Jon Thompson is on a mission to find the remains of famed aviator Amelia Earhart's plane. And he's not the only one.
By Ramit Plushnick-Masti
HOUSTON — Jon
Thompson has traveled the world collecting art and artifacts for museum
exhibits, has seen the remains of the Titanic on the sea floor and has
participated in two unsuccessful missions to find Amelia Earhart.
Now 72 and battling prostate cancer, Thompson is convinced he and a
team from deep-sea exploration company Nauticos will finally be successful
in finding the Kansas-born aviator's plane, which disappeared with
Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan in July 1937. He's among the
researchers looking for Earhart as the 75th anniversary of her
disappearance approaches, and competition between search parties is
fierce.
"Admittedly, it's a needle in a haystack, but with the technology we have employed and the brains we have involved, if we don't find it, no one will," Thompson said.
Theories about what happened to Earhart and Noonan are varied. They
disappeared while flying from New Guinea to Howland Island as part of
the adventurer's attempt to become the first female pilot to
circumnavigate the globe.
This could be the year
Last month, the International Group for Historic Aircraft, headed by longtime Earhart seeker Ric Gillespie, said a U.S. State Department analysis of an image off the remote island of Nikumaroro, in what is now the Pacific nation of Kiribati, looks like it could be aircraft landing gear. Gillespie's team will return in July to renew its search.
A few months later, Thompson will be a sonar operator on a ship headed by David Jourdan, a deep-sea explorer who used high-tech equipment in 1999 to find the Israeli submarine, the Dakar, which went missing in 1968.
"It seems to be the greatest unsolved mystery of the last century," Thompson said.
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A photo taken just three months after Earhart disappeared may provide new evidence of famed aviator’s plight. The group that plans to conduct the deepwater search believes her airplane is still recoverable. NBC’s Chris Jansing reports.
Thompson and Jourdan are among the many historians and researchers
who believe Earhart's plane crashed into the ocean, which they say
explains why extensive searches shortly after the disappearance failed
to uncover remains or debris.
TIGHAR via Reuters
A close-up view of what researchers say could be the undercarriage of a Lockheed Electra airplane is pictured at the reef at Nikumaroro in this October 1937 photo.
Gillespie's group believes Earhart and Noonan may have managed to
land on a reef abutting the atoll, then known as Gardner Island, and
survived for a short time. They surmise the plane was washed off the
reef shortly after landing and that the wreckage may be in the deep
waters nearby. That is what they will look for during their 10-day
expedition in July.
Conspiracy theories that Earhart and Noonan were U.S. government
agents captured by the Japanese before the World War II have been
largely debunked.
Thompson and his group plan to spend two months searching a 400- to
600-square-mile area within 20 miles of Howland Island. It's the final
section of an area where research from three institutions suggests the
plane could have crashed. Thompson's two previous missions searched
about 2,200 square miles nearby.
Students weigh theories
Before fall, Thompson will complete proton therapy
treatment for prostate cancer at Houston's MD Anderson Cancer Center. He
will also work with students at the University of Texas' Cockrell
School of Engineering to analyze two theories about Earhart. One
investigates how far the plane would glide before sinking based on ocean
drifts and other aspects of crashing on water. The other looks at where
the aircraft could have flipped and broken on impact if Earhart were
too exhausted and weak to operate the machine.
A map shows Amelia Earhart's intended flight path and some of the search areas targeted by Jon Thompson and his colleagues.
Vishnu Jyothindran, a senior studying aerospace engineering who is leading the research, is excited by the uncertainty.
"In class, you expect you'll get a question that you can solve with data
in the textbook," he said in a statement. "We don't have that guarantee
here, and that's unfortunate, but it's also just reality."
If artifacts are found, Thompson already knows what the exhibit would
look like. The artifacts would travel on a three-story barge and dock
at dozens of North American cities. It would be called "Patience,
Persistence, Passion." Visitors would enter an area that looks like
Earhart's childhood home, go through a portion showcasing technology
that helped find the crash site, and finally go into a place where the
aircraft — or a replica of it — would be displayed.
Human remains and any wood would have disintegrated at 18,000 feet,
Thompson said. But Earhart's jewelry, helmet and even her leather jacket
could still be found.
"I hope we still find it strapped in the seat belt," he says, grinning.
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