The research group says that the evidence is "very strong" that it is the Lockheed Electra 10E that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared in 1937 that has been located in a lagoon in the Pacific Ocean.
Amelia Earhart was the first woman to complete a solo flight over the Atlantic. She was also the first pilot to solo fly from Hawaii to the American mainland.
What happened to her on July 2, 1937, is still a mystery. Earhart had then intended to become the first woman to fly around the world, but her plane never reached Howland Island, where it was headed after taking off from Lae in Papua New Guinea.
The researchers will travel to the lagoon on the remote island of Nikumaroro, halfway between Australia and Hawaii, at the end of October to salvage what is believed to be the Electra, writes Purdue University in a press release.
According to Richard Pettigrew, part of the group traveling to Nikumaroro, researchers have previously presented evidence suggesting that Earhart and Noonan crashed on the island in Kiribati.
"Confirming the wreck there would be the smoking gun," he says.
The airplane-shaped object on Nikumaroro was first discovered via satellite images in 2020 but is visible in aerial photographs as far back as 1938 – the year after Earhart and Noonan disappeared.
It is not the first time researchers believe they have found Earhart's plane. In 2024, deep-sea researchers believed they had found the plane at a depth of 5,000 meters in the Pacific Ocean. It turned out to be a rock formation.
Corrected: In an earlier version, there was an error regarding the type of image the plane was visible on.
