Is this Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane? Explorer believes he’s solved the great mystery with sonar
“There’s no other known crashes in the area, and certainly not of that era in that kind of design with the tail that you see clearly in the image,” said Tony Romeo, CEO of Deep Sea Vision.
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A pilot and explorer who embarked on an $11 million expedition at sea believes he has solved one of the world’s greatest mysteries: the final resting place of Amelia Earhart’s plane that vanished in 1937.
Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer and the CEO of Deep Sea Vision, sold commercial real estate to fund his deep-sea exploration of the Pacific Ocean last year, when he combed the ocean floor with sonar technology in the suspected area of Earhart's crash.
His team reviewed sonar data in December caught by an underwater drone from his research voyage and found a startling image: a blurry, plane-like shape Romeo believes is Earhart's twin engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.
The image was taken about 100 miles from Howland Island, halfway between Australia and Hawaii.
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were expected to land there in July 1937 for a refueling stop in her bid to be the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe — but they never made it.
She was declared dead two years later, after the U.S. concluded she had crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, and her remains were never found.
While the image is blurry, Romeo believes it is Earhart's aircraft, given its unique shape.
“Well, you’d be hard-pressed to convince me that’s anything but an aircraft, for one, and two, that it’s not Amelia’s aircraft,” he told NBC's "TODAY" show in an interview that aired Monday.
“There’s no other known crashes in the area, and certainly not of that era in that kind of design with the tail that you see clearly in the image,” he added.
While it's too soon to determine whether it is indeed the long-lost aircraft, it's an exciting prospect.
Romeo's team plans to return to the site this year or early next year with a camera and a remotely operated vehicle to snap better images of the site.
“The next step is confirmation, and there’s a lot we need to know about it. And it looks like there’s some damage. I mean, it's been sitting there for 87 years at this point,” he said.
And returning is no easy, or cheap, feat, as the voyage requires expensive high-tech gear. Romeo's voyage used an underwater Hugin drone manufactured by the Norwegian company Kongsberg, The Wall Street Journal reported.
In his last voyage, the expedition used an uncrewed submersible to scan 5,200 square miles of ocean floor. The image of the suspected plane was found resting 5,000 meters underwater, the Journal reported.
“I think myself that it is the great mystery of all time," Romeo said. "Certainly the most enduring aviation mystery of all time."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/e...fic-rcna136134
[Reply]
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut:
And they don't look wide enough, even if you 'unsweep' them.
Honestly, it looks more like an F-86 sabre. The dimensions of a Saber are more 'boxlike' in that it's about as wide as it is long. An Electra is quite a bit wider than it is long.
Australia flew the Sabre. Obviously we did as well. We also had a carrier capable version of the Sabre (the Fury) that we probably had out in the Pacific; we had over 1,000 of those at various points, I'm sure one went down in the Pacific and if it's testing/training, we're not gonna make a big show of it.
If I'm guessing, that's some fighter that went down out there. I'll guess Sabre or one of its many variants.
I thought the same thing. Furthermore, if the wings were damaged badly enough to be bent back like that, it would be more likely that they would have separated from the aircraft during the descent to the bottom. The sweep of the wings is also consistent on both sides. Why would damage to both wings be so consistent? It looks much more like a F86 with the wings attached than an Electra that just so happened to sustain identical damage to both wings that caused neither to separate.
ETA - Looking further at the sonar picture convinces me even more that it's a F-86. You can see the bubble canopy positioned precisely where it would be in relation to the point where the wings are joined with the fuselage. Furthermore, Earhart's Electra had twin vertical stabilizers that were out at the ends of the horizontal stabilizers. In the sonar picture you can clearly see a bright line that would be the top of the vertical stabilizer positioned down the centerline of the aircraft which is consistent with a F-86. It may turn out that the sonar picture is of another aircraft than a F-86, or maybe something else entirely, but there is virtually 0 chance that that is the wreckage of an Electra.
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