Expedition To Find Amelia Earhart's Plane

Seventy-five years after Amelia Earhart's plane mysteriously disappeared over the Pacific Ocean, researchers believes they are tantalisingly close to solving the mystery of what happened to the famous female aviator.

A team of experts think they may find wreckage of the American pilot's aircraft on a remote, uninhabited island.

They also believe, rather than drowning in the sea, Ms Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were marooned on Nikumaroro but died when help failed to reach them.

Organisers hope the expedition will conclusively solve one of the most enduring mysteries of the 20th century - what became of Ms Earhart during her attempt to become the first pilot to circle the globe around the equator.

"The public wants evidence, a smoking gun, that this is the place where Amelia Earhart's journey ended," said Richard Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery .

"That smoking gun is Earhart's plane."

A recent flurry of clues point to the possibility that Ms Earhart and Mr Noonan ended up stranded on Nikumaroro, part of the Pacific archipelago Republic of Kiribati.

Previous missions to the island have unearthed evidence that Ms Earhart may have been there - including a cosmetic jar from the 1930s that appeared to be of a once-popular brand of anti-freckle cream.

A clothing zip from the 1930s, pieces of a woman's compact and a bottle of hand lotion were also found, along with parts of a woman's shoe and a man's shoe, a bone-handled pocket knife of the type Ms Earhart carried and human bone fragments.

"We've found artefacts of an American woman castaway from the 1930s, but we haven't found anything with her name on it," said Mr Gillespie.

"We've tried to get contact DNA from things that were touched, and it didn't work.

"The environment was too destructive. The recovered bone samples were too small. The logical thing is the airplane."

A cargo ship carrying the team of about 20 scientists is heading to the island from Hawaii.

They will spend 10 days searching for wreckage on the seabed and looking for other evidence on land.

Amongst the team is the expert who recovered the black box flight-data recorders from an Air France crash from the floor of the Atlantic last year.

The researchers believe Ms Earhart may have carried out an emergency landing on Nikumaroro, after which the plane was washed out to sea.

The 39-year-old pilot and Mr Noonan were on the last leg of their ambitious round-the-world trip when they went missing.

Ms Earhart had radioed that she was low on fuel and unable to find Howland Island, where she was heading. Several search and rescue missions at the time failed to find the pair.

Using underwater robotic submarines equipped with sonar, researchers will first map the sea floor, then probe the depths for objects that might be pieces of the aircraft.

If they find something promising, a third, remote-controlled submersible vehicle with camera, lights and a robot arm will attempt to explore the object up close.