Autonomous subs join hunt for Amelia Earhart's plane

Self-directed submarines will soon search for the plane of pioneer aviator Amelia Earhart around the coral reef where she is thought to have crashed

JUST 6 kilometres long, Nikumaroro is barely a dot in the Pacific. But this coral atoll is now the focus of the search for one of the most enigmatic wrecks in the history of American aviation: Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra. Her disappearance on the last leg of a round-the-world flight is a mystery: no one knows where her plane came down, nor why.

TIGHAR, the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, has pieced together physical and technical clues as to the plane's whereabouts. And the group hopes to solve the mystery once and for all, using the latest in autonomous and high-definition deep-ocean search technology.

The first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, Earhart was a record-breaking pilot and a major celebrity when she took off from Lae, New Guinea, on 2 July 1937 with her navigator Fred Noonan. They were headed for Howland Island 4100 kilometres away in the middle of the Pacific, where a US coastguard boat was due to refuel them. They never made it. The tiny island was shrouded in cloud and Earhart's urgent Morse code and radio messages to the coastguard spoke only of being lost.

Dozens of radio transmissions supposedly from Earhart followed over the next two weeks - suggesting they had crash-landed and were still alive. But the messages were written off as hoaxes - until now. Ric Gillespie and colleagues at TIGHAR have modelled the characteristics of the radio waves of 120 such messages to work out where they came from. They reckon 57 were in fact genuine. Tracing them to their source suggests the Electra landed on Nikumaroro in the Pacific republic of Kiribati.

Gillespie's theory is that although they landed safely, the pounding surf eventually claimed the plane, leaving the crew as castaways. "We think the plane was washed over the edge of the coral reef and expect the wreckage is on the reef slope, near to where it begins," Gillespie said in an email from TIGHAR's ship, the Ka'Imikai-o-Kanaloa, en route from Honolulu to Nikumaroro.

On board the ship is an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that will undertake a pre-programmed search as far down as 1500 metres, using sonar to generate a high-resolution acoustic image of the seabed. "The free-swimming AUV will be our primary search tool," says Gillespie. "We'll investigate the targets it finds using a tethered, remotely operated vehicle equipped with HD video cameras." Autonomous subs use laser and sonar-based dead reckoning to work out their location without GPS, and then surface beside a ship to upload their pictures via Wi-Fi, says Gwyn Griffiths, chief technologist at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK. The technologies were pioneered on two missions run by David Gallo of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. One mapped the seabed debris field around the Titanic in 2010, while another located the wreckage of an Air France airliner in 2011.

Gallo says TIGHAR will face different challenges: currents in shallow water are usually stronger, visibility lower and sonar searches typically shorter range. "Shallow water is usually a high-energy and dynamic environment so that the chances of the aircraft being preserved, or in large pieces are extremely small. However, the ocean is full of surprises."

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