Using sonar data from a deep-sea drone, a former US Air Force intelligence officer claims to have located what he believes to be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s plane, which vanished nine decades ago, on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Explorer Tony Romeo intends to launch a mission later this year or next to locate the long-lost plane, which a massive US search failed to find in 1937, in an attempt to unravel an 87-year-old mystery.
“She’s America’s most famous missing person, right? As long as she’s missing, there’s always going to be somebody out there searching. If we can help bring closure to this story and bring Amelia home, we’d be super excited,” Romeo Said.
Five years after Charles Lindbergh achieved the feat, American aviator Amelia Earhart made history in 1932 by becoming the first woman and the second person to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic. She was trying to fly around the world with navigator Fred Noonan when their plane vanished over the Pacific. She would have been the first female pilot to accomplish this if she had been successful.
Romeo, the CEO of Deep Sea Vision, a private exploration company, thinks the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s plane is located on the ocean floor at a depth of more than 5,000 metres (16,400 feet), roughly 160 kilometres (100 miles) from Howland Island, roughly halfway between Australia and Hawaii.
According to him, the deep-sea drone’s hazy sonar pictures reveal a plane-like shape on the sandy, level ocean floor.
At the end of the 2023, the 16-person crew of Deep Sea Vision searched an area of more than 13,400 square kilometres (5,200 square miles) in 100 days.
