Amelia Earhart's Missing Plane: The Search Happening Now, the Evidence and the Disputes

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A 17-person expedition is working on a remote Pacific atoll to find out whether a shape in a lagoon is the Lockheed Electra that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan flew into history. Its underwater survey began on October 14, 2026, and the team says it expects an answer on the object within days.

Searchers have thought they had her plane before. The best-known sonar image, in 2024, was withdrawn when a second survey showed a natural rock formation. So this page does two jobs: it reports on the search as it stands, and it sorts the established facts about the flight from the claims that remain disputed.

It covers the search now underway, the last hours of the flight on July 2, 1937, the navigator who flew with her, the evidence for and against each major theory, and what would count as proof.

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Amelia Earhart under the nose of her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra, probably before the 1937 world flight attempt. Photo: Underwood & Underwood, National Air and Space Museum collection, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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Key Insights

• An expedition from the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University began an underwater survey of a lagoon object at Nikumaroro on October 14, 2026. As of October 15 nothing has been confirmed.
• The official conclusion since 1937 is that the Electra ran out of fuel and crashed in the ocean near Howland Island. No wreckage has ever been confirmed.
• The leading alternative is that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, landed on Nikumaroro and died as castaways. The evidence is circumstantial, and the best physical clue, a set of bones, has been lost since the 1940s.
• The Japanese capture theory has no physical evidence behind it. A 2017 photo said to prove it turned out to come from a 1935 book.
• Noonan was one of the best-regarded long-range navigators of his day. Any explanation of the flight has to account for his navigation as well as her flying.

The search happening right now

Updated October 15, 2026. This section reflects reporting up to that date.

The expedition is led by the Archaeological Legacy Institute (ALI), working with Purdue University and the Purdue Research Foundation. ALI's executive director, Richard Pettigrew, is the project director. The team has 17 people, including three representatives from Kiribati, Purdue's Steve Schultz, two maritime archaeologists from RECON Offshore, a medic and safety officer, and a film crew.

They met in Tarawa, Kiribati, and sailed about five days to Nikumaroro in the Phoenix Islands. The crew sleeps aboard the vessel Marin Mainiku, because the island's very large crabs make camping on land impractical, according to NBC News. They reached the atoll on Tuesday, October 13, cut a trail and set up staging areas. The underwater survey started the next day, and stormy weather slowed the first day's work.

Day one used a magnetometer, which detects ferrous metal. The Electra was mostly aluminum, so steel parts such as cabling are what the team hopes to find. It also used side-scan sonar to look for objects under the lagoon sediment, and a drone to look at the target from above. The next stages are a hydroprobe and a water induction dredge, which would clear sediment off anything the survey flags. A solar-powered station on shore carries a camera and a water level sensor to record weather and tidal flow.

What is the Taraia Object?

It is an anomaly in the lagoon beside the Taraia Peninsula. The expedition says it was first noticed in satellite imagery in 2020 and can also be seen in aerial photographs of the lagoon going back to 1938. Reports differ on the satellite history: one outlet says the shape appeared in satellite images from 2015, after a major storm uncovered it. Nobody has yet inspected it on site and said what it is.

Pettigrew says the idea that it is the Electra rests on several kinds of evidence together: documents, photographs, satellite images, physical finds and eyewitness accounts. He has called confirmation of the plane there "smoking-gun proof," while saying it's too early for conclusions. Steve Schultz described the work as still in the data-gathering phase.

The case against it

Ric Gillespie, whose group TIGHAR has run a dozen trips to Nikumaroro since 1989, still thinks the island is where Earhart most likely ended up. He doesn't think this object is her plane. To reporters he has described the shape as a fallen tree, probably a coconut palm or a pandanus washed in by a storm, and argues that a wrecked aircraft would be buried under coral, not sand. Searchers have also looked at that spot before and found nothing, he says.

Dorothy Cochrane of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has said the object needs more imaging before stronger claims are made.

Pettigrew's reply is that objects in the lagoon move in and out of sand cover over time. That is a testable claim, which is the point of sending a dredge. If the survey data show metal, the dredge exposes it, and the structure matches an Electra, the argument is over. If it is wood, the argument ends the other way.

What happens next

The team is scheduled to return to Tarawa around October 22. If the object is identified as the Electra, organizers have said a further field season would follow, and any recovery would need permission from the Kiribati government. Purdue's research foundation, which paid for the original aircraft, has said it would like to bring the plane home. The expedition's own updates are on the Purdue newsroom, and this page will be updated when results are reported.

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Chart by PilotPassion. Dates come from the sources listed at the end of the article.

The flight: Lae to Howland, July 2, 1937

Earhart was 39, a record-setting pilot who had worked at Purdue as a women's career counselor and aeronautics adviser from 1935. Her second attempt at a round-the-world flight began in California in May 1937 and ran eastward, with the Electra reaching Lae, New Guinea, on June 29. About 22,000 miles were behind them. Roughly 7,000 miles of Pacific remained, and the next leg was the hardest.

Howland Island is a speck: about 6,500 feet long, 1,600 feet wide and 10 feet high. The Electra left Lae at 10:00 am local time on July 2, heavily loaded with about 1,100 US gallons of fuel, for a leg of roughly 2,556 miles (2,200 nautical miles). The planned flight time was about 20 hours. We measured the same leg ourselves at 2,226 nautical miles, which agrees with the published figures.

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Chart by PilotPassion. Great-circle distances are calculated for this page from approximate island positions. Coastlines are left off.

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The US Coast Guard cutter Itasca was at Howland to help. It was meant to provide radio contact, a homing signal, a direction-finding service and a column of smoke. None of them brought the aircraft in.

The last hours, from the ship's log

The Itasca radio log is held at the National Archives. It records Earhart's voice coming in strongly at times, but with a one-sided problem: she couldn't hear the ship's voice transmissions. Earlier in the flight she had reported 10,000 feet and thick cloud, then 7,000 feet at 150 knots.

At 6:14 am by the cutter's clock she reported she was within about 200 miles and asked for a bearing, whistling into the microphone to give the ship a continuous signal. The Itasca's direction finder couldn't be tuned to her 3105 kHz frequency, and the radioman on watch later said he sat there "sweating blood" because he couldn't help.

At 6:45 she estimated 100 miles to go. At 7:42 she said, "We must be on you, but we cannot see you," added that fuel was low, and said she was flying at 1,000 feet. Around 7:58 she asked the ship to send voice signals; the Itasca logged her signal as the loudest possible, which suggests she was close, but the crew couldn't get a bearing.

The last message the cutter logged came at 8:43 am: she was on a line she gave as 157/337, running north and south, and would repeat the message on another frequency. It named no landmark. The wording of the second half is recorded as questionable in the log, and transcriptions differ.

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