Device Is Possible Clue to Earhart’s Fate

The sighting of a makeshift water-collection device on a South Pacific island could be a clue in the disappearance of U.S. aviator Amelia Earhart during a 1937 globe-circling flight, researchers said.

The World War II-era sighting by a former Coast Guard serviceman was reported in a letter to Rick Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery in Wilmington, Del.

“More and more, it looks like we’re closing in on learning exactly what happened,” he said recently.

Richard Evans, 64, of Annville, Pa., wrote describing the rainwater collection apparatus he found while exploring an isolated section of Nikumaroro, about 1,000 miles northeast of Fiji.

Investigators last year found another possible clue to the Earhart disappearance on the island, a navigator’s bookcase that could have come from Earhart’s two-engine Lockheed Electra airplane.

Evans described the water-catching device as a canvas funnel draining into a 5-foot-by-2-foot metal container.

“We didn’t build it and the natives didn’t build it. If it’s Earhart’s, who knows? People are really getting excited about it, though,” said Evans, who was assigned to the now-uninhabited island to help build a Coast Guard navigation and communications base.

Gillespie said the dimensions of the canvas and container, as described by Evans, closely match the engine covers and one of the 149-gallon fuel tanks from Earhart’s plane.

It could suggest that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, survived a landing there in July, 1937, and waited in vain for rescue, Gillespie said. Evans said he wrote the letter to Gillespie after reading a news report on the hunt for Earhart’s plane.

“The water-collection structure was on the windward side of the island. The water’s rough and you can’t land a boat. But it was a good spot if you were looking for a rescue plane,” said Gillespie.

Researchers theorize that Earhart and Noonan landed on the island’s coral reef flat, but waves and tides carried the plane into the 2,000-foot-deep trench surrounding the atoll.

The team is scheduled to visit the island next summer and may conduct deep-water probes for the plane.

“If it’s down there, the water is cold enough that it should be well preserved,” Gillespie said.

Earhart’s possible route was tracked to the island by two retired military aviators who used 1930s navigation techniques to plot her likely course.

Tom Willi and Tom Gannon of Ft. Walton Beach, Fla., persuaded the aircraft recovery group to mount its $250,000 expedition last year.