Video bolsters search for Earhart’s airplane

LOS ANGELES – In July, a team searching for the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s plane was wrapping up an expedition and feeling downhearted. The members had come away with apparently little to show for their $2.2 million worth of efforts.

But now those searchers say high-definition video from that trip shows promising evidence.

“We have man-made objects in a debris field,” Ric Gillespie told the Los Angeles Times. And those objects are “in a location where we had previously reasoned where airplane wreckage should be.”

Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan were lost on their July 2, 1937, flight from New Guinea to Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean. Earhart was trying to become the first woman to fly around the planet.

“We don’t want to oversell this,” Gillespie cautioned.

The debris field captured in the underwater high-definition footage jibes with the location shown in a blurry 1937 photo that is said to show a plane’s landing gear, Gillespie said.

Technical difficulties marred the July trip, Gillespie said. Twice they had to rescue their underwater vehicle.

What they saw as they were searching was standard definition video.