David Walter Jourdan (born December 5, 1954) is an author, founder of Meridian Sciences, and the co-founder and president of Nauticos, a deep ocean exploration company. He studied physics and engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy and Johns Hopkins University, and served as a U.S. Navy submarine officer during the Cold War. Jourdan and his Nauticos team have made a number of notable deep ocean discoveries, including the missing Israeli submarine

INS Dakar INS ''Dakar'' () was a Diesel–electric transmission, diesel–electric submarine in the Israeli Navy. The vessel, a modified World War II British T-class submarine, had previously been of the Royal Navy. She was purchased by Israel from the G ...

in the Mediterranean and the

Japanese aircraft carrier Kaga was an aircraft carrier built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN). Originally intended to be one of two s, ''Kaga'' was converted under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty to an aircraft carrier as the replacement for the battlecruiser , ...

, sunk in the

Battle of Midway The Battle of Midway was a major naval battle in the Pacific Ocean theater of World War II, Pacific Theater of World War II that took place on 4–7 June 1942, six months after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and one month after the Battle of t ...

. He has led two deep ocean expeditions in search of

Amelia Earhart Amelia Mary Earhart ( ; July 24, 1897 – January 5, 1939) was an American aviation pioneer. On July 2, 1937, she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the world. During her li ...

and

Fred Noonan Frederick Joseph Noonan (born April 4, 1893 – disappeared July 2, 1937, declared dead June 20, 1938) was an American flight navigator, sea captain and aviation pioneer, who first charted many commercial airline routes across the Pacific Ocean ...

’s Lockheed Electra airplane in the ocean off

Howland Island Howland Island () is a coral island and strict nature reserve located just north of the equator in the central Pacific Ocean, about southwest of Honolulu. The island lies almost halfway between Hawaii and Australia and is an Territories of the ...

, the atoll Earhart and Noonan were attempting to find when they vanished. He has published several books, ''Never Forgotten: the Search and Discovery of Israel's Lost Submarine Dakar''; ''The Deep Sea Quest for Amelia Earhart.''; and ''The Search for the Japanese Fleet: USS Nautilus and the Battle of Midway''. He refutes the theory that Earhart and Noonan landed on Gardner Island (now called

Nikumaroro Nikumaroro, previously known as Kemins Island or Gardner Island, is a part of the Phoenix Islands, Kiribati, in the western Pacific Ocean. It is a remote, elongated, triangular coral atoll with profuse vegetation and a large central marine lagoo ...

) in the Phoenix Island Group, claiming that any transmissions attributed to Gardner Island were false. Through his company Nauticos he extensively searched a quadrant north and west of Howland Island during two deep-sea sonar expeditions (2002 and 2006, total cost $4.5 million) and found nothing. The search locations were derived from the line of position (157–337) broadcast by Earhart on July 2, 1937.Hoversten 2007, pp. 22–23. Nevertheless,

Elgen Long Elgen Marion Long (August 12, 1927 – January 26, 2022) was an American aviator, author, and researcher who set fifteen aviation records and firsts, including his 1971 flight around the world over both poles. He received the FAI Gold Air Medal ...

's interpretations have led Jourdan to conclude, "The analysis of all the data we have – the fuel analysis, the radio calls, other things – tells me she went into the water off Howland." In 2024, Jourdan said in response to Deep Sea Vision finding what appeared to be the remains of an aircraft that might be the Electra on the ocean floor near Howland, "It is impossible to identify anything from a sonar image alone as sound can be tricky and the artifact could be damaged in unpredictable ways altering its shape. For that reason, you can never say that something is (or isn’t) from a sonar image alone."

References

External links

*http://www.earhartdiscovery.com/ *http://www.nauticos.com/ *http://dakarneverforgotten.com/ {{DEFAULTSORT:Jourdan, David W. Living people 1954 births

See also

References

External links