A South Carolina man believes he may have discovered the plane Amelia Earhart was flying when she vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
Former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer Tony Romeo turned his fascination with the legendary pilot into an adventure when he embarked on an ambitious search for Earhart’s lost plane.
Romeo, who sold his commercial property investments to fund his search, managed to take a sonar image of an aircraft-shaped object on the ocean floor in December.
Earhart and her Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra vanished at the height of her fame, a mystery that has spawned decades of searches and conspiracy theories.
Earhart’s record-breaking run as a pioneering pilot at the very beginning of the aviation age made her an international celebrity.
Earhart and her Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra vanished at the height of her fame
Romeo, who sold his commercial property investments to fund his search, managed to take a sonar image of an aircraft-shaped object on the ocean floor in December
She became the first woman to fly solo, nonstop across the continental US and the Atlantic, and the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the mainland over the Pacific.
‘This is maybe the most exciting thing I’ll ever do in my life,’ Romeo told the Wall Street Journal.
‘I feel like a 10-year-old going on a treasure hunt.’
‘For her to go missing was just unthinkable,’ Romeo said.
Adding: ‘Imagine Taylor Swift just disappearing today.’
Romeo spent $11 million to fund the trip and buy the high-tech gear needed for the search including an underwater ‘Hugin’ drone manufactured by the Norwegian company Kongsberg.
The expedition launched in in early September from Tarawa, Kiribati, a port near Howland Island, with a 16-person crew aboard a research vessel.
In outings that lasted 36 hours each, the unmanned submersible scanned 5,200 square miles of ocean floor.
Earhart’s disappearance is a mystery that has spawned decades of searches and conspiracy theories
Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932
On June 1, 1937, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan left Miami, Florida, on an around-the-world flight. They disappeared after a stop in Lae, New Guinea, on June 29, 1937, with only 7,000 miles of the trip left
Experts are not ready to definitively call the find and have requested clearer images with details such as a serial number that matches Earhart’s plane
Eventually, around a month into the search, it had captured a fuzzy sonar image of an object the size and shape of an airplane resting some 5,000 meters underwater within 100 miles of Howland Island.
However, the image went unnoticed until the team found it when scanning the data, around 90 days into the trip.
Romeo is now planning a return exhibition to get better images of the mysterious object.
Some experts are intrigued by Romeo’s discovery, including Dorothy Cochrane, a curator in the aeronautics department of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.
Cochrane told the Journal that the location of the sonar image roughly matches where experts have concluded Earhart may have crashed.
However, experts are not ready to definitively call the find and have requested clearer images with details such as a serial number that matches Earhart’s plane.
‘Until you physically take a look at this, there’s no way to say for sure what that is,’ Andrew Pietruszka, an underwater archaeologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told the Journal.
Romeo is not the first to launch trips in an attempt to locate the missing plane, half a dozen adventurers an enthusiasts have spent millions on the unsolved mystery.
Expeditions were launched in 1999, 2002, 2006, 2009 and 2017.
The missions collectively cost at least $13 million when adjusted for inflation, the Wall Street Journal estimated.
‘It’s the only thing in my career that I’ve ever looked for and not found,’ said Tom Dettweiler, a sonar expert who participated in two of the searches and was part of the team that found the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, in 1985.