Discovery Channel To Follow Search For Amelia Earhart's Lost Plane

Discovery Channel will air a documentary in August on the latest attempt to find the missing aircraft belonging to the female pilot Amelia Earhart who disappeared in 1937.

Earhart was a celebrated pilot who set many records and was the first woman to receive the American Distinguished Flying Cross for flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 while trying to flying around the world. It is widely believed the duo and the aircraft, the Lockheed Electra aircraft, crashed possibly into the Ocean or on one of the remote islands in the Pacific.

At the time of their disappearance a search operation was launched but was unsuccessful; since then numerous attempts to locate the wreckage have taken place with no success. However, earlier this week a new operation to locate the wreckage of the aircraft was launched and the Discovery Channel will follow the attempts of the new mission in a documentary to air in August.

Will the mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance finally be solved?

PRESS RELEASE:

Discovery Channel and TIGHAR (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery) depart Tuesday morning, July 3, 2012, from Honolulu for what they hope will be the final mission searching for evidence of Earhart’s long-lost Lockheed Electra aircraft. The on-board activities and underwater findings of the Niku VII7 expedition will be captured exclusively by Discovery and broadcast as a documentary this coming August. Over the course of the 26-day expedition, the eighteen-person research crew aims to locate, identify, and photograph any and all surviving aircraft wreckage that they believe may still be in the deep waters surrounding Nikumaroro (formerly Gardner Island), an uninhabited coral atoll in the southwestern-Pacific Republic of Kiribati.

“This is when Discovery truly embodies its namesake. We are excited and proud to be working with TIGHAR, paying tribute to an American icon and hero while developing new technologies to reach back into the past and solve one of the last great mysteries of the 20th century,” – Eileen O’Neill, group president of Discovery Channel and TLC Networks.

The underwater search will focus on the reef slope off the west end of Nikumaroro, where waters can reach depths of up to 1,500 meters (4,921 feet). This deep-water search is made possible by the use of specialized robotic equipment brought in from the continental U.S. courtesy of FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX), a long-standing supporter of TIGHAR and itself an aviation history-maker as the pioneer of overnight delivery.

“The search for answers in the Earhart mystery has been a decades-long passion for all the members of TIGHAR. The exhaustive research leading up to today’s departure gives us great hope that the Niku VII7 expedition will provide conclusive answers in the search for Earhart’s final landing place,” – Richard Gillespie, TIGHAR Executive Director & Expedition Leader