Expedition to find Amelia Earhart’s plane will begin this year
An expedition to a remote Pacific island in search of the remains of Amelia Earhart’s plane is ready to launch after being delayed for a year.
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NBC News senior correspondent Tom Costello announced exclusively on TODAY on July 24 — Earhart’s 129th birthday — that a group led by the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University will commence a mission in October to Nikumaroro Island, which is part of the Pacific Ocean island nation of Kiribati.
The expedition was initially announced in October 2025, but was postponed for a year while approvals and permits were obtained from the government of Kiribati.
A 16-person team of archaeologists, logistics experts, scuba and safety personnel, filmmakers and Kiribati representatives will leave Tarawa, Kiribati, by boat on Oct. 7 and travel about 830 nautical miles over six days to Nikumaroro Island. The expedition will spend multiple days on the island before returning to Tarawa.
ALI executive director Richard Pettigrew is leading the mission to investigate what is known as the Taraia Object, a visual anomaly first spotted on satellite in 2020 in a lagoon on Nikumaroro Island. The expedition looks to determine if the object captured in the images is Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10-E aircraft.
Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan were famously attempting to circumnavigate the globe when they disappeared on July 2, 1937, in a mystery that has captivated people around the world for nearly 90 years.
The expedition’s hypothesis is that Earhart and Noonan landed on the remote Nikumaroro Island between Hawaii and Australia and were stranded after failing to reach their scheduled stop on Howland Island.
Human bones were found on Nikumaroro in 1940 and have since disappeared. An expert at the time of their discovery believed they belonged to a middle-aged man. However, University of Tennessee anthropology professor Richard Jantz said on TODAY in 2018 that he believes an analysis shows they are Earhart’s remains.
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The latest mission looks to pin down whether her plane is on the same island.
“The evidence supporting the Nikumaroro Hypothesis remains compelling, and the only way to answer this question is to go to Nikumaroro, inspect the Taraia Object firsthand and follow the evidence wherever it leads,” Pettigrew said in a news release by Purdue University.
In archival satellite images, the mysterious image first appears in 2015, a year after a massive tropical storm shifted the sands. Ric Gillespie, an aviation accident investigator who has been writing about Earhart for decades, told Costello on TODAY in 2025 that the satellite image shows a downed coconut tree, not the famous plane.
“We’ve looked there in that spot, and there’s nothing there,” he said at the time.
In addition to the satellite images, the Nikumaroro Hypothesis is supported by other facts, according to Purdue’s news release. Radio bearings from transmissions at the time of Earhart’s disappearance, the 2018 analysis of the human bones found on the island and the discovery of 1930s-era artifacts, like a medicine vial and compact case, also lead mission organizers to believe Earhart’s plane could be there.
Three members of the crew will be representing Purdue University, where Earhart was a career counselor for women and adviser to its Department of Aeronautical Engineering in 1935. Purdue helped finance her famous plane, which she had planned to return to the college in West Lafayette, Indiana.
“She challenged conventions, pushed the boundaries of what was possible, and inspired countless others to do the same. As we prepare to embark on this expedition, we do so with a deep sense of responsibility to her legacy and a determination to seek answers that have eluded the world for decades,” Purdue Senior Vice President Steve Schultz said in a statement in the news release.
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