Hypothesis #1: Amelia Earhart Perished on a Lonely Pacific Island. Hypothesis #2: Amelia Earhart Lies at the Bottom of the Ocean. Hypothesis #3:Who Cares? We're Having a Helluva Good Time Not Finding Her! (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine January 2002

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Hypothesis #1: Amelia Earhart Perished on a Lonely Pacific Island. Hypothesis #2: Amelia Earhart Lies at the Bottom of the Ocean. Hypothesis #3:Who Cares? We're Having a Helluva Good Time Not Finding Her! (Cont.)

So what about Hypothesis No. 2? Good question. Remember Elgen Long? In 1999, with 25 years of research and 40,000 hours of flying behind him, Long published Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved. The book theorizes that Earhart's Lockheed Electra 10-E lies in a 2,000-square-mile quadrant of the Pacific under 17,000 feet of water. Nova, the PBS adventures-in-science show, was impressed with Long's research and in the fall of 1999 struck a deal with the Nauticos Corporation to film an undersea expedition to find the plane.

Nauticos brings a wealth of ocean-exploration knowledge to the endeavor. David Jourdan, a 47-year-old former Navy submariner and the company president, has logged 20 years searching the seas for lost vessels, and his company has made several discoveries, including the Japanese aircraft carrier Kaga, sunk in 1942 during the Battle of Midway, and the Israeli submarine Dakar, which sank after a collision in 1968. Tom Dettweiler, the company's 50-year-old director of ocean operations—who worked with Robert Ballard on the discovery of the Titanic—was tapped to run the Earhart expedition.

Nauticos's plan depends more on technology than forensic sleuthing. A piece of side-scanning sonar equipment called the NOMAD 6000 is to be hung from a five-mile-long fiber-optic cable attached to a surface ship, which will then patrol up to 800 square miles of ocean west of Howland Island. The cable alone weighs 15 tons. Using sound to sweep the ocean floor—in that area, a relatively flat plain—the sonar sends the information to a computer on board the ship, which then translates the echoes into an image of the bottom. After collecting the sonar data, an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) equipped with lights and a camera will be sent down to get a better look. At 17,000 feet, little oxygen is left in the water to corrode metal, and because of the sea floor's smooth contour, Nauticos expects the gear to easily register any plane-size lumps. But it won't be a cinch: Jourdan compared their search technique to dangling a piece of dental floss from a 40-story building.

Still, he is totally confident about Nauticos's chances. "By our analysis, there is only a 15 percent chance that we won't find it," Jourdan says. "We've never failed. If the premise that she did run out of gas and went into the water is correct—if we do our job—then our chances will be very high."

Of course, there's a catch: Nova could only finance the film, a fraction of the $4 million search-and-recovery costs, so Nauticos had to find another benefactor. Enter Mike Kammerer—again. When he first heard of the Nauticos expedition, last summer, Kammerer had a realization. "One of these guys is gonna find her," he said, referring to TIGHAR and Nauticos. "In this deal, you better cover your bet."

Last August, Kammerer invited me along on his mission to strike a deal with Nauticos. We hopped into a Cessna turboprop that he uses for personal transportation and flew to Los Angeles. It was an affair designed to impress: Kammerer footed everyone's bill for an overnight stay at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills.

Over dinner that night, Kammerer and Jourdan shared their divergent views of the Earhart project, with Kammerer emphasizing the need to create media capital that could make Nauticos famous, and Jourdan explaining the many difficulties involved in a deep-ocean search. At one point Kammerer excused himself, explaining that he needed to make a phone call. When he returned about 20 minutes later, he dropped a check for $300,000 onto the table, along with a folded piece of hotel stationery roughly outlining the strings attached. He promised another $2.2 million within months.

"So, do I have your attention?" he asked, a little smile creeping out from behind his poker face. The deal was simple: Kammerer would cover the cost of finding the plane if Jourdan would sign over the media and merchandising rights to the expedition, and anything it might find, to him. Jourdan balked. Even with an 85 percent chance of finding the plane, the 15 percent possibility of landing facedown on the cold ocean floor—all under the glare of Kammerer's media rhetoric—was enough to scare him off.

For Jourdan, the real value is in actually finding the plane, not in creating media capital. "What he was saying was, 'Go to work for me, find my airplane, and go away,'" Jourdan later said of Kammerer's offer. "We're not here just to have fun, we're here to create a long-standing, self-sustaining ocean exploration project. Why should I sell out my life so this guy can have fun? There's a much bigger mission here, and that's what we're after."

Jourdan returned the $300,000 check and pinned the handwritten promissory note to a bulletin board in his office as a memento.

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