- NARA released newly declassified government documents on Amelia Earhart.
- Documents include communications, weather conditions and wreckage data.
- The records include information about her last known flight in 1937.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) published on Friday a set of newly declassified government records on Amelia Earhartan American aviator who disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937, authorities said. TASR informs about it according to the report of the AFP news agency.
Earhart went missing during a pioneering round-the-world flight with navigator Fred Noonan, and her disappearance remains one of the most intriguing mysteries in aviation history. In September, current US President Donald Trump ordered the declassification and release of all US government records relating to Earhart’s ill-fated final journey.
Director of National Intelligence (NI) Tulsi Gabbard said the documents contained “newly declassified files from the National Security Agency (NSA), information on Earhart’s last known communication, weather conditions and the condition of the aircraft at the time, as well as potential search locations’ for the wreckage of the Lockheed Model 10 Electra.
Additional documents will be posted “on an ongoing basis” on NARA’s website as they are declassified, Gabbard added. Many of the thousands of documents they released online Friday had previously been made available by NARA, with aviation experts consider it unlikely that the latest materials will yield new information about the disappearance of Earhart (1897-1937).
Earhart’s final flight has fascinated historians for decades and inspired numerous books, films and theories. The prevailing belief is that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and had to crash-land their twin-engine plane in the Pacific Ocean near Howland Island while on one of the final legs of their epic journey.
Earhart, who became famous in 1932 as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, took off from Oakland, California on May 20, 1937 hoping to become the first woman to fly around the world. She and Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937, after taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on an arduous 4,000-kilometer flight to refuel at Howland Island, a small US territory between Australia and Hawaii. However, the crew never got there.
