I think I wanna start tonight by telling you all a quick story. 

In 1932, Amelia Earhart completed the first solo transatlantic flight by a woman and became only the second person to make the flight period. She did it in NR7952 her beautiful Lockheed Vega.

Now, I love all of Earhart’s famous planes and even though it may not be the most famous one, it’s my personal favorite and has been since I was a kid. During our visit to the Smithsonian a few years ago, I remember standing under it while my wife snapped a picture. “Now look at me and smile!” she said - as she snapped a picture that continues to hang in my office to this day. 

We stood under it together after the picture and just enjoyed being in the same space as something Amelia loved so much. It was real, we could touch it. “Can you believe we made it here?” she asked? I couldn’t. We were never supposed to make it past the first few episodes of the show and now we were standing in Air & Space in Washington D.C. and we’d already shot several guests for the documentary across the country before that point. I looked up, standing under that wing thinking that it was the most beautiful piece of winged machinery I’d ever laid eyes on. 

For nearly a century, Amelia Earhart’s name has lived in two worlds at once.

One is made of headlines and legend…the kind of stuff  that turns a woman into a symbol, then turns that symbol into a battleground. The other world is quieter. Heavier. More honest. It lives in archives. In carefully preserved artifacts. In labels written by steady hands. In collections protected not for what we want to believe—but for what we can actually prove. Because if there’s one thing this case has taught me… it’s that the mystery doesn’t survive on a lack of answers.

It survives on noise. On certainty sold too quickly. On the comforting illusion that the truth must be simple… or cinematic… or just one big discovery away.

But Amelia wasn’t simple. And the story she left behind isn’t either.

Tonight, we’re sitting down with someone who has spent a lifetime living in the space between myth and material… between the public story and the private record. She’s one of the most trusted voices in American aviation history— a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum curator whose work has helped preserve and interpret the artifacts that define how the world remembers flight. And when it comes to Amelia Earhart specifically, she’s not approaching this from the outside looking in. She’s spent decades stewarding the very things people argue about—general aviation history, flight materiel, aerial cameras… and the story of women in aviation as a living, breathing timeline—not a highlight reel.

In other words…when she speaks, the room gets quieter.

Because she’s not here to sell us a theory. She’s here to bring us back to the only thing that has ever deserved the steering wheel in this case: the woman and the record.

And that matters—because right now, the Amelia Earhart conversation is loud again.
New expeditions - new claims - new “finally solved” declarations are running laps around the internet, right now. 

But before we sprint toward whatever comes next… we need to do something most people skip: We need to slow down. We need to ask what the evidence can actually carry. We need to separate story from story-telling. And we need somebody who knows the difference.

She’s devoted more than forty years to collecting and preserving aviation artifacts—not just to keep them safe, but to make sure the stories behind them are told responsibly… in a way that educates and inspires, instead of misleads and inflames.  That kind of work doesn’t make you famous in the way the internet understands fame. It makes you foundational. It makes you the person future historians cite.
The person documentaries call when they want to get it right. The person you bring in when the legend gets so big, that the truth struggles to breathe.

Oh and, something really cool. You’ve heard me talk about my original 25 - the list I made when I sat down to begin this project so long ago.

Not only was she on my original 25 - but she was number 1. How bout that?

So…….if you’ve ever wanted to hear what this case sounds like when the noise lowers and the facts step forward— This is your night. And we have one helluva instructor. Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From Washington, D.C by way of the Smithsonian Air & Space, this is Dorothy Cochrane.

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For nearly a century, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart has lived in the space between history and legend — a story told and retold, debated and dissected, yet never fully resolved. But every so often, the mystery shifts. Not because of rumor. Not because of speculation. But because of evidence.

Tonight’s conversation centers on the physical remnants left behind — fragments of a story buried in coral, sand, and time. Artifacts recovered from the remote island of Nikumaroro have forced us to ask an uncomfortable question:

What if we really have been looking in the right place all along?

Tonight we hear an update from a man that’s very much been at the center of the Earhart/Noonan search as of late — an archaeologist whose work has focused on the scientific analysis of this material evidence. His research doesn’t promise answers wrapped in certainty, but it does something far more important: it challenges assumptions, tests long-held beliefs, and brings the conversation back to what the evidence actually shows and why it matters. 

Just a few months ago, the highly publicized trip out to Nikumaroro was postponed. Now, it’s time to find out why. It’s time to slow the story down,  examine what’s been discovered, how it’s been studied, and why these discoveries continue to reshape one of aviation’s greatest mysteries.

This isn’t about closing the case. It’s about following the evidence — wherever it leads.

Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From Eugene Oregon, this is the return of Dr. Richard Pettigrew. 

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For more than nine decades, Amelia Earhart’s name has been spoken with reverence and wonder—a flight path etched deep into the world’s imagination, and a disappearance that keeps us chasing echoes of her last sunrise over the Pacific.

When I first started out on this journey so long ago, I was filled with optimism. Early in the project, I reached out to a woman who wrote one of my favorite Earhart books ever written. I never thought she’d say yes. But I was surprised a lot in those early days. She’s an award-winning historian whose work has helped broaden our understanding of women’s history, power, and the stories we tell about those who defy gravity—literal and figurative. 

But what happens when we step off the edge of the known and begin to look at the woman behind the myth? Not just the aviator who vanished, but the human being whose choices, context, and legacy ripple through gender, memory, and cultural terrain that often resists simplification?

In her writing, tonight’s guest doesn’t just recount events. She situates them in the emotional landscape of their time, inviting us to confront not only what we remember, but why we remember it at all.

In December of 2017, she made her Chasing Earhart debut. Nine years later, she’s back to discuss the latest developments in the Amelia Earhart case, for which there are many, and to remind us all what this story has always been about. Welcome back to Chasing Earhart. From Hoptiken, New Hampshire, this, is Susan Ware

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