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Expedition Amelia is a 2019 National Geographic documentary that follows Robert Ballad, an ocean explorer who sets out on an expedition to find the mysteriously lost plane of Amelia Earhart which was lost in the Pacific Ocean after the aviation pioneer’s mysterious disappearance on July 2, 1937. The TV movie is currently streaming on Disney+.
Amelia Earhart was an American aviation pioneer who became the first person to fly from Hawaii to the US Mainland, solo and the first woman to fly alone, non-stop, across the Atlantic Ocean. Earhart was on a journey to circumnavigate the globe when she was flying over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937, the day she disappeared. Her disappearance has remained a mystery for over 87 years since she went missing. On January 5, 1939, the court declared Amelia Earhart legally dead.
She was flying with her navigator Fred Noonan. Both Noonan and Earhart disappeared and were never to be found. They took off from Papua New Guinea and were reportedly headed to Howland Island when their aircraft sank into the central Pacific Ocean.
During World War I, Amelia Earhart moved to the Toronto area where she was employed as a nurse’s aide. There she attended an airshow that inspired her to fly, as TIME reported. She then attended flying classes in California. In 1922, Earhart set a women’s altitude record of 14000 feet and used to fly during her free time from healthcare and medicine. She then went on to set some of the most remarkable records in aviation.
Expedition Amelia: Has Amelia Earhart’s lost plane finally been found?
According to CNN, an ocean exploration company based in Charleston, South Carolina, suggests that it may have made some significant progress in the investigation of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance. The company is called Deep Sea Vision and onboarded archaeologists and marine robotics experts into their search team very recently.
Sonar imaging is a procedure that uses sound waves to measure the distance from the seabed to the surface. When employing this procedure, experts at Deep Sea Vision, reportedly came across an anomaly. The anomaly is currently more than 16,000 feet underwater in the Pacific Ocean. The anomaly resembles a plane-like shape suggesting that it might be an aircraft. Moreover, the images of the anomaly resembled Earhart’s Lockheed Model 10-E Electra, the 10-passenger aircraft that she was in when she disappeared.
However, the anomaly has been missing some features of Amelia Earhart’s plane including twin engines, according to Nauticos, another deep sea exploration company. Moreover, sonar imaging is a reportedly tricky procedure as the working of sound can be unpredictable and may cause irreparable damage to the surfaces it interacts with. Sonar imaging, alone, therefore, cannot determine the nature and shape of the artifact detected.
Experts suspect that Amelia Earhart might have run out of fuel which compelled her to land on water. The aircraft then sank to the bottom of the ocean. The images also hint at the anomaly’s proximity to Howland Island. During her final attempts to contact help, her radio transmissions got progressively stronger. This could be because of the fact that she was nearing the island.
Several conspiracy theories began getting popular around the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. For some years, many believed that Earhart and Noonan were captured by the Japanese. This theory was later dismissed as a myth.
Expedition Amelia is currently streaming on Disney+.
