Earhart Research Puts Woodinville Man on National Map

If you haven’t read it yet, former Woodinville City Council member Jeff Glickman is becoming a national name -- not in politics, but in the quest to find Amelia Earhart’s plane ().

Glickman is part of the ongoing effort by Delaware-based TIGHAR, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, to discover where Earhart disappeared along with famed British navigator Fred Noonan on a 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe.

This July, the 75th anniversary of the disappearance of Earhart and Noonan, TIGHAR is embarking on an expedition that will sail from Hawaii to Nikumaroro, the remote Pacific island where TIGHAR and Glickman believe Earhart’s plane crashed. It was Glickman’s examination of a black object in an old, grainy, black-and-white photo, which he believes is part of the plane’s landing gear, that convinced the nonprofit organization to go forward with the expedition.

Earhart’s airplane was not a Lockheed 10-E, but it was a Lockheed 10-E Special, according to Glickman. “The distinction being crucial: Earhart’s plane was a one-of-kind aircraft based on the 10-E airframe. As a derivative of the early 10-E airframe it shared the same landing gear assembly with the 10-A,” he explained. “The early 10-E landing gear assembly was susceptible to lateral load failure, so the later 10-E’s used a different landing gear assembly.”

You can see a photo of the aircraft by clicking here. The photograph Glickman studied was taken by British civil-servant officer a few months after the disappearance.

Glickman will not be on the trip this summer: His job at Megabess US, Inc. in Bellevue necessitates his staying locally. In addition to his job with Megabess, Glickman has his own business as a forensic examiner who uses technical analysis on photographs and other visual images to detect clues that can help solve mysteries. His clients are usually scientific organizations, law firms or businesses.

His interest in forensics started when he was a student in the 1980s at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. He was asked to investigate a security breach by the head of the computer department. “Upon solving the breach, I realized that using a fingerprint in place of a password could prevent future security breaches,” Glickman said. “I set about developing a fingerprint scanner and the development of the resulting image processing algorithms led to my long-term involvement with image forensics.”

When Glickman heard about the TIGHAR project, he felt he had the skills to help and offered his services for free. He went to Tucson's Pima Air & Space Museum to examine a rare vintage Electra there. “At Pima I only measured the landing gear which is nearly identical to the one on Earhart’s 10-E special,” he said. “After Earhart’s crash at Luke Field, material and significant repairs (changes) were made to her airplane.”

Earhart crashed on takeoff from Luke Field in Honolulu during her first attempt at circumnavigation; she disappeared during her second attempt later that year.

Working on a project about such a significant episode in history is itself a reward. "This was an important piece of American history," Glickman told the Seattle Times. "She was a true pioneer who had a tremendous amount of courage."

Glickman said one of his hopes from the project is to inspire and inform students, to show them that solving mysteries through science, and that tales from history, can be interesting. “This is an important piece of history and I hope that kids are able to see how exciting researching history can be.”