The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) made news last week when it reported that an aluminum patch it discovered in 1991 seems to be from Amelia Earhart’s lost Lockheed Electra. They say it may be a patch installed on the plane in Miami, the fourth stop on Earhart’s circumnavigation effort, according to a report in the San Diego Union-Times.
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So they found this piece of aluminum in 1991 which purportedly matches a patch put on Earhart’s plane during a stopover in Miami in 1937 before launching on her fateful around the world flight. That would seem to beg the question: Why did it take them 23 years to reach that conclusion? Next question: If the airplane ditched on the atoll and was supposedly sufficiently intact that Earhart was heard for 6 days making calls from the airplane’s HF radio (which may have required at least one of its engines to be run with whatever fuel remained in the tanks) before the airplane wreckage was swept off the atoll by an incoming tide into the deep blue sea, how is it that this specific piece of aluminum survived to be found but nothing else? Sounds like another among the many theories that raises more questions than it answers.