Finding Amelia
The Deep Sea Quest for Amelia Earhart
The search for Amelia Earhart’s airplane is the ultimate in Business Beyond the Reef – and my friend Dave Jourdan is doing exactly that. Dave heads up a deepsea exploration company called Nauticos that operates out of Cape Porpoise, Maine. These are the guys who found the lost Israeli submarine Dakar and salvaged her in 10,000 feet of water. They also discovered 2,000 year-old Mediterranean shipwrecks at the same extreme depths. Dave and his Nauticos team found the wreckage of one of the Japanese aircraft carriers that went down in the Battle of Midway, and they worked with the National Geographic Society to photograph the wreckage of the I-52, a Japanese submarine sunk in the mid-Atlantic while carrying a cargo of gold on a secret World War II mission.
Dave, Nauticos and our friend Elgen Long have put years of research and ocean exploration into their search for Amelia Earhart’s long-lost aircraft, hoping to find the site where Amelia and Fred Noonan went down in the vast Pacific, and to solve the mysteries and rumors of their fates. Nauticos has based its searches on Elgen’s exhaustive research, written up in Elgen’s 1999 book, Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved. But research only gets you so far.
Dave and his Nauticos team now have to find the wreckage in thousands of feet of water in a huge ocean. Elgen’s work narrowed their search to waters near remote Howland Island, but still leaves an area the size of Rhode Island to sift through. A search for such a small target in deep water tasks modern ocean technologies to the fullest and demands extreme ingenuity, pushing technology beyond its designed limits. Deep-towed sonar mapping is the primary tool. Nauticos has produced undersea charts of this part of the Pacific that surpass any previous surveys, yielding one-meter accuracy and the discovery of underwater features – such as volcanoes – never known before. It has also led them to several targets that match the shape and size of Amelia’s Lockheed Electra. Read about the search in Dave Jourdan’s new book, The Deep Sea Quest for Amelia Earhart, being published in the next few days.
This is an adventure, but it is also a business. Ocean exploration is expensive. Dave estimates that the search for Amelia costs about a dollar a second, and requires millions of dollars worth of equipment, not to mention the costs of keeping vessels and crews at sea for weeks or months in a remote location. There’s romance, sure, and the chance to solve mysteries, but there is also calculated risk. Finding, perhaps even salvaging Amelia Earhart’s aircraft, could lead to immense commercial possibilities. Imagine the excitement, the films, the books, the exhibitions. Every airshow and aviation museum in the world would want to show her Electra. And I can’t even imagine the return from Amelia-based fashions. The return may be incredible – or it may be nothing. This is truly Business Beyond the Reef.
