Washington men unearth potential Earhart clues

The background and experience of both men uniquely led Spink to the artifacts and Hayton to a position of authority to identify them.

Spink founded Dynatrax, an aluminum boat kit manufacturer, in Bow in 1989. He said he produces approximately 200 kits a year and sells them around the world, when he’s not teaching computer-aided design at Mount Vernon High School.

Spink said he first visited the Marshall Islands 5 1/2 years ago to sell his boats and show clients how to build them.

Conversations and interviews with island residents brought him to relatives of people who said they saw Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan perform a controlled landing on Mili Atoll, Spink said, as well as islanders who said they saw the plane.

Spink led the first expedition of the site two years ago with teams of searchers who used metal detectors, shovels and picks to sweep the beach. Along with shoes and medicine containers, Spink found a small, oblong, slightly crumpled piece of aluminum dashed with red paint, and brought it back to Hayton for inspection.

The son of a machine shop owner, Hayton bought his first airplane at the age of 14 from Barker Airfield in Mount Vernon and restored it to flying condition.

He eventually earned a Federal Aviation Administration inspection authorization license that allows him to approve aircraft for flight after yearly inspections, and has been contracted by the FAA and National Transportation Safety Board to aid crash investigations with his expertise in airplane systems, he said.

Hayton believes the racetrack-shaped, 4-by-2-inch piece of aluminum is an inspection plate that would have gone on the outboard leading edge of the Lockheed’s left wing. He said the remaining red paint on the piece looks to be a match for Earhart’s Lockheed.

“My conclusion is it came from there. The color is dead-on for the trim color. She had color on the leading edge of two wings, further on the bottom than on top, and color at the rear end of the fuselage area,” Hayton said, noting the period- and usage-correct yellow zinc-chromate primer applied to either side of the piece.

But when Spink brought back the first piece, Hayton saw something that really interested him in a picture taken on the atoll — what he believes to be the dust cover for the Lockheed’s left-hand Goodyear Air Wheel.

Spink traveled back to the Marshall Islands to get it.

“Everybody brought back what they found and put it in a pile,” Spink said of the first search party. “I did more research, did more interviews, people told me stories. I just kept wanting to go back for more and more. Four trips later, I’m back here, wondering what I may have missed … We brought back a dust cover that matches up pretty good with the Air Wheel.”

The Air Wheel was a special low-pressure tire and wheel combination that was built to handle unpaved runways.

Jim Jenkins, director and curator of the North Cascades Vintage Aircraft Museum in Concrete, said the Air Wheel was fitted to Earhart’s particular plane, and said they were fitted to many Electras at the factory.

At Jenkins’ museum is a restored 1938 Lockheed Model 12 Electra Junior that originally sported Air Wheels, but has since been converted to different wheels and tires.

“The 10s and the 12s, most were originally fitted (with Air Wheels). It allowed them to use unimproved strips, which a lot of them used in the ’30s,” Jenkins said.

An online copy of Flight magazine from April 4, 1930, notes the Air Wheel was recently developed. Jenkins said Air Wheels were likely produced through the 1950s and were fitted to many planes from those decades. The Air Wheels did come with covers, he said.

“They most likely did have a cover with a hole,” Jenkins said. “The inboard side most likely had a cover to keep the bearings free of dust and dirt. The outboard side had a removable cover — a hubcap basically — that’s where the axle, retaining nut and cotter pin would be removed to check the brakes and stuff.”

Hayton had good reason to recognize Air Wheel parts: He used to own a set.

He said he bought three of the wheels when he was young from an aircraft salvage parts company in Seattle, but sold two of them in the 1970s. The third does not have a brake unit.

“I remember them telling me they were really special wheels, like the ones on Amelia Earhart’s plane, and they were very rare,” Hayton said of the shop owners who sold him the landing gear.

Hayton was brought up-close and personal with the dust cover when he refurbished the parts before selling them, he said. The 6-inch wheel went with a 35-inch-tall tire that was built specifically for the Lockheed 10, Hayton said.

Jenkins, who has kept up with various search attempts for Earhart over the years, said a real piece of Earhart’s plane would be an amazing find.

“She was the (Charles) Lindberg of the era, people trying to break flight records. To be so popular and have a top-notch Pan Am navigator on board and disappear … There’s so much conjecture about whether the Japanese got a hold of her or if they disappeared into the ocean,” Jenkins said.

“It’s extremely interesting and I hoped in my lifetime they would find the airplane.”

The next step in verifying the source of the parts is to make a 3-D scan of them and see how closely they could match original pieces, Spink said, but original blueprints of the wheels are proving difficult to locate.

Hayton said the possibility of a different airplane with those wheels crashing on that particular beach is “astronomically slim.”

But without serial numbers, it’s impossible to definitively prove the pieces came from Earhart’s Lockheed.

“Without serial numbers, all we can scientifically say is these parts are consistent with what was on her aircraft,” Spink said. “We’re just trying to definitely get as close as we can.”