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Deep Sea Vision said last month that its recent sonar scans may reveal the long-lost plane of Amelia Earhart.
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Nauticos, a competing ocean technology company, argues that the DSV scans are unlikely to show the mysterious wreck.
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Both companies have invested millions in the search for Earhart’s wreckage and continue the search.
The race is on to find the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s final flight.
The search has attracted budding American investors looking to secure their legacy by solving one of the world’s most enduring mysteries.
Last month, Deep Sea Vision, a South Carolina marine robotics company founded by former US Air Force intelligence officer Tony Romeo, captured an image using sonar from a high-tech unmanned submarine that it believes reveals the Earhart’s iconic plane crash site.
Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan were trying to fly around the world in 1937 when the pair went missing somewhere over the Pacific near Howland Island, a small unincorporated US territory about halfway between Hawaii and Australia .
Both were pronounced dead by 1939. However, their disappearance has been unsolved for many years and Earhart’s fame is at its height. conspiracy theories about what happened to the iconic pilot and her flight companion.
Romeo says he may have solved the mystery with his sonar scans. But he is not the only one who is searching.
“The next step is confirmation; we have to go back out with different types of sensors and take good photos and see how the artifact is sitting on the seabed,” Romeo, who invested $11 million in the project. and created Deep Sea Vision to help fund the search, Business Insider said.
He added: “Once that step is taken, there will be a lot of people involved. The Smithsonian, the family, several investors will be involved as it will be an expensive operation. But then we are thinking: ‘How do we lift the plane? How can we save it?'”
Nauticos, a competitive ocean technology company known for its involvement in uncovering the location of the I-52, a Japanese World War II deep-water submarine, has spent years searching Lockheed Electra 10E Earhart. After the company conducted similar searches on the ocean floor spanning an area roughly the size of Connecticut, Romeo’s claims have been cast in doubt.
“Yes, the sonar target appears to have a fuselage, wings and tail, but … it appears to have swept wings, the relative dimensions are not the same as the Electra, and it lacks engine nacelles,” read a statement release with Nauticos in response to Romeo’s recent findings. “Those characteristics are not consistent with Lockheed Electra 10E.”
Although Nauticos said that any aircraft-like objects in the vicinity of Howland Island could be Earhart’s Electra and should be positively identified, previous discoveries in the area are believed to be connected to it. Earhart’s gambling to be as innocent as coils of cable on the seabed.
Jeff Morris, the project manager behind the Amelia Earhart Nauticos Project, told BI that it remains “highly doubtful” that Romeo’s target could be a real crash site, mainly because of its location.
A reconstructed radio system
Since Nauticos began its search efforts in 2001, the company has been slowly finding and purchasing the components to complete Earhart’s reconstruction. radio systemfinally getting a big break in 2018 when a key part – a Western Electric 13C transmitter – was discovered at a swap meet.
“As far as anyone else knows, there is no other unit in the world that still exists,” Morris said.
The company was able to reconstruct Earheart’s radio, which Morris said was key to analyzing the strength and duration of its last radio signals and triangulating where it might have crashed. Through their analysis, Nauticos found that Earhart had little chance of transmitting it final signs from the area that Romeo says could be the wreck site.
Nauticos said fuel stability studies showed Earhart likely ran out of fuel about an hour after she said she had “half an hour of fuel left,” expecting the nearby Coast Guard to pick up her transmission.
The company said the test and radio analysis determined that Earhart was likely, possibly due to bad weather, just outside the visible range of the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, anchored at Howland Island, since her signal could be get a radio. Still, no one on board reported seeing his unique Lockheed Electra in the air.
Earhart’s Nauticos Discovery: Dynamic Aviation & the Nellie Crockett Join the Bill Mills team on Vimeo.
Deep Sea Vision’s target, Nauticos said, is well west of Howland Island. The company said that it was unlikely that Earhart would have crashed there because she would not have been able to travel that far in that direction with the little fuel she had and her radio signals still received on the ground.
Not a full partnership but a shared mission
Although there is talk of combining resources to find the wreckage, neither company has agreed to form a partnership. Morris said Romeo contacted Nauticos while he was on his 100 days recently a trip to examine the bottom of the sea around Howland Island, offering to scan any area of interest where Nauticos believed the shipwreck might be.
“He literally called us when he was out there and said, ‘Hey, did you find any areas you’d like us to search in?'” Morris said. “And we said we do, but we would need a contract between the two organizations because we have too much intellectual property here to protect. And he said, ‘Well, you know, I’m not ready to do that still.'”
A representative for Deep Sea Vision told BI that Romeo and David Jourdan, president of Nauticos, “were in regular communication during DSV’s effort” to find the Earhart wreck but did not answer specific questions about any possible collaboration between the two companies.
Every trip to search Earhart wreck it costs a little money in equipment fees and to hire expert navigational staff, engineers and sonar operators to carry out the operations.
Romeo, a former real estate investor, sold commercial property to raise the $11 million needed to fund the search, which included the purchase of a $9 million high-tech unmanned submersible “Hugin” manufactured by a Norwegian company, Kongsberg. Deep Sea Vision now leases its equipment to other ocean explorers to continue funding its mission.
Nauticos started as a for-profit company. Morris said the company spent about $13 million on its initial trip searching for Earhart, adding: “We’re not talking about buying equipment money; we’re talking about the cost of the actual operations.”
The company has since created a non-profit wing to collect donations and promote the educational benefits of uncovering Earhart’s plane, which Morris said may contain remains and human remains. negotiable documents which would provide important insight into the accident.
“All this is funded in the main way by individual investors who are really looking for a legacy project,” said Morris. “It’s not the kind of thing you make money on, with the costs involved and the waits.”
Currently, Nauticos is preparing to launch a new round of fundraising to begin a fourth expedition to search for what it says is the site. Earhart’s final resting place – and if Romeo and Deep Sea Vision find the wreck at the location they’re currently targeting, Morris said, “we wouldn’t have searched there, so Tony.”
Morris declined to specify the locations Nauticos plans to search on the next trip out of caution that another hobbyist or company, such as Deep Sea Vision, might be there first and make a salvage claim on the wreck. In maritime law, anyone who assists in the recovery of a ship or cargo lost at sea is entitled to a reward proportionate to the value of the property recovered.
“We were just, with the results of our radio test, getting ready to start looking for funding for another trip, and then Tony came along, so we put everything on hold,” Morris said. “We didn’t want to come out with things right before it came out, so we said, ‘OK, we’ll sit back. You’ll get your day in the sun.'”
Although the two companies are competing for the glory of finding Earhart’s long-lost plane, the one thing they agree on is that if the aircraft is found, it belongs in a museum.
“We want the world to be able to see it,” Morris said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
