by Amelia Earhart made her last airborne radio call at 8.43am local time, about an hour after warning the Coast Guard cutter Itasca that she was running out of fuel and could not reach her destination, Howland Island, to see.
“We’re on line 157 337,” she said from the cockpit of her Lockheed 10-E Electra aircraft. “We will repeat this message. We will repeat this on 6210 kilograms. Wait.”
She did not repeat the message.
Earhart’s fate was one of America’s great mysteries. Her 1937 attempt to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by aircraft made it the most extensive – and most expensive – rescue operation in the history of the US Navy and Coast Guard.
Since then, a number of researchers, reporters and historians have tried to find out what really happened to Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, over the Pacific Ocean on the day of their disappearance.
Advances in deep-sea scanning technology – and a major $11m investment – may finally provide some definitive answers.
Discovery of the Deep Sea
Deep Sea Vision, a Charleston, South Carolina-based company, believes it may have finally found Earhart’s plane lying on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
The company began scanning the sea floor in September. Her powerful sonar, attached to a $9m submersible named Hugin, searched the murky depths, scanning a total of more than 5,200 square miles in the region where Earhart is believed to have crashed.
About 16,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, while sheltering among the silt and marine sediment, Hugin’s sonar spotted something unusual; plane shape.
“Well you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that it’s just an aircraft, one and two, that it’s not an Amelia aircraft,” Deep Sea Vision founder Tony Romeo said in an interview with NBC. Today show. “There are no other known crashes in the area, and the design is certainly not of that era with the tail that you can clearly see in the image.”
Mr Romeo, a former US Air Force intelligence officer, sold his real estate assets and provided $11m to fund the expedition to find Earhart’s lost plane.
“Maybe this is the most exciting thing I will ever do in my life,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “I feel like a 10-year-old kid going on a treasure hunt.”
Although Mr. Romeo was excited, he kept his expectations low after the initial discovery. He admitted that the images could be images of rocks or some other underwater object. He noted, however, that the image reflects the shape and size of the aircraft that Earhart flew on her last trip.
Unfortunately for Deep Sea Vision, the image was one of thousands taken during its scan, and the anomaly was not discovered until three months after it was taken. By then, the team had traveled far from the discovery site.
With an image and coordinates in hand, the physical remains will need to be examined to solve the mystery.
the rise of Earhart
Earhart’s disappearance was the culmination of a decade of newspaper and radio stories describing her record-setting flights.
On June 17, 1928, at the age of 30, she became the first woman to pilot an airplane — a bright red Lockheed Vega 5B, which she called “old Bessie, the fire steed” — across the Atlantic. The effort made headlines across the country.
Later, she became the first person to complete a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean, flying from California to the Hawaiian islands in 1934.
At first Earhart was treated as an aviation freak because of her gender; News reports at the time called her the first “girl” to fly across the Atlantic, while another referred to her as an “aviatrix”. At the time, the skies were dominated by men. But as she continued to prove her prowess in the dot, she gained notoriety as a great pilot, rather than a quirky outlier. Even still, she used her growing prominence to push for equality in the skies; in an interview with the Evening Star in 1929, Earhart pleaded with the public to “give women a chance in the air.”
“Women can qualify in the air as in any other sport. Their influence and approval is critical to the success of commercial aviation,” she said at the time. “Women and girls write to me by the thousands to learn the truth about aviation and what opportunities there are for women. There is nothing in the make-up of women that would make a less than a man an air pilot. The only obstacle to their rapid success due to her lack of opportunity to receive proper training.”
After many successful and recorded flights in the late 20s and early 30s, Earhart set her sights on a new goal; to be the first woman to circumnavigate the planet in an aircraft.
After she went missing, the community was quite hopeful that she would be found flying again another day. But after a two-month search that turned up no trace of her or Noonan, both were presumed dead.
Looking for Amelia
Researchers have tried to find Earhart’s remains – or any evidence of her fate – since she went missing nearly 90 years ago.
The most recent search to yield some results was in 2012, when the International Historic Aircraft Recovery Group discovered that Earhart may have sent numerous distress calls on the radio after her crash. Those transmissions, according to the group, were not ignored.
“Amelia Earhart did not simply disappear on July 2, 1937. The radio distress calls believed to have been sent from the missing plane dominated the headlines and drove much of the US Coast Guard and Navy search, ” Ric Gillespie, executive director of TIGHAR, said Discovery News. “When the search failed, all the reported post-loss radio signals were dismissed as false and largely ignored ever since.”
He believes Earhart crashed on Gardner Island, about 350 nautical miles from her intended destination on Howland Island. In theory, Earhart spent a week looking for help before the tides washed her plane out to sea.
Mr Gillespie was skeptical of the Deep Sea Vision discovery.
“Despite media hype, this is NOT a sonar image of Amelia Earhart’s plane,” he wrote on his Instagram page.
In 2018, researchers used modern forensics to examine a set of human remains found on Nikumaroro Island in 1940 that were candidates for Earhart’s remains. According to Richard L. Jantz, professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, he studied the remains and determined that they were likely those of Earhart.
Mr Jantz said Earhart landed her plane on Nikumaroo and died while stranded on the island. The Florida Times-Union.
Now, Deep Sea Vision’s discovery seeks to add to what we know about its final days.
The next steps
Sonar experts will have to take a closer look at the object found by Deep Sea Vision before it can be confirmed that it really is Earhart’s lost plane.
“Until you look at this physically, there’s no way to say for sure what that is,” said expert Andrew Pietruszka Wall Street Journal.
Mr Romeo said he planned to return his team to the site to collect more images of the object.
“The next step is certification and we need to know a lot about it. And it looks like there is some damage. I mean it’s been sitting there for 87 years at this point,” he said.
Until Deep Sea Vision can return, the mystery of Earhart’s lost plane will remain so.
“I think it is the great mystery of the time,” said Mr. Romeo, “certainly the most enduring aviation mystery of all time.”
