Deep in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, the rainforest swallows history whole. Rusted fuselages and twisted propellers hide beneath vines so dense that even a B-17 bomber can disappear in the tangle. “You can’t believe how overgrown it is until you’re there,” says aviation researcher Michael Carra, who has spent years hacking through this terrain in search of downed aircraft and their ghosts.
In mid-August, Carra was back on a boat off Papua New Guinea’s northeastern coast, leading his third expedition — this time with backing from a private donor and the Palm Springs Air Museum. The mission was his most ambitious yet, zeroed in on the mystery of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.
For years, Carra has sifted through theories and maps that indicate Wide Bay may hold the answer. He knows the terrain well. His first expedition, in 2021, was funded by the Discovery Channel and became the basis of the documentary Finding Amelia (now streaming on HBO Max). A year later, he sank his retirement savings into a second search.
Fred Bell, the Palm Springs Air Museum’s managing director, has known Carra for more than 15 years. “He’s convinced us that he’s right,” Bell says. “It’s an exciting possibility for a high-profile expedition.”
Video by Palm Springs Air Museum
Just a few months before her disappearance, Amelia Earhart was in Palm Springs for the December 1936 grand opening of The Plaza Theatre. She and scores of motion picture stars and socialites attended the world premiere of Camille. According to The Aviator and the Showman, Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s 2025 biography, Earhart spent much of her final year at the Cochran-Odlum Ranch (now Indian Palms Country Club & Resort) in Indio, a hideaway where she could retreat with fellow aviator Jacqueline Cochran.
Aviation researcher Michael Carra leads the search for Amelia Earhart’s downed Lockheed Electra, supported by funding from the Palm Springs Air Museum.
Photo courtesy palm springs air museum
Born in 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, Earhart had become the face of modern aviation. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic (1932) and the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California (1935). She embodied the glamour of progress, and her husband and promoter, publisher George Palmer Putnam, ensured she stayed in the headlines, organizing publicity stunts and positioning her as a showgirl of the skies.
Of course, we know what happened next. In March 1937, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan began their attempt to circumnavigate the globe in a twin-engine Lockheed Electra. The first leg ended abruptly when a takeoff accident in Hawaii damaged the plane. Undeterred, they launched again in June, flying east from Miami and covering nearly 29,000 miles before reaching Lae, New Guinea — their final confirmed stop. On July 2, 1937, six months after the Plaza Theatre gala, Earhart vanished into the Pacific.
Now, nearly nine decades later, Carra believes he may be closing in on the truth.
The goal for his latest expedition was straightforward: revisit four promising sites within a 12-mile radius, two of them identified through LiDAR data — laser-based scans that pierce the jungle to reveal objects on the forest floor. One image, in particular, seemed to suggest the shape of an aircraft strikingly similar to Earhart’s Electra, Carra says.
The team also aimed to locate a massive four-engine bomber, the B-17E Flying Fortress, that went down in 1942 while carrying nine American servicemen. “Our mission is to preserve, educate, and honor,” Bell explains. “There’s no question that finding that B-17 falls into that mission. That’s part of what we do, honoring veterans and bringing closure to families. So that’s another reason why this expedition was appealing — it’s an opportunity to close a chapter on some missing American servicemen.”
The most widely accepted story about Earhart’s disappearance is the “crash and sank” theory, which suggests she and Noonan ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean on the way to Howland Island, a coral atoll so small it’s barely more than a runway in the middle o f the Pacific, halfway between Hawaii and Australia.
Residents of Papua New Guinea teamed up with searchers to brave the tangled jungles in pursuit of downed aircraft.
Photo courtesy palm springs air museum
Carra doesn’t buy it. To him, the idea that they would simply keep circling until the fuel was gone defies common sense. “As a pilot, you don’t do that,” he says. “When you’re running out of options, you turn back toward the last place you know you can land.”
That instinct shapes his theory. “All these books [about Earhart’s disappearance] were written by historians,” he notes. “None of them were pilots.”
Instead Carra points to a wartime account from 1945. After a firefight with Japanese troops in the jungles of New Britain, part of Papua New Guinea, an Australian reconnaissance patrol stumbled upon the wreckage of a nonmilitary, all-aluminum aircraft. Though the soldiers couldn’t find identifying marks on the fuselage, one man pried a data tag from the engine and jotted down its serial number on a map. Decades later, that number was found to match one plane — Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra.
“In all these decades, this is the only theory with actual proof,” Carra says.
He has since verified the authenticity of the map and the pencil marks, even filmed testimony from the man who recorded the number, and asserts the Australian soldiers had no incentive to fabricate the find. Carra believes this forgotten note in a war archive may be the closest thing to a fingerprint left by Earhart’s lost plane.
So in mid-August, the historian and his team ventured into Wide Bay. It’s a treacherous journey, as the jungles of Papua New Guinea are vast and challenging to navigate. Mountains are cloaked in cloud forest, rivers can turn into walls of water overnight, crushing heat takes a toll on gear and stamina. Dozens of aircraft went down in this region during World War II — American, Japanese, Australian — and their twisted remains surface from time to time, some just tiny shards. To find one plane in that tangle of history is like searching for a needle in a scrapyard.
Carra’s team arrived armed with an arsenal of cutting-edge tools: magnetometers to detect buried metal, LiDAR scans that can penetrate the tree canopy, and AI models trained to sift through satellite imagery for the faint outline of an aircraft.
Over the first three days, they visited all four priority sites identified from earlier scans. They found neither artifacts nor aircraft parts — no trace of the Electra. From there, the mission widened to 16 targets flagged by AI. The team pressed on, covering new sites and chasing down village stories of a bulldozer operator who once claimed to have buried a plane to keep it hidden.
Carra confirmed that artifacts were recovered and are now undergoing laboratory testing. For the moment, he’s holding back details. “I’m biting my fingernails over here,” he admitted during a phone call in late September. “We’re waiting, and we’re hoping the results are what we want them to be.”
The expedition was never only about finding the Electra. Bell says the Palm Springs Air Museum knew the odds and planned for that.
The story of the search itself is being transformed into an exhibit with satellite maps, field notes, and interviews. Visitors to the museum — already home to one of the country’s largest collections of WWII aircraft — will be able to keep up with Carra’s work, to see how mystery collides with technology, and to feel the pull of this legendary puzzle, which has refused to be solved for nearly 90 years.
There’s a larger purpose, too. Proceeds from Expedition Amelia 2025 support the museum’s Women in Aviation scholarship program, which puts Earhart’s legacy into the hands of a new generation of pilots. It’s a reminder that the disappearance was never the end of Amelia’s journey.
“When you think about it, Amelia was the influencer of her day,” Bell says. “The public was fascinated with her, and she made the world more accessible through aviation. Now, you can get on a jet and fly to Australia or fly to Midway or fly anywhere, and you have a 99.9 percent assurance you’re going to get there. Well, that was because of people like Amelia, who kept pushing the boundaries.”
For Palm Springs, Earhart isn’t just a glamorous figure who once strolled into The Plaza Theatre or a pilot who found rest at a friend’s ranch in Indio. She is a thread that ties the desert to the sky, the past to the future, the myth of a lost plane to the very real ambitions of women who still look up and decide to fly.
