An ocean explorer claims to have solved aviation’s biggest mystery by finding the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s missing plane.
The American aviator’s plane disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 during her attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world.
His unexplained fate has become a source of widespread speculation since crash investigators were unable to find his body or any debris.
But former US air force intelligence officer Tony Romeo, who sold his property business to raise $11 million to fund a deep-sea search for the missing plane, believes he captured a sonar image that revealed the plane’s location.
“This is perhaps the most exciting thing I will ever do in my life. I feel like a 10-year-old kid on a treasure hunt,” Mr. Romeo, from South Carolina, told the Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Romeo and his two brothers, all pilots, were motivated by the hope of using their flying knowledge to help solve the “perfect puzzle.”
“We always felt that it was a group of pilots who were going to figure this out, not the sailors,” he said.
Mr. Romeo’s company, Deep Sea Vision, used an unmanned submarine to scan 5,200 square miles of ocean floor with sonar technology in the area where Earhart is suspected to have crashed.
After examining data from the research voyage, the team discovered a blurry, plane-like shape at the bottom of the Pacific 5,000 meters below.
The sonar image was taken about 160 kilometers away from Howland Island, halfway between Australia and Hawaii.
Mr. Romeo, who has since shared the photo on Instagram, believes it shows Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.
“You’re going to have a hard time convincing me that this is anything other than a plane, first and second, that it’s not Amelia’s plane,” he told NBC News.
“There are no other known accidents in the area and there is certainly no accident from that period with the tail design you clearly see in the picture.”
Mr. Romeo’s team plans to return to the site later this year or early 2025 to conduct further research.
“The next step is verification, and there’s a lot we need to know about this. And there appears to be some damage. So it’s been at this point for 87 years,” he added.
“I think this is the greatest mystery of all time. “Surely the most enduring aviation mystery of all time.”
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were expected to land on Howland Island in July 1937 to refuel during her quest to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the world.
However, the duo could not make it and he was pronounced dead two years later; US crash investigators concluded that the plane crashed somewhere in the Pacific. No remains were found.
Mr. Romeo’s quest follows a series of earlier attempts to solve the mystery.
In 1999, America’s Cup sailor Dana Timmer led a deep-water search near Howland Island. Although a promising shadow was spotted on the sonar, Mr. Timmer was unable to raise the money needed to return and confirm his finding.
Ten years later, a team led by Ted Waitt, founder of the Gateway computer company, conducted a new search in the Pacific, but to no avail. “We are confident we know where Earhart is,” the team later said.
Ocean exploration company Nauticos launched three fruitless searches in 2002, 2006 and 2017. “This is the only thing I’ve been looking for my whole career and never found,” said sonar expert Tom Dettweiler, who joined the two companies from Nauticos. He conducted searches and was part of the team that found the wreck of the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland in 1985.
There are also those who believe the wilder theory that the Japanese captured and killed the airmen; The “evidence” ranges from a generator seized from the port of Saipan in 1960 to a discredited photograph of the couple taken at a port in 1937. The Marshall Islands, which were controlled by Japanese forces at the time.
Another claim, supported by a 2018 forensic analysis of bones found on the remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro, suggests that Earhart may have died there.
The bones were discovered in 1940 and were initially thought to belong to the man. But a reexamination six years ago showed that the measurements were female and similar to Earhart’s body shape.
The International Historic Aircraft Recovery Group had previously claimed that Earhart died of starvation as a casualty at Nikumaroro, which was east of the sonar image.
The US-based group has expressed doubts about Mr Romeo’s alleged discovery.
“For the wings of an Electra to fold back as shown in the sonar image, the entire midsection would have to fail at the wing/fuselage junctions,” he said. “This is simply not possible.”