A potential breakthrough in the 87-year-old mystery surrounding the disappearance of Amelia Earhart is about to vanish as the pilot tracks himself down while the adventurer who captured her investigates a 14-year-old theory about what happened on her ill-fated flight.
Deep Sea Vision CEO Tony Romeo and his brother Lloyd released sonar images last week from their $11 million expedition in the Pacific Ocean, depicting a hazy plane-shaped mass they believe may have been Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra.
The brothers, who said they plan another expedition this year or next to get better pictures of the wreckage, told The Daily Mail that potentially important images may never be seen because of hard drive problems they faced during their 90 days. voyage
The 16-person expedition, funded by the sale of Tony Romeo’s commercial property, launched in September from Tarawa, Kiribati, a port near Howland Island.
They scanned 5,200 square miles of the ocean floor using an underwater drone, whose sonar data had to be retrieved and scanned between runs.
At one point, the hard drive appeared to be completely damaged and set to be erased and formatted – until the company’s head of operations discovered the data was recoverable, he said.
Amelia Earhart disappeared in 1937 during a supposed record-setting voyage around the world. AP
That’s when the group’s extraordinary discovery was made.
“We realized we had something there – a very sandy and flat area, this immediately stood out as something that was most likely an aircraft,” Romeo told the Daily Mail.
The siblings said their team’s potentially breakthrough discovery stems from the “Date Line” theory proposed in 2010 by Liz Smith, a former NASA employee and amateur pilot, to explain the supposed disappearance of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan. record-breaking voyage around the world in 1937.
Tony and Lloyd Romeo say the sonar image they believe may be of Amelia Earhart’s missing plane was almost lost due to technical problems. Deep Sea Vision/AFP via Getty Images
The theory posits that as Earhart and Noonan soared across the international date line, the navigator forgot to reset his calendar one day, which eventually sent the pair off course about 60 miles.
Romeo, a pilot and former US Air Force intelligence officer, said that while Noonan was an experienced pilot who was unlikely to make such a mistake, fatigue could have played a role in the big mistake.
“When we look at it as pilots, you get tired when you fly,” he told the Daily Mail.
The Romeo brothers planned another Pacific Ocean expedition to obtain better sonar images to confirm whether they had found the wreckage of Earhart’s doomed voyage. Bettmann Archives
That theory led them to a coordinate that was about 3 miles below the surface of the ocean, and within 100 miles of Howland Island, where their drone picked up sonar images of a plane-like figure they believed to be the remains of Earhart’s doomed voyage.
Romeo admitted to the outlet that there was a possibility that the sonar image was not his plane, but rather the remains of another crashed plane or even a strange rock formation. A follow-up expedition will hopefully confirm their findings – and help solve a decades-long mystery.
“We need to get a camera on him. When we see the number NR16020 on the wing, that’s when we’ll know for sure what it is,” he told the Mail.
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On July 2, 1937, Earhart and Noonan departed from Lae, Papua New Guinea, with plans to refuel at Howland Island before continuing on to Honolulu and their final destination in Oakland, Calif.
The pair encountered high winds at Lae, and were heading toward Howland when Earhart’s radio transmission finally went silent.
The US Navy and Coast Guard conducted a 16-day search for the missing couple without success, and Earhart was officially pronounced dead on January 5, 1939.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
