Tarawa, Kiribati - Simply finding the tiny island in the vast expanse of the Pacific is a feat. From the air, Tarawa looks like an inverted letter L that could easily be missed by the uninitiated.
Little more than 50 metres wide at some points, the group of islets cover just 26 square kilometres.
Today pilots can easily find it with the aid of modern navigation systems, but it was a different matter for aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart flying over the region 75 years ago. She and her aircraft lost radio contact and were never seen again.
“Her example of independence, courage and perseverance in the face of adversity still inspires,” says Richard Gillespie, founder and director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery.
“Her story remains intriguing, in part, because there is still controversy about how it ended.”
He recently led an expedition to the uninhabited Nikumaroro Atoll, formerly known as Gardner Island, where he believes the wreck of Earhart's Lockheed Model 10 Electra could be.
Born in Kansas in 1897, Earhart made history in 1932 as the first woman pilot to make a solo Atlantic crossing.
She set out five years later from the United States to fly around the world with navigator Fred Noonan. They flew via South America, Africa, India and Papua New Guinea, where they took off July 2, 1937.
The two had a flight leg of 4,000 kilometres ahead but something went wrong and radio contact was lost. An extensive search that was one of the most costly at the time turned up no clues.
Gillespie's group has previously found fragments on Nikumaroro that could have belonged to the aircraft.
Those include a piece of aluminium, an unusually shaped piece of Plexiglas and a shoe similar to the ones Earhart was wearing.
A blurred black and white photograph taken of a shipwreck off the island three months after Earhart's disappearance may provide a clue.
Using new technology, an object at the edge of the photo has been identified as possibly being the plane's landing gear. Gillespie has conducted an underwater inspection of the reef.
“I think the best word for the mood on board is hopeful. We all knew that the evidence for the plane having once been there is strong but we also realised that finding wreckage after 75 years would extremely difficult,” Gillespie told dpa from the region by email.
The team has a large quantity of equipment at their disposal with the capacity to take photographs and videos to a depth of 1,500 metres. It also has an remote-controlled submarine, but sea conditions have proved difficult.
“We had hoped that large pieces of aircraft wreckage would be immediately apparent but as soon as we understood the underwater landscape we could see that this was not a realistic expectation,” Gillespie said.
He said the reef was steeply sloped and subject to storms and frequent underwater landslides. - Sapa-dpa