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Amelia Earhart mystery may hinge on aluminum plane part

FILE - In a March 10, 1937 file photo American aviatrix Amelia Earhart waves from the Electra before taking off from Los Angeles, Ca., on March 10, 1937. Earhart is flying to Oakland, Ca., where she and her crew will begin their round-the-world flight to Howland Island on March 18. (AP Photo, file)
FILE - In a March 10, 1937 file photo American aviatrix Amelia Earhart waves from the Electra before taking off from Los Angeles, Ca., on March 10, 1937. Earhart is flying to Oakland, Ca., where she and her crew will begin their round-the-world flight to Howland Island on March 18. (AP Photo, file)
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It’s a question as old as the big ones that humans have asked for centuries as they’ve looked to the sky: Who am I? Where am I going? How will I get there?

What went wrong?

One day after a forensic team began trying to figure out why a private rocket bound for the International Space Station exploded Tuesday, another group of researchers released new information on a much older aviation mystery: the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

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The aviator and her co-pilot, Fred Noonan, were lost over the Pacific while trying to circumnavigate the globe in 1937. Did their plane, the Electra, run out of fuel and take them to a watery grave, as many historians surmise? Or did one or both of the pilots survive a crash landing on the flat, coral reef of an uninhabited island? Did one or both of them die as castaways? What went wrong?

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery or TIGHAR has been coming to that conclusion for years and Wednesday researchers declared that an aluminum patch it discovered in 1991 seems to be from the Electra. They say it seems to be a patch installed on the plane in Miami, the fourth stop on Earhart’s circumnavigation effort, according to Discovery News.

The piece of aluminum was discovered on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati. TIGHAR has made a series of expeditions to the remote area and recovered a series of artifacts that may indicate one or both of the people aboard the Electra survived as castaways for weeks or months after it went down. The artifacts include a glass jar, a broken knife, a woman’s shoe and a sextant box similar to one that Noonan carried, as Discovery News reported two years ago amid a renewed focus on Amelia Earhart because of a biopic starring Hilary Swank.

Richard Gillespie, TIGHAR’s executive director and the author of “Finding Amelia,” told Discovery News then that a castaway’s bones were found on that island not long after Earhart’s disappearance.

“We know that in 1940 British Colonial Service officer Gerald Gallagher recovered a partial skeleton of a castaway on Nikumaroro. Unfortunately, those bones have now been lost,” he said. “The reason why they found a partial skeleton is that many of the bones had been carried off by giant coconut crabs. There is a remote chance that some of the bones might still survive deep in crab burrows.”

On its website, TIGHAR wrote Wednesday that it “finds the hypothesis that Artifact 2-2-V-1 is the patch installed on NR16020 in Miami to be strongly supported. Research will continue to seek answers to remaining questions about this wonderfully complex artifact, including defining and quantifying the type and magnitude of the forces necessary to cause the damage exhibited by the artifact. Those answers may strengthen or weaken the artifact-as-patch hypothesis but they will certainly inform our search for the rest of the aircraft.”

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