A pilot and former US Air Force intelligence officer believes an image he captured using sonar on a high-tech unmanned submersible may have finally answered one of America’s most baffling mysteries.
What caused the disappearance of iconic pilot Amelia Earhart at the height of her fame.
Tony Romeo, a former US Air Force officer, spent $11 million searching for Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane and may have found it.
He is one of a long line of researchers and hobbyists to have taken up the search for Earhart’s distinctive Lockheed 10-E Electra plane, which disappeared over the Pacific Ocean along with its famous pilot and navigator Fred Noonan during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe in July of 1937.
Amelia Earhart, 40, stands next to a Lockheed Electra 10E before her last flight in 1937 from Oakland, California.
The mystery surrounding Earhart’s disappearance has long puzzled researchers and spurred conspiracy theories over the years, from the Japanese taking her prisoner to her being a government spy.
But Romeo, a former real estate investor who sold commercial properties to raise the $11 million needed to begin funding the search, returned in December from a roughly 100-day voyage at sea with a sonar image that he believes shows the lost plane in the ocean’s depths.
A high-tech search at sea
His expedition, which was carried out using a $9 million high-tech unmanned submersible “Hugin” drone manufactured by the Norwegian company Kongsberg and a research crew of 16, started last September in Tarawa, Kiribati, covering 5,200 square miles of the ocean floor.
It was a dream Romeo had for years before making it a reality.
“This has been a story that’s always intrigued me, and all the things in my life kind of collided at the right moment.”
Romeo, whose father and brothers are also pilots, told Business Insider. “I was getting out of real estate and looking for a new project, so even though I really started about 18 months ago, this was something I’ve been thinking about and researching for a long time.”
Amelia Earhart took off from the airport in her £10,000 Flying Laboratory for Honolulu on the first leg of her round-the-world flight.
Roughly a month into the trip, the team captured a sonar image of the plane-shaped object about 100 miles from Howland Island but didn’t discover the image in the submersible’s data until the 90th day of the voyage, making it impractical to turn back to get a closer look.
Experts have shown interest in the finding, with Dorothy Cochrane, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, telling The Journal that the reported location where the image was taken was just about right, geographically, compared to where Earhart’s flight is believed to have gone down.
But others say they need clearer views and more details, such as the plane’s serial number.
“Until you physically take a look at this, there’s no way to say for sure what that is,” says Andrew Pietruszka, an underwater archaeologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
A map of where Earhart’s plane is believed to have gone missing along her presumed flight path.
Credit:-Google Maps
Romeo told BI that if it’s not Earhart’s plane, the object he found could be a different missing aircraft lost in the Pacific or—less interestingly, perhaps—another manmade object that fell off a shipping container. But as of now, he’s feeling confident that he’s made a groundbreaking discovery due to the distinctive shape of the fuselage, tail, and wings.
Romeo, who said the search may be “the most exciting thing I’ll ever do in my life,” added that he planned to return to the area to try to capture better images using autonomous or robotic submersibles equipped with cameras and sonar to get closer to the object, which rests more than 16,500 feet beneath the surface.
Romeo and his company, Deep Sea Vision, discovered an object of similar size and shape to Amelia Earhart’s iconic plane deep in the Pacific Ocean. Deep Sea Vision.
“The next step is confirmation — we’ve gotta go back out with different sorts of sensors and really photograph it well and take a look at how the artifact is sitting on the seabed,” Romeo told BI. “Once that step is done, lots of people will be involved.
The Smithsonian, the family, there’ll be some investors involved because it’ll be an expensive operation, but then we’re thinking, ‘How do we lift the plane? How do we salvage it?'”
He added, “I don’t think we’re there yet. But I do think Americans want to see this in the Smithsonian; that’s where it belongs. Not the bottom of the ocean.”
Earhart, who was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the US, was declared legally dead on January 5, 1939, two years after she vanished.
But her legacy has lived on, and she continues to fascinate people worldwide.
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