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.
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