A veteran pilot says he may have located the remains of aviator Amelia Earhart’s long-missing aircraft on a remote Pacific island, using satellite imagery from Google Earth nearly 90 years after her disappearance.
Justin Myers, who has nearly 25 years of flying experience, said he identified what he believes could be the wreckage of a small airplane in GPS images of Nikumaroro, an island long considered by researchers as a possible site connected to Earhart’s final flight aboard her Lockheed 10-E Electra.
Myers said his interest in the decades-old mystery began after watching a documentary about Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, who disappeared in 1937 during a failed attempt to travel around the globe.
When he started poring over the satellite images, he said he “was just putting myself in Amelia and Fred’s shoes,” he said in an interview with Popular Mechanics.
But then, as he began looking at the overhead images, he began to refer to his own experiences as a pilot to contemplate “where I would have force landed a light twin aircraft in their position, lost and low on fuel.”
Myers focused on a flat section of Nikumaroro — a small island in Kiribati located between Hawaii and Fiji in the central Pacific Ocean — where he identified a dark-colored object measuring approximately 39 feet in length, consistent with the size of Earhart’s aircraft.
He said he continued to examine the surrounding area in detail and believes he identified additional debris from the plane, including what he suspects may be the engine, according to a blog post outlining his findings, the outlet reported.
“The bottom line is from my interests from a child in vintage aircraft and air crash investigation, I can say that is what was once a 12-metre, 2-engine vintage aircraft,” Myers told PopMech. “What I can’t say is that is definitely Amelia’s Electra.”
Last year, the decades-long mystery drew renewed attention after researchers at Purdue University said a 1938 aerial photograph offers “very strong” evidence that an anomaly on Nikumaroro — referred to as the “Taraia Object” — could be linked to Earhart’s missing aircraft.
The image shows a metallic object located underwater in a lagoon on the island, captured roughly a year after the pioneering aviator disappeared.
A team of 15 researchers had planned to travel to the island in November to conduct further investigation, but the expedition has since been postponed until 2026.
“To be totally honest,” Myers told Popular Mechanics, “my interest started after watching a documentary on the National Geographic Channel. It was the next day when curiosity about Nikumaroro Island took me to looking on Google Earth.”
“This theory…is based on several on-site investigations that have turned up artifacts such as improvised tools, bits of clothing, an aluminum panel and a piece of Plexiglas the exact width and curvature of an Electra window,” Biography.com has previously noted.
Myers noted in his blog post: “I picked an area which would probably have been what I thought to be best considering the circumstances. I zoomed in and there was a long sandy-looking shape. […]I measured the sandy section, which was over 50ft long, looked up the specifications of the Electra, and that measured 39ft. I laughed and thought ‘What do you think you are doing?’
“However, to the left of the sandy section that had been eroded by the weather over many years was a dark-coloured, perfectly straight object. I used the measuring tool on Google Earth and to my surprise and mild little shiver it measured approximately 39 ft,” he added.
“It looked man-made,” Myers noted as he continued to peer at the object. “It looked like a section of aircraft fuselage, that was remarkable by itself, let alone the possibility it was Electra 10E NR16020, even though the measurements looked the same.”