Page 4 - MeekooBedtimeBunny

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Flying in the face of danger Two pilots are lost without a trace.
Will we ever know what happened to them?
AMEliA eArHArT
On July 2, 1937, in the city of Lae, Papua New Guinea, Amelia Earhart set off on the trickiest leg of her round the world flight. If she made it, she would become the first woman ever to fly around the world. With her, in a tiny Lockheed Electra plane, was navigator Fred Noonan. 4,000 kilometres of Pacific Ocean lay between them and their destination: Howland Island,
a speck of land just a few miles across.
Four hours in, Amelia sent radio messages to the Coast Guard. She was close to Howland Island and
all was well. But then she was never heard from again. What happened?
Amelia was running out of fuel, the weather was poor, and perhaps she couldn’t locate the tiny island. But a huge air and sea search was launched and found no trace of her
or her plane. Even modern-day searches using high-tech sonar and deep-sea robots have had no success.
To add to the mystery, 550 kilometres south of Howland lies
the deserted Nikumaruro Island. In 1940, an expedition here discovered tools that appeared to come from a plane, the remains of a woman’s shoe, some make-up from the 1930s, and even human bones! Had Amelia flown wildly off course, landed on a different island and set up camp?
When scientists examined the bones in 1940, they said they came from a man. But, 60 years later, scientists changed their mind. The bones belonged to a woman! Now, to complicate things further, the bones have disappeared too, so they can’t be tested again and the mystery remains . . .
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HOWlanD iSlAND
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A BlaCK, rUBBer HEEL FROM A WOMan’S SHOE
A MYStERiOUS SKULl