A team of oceanic explorers has announced that they may have located the missing plane of one of the most legendary U.S. aviators.
The longstanding mystery surrounding the disappearance of Amelia Earhart over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to become the first female aviator to circle the globe might soon be resolved. The South Carolina-based company Deep Sea Vision posted tantalizing sonar images of what its team believes might be Earhart’s long-lost Lockheed 10-E Electra aircraft.
“All that combined, you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that this is not an airplane and not Amelia’s plane,” said Tony Romeo, the founder of Deep Sea Vision, according to NPR.
The images were taken by an unmanned underwater drone in waters about 16,000 feet deep, roughly 100 miles from Howland Island, located in the center of the Pacific Ocean between Australia and Hawaii.
Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan were supposed to stop on Howland Island to refuel their plane after taking off from Papua New Guinea on July 2, 1937. It was one of the final stretches of their circumnavigation quest, yet the duo never reached their intended destination.
The disappearance of the 39-year-old woman came just five years after she had earned acclaim as the first female aviator to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean on her own in 1932. The doomed flight has long generated public interest, which has been fueled by reports that individuals picked up Earhart’s distress signals on their radios despite being thousands of miles away and claims that her bones were allegedly found on Gardner Island, roughly 350 nautical miles from Howland Island.
The news that the world might soon know what happened during that mysterious flight is welcomed by most, but they might be held in considerable suspense before Deep Sea Vision’s claims can be confirmed.
The drone captured the sonar image about a third of the way into its 90-day mission to survey 5,200 square miles of the ocean floor, but the team reviewing the data did not actually see the image until the journey was nearly completed. By then, the ship was too far away to turn around and investigate further. A new expedition is being planned for later this year to take better images of whatever was spotted at that location, according to Romeo.
“This is maybe the most exciting thing I’ll ever do in my life,” said Romeo, a pilot and former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, per The Wall Street Journal. “I feel like a 10-year-old going on a treasure hunt.”
