his shock, no one had ever searched by foot.
by CNB