Amelia Earhart and her Lockheed Electra disappeared in 1937 while trying to circle the globe. Photo / New York Times
Amelia Earhart and her Lockheed Electra disappeared in 1937 while trying to circle the globe. Photo / New York Times
Donald Trump has promised to declassify secret government records relating to the disappearance of aviatrix Amelia Earhart.
The American’s light aircraft vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 during her attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world.
Conspiracy theories have abounded since her disappearance, as accidentinvestigators never found her body or the wreckage.
These include unconfirmed speculation that her plane may have landed on a small island in the central Pacific or that she had been captured by Japanese forces.
Mr Trump announced on his Truth Social platform that he had ordered his administration to “declassify and release all Government records relating to Amelia Earhart, her final trip and everything else about her”.
The US president said her disappearance almost 90 years ago had “captivated millions” and that he had been repeatedly asked to declassify the details of her last flight.
Aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart wanted to be the first woman to fly around the globe.
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had been expected to land at Howland Island in July 1937 to refuel during her quest to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.
But the pair failed to arrive and were declared dead two years later. US accident investigators concluded the plane had crashed somewhere in the Pacific.
No remains were ever found.
Kimberlyn King-Hinds, the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands’ delegate to the House of Representatives, had asked Trump to have the files declassified in July, according to the news website Politico.
In a letter to the president, King-Hinds wrote that Earhart’s story “carries particular weight” in her district and that elderly residents had shared “credible, first-hand accounts of having seen her on the island of Saipan”.
“In pursuing clarity for my constituents, I have become aware that the US government may still hold documents or records related to Earhart’s journey and final whereabouts that have not yet been made public,” King-Hinds, a Republican, wrote in the letter.
“Should such records exist, their release would contribute meaningfully to our understanding of one of America’s most revered aviators and could finally shed light on the final chapter of her remarkable life.”
An ocean explorer claims to have solved aviation’s greatest mystery by finding the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s missing plane.
Last year Tony Romeo, a former US Air Force intelligence officer who sold his property business to fund an $11 million deep-sea search for the missing plane, claimed to have taken a sonar image revealing its location.
His company, Deep Sea Vision, used an unmanned submersible to scan 13,500sq km of ocean floor with sonar technology in the suspected area of Earhart’s crash.
After reviewing data from the research voyage, the team discovered an image of a blurry, plane-like shape 5000 metres down at the bottom of the Pacific.
Romeo, who posted the picture on Instagram, believes it shows Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.
The sonar image was taken about 160km from Howland Island, halfway between Australia and Hawaii.
Romeo’s mission follows previous attempts to solve the mystery.
In 1999, Dana Timmer, an America’s Cup sailor, led a deep-water search near Howland Island. Although a promising shadow was spotted on sonar, Timmer was unable to raise the cash to go back and verify his find.
Ten years later, a team put together by Ted Waitt, founder of the Gateway computer company, conducted a new Pacific search but to no avail. “We’re confident we know where Earhart isn’t,” the team announced afterwards.
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