An explorer believes he has found Amelia Earhart’s plane. Experts are not convinced

It is one of the greatest mysteries in the history of aviation: the disappearance of Amelia Earhart after takeoff from Lae, New Guinea, aboard a Lockheed 10-E Electra on July 2, 1937.

Earhart was trying to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world.

She and a boatman, Fred Noonan, were headed to refuel on Howland Island, a small coral atoll in the southwest Pacific.

But they were never seen again.

For years many have tried to find the remains of his plane, without success.

Now, the director of a company marine robotics He believes he has succeeded, even if some experts are very skeptical.

Tony Romeo, CEO of Vision of the deep seahe says a sonar image captured by his company during an expedition last year appears to show a plane resting 5 kilometers deep at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, somewhere within a 100-mile radius of Howland Island.

He doesn’t want to give the exact location.

He says he believes it’s Earhart’s plane because the picture appears to show it two distinctive fin stabilizers in the back of his plane and the dimensions are “very similar” to those of his sleek twin-engine Lockheed.

On the last day of the expedition, the 16 crew members found the image among the data they had scanned 8,000 square kilometers of the ocean floor between New Guinea and Howland Island.

“We hadn’t found anything for 100 days,” Romeo said in an interview this week.

“We were up to our necks in water. And there it was. It appears on the screen. That’s when we realized that we were the first to see Amelia’s plane in 86 years old. “It was an incredible moment.”

Archaeologists who have used similar technology to search for underwater wrecks said they were not at all convinced that the image was actually a plane, much less Earhart’s.

“The image is really exciting in that it obviously shows a plane or something that looks like a plane,” said Megan Lickliter-Mundon, an underwater archaeologist who has searched for sunken planes.

But to confirm that it is indeed a plane, he said, researchers would need to take more sonar images from different angles.

So they should use a remote controlled vehicle with a video camera to see if the plane has serial numbers or markings identifying it as Earhart’s.

After more than 80 years in the ocean, it would be surprising if the plane was so intact as it appears in the sonar image, Lickliter-Mundon said.

“But who knows? Nothing is definitive until you have more information and a photo.”

Andrew Pietruszka, an underwater archaeologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, said the image, reported by the Wall Street Journal, could be “noise” in the sonar system or a geological feature on the ocean floor.

“You can’t say for sure that it’s a plane,” said Pietruszka, who has searched for World War II planes.

“For me, at most, you could say I have a promising target which could be a plane, and at most it could be Amelia Earhart’s plane.”

Piotr Bojakowski, associate professor of nautical archeology at Texas A&M University, showed “quite skeptical” that it was Earhart’s long-lost Lockheed. He said it could be the remains of a World War II plane.

“There are a lot of plane crashes on all those islands,” Bojakowski said. “Could it be American? Could it be Japanese? Could it be something else? Right now, all we know is that it looks like an airplane.”

Romeo said he plans to mount another expedition in the future to take an underwater video of the site, which he says will confirm that it is Earhart’s plane, hopefully with its registration number, NR16020, still visible on the ‘wing.

“I want the world to see it,” he said.

Charm

Romeo, 43, a former Air Force intelligence officer whose father was an airline pilot, says Earhart’s story has fascinated him since childhood.

Earhart, a pioneering aviator, was the first woman to make a solo non-stop flight across the United States in 1932.

She was also the first woman to complete a solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, also in 1932.

She was a writer, teacher and stylist.

To launch Deep Sea Vision in 2022, Romeo said, he sold his real estate investments and purchased an underwater drone 9 million dollars capable of scanning the ocean floor.

He said the company, based in Charleston, South Carolina, will take on other wrecks under private contract.

Earhart’s disappearance has inspired similar expeditions over the years wacky theories that she would be captured by Japanese agents or return to the United States and live under another name.

Susan Butler, Earhart’s biographer, believes that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean off Howland Island.

“The only question is where the plane crashed,” he said.

Although the search isn’t over yet, James Delgado, an underwater archaeologist based in Washington, D.C., praised Romeo for undertaking the expedition.

“I will always support anyone who goes looking for answers,” he said.

“Right now, we’re in the early stages. But if it were up to me, out of curiosity, I would want to go back and see what all the fuss is about with cameras.”

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