The disappearance of Amelia Earhart remains one of the biggest mysteries in the last 100 years of American history, yet one pilot believes he has made a major breakthrough thanks to an investigation using Google Earth.
It has been over 88 years since legendary pilot Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared shortly after embarking on a plane journey around the world, and their locations remain up in the air all this time later.
There are a number of popular theories that have continued to spiral in the decades following their mysterious disappearance, including one that involved the boundary-breaking pilot being eaten by giant crabs, yet there's still no actual sign of where their plane went.
Following suggestions that scientists have finally managed to locate evidence of Earhart's location, one keen-eyed pilot has come up with his own theory — using Google Earth to crack the case that many have been working on for years and years.
Where does the pilot think that the plane crashed?
As reported by the Daily Mail, experienced pilot Justin Myers recently had a guest blog post on aircrashsites.co.uk where he provided evidence for where he believes Amelia Earhart's plane crashed on Nikumaroro Island.
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It's broadly accepted that Earhart and Noonan crashed on Nikumaroro as various circumstances saw them stray from their intended destination of Howland Island, but there hasn't been any actual way to prove this in the years since their supposed accident.
However, Myers believes that he has found the locations not only of the crash but where parts of the plane now reside following the wreckage, and it's all thanks to some close inspection on Google Earth.
"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," Myers reveals in his blog post.
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"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?'."
He then describes finding a 'dark colored perfectly straight object' in that sandy section that measured almost exactly the length of Earhart's Electra plane, and he also is confident that it's a man-made object due to previous images available on Google's software.
Upon settling on this realization, he then decided to look around the surrounding area and see what he could find. 110ft to the west he appeared to spot a radial engine, and underneath that a wheel too.
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He then managed to spot what looked like part of the plane's exhaust system, alongside the fuselage.
"I didn't know really where to go with this, so I wrote to the NTSB in the US and they emailed me back saying in was not their jurisdiction, it was the ATSB, Australian Transport Safety Bureau," Myers added, "so I filed an official report with the air crash investigation team in Brisbane."
Exact locations for each part of the crashed plane
If you wanted to head into Google Earth and take a look at Myers' findings yourself, here are all of the exact locations for what he has spotted:
- Fuselage: -4.6708008, -174.5412182
- Engine/Wheel: -4.6710688, -174.5413395
- Exhaust: -4.6709545, -174.5412963
Unfortunately due to the price and isolated position of Nikumaroro Island, Justin is unable to head there and explore the location itself. He remains not entirely convinced that these are indeed eerily similar to what could end up being a major discovery.
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"It would be very bold of me to say the objects in these Google Earth images are the remains of Amelia Earhart's Electra 10E," he writes. "All I am sayiung is that these objects look like unfound plane wreckage, which strangely looks and measures the same as her aircraft."