Tony Romeo former US Air force intelligence officer of explorer ‘Deep Sea Vision,’ believes he may have found Amelia Earhart’s missing plane after new sonar images picked up in the Pacific Ocean lead to renewed optimism.
A South Carolina man who has dedicated himself to discovering the missing airplane of Amelia Earhart who seemingly vanished after flying over the Pacific Ocean in 1937, believes he may have now found the aircraft which has eluded discovery close to 90 years.
Former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer Tony Romeo turned his fascination with the legendary pilot into an adventure when he embarked on an ambitious search for Earhart’s lost plane.
Romeo, who sold his commercial property investments to fund his search, managed to take a sonar image of an aircraft-shaped object on the ocean floor in December according to a new report via the Wall Street Journal.
‘We think it could be her plane,’
‘We think it could be her plane,’ Tony Romeo of Sullivan’s Island and the founder of the exploration company Deep Sea Vision told WSJ.
It’s also possible that the object is a string of rocks in the shape of a plane, he added.
Earhart and her Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra vanished at the height of her fame, a mystery that has spawned decades of searches and conspiracy theories.
Earhart’s record-breaking run as a pioneering pilot at the very beginning of the aviation age made her an international celebrity.
She became the first woman to fly solo, nonstop across the continental US and the Atlantic, and the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the mainland over the Pacific.
‘This is maybe the most exciting thing I’ll ever do in my life,’ Romeo told the WSJ.
‘I feel like a 10-year-old going on a treasure hunt.’ Adding, ‘For her to go missing was just unthinkable.’
$11 million gamble
What’s clear are the stakes. Discoveries of lost ships such as the Titanic and the former slave ship Clotilda generated international headlines and lucrative filmmaking deals. But searches that turn up nothing can be wildly expensive, and embarrassing and of course tragic too.
Romeo spent $11 million to fund the trip and buy the high-tech gear needed for the search including an underwater ‘Hugin’ drone manufactured by the Norwegian company Kongsberg.
The expedition launched in in early September from Tarawa, Kiribati, a port near Howland Island, an uninhabited coral island located just north of the equator in the central Pacific Ocean with a 16-person crew aboard a research vessel.
In outings that lasted 36 hours each, the unmanned submersible scanned 5,200 square miles of ocean floor.
Eventually, around a month into the search, it had captured a fuzzy sonar image of an object the size and shape of an airplane resting some 5,000 meters underwater within 100 miles of Howland Island.
Perfect riddle
However, the image went unnoticed until the team found it when scanning the data, around 90 days into the trip.
‘I’m not saying we definitely found her,’ Romeo recently told the PostandCourier, but he said he is ‘very optimistic’ about what his team discovered. Ultimately, he said he hopes to bring closure to a story that has captivated people for generations.
‘It’s almost a perfect riddle,’ Romeo said of Earhart’s last flight. ‘There’s just enough information to pull you in.’
Romeo is now planning a return exhibition to get better images of the mysterious object.
Definitive discovery not called until specifics such as plane serial number conveyed
Some experts are intrigued by Romeo’s discovery, including Dorothy Cochrane, a curator in the aeronautics department of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.
Cochrane told the Journal that the location of the sonar image roughly matches where experts have concluded Earhart may have crashed.
However, experts are not ready to definitively call the find and have requested clearer images with details such as a serial number that matches Earhart’s plane.
‘Until you physically take a look at this, there’s no way to say for sure what that is,’ Andrew Pietruszka, an underwater archaeologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told the Journal.
Romeo is not the first to launch trips in an attempt to locate the missing plane, half a dozen adventurers an enthusiasts have spent millions on the unsolved mystery.
Expeditions were launched in 1999, 2002, 2006, 2009 and 2017.
The missions collectively cost at least $13 million when adjusted for inflation, the Wall Street Journal estimated.
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 had been built for them so they could journey on to Honolulu and Oakland, Calif., their final destination.
The two encountered a strong headwind in Lae, and operators monitored Earhart’s radio messages as she flew toward Howland — until she went silent.
After 16 days, the US Navy and Coast Guard ended their search for the missing trailblazer, who was declared dead on Jan. 5, 1939.
