A grainy sonar image recorded by a private pilot has reinvigorated interest in one of the past century’s most alluring mysteries: What happened to Amelia Earhart when her plane vanished during her flight around the world in 1937?
Numerous expeditions have turned up nothing, only confirming that swaths of ocean floor held no trace of her twin-tailed monoplane.
Tony Romeo said his new South Carolina-based sea exploration company captured an outline of the iconic American’s Lockheed 10-E Electra.
Photo: AFP
Archeologists and explorers are hopeful, but whether the tousled-haired pilot’s plane lies at the about 4,800m depth remains to be seen, and debates abound about the proper handling of whatever object is discovered.
Archivists are hopeful that Romeo’s Deep Sea Vision is close to solving the puzzle — if for no other reason than to return attention to Earhart’s accomplishments.
Regardless, the search is on for the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean.
Photo: AFP / handout / Deep Sea Vision
Romeo wanted more of an adventure than his commercial real estate career. His father flew for Pan American Airlines, his brother is a US Air Force pilot and he has a private pilot’s license himself.
Hailing from an “aviation family,” he said he long held interest in the Earhart mystery.
Romeo said he sold his real-estate interests to fund last year’s search and buy a US$9 million underwater drone from a Norwegian company.
The state-of-the-art technology is called the Hugin 6000 — a reference to its ability to break into the deepest layer of the ocean at 6,000m.
A 16-person crew began a roughly 100-day search in September last year, scanning more than 5,200km2 of seafloor. They narrowed their probe to the area around Howland Island, a mid-Pacific atoll between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii.
It was not until the team reviewed sonar data in December last year that they saw the fuzzy yellow outline of what resembles a plane.
“In the end, we came out with an image of a target that we believe very strongly is Amelia’s aircraft,” Romeo said.
The next step is taking a camera underwater to better examine the unidentified object. If the visuals confirm the explorers’ greatest hopes, Romeo said the goal would be to raise the long-lost Electra.
Romeo said his team undertook the costly adventure to “solve aviation’s greatest unsolved mystery.”
An open hatch could indicate that Earhart and her flight companion escaped after the initial impact, he said, adding that a cockpit dial could lend insight into what, exactly, went wrong.
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared while flying from New Guinea to Howland Island as part of her attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. She had radioed that she was running low on fuel.
The US Navy searched, but found no trace. The US government’s official position has been that Earhart and Noonan went down with their plane.
Since then, theories have veered into the absurd, including abduction by aliens, or Earhart living in New Jersey under an alias. Others speculate that she and Noonan were executed by the Japanese or died as castaways on an island.
“Amelia is America’s favorite missing person,” Romeo said.
If the fuzzy sonar images turn out to be the plane, international standards for underwater archeology would strongly suggest the aircraft remain where it is, said Ole Varmer, a retired attorney with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a senior fellow at The Ocean Foundation.
Nonintrusive research can still be conducted to reveal why the plane possibly crashed, Varmer said.
“You preserve as much of the story as you can,” Varmer said. “It’s not just the wreck. It’s where it is and its context on the seabed. That is part of the story as to how and why it got there. When you salvage it, you’re destroying part of the site, which can provide information.”
Raising the plane and placing it in a museum would likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, Varmer said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver