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Investigators are heading to one of the most remote islands in the Pacific next week to resolve a 70-year-old mystery: what happened to Amelia Earhart, the world's most famous woman aviator.
The glamorous adventurer, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, disappeared along with navigator Fred Noonan while attempting to circumnavigate the globe. It was always assumed their aircraft crashed in the sea and sank, but the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or Tighar, hopes to prove that one or both of the fliers survived.
The organisation has found circumstantial evidence that Earhart may have spent the last days of her life as a castaway on Nikumaroro, an island in the Kiribati group.
A team of 15 will carry out archaeological searches at a campsite where human remains and a woman's shoe were found in 1940.
"We hope to find some bones on the island and use DNA tests to prove they belonged to Amelia or her navigator by comparing it with DNA from their living relatives," said American expedition leader Ric Gillespie.
Earhart and Noonan set off from Oakland, California, in May 1937 in a twin-engined Lockheed Electra.
After a route that took them over the Caribbean, South America, Africa, Arabia, India, Burma, Singapore, Indonesia and Australia they stopped in Lae, New Guinea.
The next leg of the flight, on July 2, was a daunting 4000km across the Pacific to tiny Howland Island. A United States Coastguard boat, Itasca, was to guide them in by radio.
The Lockheed, fitted with extra fuel tanks, never arrived. After 19 hours in the air, radio operators on the Itasca heard Earhart but apparently she was unable to hear them.
Before contact was lost, she said the aircraft was low on fuel.
An extensive two-week search failed to find any trace of the plane or its crew.
- Observer
