Pilot says Google Earth image may show Earhart’s lost plane on Pacific island

A pilot with decades of flying experience thinks he may have found the image of Amelia Earhart’s missing plane via Google Earth.

Justin Myers recently told Popular Mechanics that he started looking at satellite images of Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific after watching a documentary on his last flight.

“To be honest, my interest started after watching a documentary on the National Geographic Channel. The next day, my curiosity about Nikumaroro Island led me to look at Google Earth.”

When he first looked at images of Nikumaroro, an uninhabited coral atoll in the Pacific, Myers said he wasn’t trying to find the Lockheed Electra 10E. “I was just putting myself in Amelia’s shoes and [her navigator] Fred’s shoes.”

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But later, as a pilot, he tried to imagine “where I could force-land a light twin plane, lost and low on fuel, into their respective positions.”

When he zoomed in on an area where he thought they might have tried to land, he noticed a “dark-colored, completely flat object” about 39 feet long, identical to Earhart’s plane.

“I used the measurement tool in Google Earth and surprisingly and with a slight shiver it measured about 39 ft,” he wrote in a blog post.

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“It looked man-made,” he told Popular Mechanics. “It looked like a section of the fuselage. Even though the measurements looked the same, that in itself was remarkable, let alone the possibility that it was Electra 10E NR16020.”

Pilot Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan with a map of the Pacific showing the planned route of their final flight. (Getty)

While trying to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe in 1937, Earhart lost radio contact as she and her navigator attempted to land on Howland Island in the Pacific north of Nikumaroro on July 2.

Neither the duo nor their plane were ever found, and for nearly a century professional and amateur researchers have been trying to find out what happened to them.

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As he continued to look at satellite images, Myers said he saw more plane wreckage and thought he might get lucky with this sighting.

“There was an element of luck in identifying this plane wreck as Mother Nature uncovered what had been long buried in the reef,” he said. “I managed to take a few photos before it was covered up again by the weather systems.”

Myers wrote on his blog that he tried to contact various institutions about his findings but was largely ignored.

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The National Transport Safety Board said the island was not under its jurisdiction and so submitted a report to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau but received no response.

Earhart’s Lockheed Electra in March 1937 (Getty)

He also contacted Purdue University in California but heard nothing, and contacted an exploration company in the state but said he hadn’t heard from them in a while.

Myers is not the first person to believe he has solved the mystery of the airmen’s disappearance.

Last year, Purdue announced its own expedition to investigate the Taraia Object, a visual anomaly also located in Nikumaroro that some think may be the wreckage of the plane.

According to archeologychannel.org, the International Historic Aircraft Recovery Group believes Nikumaroro is where Earhart crashed, based on ample evidence and a dozen visits to the island between 1989 and 2019.

Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer and CEO of Deep Sea Vision, made news a few years ago after sonar images from a 2023 expedition showed what appeared to be a plane on the seafloor near Howland.

Google Maps images of Nikumaroro Island (Google Maps)

However, it was soon discovered that this was a natural rock formation with plane-like features.

However, this did not deter Myers from his findings.

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“The bottom line is that for a kid who is interested in old airplanes and air crash investigation, I would say that this was once an old 40-foot, 2-engine airplane,” he said. Popular MechanicsHe adds the caveat that he’s not sure it’s Earhart’s.

And even if it’s not the famous pilot’s plane, “then this is the answer to another hitherto unanswered mystery. This find may answer some questions about someone who disappeared many years ago.”