Researchers believe a piece of aluminum aircraft debris found on a South Pacific atoll came from Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra, which disappeared in the late 1930s.
If this is true it would suggest a "sonar anomaly" spotted nearby is the lost aircraft, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) reported.
In June of 2015 TIGHAR plans to return to the island Nikumaroro to check out the anomaly, which is submerged beneath 600 feet of water. The expedition will last for 24 days and will include divers in shallower water and an on-shore team.
When Earhart stopped in Miami at the start of her second world flight attempt a window on her plane was replaced with an aluminum patch. The "dimensions, proportions, and pattern of rivets" of this patch was uniquely tailored to the Lockheed Electra; the aluminum found on Nikumaroro in 1991 was found to match the profile.
Studying this telling piece of metal could help determine what forced the craft to land or caused it to crash. Evidence suggests Earhart landed her aircraft safely on the reef at Nikumaroro and sent radio distress signals for five nights before being washed ashore and stranded. If the plane was washed to shore it would have been torn up in the surf and scattered.
Researchers tested this theory in the 2010 and 2012 expeditions, but were not able to identify any of the wreckage. A few months after the 2012 expedition the researchers noticed an anomaly in the radar scans that had been overlooked; the object appears to be the correct size and shape to be a candidate for the Lockheed Electra.
Despite its promise of solving a decades-old mystery, the recovered piece of aluminum also comes with its own questions that need to be answered.
"If Artifact 2-2-V-1 is from the Earhart aircraft, as it appears to be, it seems to have had a different history from the rest of the aircraft. Did the underwater search for scattered wreckage fail because the wreckage is not scattered? Is the wreck of Earhart's aircraft far more intact than TIGHAR had assumed? Is the anomaly the aircraft? The only way to know is to go look," TIGHAR stated.
