Key to finding Amelia Earhart's missing plane lies in old radio after search replicated her final movements
SOURCE:Daily Mail
Nauticos, an exploration firm, believes that a replica of the radio Earhart used, combined with a flight over the exact portion of the Pacific where she was lost, could finally help locate her plane.
A radio transmitter identical to the one Amelia Earhart used in her doomed 1937 flight around the world could finally help locate the wreckage of her missing plane, according to a deep-sea exploration team that spoke with Daily Mail.
Today marks 91 years since the start of Earhart's historic flight from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California, when she became the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean.
However just over two years later she would vanish during a daring around the world attempt and her disappearance would become one of the greatest aviation mysteries in history.
More than nine decades later, investigators continue to search for the wreckage of her plane.
David Jourdan is one of those hoping to find it. He had already gained his expertise by serving as a US Navy submarine officer and as a physicist at Johns Hopkins before cofounding ocean technology company Nauticos in September 1986.
After Jourdan uncovered two lost submarines and a shipwreck from the third century BC, he turned his attention to Earhart. Since 1997, Jourdan has dedicated much of his company's time, energy and money to finding Earhart's final resting place. His team has taken a unique approach to do this.
On top of already having searched an area of seafloor the size of Connecticut with autonomous vehicles, Nauticos set out to recreate Earhart's last flight to narrow down where she could have crashed. Finding a replica of the radio she used, as well as getting a close match of the plane she flew, was crucial for this plan to work.
Earhart used a Western Electric Model 13C, commonly known as the WE 13C, to communicate with the Itasca, the US Coast Guard Ship stationed near her destination, Howland Island. The tiny island is roughly 1,800 miles southwest of Hawaii.
Amelia Earhart is pictured standing on one of her planes. Nauticos, a deep sea exploration company, is intent on finding the wreckage of her plane nearly 90 years after she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937
Amelia Earhart leans on the propeller on the right wing engine on her airplane. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared on a flight over the Pacific Ocean in July 1937
The bedrock of Nauticos's strategy was finding and refurbishing the communication equipment onboard Earhart's plane and the Coast Guard ship she was sending radio transmissions to. Radio engineer Rod Blocksome shows off equipment identical to Earhart's aircraft transmitter and the receiver used by the Coast Guard back in 1937
To perfectly replicate the transmissions she sent while in the air on July 2, 1937, the Nauticos team needed a radio like Earhart's and they needed it in working order.
In the summer 2019, Rod Blocksome, a professional radio engineer who has volunteered with Nauticos for decades, finally got his hands on one after 20 years of looking.
That year, Blocksome was the keynote speaker at a radio convention banquet in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Blocksome's friend was hosting the event and surprised him by bringing a WE 13C aircraft transmitter and an RCA CGR-32 receiver, the piece of equipment used onboard the Itasca to listen to Earhart's transmissions.
'Six months later he offered to sell both of them to me - [and] I immediately accepted his offer,' Blocksome told the Daily Mail.
After paying $3,000 for both pieces, it took him nearly a year to restore them and conduct lab tests to make sure they met the manufacturer's specifications in 1936.
While this process was underway, Jourdan said a company called Dynamic Aviation lent him an airplane very similar to Earhart's Lockheed Electra. Nauticos also acquired a ship that was made 'electrically identical' to the Itasca and was outfitted with the Coast Guard's receiver.
With all the components there, Jourdan and his team flew Earhart's route in September 2020.
Amelia Earhart is pictured in her Lockheed Vega plane at the First National Women's Air Derby from Clover Field, Santa Monica to Cleveland
Amelia Earhart and the navigator she vanished with, Fred Noonan, are pictured in Darwin, Australia
Howland Island is an uninhabited coral island located just north of the equator in the central Pacific Ocean
During the flight, Blocksome monitored the equipment and sat next to Sue Morris, Jourdan's sister. Morris assumed the role of Earhart and spoke the exact words the aviator said over the radio some 83 years earlier.
'We flew that plane out 200 miles offshore [from Howland], and we transmitted the same messages that she was transmitting and measured the distances, so we were able to replicate pretty much every piece of that radio communication. That gave us much greater confidence in the distances,' Jourdan told the Daily Mail this week.
Jourdan cautioned that there is still a lot of uncertainty, largely because of the hourlong gap between Earhart's last two transmissions to the Coast Guard, making it virtually impossible to know where she was during that time.
Earhart's second to last message came in at approximately 7.42am local time.
'We must be on you, but cannot see you - but gas is running low. Have been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet,' she said.
Her voice was never actually recorded by the Coast Guard, but transcripts of what she said were compiled based on interviews with eight men aboard the Itasca.
Her last garbled message came in at 8.43am local time, when she gave the crew her compass bearing, 'We are on the line 157 337.'
She also said she was traveling on a north-south line, which did not tell the Nauticos team if she was flying north or south, complicating things further.
Blocksome (left) is pictured next to Sue Morris, Jourdan's sister, who is speaking Earhart's transmissions over the refurbished radio while the plane is being flown as close to Earhart's path as possible
Nauticos obtained this plane, similar to Earhart's Lockheed Electra, so they could retrace the last several hours of her flight before she went down in the Pacific
The vessel Nauticos sailed on during its 2017 voyage to search for Earhart. It was called the 'Mermaid Vigilance' and was a Singaporean-flagged ship
During that trip, Nauticos used the Remus 6000 (pictured) to map the ocean floor and search for any possible wreckage
'She was going to resend it on a different frequency. And she said, "Wait." And then they didn't hear from her, and that corresponds to the time that it was calculated that she ran out of fuel,' Jourdan said.
Retracing Earhart's final moments has given the Nauticos team new faith that the wreckage really can be found, and for the last five years, they have been itching to get back out into the Pacific to begin combing the seafloor once again.
'Having narrowed it down with this new radio data, we feel like we can pretty much look everywhere else she could be with a very high confidence, you know, 90 percent confidence,' Jourdan said.
Using what they found on this flight, Jourdan is preparing for another mission. However the COVID-19 pandemic and funding snags have delayed Nauticos in staffing and securing an ocean vessel that could take them out to the extraordinarily remote area where Earhart disappeared.
Jourdan said he already has a ship and the necessary equipment lined up, adding that he is still trying to raise about $10 million for a month-long expedition sometime this year.
'These things are expensive, millions of dollars, and we have to find folks willing to support it, and that's always been the thing that slowed us down the most,' he said.
Once they're out there, Nauticos will sail out to the area it believes Earhart's most likely crashed based on the new radio data.
The team will then send an autonomous vehicle down to the bottom of the ocean, just as it's done during past expeditions, the most recent being in 2017.
Amelia Earhart with her husband George Palmer Putnam. She was declared dead on January 5, 1939 after she vanished in July 1937
Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly the Atlantic as a passenger, in 1928, and followed this by a solo flight in 1932
A view of Howland Island from inside the plane during the flight, which took place in September 2020
Jourdan said this part of the Pacific is 18,000 feet deep on average, about a mile deeper than where the Titanic was found.
Weighed down with a steel anchor, the autonomous vehicle takes about an hour to reach the bottom, where it can stay for as much as 28 hours before it needs to be brought back up to the surface for a battery charge.
While down there, the vehicle blasts out high-frequency sound waves to acoustically map the ocean floor.
'Rocks and hard sand echoes stronger than silt. But what really echoes strong is metallic objects and sharp edged objects. So Amelia's plane should ring out pretty clearly,' Jourdan said.
'Unless, of course, it's in a crevasse or it's behind a mountain range or something like that. So you have to be very thorough when you do this search.'
Jourdan, like every other explorer on the Earhart beat, has not found a trace of her plane so far. But given the incredibly large area he's already searched and the radio data he has, he is optimistic that next time will be different.