Portions of the sheet have suffered a loss in ductility through exposure to heat – more heat than can be explained by simple exposure to intense sunlight, but not enough heat to melt the metal. Aluminum melts at 1,221°F. The loss of ductility in portions of the sheet is consistent with exposure to heat in the realm of 800°F such as might result from brief exposure to flame. A former resident of Nikumaroro has described cooking fish on a sheet of metal with many small holes. 
 
 The rivet has a shaft length of 3/16″ indicating that the underlying structure to which it was once attached was approximately .06″ in thickness. 
 
 The single surviving rivet is an AN455-AD “brazier head” rivet with a shaft diameter of 3/32″ (colloquially a “#3” size rivet). The “brazier head” has a low profile and was used on external surfaces to reduce aerodynamic drag. 
 
 The sheet is perforated with four rows of rivet holes 3/32″ in diameter with a precise pitch (interval between holes) of 1″. There is no crossing line of rivet holes. 
 
 The sheet is .032″ in thickness. Skins of that thickness were common on Earhart’s Lockheed and on many other aircraft. 
 
 The sheet is made of a product introduced by Alcoa Aluminum in 1933 known as “24ST Alclad.” Earhart’s Lockheed 10E Special was skinned with 24ST Alclad. Nearly all American all-metal aircraft manufactured in the 1930s, during WWII, and afterward were skinned with this material. 
 
 The edges of the sheet exhibit three types of failures. One long edge failed from lateral tearing; the other long edge and one short edge fractured due to the impact of a powerful fluid force on the interior surface of the sheet; the remaining short edge failed from fatigue after repeated cycling. The failures did not occur simultaneously in a single event. The artifact appears to be a piece of debris from an aircraft that was destroyed in a series of high-energy events over some period of time – perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, perhaps days. 
 
 The sheet measures roughly 19 inches wide by 23 inches long. None of the four sides is an original manufactured edge. Artifact 2-2-V-1 is a piece forcibly separated from a larger panel of aluminum aircraft skin. 
 
 In 1991, TIGHAR’s second expedition to Nikumaroro discovered a damaged piece of aluminum sheet lying among the vegetation and flotsam from a severe storm that had hit the island since our initial visit two years earlier. Cataloged as TIGHAR Artifact 2-2-V-1, the object has been the subject of intense scrutiny and analysis ever since. In the process of investigating 2-2-V-1 some parts of it have been sacrificed to destructive testing. Specifically, the National Transportation Safety Board Laboratory cut off a small piece for microscopic examination, and the ALCOA company cut out three rather large rectangular “coupons” in order to assess the composition and condition of the metal. As a consequence, the artifact today looks somewhat different than it did when it was first discovered. 
 
 The purpose of the Commission’s visit to NMUSAF was to collect data and solicit expert opinion that will help TIGHAR test the hypothesis that Artifact 2-2-V-1 came from Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra aircraft. 
 
 The Commission is comprised of 10 volunteers, most, but not all, of whom are TIGHAResearchers. Three members of the Commission are aviation professionals with extensive knowledge and experience in aircraft construction, maintenance, and repair practices. Aris Scarla is the manager of the FAA Flight Standards District Office in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but his work on the Artifact 2-2-V-1 Commission is as a private individual and his opinions should not be construed as official findings by the FAA. Similarly, Greg Hassler is the Restorations Supervisor for the NMUSAF but his opinions should not be construed as official findings of the National Museum of the United States Air Force. Jeffrey Neville is an executive with Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation but, as with the others, his service to the Commission is as an individual volunteer, not as a representative of his employer. 
 
 During our visit, TIGHAR enjoyed almost unlimited access to the museum’s aircraft, materials, and expertise. We want to thank NMUSAF Restoration Division Chief Roger Deere and Restoration Supervisor Greg Hassler for their hospitality and enthusiastic participation in our research. We also extend our sincere appreciation to Restoration Volunteer Garry Guthrie, who devoted his own time to research prior to our visit and accompanied us throughout our entire day at the restoration hangars and in the museum. 
 
 On March 28, 2014, TIGHAR’s Artifact 2-2-V-1 Commission conducted research at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio. The Commission’s access to the museum’s restoration hangars, which are located on the active air base, was hosted by Commission member Lt. Col. William Mangus USAF (ret). ||||| The photo is, mostly, unremarkable. It shows an airplane looming darkly on a runway at Miami Municipal Airport in the spectral shadows just before dawn  probably a test as the photographer waited for the money shot moments later, when the aircraft would lift off with famed aviator Amelia Earhart at its controls, unknowingly headed to a mysterious appointment with fate. 
 
 Yet the picture  shot by a now-forgotten Miami Herald photographer just before Earhart departed the United States on her doomed flight around the world on June 1, 1937  contains an odd detail visible on none of the other thousands of photos of her plane. 
 
 There on the fuselage, about two-thirds of the way from the planes nose to its tail, is a rectangular patch that shines a peculiar silver on the aircrafts dusky skin. Could it be a clue  the clue  to what happened when Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan vanished somewhere over the trackless Pacific Ocean three months later? 
 
 Long-time Earhart investigator Ric Gillespie thinks so. He believes that the silvery patch reveals an unrecorded repair performed on Earharts plane during her stopover in Miami. And he hopes that modern computer enhancements of that part of the photo will link it to a piece of possible airplane wreckage discovered a quarter century ago on a tiny Pacific island in the area where Earhart disappeared. 
 
 If we can match a rivet pattern from the repair in the photograph to a rivet pattern on the wreckage, I think it would be beyond dispute that Noonan and Earhart werent lost at sea, but made it to the island, said Gillespie, the executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR). 
 
 That would bring an indisputable forensic conclusion to one of the greatest and most contentious mysteries in aviation history. It would also mean, possibly, that the tale of Amelia Earhart had an even more tragic end than we have thought all these years  that she died not in a single terrifying instant as her plane crashed into the sea, but in a long torturous spiral of starvation, thirst and disease. 
 
 The Flight 
 
 Earhart was one of the worlds most famous and admired women when she and Noonan set off from Oakland, California, to fly around the globe. She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic and the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to Oakland. She competed successfully with men in the popular airplane races of the day. And she was a feminist before the word was invented, advocating tirelessly for women to be allowed to pursue careers in aviation or anything else they wanted. 
 
 Her aviation career, however, was not without its share of near-misses. On her transatlantic flight, she was trying to land in Paris but got lost and wound up in Ireland instead. Her first try at flying around the world (heading west rather than east) ended abruptly after the first leg when she crashed on takeoff in Hawaii. 
 
 Her second attempt, this time east-bound, also had problems right from the start. She landed at the wrong airport in Miami, in what was then known as the 36th Street Airport (now part of Miami International) rather than the bigger Miami Municipal Airport just south of Opa-locka (now a park named for Earhart). Her landing on May 24, 1937 was rough and she stayed in Miami for a week while the plane underwent repairs. 
 
 One of them, it appears, was the removal of a specially installed window in the rear of the airplane that navigator Noonan used to take sightings on the sun and stars, the method by which pilots found their way over unmapped oceans, jungles and desert in the days before radar and GPS. The window is clearly visible in photos of Earharts plane taken in California at the start of her trip, and even in some Herald photos shot after her arrival in Miami. 
 
 But in the photo shot just before her June 1, 1937, takeoff for Puerto Rico, the window is gone, replaced by that odd silvery plate. 
 
 I think the window must have been broken or compromised by the hard landing in Miami, Gillespie said. It wasnt standard equipment and they found out it would take a while to replace it, so they just took it out and patched the fuselage instead. 
 
 From Puerto Rico, Earhart continued through South America, Africa and Asia. Her plane suffered occasional malfuctions, but the biggest problem was confusion over the tangle of different radio frequencies used by different civil and military aviation agencies around the world, which sometimes left Earhart out of touch. On July 2, 1937, as Earhart took off from Lae, New Guinea, and headed for Howland Island nearly 2,600 miles away, her communications suffered a blow. Photos and home movies of the takeoff show that as she taxied down the runway, a radio antenna on the bottom of her plane tore away. 
 
 That may be why Earhart was unable to hear Coast Guard crewmen who were trying to make contact with her as she neared Howland Island 19 hours later. We are circling but cannot see island, cannot hear you, she radioed as the crewmen listened helplessly. A series of increasingly distressed messages continued for another hour and a quarter before Earhart, in a distraught voice, gave her location: We are on the line of position 157 dash 337. We are now running north and south. 
 
 The rest was silence. 
 
 The Search 
 
 Some Navy and Coast Guard ships began looking for Earhart right away, but the epicenter of the search, Howland Island, is in the middle of nowhere, 1,700 miles from Hawaii, so it took two weeks for the search to acquire much manpower. Search planes passed over a tiny, apostrophe-shaped patch of coral called Gardner Island, about 400 miles away, and spotted signs of recent habitation. But Navy records showed that tribes of Pacific Islanders had been living there, which seemed to explain that, and the planes moved on. The search continued several weeks, but turned up absolutely nothing. 
 
 In the 1960s, journalists began searching for Earhart  but their focus was 2,800 miles west of Howland Island, on Saipan, where U.S. Marines fought a vicious battle against Japanese occupational troops during World War II. In the aftermath of the fighting, it was said, American troops had made a grisly discovery that Washington had covered up: that the Japanese had captured Earhart and Noonan and, believing them spies, either executed them or mistreated them so badly they died in prison. 
 
 Theres probably a dozen books and, who knows, hundreds of magazine and newspaper stories about this, says Gillespie. They have different casts of characters but they all follow the same template: Some American enlisted man on Saipan finds something associated with Earhart  a briefcase, a flight log, a photo of her. Or a native shows him a grave and says, White woman buried here. 
 
 Inevitably, he shows the evidence to an officer, who takes it and swears him to secrecy, and he hears nothing more about the case. Years later, he comes forward, but he handed over the evidence, and he has no receipt and doesnt remember the officers name. And thats where it ends. 
 
 (The Japanese-capture-and-execution theory is actually a variant on a conspiracy theory that swept America during World War II. In that one, Earhart and Noonan were secret agents assigned by the U.S. government to fake their own disappearance, giving the U.S. Navy an excuse to search the Pacific gathering intelligence about Japanese military activity. There was even a Hollywood movie called Flight for Freedom starring Rosalind Russell as a thinly disguised version of a spy Earhart. Big problem with the theory: Earhart was a fervid pacifist who despised war after working in a military hospital during World War I.) 
 
 It wasnt until the 1980s that modern technology  and perhaps even more importantly, modern fundraising techniques  began making it feasible to mount private searches for Earhart in the area where she disappeared. Using sophisticated underwater radar and deep-sea diving vehicles, groups devoted to the case searched for her plane in the waters around Howland Island, by now deserted. But still no conclusive evidence emerged. 
 
 TIGHAR was not one of those groups. Though it was formed in 1985 by aviation fanatics interested in investigating old missing-plane cases and, if possible, recovering the aircraft, Gillespie steered TIGHAR clear of the Earhart mystery. Earhart had run out of gas somewhere on a very large ocean, he figured, and her plane could be anywhere in it, miles under the water. 
 
 But in 1988, two of his members came to him with a proposal. What if Earhart didnt crash into the sea? What if she reached an uninhabited island? 
 
 The key to it is her final message, where she says line of position 157 dash 337, Gillespie said. Thats a line that Noonan calculated from the sunrise, running 337 degrees to the northwest and 157 degrees to the southeast. And if you follow it far enough, there are two deserted islands on it, McKeon Island and Gardner Island. 
 
 It didnt take long for TIGHAR investigators to find that somebody else had already mentioned the possibility of Earhart landing on Gardner Island. In 1960, a 68-year-old ex-Marine named Floyd Kilts gave an interview to a San Diego newspaper recounting his visit to Gardner Island in 1946, when he was sent there to dismantle a navigational device installed there during World War II. 
 
 Kilts said a Micronesian tribesman living on Gardner told him that when the Micronesians moved onto the island in 1938, they found a partial human skeleton, along with a womans shoe  a sign that she was a foreigner, since the tribesmen all went barefoot. The remnants of a fire pit nearby contained burned bones of small birds and fish, which suggested the woman had lived there some time. 
 
 The bones had been given to a British colonial official, who thought they might be the remains of Earhart. The Micronesian didnt know what happened after that, and neither did Kilts. 
 
 That story sounds straight from the captured-by-the-Japanese template  except in this case, British archives yielded a load of radio traffic about the discovery of the bones and detailed measurements by a British medical examiner. (The bones themselves had disappeared. The British doctor had concluded the bones belonged to a man of mixed Polynesian and European race, though forensic anthropologists who looked at the data in the 1990s thought it more likely they were those of a European woman.) 
 
 One other thing TIGHARs research turned up: The Navys belief that Micronesian tribesmen had recently been living on Gardner Island in 1937 when its pilots flew over it was wrong. The tribesmen arrived for the first time a year later. Those signs of habitation had been left by someone else. 
 
 The Wreckage 
 
 Gillespie and his group made their first expedition to Gardner Island  by now renamed Nikumaroro and part of the Republic of Kiribati  in 1989. It was once again deserted; drought drove the population away in the mid-1960s. Some of their empty buildings, including a general store, survived. Otherwise, not much was found. 
 
 A second, better-funded expedition arrived in 1991. The past two years had been hard on the island; a major storm had knocked down what little remained of the Micronesian settlement. But as they poked through the rubble, investigators found a fascinating piece of junk: A scrap of aluminum, 19 inches wide by 23 inches long, with four precisely measured rows of rivet holes. It looked for all the world like the torn outer skin of an airplane. 
 
 Over the years, tests have shown thats exactly what it was. The scrap is made from a substance Alcoa Aluminum called 24ST Alclad, which was used in the manufacture of nearly all American planes manufactured in the 1930s  including Earharts Lockheed Electra. 
 
 But Gillespie got out well ahead of his forensic evidence in 1992 by holding a Washington, D.C., press conference where he declared that every possibility has been checked, every alternative eliminated... There is only one possible conclusion: We found a piece of Amelia Earharts aircraft. 
 
 In fact, as other Earhart-investigation groups (there are more of them than Justin Bieber fans clubs, and they can be just as temperamental) quickly pointed out, the rivet patterns on Gillespies scrap were very, very different than those on Lockheeds Electra. 
 
 It was soon apparent that the Earhart mystery was not solved, Gillespie admitted ruefully. 
 
 For years, the metal scrap was like a thorn in TIGHARs paw. We knew it was significant, we knew it was a piece of a plane, but we just couldnt quite figure out where it fit, Gillespie said. Three months ago, the group decided to come at the scrap from the opposite direction: If it wasnt from a Lockheed Electra, then what plane was it from? Gillespies investigators spent a day with the reconstruction team in Dayton, Ohio, at the U.S. Air Force Museum, which rebuilds World War II-era planes for a living. The team scoured its vast store of blueprints and technical drawings. It didnt fit anything. 
 
 Thats when one of our investigators said, look, we know theres one piece on that plane that wasnt built or installed by Lockheed  the replacement for that missing window, Gillespie recalled. So maybe thats the match. 
 
 TIGHAR began reviewing its massive archive of photos of Earharts plane. But relatively few showed the right side of the aircraft, because photographers usually wanted to get Earhart herself in the shot, and her pilots seat was on the left side. Only one shot offered a really good view of the patch: that 1937 photo from the Miami Herald. 
 
 The replacement of that window had to be done in Miami, at a Pan Am facility that was helping Earhart, Gillespie said. They may have used different materials than Lockheed ... If we can match that rivet pattern in the photo, I dont see how anybody can argue against this any more. 
 
 In fact, it seems certain that they will argue. The Earhart bug, when it bites, takes hold like something akin to theology, and supporters of one theory delight in damning others. I wouldnt say were fighting about anything, said Elgen Long, an 86-year-old veteran pilot and author of the 1999 book Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved, widely regarded as the Bible of whats known as the crashed-and-sank theory, which goes pretty much the way it sounds. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion. But everybody should have some facts to back up those opinions, and Mr. Gillespie, well, he doesnt. 
 
 Long says Gillespies metal scrap is obviously from a PBY seaplane (the flying boat, it was often called) like those flown by the U.S. Navy in the first half of the 20th century and is probably a remnant of some other crash that washed up on Gardner Island, unconnected to Earhart. (Laughable! retorts Gillespie.) 
 
 Equally scathing is Susan Butler, the Lake Wales writer who authored East To The Dawn, the definitive biography of Earhart and the basis for the 2009 Hillary Swank film Amelia. She regards Gillespie as a huckster, constantly devising new Earhart tall tales to raise money for his group. 
 
 Hes very creative, she said. hell take it to the Nth degree. He can probably even prove it  for six months, or a year. 
 
 Gillespie, accustomed to the criticism (this is a a field where people have definite views) shrugs it off. 
 
 Gillespies theory is that Earhart landed her plane on a coral reef just off Gardner Island that becomes visible at low tide. For a time, she used the planes radio to send out distress signals, until rough weather washed the aircraft off the reef into a deep ocean trough below. 
 
 More than 100 shortwave radio listeners around the United States  many of them with enhanced antennas intended to pick up distant signals  reported hearing distress calls from a woman identifying herself as Earhart in the days after her disappearance. At the time, they were all dismissed as hoaxes or mistaken identities, but Gillespie believes some of them may have been genuine, the product of a signal leakage known as harmonics that was common on early radio transmitters. 
 
 A voice 
 
 Among the most haunting of the reports came from a St. Petersburg teenager named Betty Klenck, who died just last week at the age of 92. In 1937, she was a kid spending her summer afternoons trolling the shortwave radio her father had rigged with a 60-foot antenna, scribbling down in a notebook song lyrics and bits of news she heard. 
 
 Three days after the plane went down, Betty stumbled onto a call from someone who identified herself as Earhart. For three hours, the teenager listened, transfixed and jotting notes all the while, as the woman pleaded for help, comforted an apparently injured Fred Noonan, and sometimes cried. Oh, if they could hear me, she moaned in despair at one point. 
 
 Bettys father came home from work about midway through the broadcast and joined her in listening to it. Later he showed her notebook to Coast Guard authorities, who werent interested, thinking it the fantasy of a bored teenager. Yet the notebook contains intriguing hints of things Betty couldnt possibly have known, and which may support the idea that the woman on the radio was Earhart, calling from Gardner Island. 
 
 For instance: Earharts constant repetition of something that sounded like New York City. That wouldnt have made much sense. But if the words were Norwich City, its another matter: The S.S. Norwich City was a freighter lost at sea in 1929 that washed up on the reef just off Gardner Island. Bits of the wreckage can still be seen there today. They say it looms darkly in the spectral shadows just before dawn. ||||| A recently surfaced photo of Amelia Earhart’s plane, captured by the Miami Herald in 1937, could offer crucial evidence regarding the famous aviator’s disappearance. 
 
 The picture, snapped right before Earhart made her ill-fated second attempt to fly around the world, shows a patch of aluminum bolted onto Earhart’s plane that appears to match a piece of aluminum discovered by investigators on a remote Pacific Island in 1991, the Herald reports. 
 
 The metal plate, which experts assumed was used to cover a broken window, does not appear in any other known photos of Earhart’s plane, according to the report. 
 
 The photo adds another twist to the controversy surrounding Earhart’s death. The aviation pioneer disappeared somewhere over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 during her second attempt to circumnavigate the globe by air. 
 
 Dozens of theories about the nature of Earhart’s death have sprung up over the years. It remains one of the most debated unsolved mysteries in America even today. 
 
 In Miami in 1937, the press gathered to see Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan embark on their flight around the world. Earhart’s plane had been undergoing repairs in Miami for a week before its departure. Ric Gillespie, a prominent Earhart investigator, believes that these repairs included the patching over of a broken rear window with an aluminum plate. The window had been specially installed so Noonan could navigate via the sun and stars but may have sustained damage during Earhart’s rough landing in Miami. 
 
 Gillespie, a prominent Earhart investigator, is convinced he and his team discovered the same aluminum plate on the tiny Gardner Island in the Pacific in 1991. Upon the plate’s initial discovery, forensic analysis revealed it was made from a type of aluminum that was commonly used in the manufacturing of American airplanes during the 1930s. 
 
 Despite this evidence, the case remained open when further investigation showed the rivet patterns on the scrap did not match those on the metal used to make Earhart’s plane. 
 
 However, the Herald photo suggests the plate was not part of the plane’s original structure, but an add-on installed shortly before Earhart’s departure from Miami. If this piece of metal is in fact the same one Ric Gillespie and his team discovered, it would debunk the popular theory that Earhart simply crashed and sank into the Pacific Ocean, suggesting instead that she died after crash-landing on Gardner Island and finding herself stranded. 
 
 “The replacement of that window had to be done in Miami, at a Pan Am facility that was helping Earhart,” Gillespie told the Herald. “They may have used different materials than Lockheed ... If we can match that rivet pattern in the photo, I don’t see how anybody can argue against this anymore.”
– Attention, Amelia Earhart buffs. The Miami Herald has an intriguing report about how a long-forgotten photo snapped before takeoff could prove that she crash-landed on a Pacific island. The photo, taken on a runway in Miami in 1937, shows a shiny rectangular patch on the side of the plane that suggests a recent repair—a potential clue not visible in any other photos taken of her plane that day. Earhart investigator and TIGHAR Director Ric Gillespie hopes that computer analysis of the image will reveal a rivet pattern that matches up with a piece of aluminum found on the island of Nikumaroro in 1991. In fact, it was Gillespie's search team that found the 23-inch-long piece, which it dubbed Artifact 2-2-V-1, years ago, and he viewed it as a major breakthrough in solving the mystery of where the plane went down. (TIGHAR released a research bulletin on the artifact in May.) But critics soon pounced, pointing out that its rivet patterns didn't match those on Earhart's Lockheed plane. If, however, the scrap had been added in a last-minute, unrecorded repair, that could explain it. The Herald report also notes that Earhart had a rough landing in Miami, and she apparently had to patch a broken rear window as a result. The window can be seen in photos from an earlier leg of the trip, but in its place in the newly surfaced photo is that shiny aluminum patch. Click to see the image, or to read other stories on developments in the search.