Andrew McKenna

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In Search of amelia

Andrew McKenna hopes to solve an 83-year aviation mystery

BY JEFF BLUMENFELD

Amelia Earhart sitting in the cockpit of her Lockheed Electra airplane, ca. 1936. In July 1937, Earhart and the airplane were lost over the Pacific Ocean. a ndrew McKenna’s baby teeth are in the American Museum of Natural History. It’s true. The Boulder resident is the son of Dr. Malcolm C. McKenna, former curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Traveling with his father on fossil digs, McKenna honed his archaeological skills, which he’s now using to help solve one of the most puzzling cold cases of all time: the disappearance of aviatrix Amelia Earhart.

The year was 1937 when Earhart, one of the most famous women of her day, disappeared without a trace along with her navigator, Fred Noonan, and her aircraft, a Lockheed Electra 10E. At age 39, Earhart was attempting to fly around the world as close to the equator as possible. If successful, she would have been the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.

The search for clues has continued for more than 80 years, and is now focused on Nikumaroro, a tiny uninhabited atoll in Kiribati. About 2,100 miles southwest of Honolulu, the tiny island is where Earhart and Noonan are believed to have crashlanded and died as castaways. McKenna, 61, a graduate of Wesleyan University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Environmental Science, is a certified SCUBA diver, commercial pilot and president of Journey’s Aviation, the flight school and Fixed Base Operator (FBO) at Boulder Municipal Airport. He has traveled to Nikumaroro six times over the past 30 years as a member of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), a nonprofit that has been chasing clues for decades. McKenna and his teammates have worked with drones, ground-penetrating radar, forensic dogs, multibeam- and side-scan sonar, UV lamps, historical photos and film, radio reception patterns, and a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Progress is slow, but exciting. With every trip to the western Pacific Ocean, the team finds another clue to keep them occupied for years. One of the most intriguing is a piece of aircraft aluminum that washed ashore and was found in 1991. As forensic experts study the rivet patterns compared to photos and 16mm film of the aircraft, McKenna reports that a piece of insulated copper antenna wire embedded in the recovered piece has been reliably traced to the Earhart era.

“Is it part of the Lockheed Electra? Every clue opens new doors and brings us closer to solving what happened,” says McKenna. He’s eager to return to the Pacific in 2021 to expand the deepwater search and continue to scour for clues buried on one of the most remote islands on Earth.

“We’re placing the puzzle pieces together with every expedition and following the research in a direction that makes the most sense. It would be tremendously gratifying to answer one of the great mysteries of the twenty-first century.”

Boulder resident Jeff Blumenfeld is chairman of the Rocky Mountain chapter of The Explorers Club and author of Travel With Purpose: A Field Guide to Voluntourism (www.travelwithpurposebook.com).

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