Aircraft Fragment Likely Not Amelia Earhart's, Says Investigator

An aluminum fuselage fragment purported to be from Amelia Earharts 1936 twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10E Special, actually dates from World War II (or at least several years after Earhart went missing), Gary LaPook, a California-based attorney specializing in aviation accident investigations told Forbes.

The slightly rectangular, roughly three sq ft fragment was found on the uninhabited southwest Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro in 1991. But it was recently offered by Tighar, a prominent Earhart search group, as fresh fodder for the hypothesis that on July 2, 1937, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan crash-landed on one of the islands outlying coral reefs. That is, after completely missing tiny Howland Island some 400 miles to the north. An unprecedented air and sea search at the time turned up nothing.

Amelia Earharts Lockheed Model 10 Electra, at Oakland, CA on March 20, 1937. Scanned from Lockheed Aircraft since 1913, by Ren Francillon. Photo credit USAF. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (Tighar)s claim is that after leaving Lae, New Guinea around Noon on July 2nd, Earhart was actually as much as 200 miles south of Howland as part of her attempt to finish a weeks-long second attempt to complete a west to east round-the-world journey. The Pennsylvania-based Tighars idea is that they then ran south on a navigational line of position and hit Nikumaroro, then known as Gardner Island.

Yet Tighars executive director Ric Gillespie and LaPook disagree on the dates and labeling of the artifact fragment which Tighar found on Nikumaroro.

The skin of the aircraft [fuselage] was made of an aluminum alloy and to protect it from corrosion was then coated with pure aluminum known as ALCLAD for aluminum clad, said LaPook, who is also a celestial navigation instructor and former commercial transport pilot. On the back of the fragment, only the AD of the longer marking ALCLAD is still legible, a label that LaPook maintains would not have been in use until years after Earharts doomed flight.

But Gillespie, who is also author of Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance, contends that aluminum sheets on such 1930s aircraft were first marked with the ALCLAD [aluminum clad] label; then the letters ALC, before Alcoa Alcoa finally switched the labeling back to ALCLAD.

LaPook however counters that the ALCLAD labeling followed the earlier ALC labeling by several years and the switch was made during World War II.

My challenge to Gillespie still stands, if they ever marked aluminum with the word ALCLAD prior to Earharts disappearance, then he has the burden of proving it by producing one other piece of it with that marking, said LaPook. Nor has he come up with any photos showing such ALCLAD aluminum [markings] being used prior to July 2, 1937.

Gillespie told Forbes that Tighar has yet to find any piece of metal or photograph of a piece of metal that has exactly the same font on it as the artifact. But he says there are other features about the artifact that fit perfectly with it being part of a patch from Earharts aircraft.