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British pilot Justin Myers believes he has found the exact location of where Amelia Earhart’s plane crashed 88 years ago. Myers, who has almost 25 years of experience as a pilot, says he found photographic evidence of fragments of the missing plane in enlarged images taken by Google Earth. Now, he wants to go search for it.
Amelia Earhart was a pioneer in the field of aviation. She was world-renowned for becoming the first female pilot to fly solo non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean. Earhart also set numerous other flying records, including several speed marks. Unfortunately, on July 2, 1937, Earhart’s plane disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were never seen again, despite the most expensive sea and air search in American history up until that time.
An untold number of searches since then have yielded very little in the way of evidence of what happened or where it occurred. Captain Myers, however, believes he has at least part of the mystery figured out.
“As a pilot, I thought to myself, if I was in Amelia’s position trying to find a needle in a hay stack low on fuel and to be honest if we were in her position no doubt using some choice language, where would I force land my Lockheed Electra 10E?” he wrote on his blog (where he also shared numerous images of his discoveries).
“I picked an area which would probably have been what I thought to be best considering the circumstances. I zoomed in and there was a long sandy looking shape. I was not looking for the plane because that would be ridiculous, I thought. Anyway, I measured the sandy section which was over 50ft long, looked up the specifications of the Electra and that measured 39ft. I laughed and thought ‘What do you think you are doing?’
“However, to the left of the sandy section that had been eroded by the weather over many years was a dark colored perfectly straight object. I used the measuring tool on Google Earth and to my surprise and mild little shiver it measured approximately 39 ft.
“Last year you could move around the subject and it was absolutely clear to me this was a man-made object, not naturally occurring coral. I used to dive some years back and have seen lots of coral and the wrecks of man-made objects. It was clear that it had been there a long time and likely that passing weather systems had revealed it.
“Well, being a realist and a practical person, I thought it can’t be what was a beautiful aircraft. So I tried to disprove the notion myself. I struggled to do so. It looked man-made, it looked like a section of aircraft fuselage, that was remarkable by itself, let alone the possibility it was Electra 10E NR16020, even though the measurements looked the same.”
His suspicions were reinforced the next day when he says he noticed that 110 feet to the west of the metal section was “what appeared to be a perfect half exposed radial engine measuring 4-4.5ft in diameter.” He also noted that just under the engine is a wheel, which he says “is perfect and is in absolute proportion in size.” Other images he studied appeared to show part of the exhaust system and “perfectly sized exactly between the engine and what looked like a fuselage.”
So how did he find these images, while for 88 years and numerous searches for Amelia Earhart’s plane, no one else came up with anything? He told Popular Mechanics, “there was an element of luck in spotting that aircraft debris, as Mother Nature had revealed what had been buried on the reef for a long time. I managed to catch some photos before being covered over again by passing weather systems.”
Now, according to reports by the Daily Express and others, Myers wants to conduct an expedition to the location to confirm his theories.
“If this is not Amelia’s Electra 10 E,” he told Popular Mechanics, “…then it’s the answer to another mystery that has never been answered. This finding could answer some questions to someone who disappeared many years ago.”