6. The aluminum panel found by TIGHAR likely came from another airplane
During World War II, an Army Air Corps C-47B crashed near Gardner Island. Villagers on the island scavenged aluminum from the aircraft, as well as other materials, including aviation wire (cables) and other components they believed to be of use. In 2017, the New England Air Museum examined the rivet pattern on the piece of aluminum TIGHAR believed to have been the window cover on Amelia’s Electra. They found it to be an exact match for a wing panel on a C-47B. They also compared it to the Lockheed Electra in their inventory and found no logical use for it on the aircraft, given the rivet pattern. Nonetheless, speculation continued to build around the theory that Earhart survived for some time on Nikumaroro.
If she did, it could not have been for very long. There is little fresh water on the island, other than pools of rainwater. Without a desalination plant of some kind, someone on the island would have to collect rainwater to survive. The extreme scarcity of water hampered the attempt at colonizing the island. Nor did Noonan and Earhart have much of a supply of drinking water, their aircraft carried as much fuel as possible, at the expense of everything else. Nonetheless, efforts by TIGHAR and others gained credibility for the Nikumaroro theory. In the early 20th century, re-examination of the Bevington photo led to the belief that a blurred image was actually part of an airplane’s landing gear. Nikumaroro became the subject of another scientific expedition to find evidence of Amelia Earhart.