Landfall? (Part One)

CCXL

The overwhelming odds are that the Electra 10E Special and its two occupants are lying, or were lying, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for decades while time, and war, and technological changes neither Amelia Earhart nor Fred Noonan could even begin to contemplate passed over the world at the surface of the ocean. 

Earhart’s Electra, or a plane lost in war?

At 16,500 feet down, weird deep sea fish and stark white crabs would have found the Electra’s drowned crew a feasting board. The bones that remained would have been dissolved by pressure and salinity into the very water that surrounded them, and the thin metal of the fuselage would have corroded quickly leaving an unseen stain on the ocean floor. A few bits of brass and copper might be all that now remain.

A bizarre Dragonfish

Miles above the wreck lying silent and entombed in utter darkness, ships and planes would soon be battling to determine the fate of the human race.  Some would share the fate of Earhart and Noonan, and therein lies one of the great imponderables of A.E. and Fred’s ultimate doom, for so many of the places they might have landed safely are places that were swept by war. The wreckage of downed aircraft and bits of human remains exist on many of the islands, making identification of any specific artifact far more complicated a task than one might imagine.

The U.S.S. Lexington, which played a huge part in searching for the Electra, was battered at the Battle of The Coral Sea in 1942

But there is something about the disappearance of the aviatrix and her companion that compels conjecture. The suddenness and totality of Earhart’s exit from the world is disturbing and uncanny. No cry for help, no position given, and after seventeen days of searching, not so much as a rag scrap of clothing or some floating detrius, causes even the most level-headed observers to put forth all kinds of theories about what really happened to Earhart and Noonan.

TIGHAR claims that this aluminum panel covered the “skinned-over” aft window of the Electra as seen below. Others disagree

Instructive is the fate of Malaysia Air Flight 370, which disappeared in flight on March 8, 2014, en route from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China. Contact was lost with the cockpit just after Flight 370 was handed off to air traffic control in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The plane likewise disappeared from civilian radar soon after, although the computers aboard continued to transmit and receive for some time.  Analysis of the computer data showed that the plane turned back toward Malaysia, crossed the Isthmus of Kra and entered the airspace of the Indian Ocean before disappearing completely.

9M-MRO, the Boeing 777-200ER that vanished over the Southern Ocean

Despite two intensive searches in the Andaman Sea of the northeastern Indian Ocean and in the Southern Ocean, no trace of the plane was found for a year. It was as vanished as Earhart’s Electra, and many people remarked on the similarity of the two disappearances.

MH 370, headed for Beijing, doubled back on its course, crossed over into the Indian Ocean, and was lost somewhere over the Southern Ocean. The last satellite contact with the plane, a reboot signal from an onboard computer, came nine hours after the plane went off course, but it did not provide a precise position.  There are many anomalies to the story of MH 370. Theories regarding the loss of the plane include a pilot gone mad, an onboard malfunction or other emergency, or a hijacking. Two passengers, later identified as Iranians, were traveling on stolen passports. All 227 passengers and 12 crew died

Debris from the plane washed up on the beaches of Reunion, a French dependency, in 2015. Other pieces of wreckage later appeared in Mauritius, Australia and southern Africa. Even with state-of-the-art tracking equipment a plane many times larger than the Electra had vanished utterly, until the sea gave up its secrets. It does so grudgingly, and Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan as yet remain unaccounted for.

A fragment of MH370 washing ashore in Mozambique