History

Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan vanished in 1937 while attempting to fly around the world in a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island

According to The Telegraph, a new forensic investigation has determined that the bones discovered on a remote Pacific island are most likely those of the missing aviator Amelia Earhart.

Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean, vanished over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937, while attempting to be the first woman to fly around the world.

Since then, a number of conspiracies and rumors regarding her fate have surfaced, one of which is that the Japanese captured and held her.

However, according to a recent investigation led by University of Tennessee professor Richard L. Jantz, the bones discovered on the island of Nikumaroro three years after the pilot went missing are indeed those of the missing pilot.

The bones were first rejected as belonging to Amelia Earhart since a preliminary investigation revealed they were male. Professor Jantz has suggested that the bone measurements closely match Earhart’s records, despite the fact that forensics were not completely developed at the time.

“The only documented person to whom they may belong is Amelia Earhart,” he pointed out.

American aviation pioneer and novelist Amelia Earhart was born on July 24, 1897. She achieved many records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in the establishment of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots. Earhart joined the visiting faculty at Purdue University in 1935, serving as an aviation engineering advisor and a career counselor for female students. She was also a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment and a member of the National Woman’s Party.

Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan vanished over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island in 1937 while trying to fly around the world in a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra Purdue-funded.

The U.S. Navy searched the area for weeks, but the plane was never located, and Earhart was formally declared dead in 1939. An exploratory team from the Phoenix Island Settlement Scheme, which sought to populate remote islands, discovered bones on Nikumaroro in 1940.

The officer in charge then directed a larger search of the area, which, according to The Telegraph, uncovered other bones, a piece of a woman’s shoe, and personal items like a sextant box and a bottle of the herbal liqueur Benedictine.

The remains were inspected by Dr. D. W. Hoodless, the principal of the Central Medical School in Fiji, who came to the conclusion that they belonged to a “stocky male” who stood roughly 5 feet, 5 inches tall.

Professor Jantz used the bone measurements acquired by Hoodless and compared them to what is known about Amelia Earhart’s body type because bones have since been lost.

Using her photographs, together with copies of her driver’s and pilot’s licenses, Jantz was able to piece together Earhart’s bone dimensions.

Summing up the process, he said: “If the skeleton were available, it would presumably be a relatively straightforward task to make a positive identification or a definitive exclusion.

“Unfortunately, all we have are the meager data in Hoodless’s report and a premortem record gleaned from photographs and clothing.

“From the information available, we can at least provide an assessment of how well the bones fit what we can reconstruct of Amelia Earhart.”

Professor Jantz claimed that in 1940 “osteology was not yet a well-developed discipline,” leading Hoodless to incorrectly assign the gender of the remains.

According to his own research, the bones were more similar to Amelia Earhart’s measurements than 99 percent of a considerable sample size.

Jantz concluded: “Until definitive evidence is presented that the remains are not those of Amelia Earhart, the most convincing argument is that they are hers.”

What happened to Earhart and Noonan after they vanished is the subject of much speculation. Although many explanations, including various conspiracy ideas, have been put out, most historians still adhere to the straightforward “crash and sink” scenario.

Some claim that Earhart and Noonan made it to another place after landing; however, they were either never discovered or murdered, which makes en-route locations like Tarawa implausible. The Japanese-controlled Marshall Islands, which are located 870 miles (1,400 km) away from Howland at Mili Atoll, the uninhabited Gardner Island, and the Japanese-controlled Northern Mariana Islands, which are situated 2,700 miles (4,300 km) away from Howland, have all been suggested as potential locations.

Photo by NASA on The Commons, United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division, SnowFire and Underwood & Underwood via Wikipedia

“We heard the first explosion, then a second, and then a third. The Taleban was on base and we were under attack. Believe me, there was not a rifle in the rack one minute later, which left me looking for one,” Willie Walker, Boeing airframe specialist and former Marine who witnessed the raid on Camp Bastion

The U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) bought the Harrier from the U.K. in the 1970s because of its special vertical/short take-off and landing (V/STOL) characteristics. It has been used for close air support (CAS) for more than four decades. In late 2001, as part of the “War on Terror,” it led the USMC air attack on the Taleban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in AV-8B Harrier II form.

From the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) to the withdrawal of NATO forces, Harrier II squadrons were almost always present in the theater of operations until their role was completed in September 2013.

In spite of this, the USMC Harrier IIs sent to Afghanistan suffered the biggest loss of American air power in a single occurrence since the Vietnam War when eight AV-8Bs were lost or severely damaged by a Taliban raid on Camp Bastion in Helmand province on the night of September 14, 2012.

The Marine Attack Squadron 211 (VMA-211) CO, Lt. Col. Chris Raible, and Capt. Kevin Smalley had just finished a routine mission and parked their jets that night when Camp Bastion came under attack from a force of 15 Taleban insurgents wearing U.S. Army uniforms, according to Lon Nordeen’s account in his book AV-8B Harrier II Units of Operation Enduring Freedom. After breaking through the outer perimeter of the base, the insurgents divided into three groups of five and assaulted the VMA-211 personnel in tented quarters close to the flight line, the AV-8Bs in their temporary hangars on Lima Ramp, and aircraft refueling stations.

Lt. Col. Raible and his aircraft maintenance officer (AMO), Maj. Greer Chambliss drove back to the flight line from the operations hut after hearing gunfire and explosions and planned a counterattack.

Regular soldiers, members of VMA-211, and a quick reaction force of 15 RAF Regiment gunners in their Jackal patrol vehicles engaged the Taleban and eventually killed all but one of them; the lone survivor was captured. Air support was provided by a British Army Air Corps Apache and a USMC aviation attack team composed of an AH-1W and UH-1Y. Six AV-8Bs were destroyed, and two more were severely damaged, during the fighting, which also claimed the lives of Lt. Col. Raible and technician Sgt. Bradley Atwell of Marine Aviation Logistics Squadron 16 (MALS-16). Several other Marines and a civilian technician were also injured.

Willie Walker, a former Marine and a Boeing airframe expert saw the attack while working with a small group of civilian “tech reps” to maintain VMA-211’s crew flying their Harrier IIs in 2012:

“We had just come off maintenance, and all the jets for the next missions were refueled, loaded, and ready to go. I was in the airframes workshop and as part of we had one jet in phase inspection having its blast shield repaired. We heard the first explosion, then a second, and then a third, which I thought were RPGs. At about the same time two guys ran into the hangar shouting that they weren’t rockets [they were actually F-1 anti-personnel grenades], the Taleban was on base and we were under attack. Believe me, there was not a rifle in the rack one minute later, which left me looking for one.

“As the Marines covered the doors, there were rounds coming in through the side of the hangar and then flying out the opposite wall. We were in a metal-covered workshop, with dividers for workstations and no protection. The CO, AMO, and other Marines raced up to the workshop in a vehicle, and Lt. Col. Raible came in and ordered the Marines out into the ditches surrounding the Lima Ramp in an attempt to fight back. It was at this point he got hit. Then an RPG came into our side of the hangar and detonated when it hit a door, wounding a few of the Marines who worked in the powerline [engine] shop. We just hunkered down while the guys outside fought back, and the guys inside passed their ammunition to those firing from the ditches. Eventually, several helicopter gunships appeared overhead and they contained the enemy threat.

“In the days following the attack, we helped with battle damage assessment on the two jets that had survived and worked with the Marines to get them prepared for shipment back to Cherry Point. The two VMA-211 jets that had been on detachment in Qatar [the Squadron received orders to reduce its debt commitment to eight AV-8Bs and 140 personnel for the final six weeks of the deployment] at the time of the attack came back to Camp Bastion, and VMA-231 sent six jets over from Cherry Point [ahead of the unit’s OEF deployment scheduled for October 2012]. We worked hard to clean up the mess and extend the flight line so that it was ready for the replacement aircraft.”

Six percent of the USMC’s Harrier II attack jet fleet was made up of eight destroyed or damaged aircraft. The USMC’s Harrier planes typically lose two airframes each year to attrition.

Prince Harry, who was stationed at the site at the time, was allegedly the objective of the operation, according to the Taleban, who also claimed that it was in retaliation for the film Innocence of Muslims.

The attack “bore all the hallmarks of the Haqqani network,” according to the BBC. A week later, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said that it had apprehended one of the raid’s organizers.

Photo by Sgt. Keonaona Paulo / U.S. Marine Corps