Ameilia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan set out in 1937 to circumnavigate the globe in a Lockheed Electra aircraft. They took off from Lae, New Guinea to make one of their last legs of the trip to Howland Island in the Pacific Ocean. This leg of the trip was about as long as a flight across the continental US, but they never made it to Howland Island. Huge search and rescue operations were conducted by air and by sea, but no evidence was found. Over the years there has been much speculation as to what happened to Earhart and her navigator, but most assumed that they crashed out at sea and perished.
But in 1991 a scrap piece of aluminum was found on the tiny, uninhabited atoll of Nikumaroro. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has been investigating this case since 1989 and recently focused the research on this piece of aluminum. When compared to photos of Earhart's aircraft, it appears that the piece is a metal patch that covered one of the rear navigational windows on the plane.
Researchers and experts have commented that the patch and its rivet pattern is "as unique to [Earhart's] particular aircraft as a fingerprint is to an individual." The theory now is that Earhart and Noonan made a forced landing on the tiny atoll and may or may not have lived there for a period of time before they both died. There was a large and expensive expedition planned for this past Fall, but due to lack of funding it had to be postponed and scaled down. TIGHAR plans to conduct a more modest expedition by land, air and sea in June 2015. I guess we will have to stay tuned! And maybe, eventually, Malaysia Flight 370 will have some kind of breakthrough like this. I hate stories without endings, but I suppose that is just part of being a human and something I will have to deal with as an historian.
http://www.history.com/news/researchers-identify-fragment-of-amelia-earharts-plane
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