It's been seventy-seven years since airplane where the first female aviator to cross the Atlantic first disappeared; but now, Amelia Earhart's plane scrap has been found in an uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific ocean. In truth, Amelia Earhart's plane scrap was found decades ago, but it is only now that scientists have reached the conclusion that the piece indeed belonged to the famed aviator.
According to The Daily Mail, Amelia Earhart's plane scrap was found twenty-three years ago in Nikumaroro, also known as Gardner Island, in the Republic of Kiribati - a small, uninhabited island in the Pacific where Earhart and co-pilot Fred Noonan have been thought to have disappeared back in 1937.
The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) thinks they may have found Amelia Earhart's plane scrap. The piece, which they named Artifact 2-2-V-1, was apparently used as a fill-in for a navigational window when Earhart stopped in Miami before her plane disappeared in 1937, leading to her being presumed dead since July of that year.
The TIGHAR executive director, Ric Gillespie, has been on the search for Earhart's airplane for a long time. He has led ten archeological expeditions to Nikumaroro, according to Discovery News, and his team has found several scrapes that could have been part of the airplane that saw the iconic figure disappear in the 30s.
The Amelia Earhart plane scrap was discovered in 1991 in one of his expeditions, and consists of a piece of aluminum aircraft debris. According to a new scientific report, the aluminum sheet is a patch of metal installed on the plane that led Earhart (name the Electra) when the aviator stayed in Miami for eight days, the fourth stop in her ambitious trip.
Back in 1937, Earhart attempted to become the first woman to fly across the world, circumnavigating the entirety of the globe. Earhart is famous for having been the first female pilot to fly across the Atlantic.
