A New Clue To The Amelia Earhart Mystery

I guess it's that time of the year again ,when a new clue appears, and we all try to solve the Amelia Earhart Mystery.

The photo is, mostly, unremarkable. It shows an airplane looming darkly on a runway at Miami Municipal Airport in the spectral shadows just before dawn — probably a test as the photographer waited for the money shot moments later, when the aircraft would lift off with famed aviator Amelia Earhart at its controls, unknowingly headed to a mysterious appointment with fate.

Yet the picture — shot by a now-forgotten Miami Herald photographer just before Earhart departed the United States on her doomed flight around the world on June 1, 1937 — contains an odd detail visible on none of the other thousands of photos of her plane.

There on the fuselage, about two-thirds of the way from the plane's nose to its tail, is a rectangular patch that shines a peculiar silver on the aircraft's dusky skin. Could it be a clue — the clue — to what happened when Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan vanished somewhere over the trackless Pacific Ocean three months later?

Long-time Earhart investigator Ric Gillespie thinks so. He believes that the silvery patch reveals an unrecorded repair performed on Earhart's plane during her stopover in Miami. And he hopes that modern computer enhancements of that part of the photo will link it to a piece of possible airplane wreckage discovered a quarter century ago on a tiny Pacific island in the area where Earhart disappeared.

Source: www.sfgate.com...-6559033

So the photographer was trying to get the "money shot" before she took off, and took this photo before,which is kind of dark, but does show the rectangular patch just before she flew away. To me, this does show that there was some last minute maintenance work done to the plane.

Here is the photo:


This rectangular patch is what they are talking about:


Photo and more source from: www.miamiherald.com...

To me it looks like they patched up a window . Could it have gotten loose, and caused her having to crash land somewhere?

What do you think?

That is an interesting theory, I still think they got shot down, but anything is open to debate and of interest.

Maybe one day we'll find remains on a remote pacific island, guess who....

S&F

Given her report of low fuel versus plane damage, it seems more likely they missed the target island and ended up somewhere else or in the ocean.

I did an image search. I found several photos of the port side of Earhart's A/C. In each of those, there are two windows visible on the side of the aft fuselage, beginning just about the aft end of the wing root. The forward window is longer than it is high, the one aft is higher than it is long. I could not find a good photo of the starboard side of the A/C.

Here is a pic of her A/C, starboard side. There were two windows on the fuselage..... (Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10E Special, NR16020, in a hangar at Wheeler Field, Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, 19 March 1937.)

a reply to: butcherguy

So, it was a window, but why was it covered up? Does anyone know what the reason would be, other than possible glass damage/cracking, and they didn't have any replacement glass?

a reply to: Catacomb

other than possible glass damage/cracking, and they didn't have any replacement glass?

This would be the most likely reason for it to have been replaced with metal, IMO.

It doesn't seem like anyone read the article. The article isn't really about that photo or the repair. But whether the rivet pattern on a scrap of metal found by Earhart researcher Ric Gillespie on Gardiner Island matches that patch. There's no real indication that it does.

Back in 1992, Gillespie claimed the scrap was from Earhart's plane, stating that ""every possibility has been checked, every alternative eliminated... There is only one possible conclusion: We found a piece of Amelia Earhart's aircraft." But other researchers noted that the rivet pattern was wrong.

Oops.

Now he's back making a case for the scrap again. But other researchers suggest all he has, or ever had, was a piece of a PBY seaplane.

originally posted by: Moresby
It doesn't seem like anyone read the article. The article isn't really about that photo or the repair. But whether the rivet pattern on a scrap of metal found by Earhart researcher Ric Gillespie on Gardiner Island matches that patch. There's no real indication that it does.

Back in 1992, Gillespie claimed the scrap was from Earhart's plane, stating that ""every possibility has been checked, every alternative eliminated... There is only one possible conclusion: We found a piece of Amelia Earhart's aircraft." But other researchers noted that the rivet pattern was wrong.

Oops.

Now he's back making a case for the scrap again. But other researchers suggest all he has, or ever had, was a piece of a PBY seaplane.

Going by the title of the article, and this blurb from it....

Long-time Earhart investigator Ric Gillespie thinks so. He believes that the silvery patch reveals an unrecorded repair performed on Earhart's plane during her stopover in Miami. And he hopes that modern computer enhancements of that part of the photo will link it to a piece of possible airplane wreckage discovered a quarter century ago on a tiny Pacific island in the area where Earhart disappeared. "If we can match a rivet pattern from the repair in the photograph to a rivet pattern on the wreckage, I think it would be beyond dispute that Noonan and Earhart weren't lost at sea, but made it to the island," said Gillespie, the executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).

it would seem that this is really about the photo and the repair.

I am not saying that the guy has a piece of AE's plane... but the photo and the repair are the point of the story.

I heard she was actually a terrible pilot. Could that have something to do with her disappearance?

originally posted by: butcherguy

I am not saying that the guy has a piece of AE's plane... but the photo and the repair are the point of the story.

Not really. The article is about a not very well respected researcher claiming a long discredited scrap of metal actually is from Earhart's plane. He has zero evidence of this.

Don't get lured in by fancy headlines. He hasn't done any computer enhancement. He hasn't proven anything.

He has a piece of metal that most likely comes from a PBY. And a photo that shows nothing relevant to the scrap. It's a classic piece of hucksterism.

a reply to: Moresby

The article isn't really about that photo or the repair

From the OP

Could it have gotten loose, and caused her having to crash land somewhere?

Which is why the questioning of it causing her to go missing gets discussed...

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts on the subject.

Special thanks to butcherguy for the additional information.

I'm not suggesting in anyway that this solves the mystery.
It's just another piece to the puzzle.

NR16020 wasn't a pressurised aircraft, so I doubt the patch had any contribution to the loss of airframe and crew.

I think Gillespie is just grasping at straws again, digging out old stuff, remember this is the same piece of scrap he said was proof decades ago, yet still people believe him.

He is basically saying that the Electra carried on a line of position course to the then Gardner Island, something which is impossible over the distance the flight was due to Earth curvature and that the navigator Noonan shouldn't have been far enough off course in the first place.


a reply to: Rainbowresidue

Moresby, not an advocate of the East New Britain hypothesis are you? lol

Yeah, you nailed it, Mr Gillespie is trying to get more sucker money to 'look' for the plane, he's already moved to a nice new home and headquarters thanks to the brain dead following him and swallowing every scrap of effluent he produces...this patch was definitely proof once before, yet still people think he could be right -again.

I see he is dragging in the old photographic analysis morsel again -like Glickman did with the Nessie artefact that was 'consistent with' an Electra landing gear strut.

It is possible that he pathologically and psychotically believes that he is being objective and that the plane did land there on Nikumaroro/Gardner...who knows.

I'd take East New Britain over Gardner any day, and ENB is a very long shot, like the spy stories...

I think that when you look at the evidence, Fred got them close enough to Howland -going by radio strength- for direction finding to take them the rest of the way, BUT, it is obvious she couldn't hear a thing transmitted to her until she tried the loop antennae for direction finding, so she had no idea what was going on with Itasca, and for various reasons it seems direction finding failed, so she and Fred probably executed a search pattern until they dropped into the sea.

I think the lack of radio after the 'north and south' transmission is probably due to radio failure, running the radio took a lot of power from the electrical system, so she couldn't transmit all the time, and the electrical load of the aircraft was suspect, she'd already blown a main bus fuse before and had spares, BUT, they could not be fitted in flight if it blew...which I think is crazy.



a reply to: Moresby

Moresby, not an advocate of the East New Britain hypothesis are you? lol

Yeah, you nailed it, Mr Gillespie is trying to get more sucker money to 'look' for the plane, he's already moved to a nice new home and headquarters thanks to the brain dead following him and swallowing every scrap of effluent he produces...this patch was definitely proof once before, yet still people think he could be right -again.

I see he is dragging in the old photographic analysis morsel again -like Glickman did with the Nessie artefact that was 'consistent with' an Electra landing gear strut.

It is possible that he pathologically and psychotically believes that he is being objective and that the plane did land there on Nikumaroro/Gardner...who knows.

I'd take East New Britain over Gardner any day, and ENB is a very long shot, like the spy stories...

I think that when you look at the evidence, Fred got them close enough to Howland -going by radio strength- for direction finding to take them the rest of the way, BUT, it is obvious she couldn't hear a thing transmitted to her until she tried the loop antennae for direction finding, so she had no idea what was going on with Itasca, and for various reasons it seems direction finding failed, so she and Fred probably executed a search pattern until they dropped into the sea.

I think the lack of radio after the 'north and south' transmission is probably due to radio failure, running the radio took a lot of power from the electrical system, so she couldn't transmit all the time, and the electrical load of the aircraft was suspect, she'd already blown a main bus fuse before and had spares, BUT, they could not be fitted in flight if it blew...which I think is crazy.



a reply to: Moresby