The search for Amelia Earhart and her plane continues. But in Atchison, her fingerprints remain.

ATCHISON — The search for the plane Amelia Earhart piloted in her tragic 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe is again making headlines, this time because of a blurry image of what appears to be an aircraft under 16,000 feet of water in the central Pacific.

But for me the hunt for Amelia Earhart — Air Heart! — ended some years ago in a trim Victorian home overlooking the Missouri River.

It was here, in the house built by her maternal grandfather in 1861, that the woman who would become one of America’s most famous pilot-adventurers was born, in the southwest bedroom on the second floor. Amelia Earhart arrived in 1897 and her sister, Muriel, in 1899. Their father was a struggling lawyer who fought and lost a battle with alcoholism. During the struggle, the family lived in a half dozen places across the country, but if Amelia could rightly call any place home, it was this house on the bluff in Atchison.

The girls returned here during the school year to be with their grandparents, a former federal judge named Alfred Otis and his wife, a Philadelphian who felt out of place in the west.

That house, now the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum, is a portal to another century — and a glimpse into the childhood of a woman who would become one of the foremost celebrities of her day, a rambunctious feminist whose disappearance would become central to the story not just of aviation but to the story of America.

“Long before she entered school Amelia was familiar with all eleven rooms of the house on the bluff,” writes Doris L. Rich in her 1989 biography of Earhart. “She explored the drawing room where frock-coated men sat in oversized chairs discussing politics and business. She watched tightly corseted women in long gowns with leg-o’-mutton sleeves drink tea in the living room with its Tiffany lamps and horsehair sofa.”

In June 1916, Earhart graduated from high school (in Chicago) and in 1917-18 was a volunteer nurse at Toronto. In 1921, she took her first flying lesson, in Los Angeles, and bought her first airplane, a Kinner Airster biplane. In 1928, she and pilot William Stultz flew from Newfoundland to Wales, making her the first woman to fly across the Atlantic (a year before, Charles Lindbergh had made the first transatlantic flight).

In 1931, she married George Putnam, an American publisher — of G.P. Putnam’s Sons — and explorer. In 1932, Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, in a red Lockheed Vega, a single-engine airplane. She also tried her hand as a fashion designer and, in 1935, she flew from Honolulu to Oakland, California, the first person to make the flight. She joined Purdue University as a consultant in aeronautics and a career counselor to young women.

On her 39th birthday, in 1936, Earhart took delivery of a Lockheed Electra 10E Special, registration number NR16020. The Purdue Research Foundation paid $80,000 for the twin-engine, specially equipped aircraft in which Earhart would attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Her first attempt was abandoned in March 1937 after a crash on take-off in Hawaii. She would begin her second attempt in May 1937, with Fred Noonan, a Pan Am navigator with experience in the Pacific.

The Electra, with its aluminum skin, red accents, retractable landing gears, powerful nine-cylinder Wasp engines, twin tails, and an experimental Bendix loop receiving antenna above the cockpit, has become an icon of aviation history. In normal configuration, the Electra was a 10-passenger commercial airplane, but Earhart’s model was experimental. The lead-up to the event saw a steady stream of publicity photos of Earhart and the plane. Sometimes she would be sitting on the nose and at other times stretching out her arms to grasp a propeller in each hand.

The plane, according to Mindi Love Pendergraft, director of the Amelia Earhart Hanger Museum at Atchison, was carefully chosen for its capabilities.

“The twin engines were important,” Pendergraft told me.

The range of Earhart’s Electra, augmented by fuel tanks inside the cabin, was 4,000 to 4,500 miles, depending on conditions. There were also other modifications, including a state-of-the-art radio system with three antennas — the receiving loop, a V wire antenna from the fuselage to the tails and a longwire antenna that trailed behind the aircraft.

“We get a lot of aviation enthusiasts here,” Pendergraft said.

Lockheed built 149 Electras, but only 14 were the same model as Earhart’s; of those, only Muriel survives, Pendergraft said. Another Electra, a model 10A converted to a 10E early in its service, is at the Museum of Flight at Seattle. It was flown in 1997 by pilot Linda Finch in recreating Earhart’s final flight.

The only surviving original 10E is in Atchison, at the AE Hangar Museum, and it’s nicknamed for Earhart’s little sister. It is, according to the museum website, the “last remaining Lockheed Electra 10-E — identical to the plane Earhart flew on her final flight.”

The AE Hanger Museum opened in April 2023 and has had 21,000 visitors, she said. The star attraction is “Muriel,” which was purchased in 2016 by the Amelia Earhart Foundation from Grace McGuire, a pilot in California who had spent 30 years restoring it.

The plane was built in 1935, was flown by Pan American in South America, in the 1950s was purchased by a Provincetown Boston Airways, and in the 1970s saw heavy use at a parachute school in Florida. It was bought by a Florida museum in 1979 and later acquired by McGuire, a pilot who spent three decades restoring the plane to match Earhart’s, in preparation for recreating the 29,000-mile around-the-world flight. McGuire had to cancel her plans because of illness.

The plane is not currently airworthy, according to museum staff.

One also is not allowed to see or go inside the aircraft, although there is a mockup of the 10E’s cramped cockpit nearby. This experience is not for the claustrophobic, as there is less room in the pilot’s seat than in the driver’s seat of an average car — and the ceiling is head-bumpingly low.

When Earhart and Noonan set off in their Electra 10E, they left Oakland and headed southwest to Natal, Brazil, with several stops between. From Brazil, they flew across the Atlantic to the west coast of Africa, then on to the Middle East. They reached Karachi, India, on June 17. From there they threaded their way down to Port Darwin, Australia, and then on to Lae, New Guinea. The next hop was the longest stretch of the trip, 2,556 nautical miles over open ocean to tiny Howland Island in the central Pacific. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter, the Itasca, was dispatched to provide weather and position reports.

But upon takeoff from Lae, the Electra’s belly antenna, its most sensitive long-distance receiving antenna, may have have been ripped away by the roughness of the airfield. This, according to Ric Gillespie in “Finding Amelia,” published in 2006, may have proved catastrophic. Gillespie is the founder of the historic aircraft recovery group TIGHAR and a leading authority on the Earhart-Noonan disappearance.

The loss of the belly antenna, and Earhart’s apparent confusion over calling frequencies to be used in contacting the Itasca, might have contributed to her inability to find Howland Island. She appears not to have known Morse Code, which would have been a more reliable means of communication than voice in challenging conditions. Her last transmission to the ship was: “Calling Itasca we must (be) on you but cannot see you but gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio we are flying at 1,000 feet.”

TIGHAR’s research has suggested Earhart and Noonan may have survived a landing on Gardner (now called Nikumaroro) Island, a spot that is along a bearing that Earhart was probably following after missing Howland. Contributing to this theory is that amateur radio operators and shortwave listeners across the U.S. heard what they say were pleas for help from Earhart.

On the island, shoes like those Earhart was wearing, the bones of a woman, and assorted pieces that may have come from the Electra were discovered. As of yet, however, there have been no serial numbers or other definitive proofs that would solve the mystery.

The Navy launched a massive search for Earhart, but it was called off on July 18, 1937. Earhart was declared dead in 1939 by a California judge, at the request of her husband, Putnam.

The new leads, in the form of blurry sonar images that resemble a plane on the ocean floor about 100 miles from Howland Island, comes from Deep Sea Vision, which last year launched an $11 million search for Earhart’s plane. Tony Romeo, CEO of the firm and a former Air Force intelligence officer, has said the image resembles Earhart’s plane and that he believes the mystery may have finally been solved.

I’m not so sure.

The image looks a plane, but it doesn’t look like Earhart’s plane to me. The wings are too swept. It’s difficult to believe the Electra would not have broken up on impact. Also, a sonar image is also not a photograph, and there’s just not enough detail to tell. It has not been confirmed as Earhart’s plane, as the image was discovered in reviewing sonar data after the expedition had ended.

At 16,000 feet, the object — whatever it is — is deeper than the Titanic, which makes it accessible only to a narrow (and expensive) range of submersibles, manned or unmanned. So, I’m not sure the Earhart mystery is really any closer to being solved.

In the days following Earhart’s disappearance, Putnam turned to an unusual source for help — a celebrity psychic from Amelia’s hometown of Atchison. Her name was Gene Dennis. Putnam sent Dennis a pair of Earhart’s stockings and a handkerchief of Noonan’s.

Earhart was “alive and safe on a South Seas island,” Dennis said, according to Gillespie’s book. She said the name “Gelbert” came to her and predicted that fishermen would discover the flyers, perhaps as soon as the coming weekend.

Other theories on Earhart and Noonan’s fate over the years include that they were captured as spies by the Japanese or that they survived but lived under assumed identities. Robert Ballard, the discoverer of the Titanic, in 2019 voiced his support for the Nikumaroro Island theory, based on a photograph that may have shown one of the landing gears of the Electra. Ballard led an expedition to the waters off Nikumaroro but failed to find the plane. He concluded the blurry landing gear shaped object in the photograph was probably just one of the many rounded beach rocks.

Visitors to the AE Hanger Museum are given a chance to vote on which of seven theories they believe is most likely, Pendergraft said. Of those who have voted, the most popular theory is “crashed and sank.”

That is the closest the hangar museum gets to the depressing part of Earhart’s story. The mood throughout is upbeat, mostly geared for school children, and stresses the importance of science and pluck. It also encourages women to pursue their dreams in roles such as exploration and aviation that have been traditionally dominated by men.

Pendergraft said the Deep Sea Vision images have spurred attendance at the hangar. While she is “excited and intrigued” by the possibility Earhart’s plane may have been found, she is reserving judgment until more information is available.

While the “Muriel” Electra is an impressive bit of history, and a reminder of the days when air travel was new and dangerous, it did not move me as much as visiting the Earhart birthplace. “Muriel” is definitely worth the price of admission, but it lacks the personal connection to Earhart.

But during a visit to the Otis house in 2017, with my wife, Kim, I remember being moved by something we found framed on the wall.

It was Amelia Earhart’s inked handprint from 1933. It was of her right hand and signed beneath by her.

There was something about the long, thin fingers and thumb and the lines in her palm that said, across the space of 90 years, here I am! It was the hand of an artist, a poet, a dreamer. An explorer. It was the hand that held the yoke of the Electra until it could hold it no more.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.