WASHINGTON — Seventy-five years after Amelia Earhart disappeared while attempting to circumnavigate the world, the search for the wreckage of her twin-engine Lockheed Electra will resume this summer.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton applauded the effort Tuesday in a speech to, among others, those who will conduct the search in the waters off Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the southwestern Pacific where Earhart might have died.
“Even if you do not find what you seek, there is great honor and possibility in the search itself,” Clinton said.
Earhart, the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and nonstop solo across the U.S., disappeared July 2, 1937, while trying to fly around the globe at the equator.
The search will be conducted by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, an organization that has been investigating Earhart’s final flight and has theorized that she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, might have died as castaways on what was then called Gardner Island.
Their disappearance sparked a multimillion-dollar search effort at the time but turned up nothing.
Fresh analysis of a photo taken just months after Earhart’s disappearance shows what might be portions of her plane in waters near the island, according to The Associated Press.
Oceanographer Robert Ballard, who found the wreckage of the Titanic, is advising on the expedition, which begins in July.
It will be filmed by the Discovery Channel, which is helping to pay for its cost.
