Purdue Research Foundation stakes expedition to find Amelia Earhart’s lost plane
A five-day search in the south Pacific will focus on an object seen by satellite that explorers believe is the Lockheed Electra 10E that PRF helped Earhart buy for her round-the-world attempt
Purdue Research Foundation, which recruited big-name university donors to raise the money to buy the Lockheed Electra 10E Amelia Earhart used in her attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1937, will stake an expedition in November looking to determine whether a lagoon in a small Pacific island holds the remains of the aircraft the famed aviator and her navigator were flying when they disappeared.
The $900,000 project, led by the Archaeological Legacy Institute and backed by a $500,000 line of credit from PRF, will chase a theory fueled in part by satellite images taken over the past decade that pieces of the plane are settled in the sediment near a spit of sand just off the island Nikumaroro, roughly midway between Hawaii and Australia.
If the theory pans out, and the pieces of the Electra 10E can one day be salvaged, Purdue officials said Wednesday that they hope to bring historic craft to the West Lafayette campus, where Earhart spent time as an adviser for the university’s budding aeronautics program and where she and her husband, George Putnam, indicated they’d like it to go as a museum piece.
“This is the story of a legacy, it’s the story of a mystery,” Steve Schultz, chief legal counsel for Purdue and PRF, said during an announcement Wednesday morning at Purdue Airport. “We hope it will ultimately be the story of discovery and even, perhaps one day, the story of a special homecoming.”
The announcement Wednesday came on the 88th anniversary of Earhart going missing on one leg of the attempt to fly around the world. Earhart and Fred Noonan, her navigator, had taken off from Lae, New Guinea, heading toward Howland Island, a small island in the Pacific, to refuel on July 2, 1937.They never made it, prompting a massive, months-long search that came up empty.
Schultz said Purdue had been approached several times through the years about putting its name behind one expedition or another tied to a search for answers in Earhart’s disappearance.
“In my estimation, none has presented a circumstantial case as strong and convincing as this one,” Schultz said Wednesday.
How confident is PRF this time, enough to put $500,000 in new donor money to the expedition?
“Another way to put that is,” Schultz said, “what else could it be? … We believe we owe it to her legacy to follow the evidence where it leads.”
The search is being dubbed the Taraia Object Expedition, named for anomalies first spotted in satellite images in 2020 near the Taraia Peninsula, which juts out in the lagoon of the tiny island of Nikumaroro in the Republic of Kiribati.
Rick Pettigrew, executive director of the Eugene, Oregon-based Archaeological Legacy Institute, said the images bolstered theories that Earhart was able to land the Electra 10E on Nikumaroro and wound up marooned there, trying to radio for help in the days that followed.
The island already had been a target in the search for clues about Earhart’s fate, courtesy of a records from her flight and a number of finds through the decades.
Among them: During her flight, as she tried to radio to the U.S. Coast Guard, transmissions from Earhart heard her saying, “We are on the line 157 337,” bearings indicating a flight path the coincides with the longitudinal line leading from Howard Island in the direction of Nikumaroro. Human bones found on the island in 1940, and analyzed in 2017, produced findings that indicated they could have belonged to Earhart. Artifacts dating to the 1930s had been found on the island, including a woman’s shoe, a compact case, a freckle cream jar and a medicine vial that included the remnants of type reading “UCA Pharmacy.” (Earhart had been living in Toluca Lake, California, outside Los Angeles, at the time of her flight.)
What became to be known as the Taraia Object revealed itself in satellite images – first in 2020 and then backdated several years from there – after massive storm surge hit the island via Tropical Cyclone Pam in March 2015.
Pettigrew said the cyclone pushed away sediment that had built up at the spot through a routine cycle of high and low tides.
Pettigrew said the theory is that the images from space show broken pieces of a fuselage, a tail and a spar from a wing that appear to be in line with the dimensions of the Lockheed Electra.
Here’s a timelapse of satellite images of the site over the years, provided by Pettigrew:
Pettigrew said the hypothesis is that after Earhart landed and waited in vain for rescuers to find her and Noonan, get the Electra refueled and get them going again on the round-the-world route, the plane – buoyed by its massive, but empty fuel tanks – eventually was lifted by tides and deposited in the lagoon, where it was slowly covered in sediment until the surge of Tropical Cyclone Pam.
The plan laid out Wednesday was to leave Majuro in the Marshall Islands Nov. 5 and sail to Nikumaroro for five days of work to see whether all those theories are correct and the object spotted by satellites is Earhart’s plane.
Pettigrew said crews will use magnetometers, side scan sonar, underwater and overhead photography, and a hydro probe to eventually try to contact whatever is there.
“We're going to do as much as we can without disturbing it, because the sediment there is very, very fine,” Pettigrew said. “When you disturb the sediment, you ruin the visibility. So we're going to do nonintrusive kinds of work first. … We know exactly where to look now because we have good satellite images, and when we go there, we’re going to get better close-up pictures.”
If the object really is the Electra, Pettigrew said, crews would return in 2026 for a more intensive archaeological expedition.
The crew on the expedition will include Marc Hagle, a 1971 Purdue graduate, Schultz said. Schultz said Hagle – the namesake of the recently built Hagle Hall on the West Lafayette campus and the first alum to be what the university is calling a Purdue Spacefarer, thanks to a seat on a Blue Origin flight in 2022 – was designated as “a special emissary” to the expedition for PRF. (Schultz said he’s also on the list to possibly go.)
Schultz said PRF has not committed finances for follow-up work beyond the November expedition.
“We've only gotten approval to cover and support the first phase, the identification phase, so I can't speak for that, yet,” Schultz said. “But we're obviously very interested in it, and we'll see what comes up.”
Schultz said that if the object is the Electra and it can be recovered, Purdue is interested in displaying it.
“Our pledge at Purdue will be, let's just say, between us and the Smithsonian, if we're able to repatriate it to the United States, we're clearly the best home,” Schultz said. “This was the original home of the Electra.”
Records kept in Purdue archive shows a complicated trail about where Earhart’s plane was going to land for posterity once it made it around the world.
Letters and agreements exchanged between Earhart, her husband George Putnam, PRF officials and then Purdue President Edward Elliott discuss how the university funneled to Earhart the bulk of the money needed for the Lockheed Electra. But the archives show that the “flying laboratory” was in her name.
Earhart’s affiliation with Purdue started in 1935, when Elliott recruited her as a career counselor for women on campus and an adviser for the university’s budding aeronautics program.
Purdue historian John Norberg wrote in “Ever True,” a book published in 2019 for the university’s 150th anniversary, that Elliott asked Earhart during a campus visit whether she had more adventures planned. She mentioned the idea of flying around the equator. “Elliott was intrigued,” Norberg wrote, “and he talked with people who might help finance her adventure.” Among the contributors to a $40,000 fund were Purdue benefactor David Ross and J.K. Lilly, son of Eli Lilly and president and chairman of the board of the pharmaceutical company.
Letters collected in the George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers and the Amelia Earhart at Purdue collection in Purdue Archives covered financial terms, along with the prospects for research finds from her trip and what might happen with the airplane – including returning to campus when the adventure was through.
Among those:
In an undated document, pinned by Purdue Archives to early 1936 and under a header reading “Amelia Earhart Project,” George Palmer Putnam described for Purdue President Elliott Earhart's intention to perform a round-the-world flight and the plane she would need to make the flight. “At the end of its career of usefulness the plane itself could be installed as a permanent exhibit at Purdue,” Putnam wrote. “Meanwhile it would be useable by Miss Earhart – to be maintained and operated at her expense.”
A letter from March 11, 1936, addressed to “My dear Mrs. P.” from the president of the Purdue Research Foundation, discusses Earhart’s willingness to help PRF establish the Amelia Earhart Research Fund for Aeronautics to help the university in the field of aeronautics and outlines the PRF offer to help finance her project. That included the hopes to get scientific data from her flights. It includes this passage: “The Foundation suggests that at the conclusion of the flight you assign to it, in such form as may be necessary, scientific data obtained in or resulting from the flight with non-exclusive publication rights therein. Such data will be held as part of the assets of the research fund above referred to, and should be a stimulating influence to the Foundation in its research work in this field.”
A 1936 letter from the Purdue Research Foundation to George Putnam, as Earhart’s agent, solidifies that arrangement for a contribution of $40,000 to be used “for the purchase of a Lockheed Electra plane, equipment and incidental expenses arising in connection with this project.” The letter says the financial support doesn’t beholden Earhart in any way, unless she abandons her plans for the flight around the world.
A letter from George Putnam, July 15, 1936, G. Stanley Meikle, PRF's director of research, includes this passage among several updates about the project: “As I think you know, we have decided to have title to the plane rest exclusively in her name as an individual.”
In a Sept. 26, 1936, letter to Elliott, Putnam tells the Purdue president about the plane, saying it was in “absolutely first-class shape, and I suppose historically the most interesting plane in service today.” He, again, talks about “perhaps” the Electra aircraft would be at Purdue one day. (He also included a photo of a Lockheed Vega, which Earhart used in other flights.) Putnam wrote: “The more I think about the project we discussed, the more enthusiastic I am. I would love to see it become the nucleus of a magnificent transportation exhibit at Purdue. How interesting for the engineers of 1975 to have before them an example such as this Lockheed of what the fliers today were using in plane, instrument, engine and equipment. Incidentally, should our project take form, I would suggest supplementing the plane itself with a fine exhibit of trophies of A.E.’s major flight – charts, photographs, records, personal equipment. This might become the foundation of an exhibit paralleling in world interest the Lindbergh collection at St. Louis. … Someday perhaps the present Electra will likewise go into your museum. And I doubt if there is any place that A.E. would rather have her medals and other prized possessions ultimately and permanently based, than at Lafayette.”
Schultz read part of the last entry during Wednesday’s announcement.
How confident was Purdue that it could lay claim to Earhart’s Electra, whether for an exhibit in an airport terminal ready to open bearing her name later this summer or in some other facility on campus?
“My fellow lawyers in the audience will know that there's different kinds of claims in the law,” Schultz said. “There's legal claims, contractual claims. There's also equitable claims. I would say Purdue has the strongest equitable claim to the remains of any other organization in the world. That's based on the clear donated intent – the clear intent of Amelia and her husband to bring the plane back to Purdue – and the fact that we facilitated it. Obviously, there are a lot of stakeholders now involved in this.”
Schultz said that would include the people of the Republic of Kiribati. He said he and Pettigrew met with leaders there several weeks ago.
“Their view on this matter is very important,” Schultz said. “They actually studied the Amelia Earhart story in grammar school, too, it turns out, They quickly realized, once they grasped what we were talking about, how important it will be for the Republic of Kiribati when all eyes of the world are on them, if, indeed, we make this discovery.”
First things first, Pettigrew said. And that’s the expedition.
“Just a few short months ago,” Pettigrew said Wednesday, “this would have been considered fantasy.”
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I wrote of Earhart’s time at Purdue in my book THE DEANS’ BIBLE in 2014. Hired by Elliott as Purdue’s career counselor for women students, Earhart was good friends with Deans of Women Dorothy Stratton and Helen Schleman. In Earhart’s book “Last Flight” (Originally to be named “World Flight”) that she wrote along the way and sent to her husband in installments, she stated that she was looking forward to using what she was learning in her “flying laboratory” at Purdue upon her return. —Angie Klink
This is a cool story, thanks for reporting it. In particular, I loved seeing the images of the old letters.