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Tony Romeo believes he has long lost Amelia Earhart’s aircraft.
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Romeo told BI that he captured an image of an aircraft-shaped object on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
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Experts say the site appears to be fairly accurate but that clearer images are needed.
A pilot and former US Air Force intelligence officer believes an image he captured using sonar on a high-tech unmanned submersible may have answered one of America’s worst mysteries: What caused iconic aviator Amelia Earhart to disappear while on the top her reputation?
Tony Romeo is one of a long line of researchers and hobbyists who have pursued Earhart’s distinctive Lockheed 10-E Electra plane, which flew across the Pacific Ocean with its famous pilot and navigator Fred Noonan during an attempt make around the globe. in July of 1937.
The mystery surrounding Earhart’s disappearance has long baffled researchers and inspired conspiracy theories over the years, from the Japanese taking her prisoner to her being a government spy.
But Romeo, a former real estate investor who sold commercial properties to finance the $11 million needed to begin the search, returned in December from a roughly 100-day trip at sea with a sonar image that he believes that shows the plane lost in the ocean. depths.
High-tech search at sea
His journey, carried out using a $9 million high-tech unmanned submersible drone “Hugin” manufactured by the Norwegian company Kongsberg, and a research crew of 16, began last September in Tarawa, Kiribati, covering 5,200 square miles of the ocean floor. , the Wall Street Journal reported.
Romeo had a dream for years before it was realized.
“This is a story that has always interested me, and everything in my life hit at the right time,” Romeo, whose father and brothers are also pilots, told Business Insider. “I was getting out of real estate and looking for a new project, so although I actually started about 18 months ago, this was something I had been thinking about and researching for a long time.”
About a month into the trip, the team took a sonar image of the airplane-shaped object about 100 miles from Howland Island—but the image wasn’t found in the dive data until the 90th day of the trip, making it impractical to return. back to get a closer look.
Experts expressed interest in the finding, with Dorothy Cochrane, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, telling the Journal that the reported location where the image was taken was almost exactly, geographically, compared to where Earhart is believed to have flown. . that they have gone down.
But others say they want clearer comments and more details, such as the plane’s serial number.
“Until you look at this physically, 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, who said the search might be “the most exciting thing I’ll ever do in my life,” said he plans to return to the area to try to capture better images using from an autonomous or robotic submarine equipped with cameras and sonar to receive. closer to the object, which lies more than 16,500 feet below the surface.
Romeo told BI that if it wasn’t Earhart’s plane, the object he found could be another missing aircraft lost in the Pacific Ocean or — perhaps no less interesting — another man-made object that fell out of a shipping container. But for now, he feels confident that he has made a brand new discovery because of the distinctive shape of the fuselage, tail and wings.
“The next step is confirmation – we have to go back out with different types of sensors and really photograph it well and look at how the artifact is sitting on the bottom of the sea,” said Romeo BI. “When that step is done, many people will be involved. The Smithsonian, the family, some investors will be involved because it will be an expensive operation, but then we are thinking: ‘How do we raise the plane. ? How are we going to save him?'”
He said: “I don’t think we’re there yet. But I think Americans want to see this in the Smithsonian; that’s where it belongs. Not the bottom of the ocean.”
A decades-old mystery
Hopeful explorers have pumped millions of dollars into expeditions to find Earhart’s lost plane over the years, but its last known location has made the search difficult.
“It’s very deep water, and the area where she could be is big,” Tom Dettweiler, a sonar expert, told the Journal.
One team that searched for Earhart’s plane in 2009 on X, known as Twitter, said they knew where the aviator was after searching 2,500 square miles near Howland Island, close to where Romeo searched ” . was … not.”
Earhart, who was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic and the US, was declared legally dead on January 5, 1939, two years after she left office. But her legacy lives on and continues to fascinate people around the world.
“It was one of the great mysteries of the 20th century and still is in the 21st century,” Cochrane told the Journal. “We are all hopeful that the mystery will be solved.”
The dateline theory
Romeo believes he has taken a giant step towards answering crucial questions surrounding the disappearance of the legendary pilot after decades of clues that could lead to her location, including the “theory dateline”.
The theory, which Romeo relied on in part to guide his search, suggests that when Earhart crossed the international line during her 20-hour flight, her navigation system was inaccurate and led her astray about 60 thousand, which could lead to a tragic end.
Once he receives confirmation that he has found Earhart’s plane, he hopes during another trip planned later this year, Romeo says the company he created as part of the search will continue to try to solve other mysteries in the ocean.
“There are many cool things in the Pacific Ocean – the aircraft of the Second World War and flight MH370 are still out there, and maybe we can run at some point,” said Romeo BI. “I am not announcing yet that we are, but I would love to collaborate with other people on other projects since we have state-of-the-art equipment. There are only a few of these in the world and to find there is a demand for these things out .”
Read the original article on Business Insider
