For dozens of explorers, Amelia Earhart was a runaway — seemingly forever.
However, a commercial real estate investor from Charleston, South Carolina, believes he may finally have found an important piece of the 87-year-old puzzle.
The pioneering female aviator, a household name at the time, disappeared with her flight attendants on what would become a record-breaking trip around the world in 1937.
Despite numerous attempts and millions of dollars spent over nine decades, neither Earhart’s remains nor the wreckage of her plane have ever been definitively found.
But Tony Romeo, a pilot and former US Air Force intelligence officer who sold all his commercial properties to pay for the search, told The Wall Street Journal he thought he had found part of Earhart’s plane resting on the ocean floor.
Romeo says his sonar image of a plane-shaped object in the Pacific Ocean may be Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra — and experts who have seen the image say it deserves investigation.
“This is probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Romeo told the Journal.
“I felt like a 10-year-old kid who went on a treasure hunt.”
Earhart’s daring pilot made her world famous.
An airplane-shaped mass on the Pacific floor may be an important clue to solving the decades-long mystery surrounding famed aviator Amelia Earhart, who disappeared in 1937. Bettmann Archive
She was the first woman to fly solo, non-stop across the continental US and the Atlantic Ocean and the first person to fly solo across the Pacific from Hawaii to the mainland.
“For him to disappear is unthinkable,” said Romeo. “Imagine Taylor Swift missing today.”
Romeo and his two brothers, all pilots, felt they had better luck finding Earhart than killing the past travelers, most of whom were sailors.
“We always felt that a group of pilots were the ones who were going to get it done, and not the sailors,” Romeo told the WSJ.
They tried to play up Earhart’s flight path by studying her direction, location and fuel level based on radio messages received by the Itasca, a US Coast Guard vessel stationed near Howland Island to help Earhart land and refuel.
Tony Romeo, a pilot and former US Air Force intelligence officer who sold all his commercial properties to pay for the search, told The Wall Street Journal he thought he had found part of Earhart’s plane resting on the ocean floor. Bettmann Archives
They then drew up a search area based on where they thought Earhart was most likely to have crashed.
Romeo spent $11 million on travel and high-tech equipment.
The key to the quest is the “Hugin” drone in the water.
His 16-person expedition launched in early September from Tarawa, Kiribati, a port near Howland Island, aboard a research vessel.
The team’s unmanned submersible scanned 5,200 square miles of the ocean floor, and after about a month, it captured a blurry image of an airplane-like object 5,000 meters below the surface within 100 miles of Howland Island.
Romeo says that his sonar image of a plane-shaped object in the Pacific Ocean may be Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra. Instagram @deep.sea.vision
However, Earhart’s hunters didn’t find compelling drone images until three months into their trip, and by then they couldn’t be traced back, Romeo said.
He told the WSJ that he plans to make another visit to get better pictures to help experts solve the decades-old mystery.
Dorothy Cochrane, curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum’s aeronautics department, told the outlet the area where the image was taken aligns with where Earhart scholars believe she may have been before she disappeared.
“Until you physically see these things, there’s no way to say for sure what they are,” Andrew Pietruszka, an underwater archaeologist who led the deep-sea search for the missing military aircraft and their soldiers, told the Journal.
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On July 2, 1937, Earhart and Fred Noonan, her navigator, took off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, and planned to refuel on uninhabited Howland Island. A runway and refueling station were built for them so they could continue on to Honolulu and Oakland, Calif., their final destination.
The two faced strong winds at Lae, and the operator monitored Earhart’s radio messages as she flew toward Howland — until she shut up.
After 16 days, the US Navy and Coast Guard ended their search for the missing tracker, who was declared dead on January 5, 1939.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
