COLUMBIA, South Carolina — A grainy sonar image recorded by a private pilot has revitalized interest in one of the most fascinating mysteries of the last century: What happened to Amelia Earhart when her plane disappeared during her round-the-world flight in 1937?
Numerous expeditions have not yielded any results, only confirming that in strips of the ocean floor there were no traces of his twin-tailed monoplane. Tony Romeo now believes his new South Carolina-based marine exploration company has captured an outline of the iconic American Lockheed 10-E Electra.
Archaeologists and explorers are hopeful. But whether the wild-haired pilot’s plane is at a depth of about 16,000 feet (4,800 meters) remains to be seen. And debates abound about the proper handling of any discovered object.
Archivists are hopeful that Romeo’s Deep Sea Vision comes close to solving the puzzle, if only to bring attention back to Earhart’s accomplishments.
Regardless, the search continues for the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean by plane.
Romeo wanted an adventure more than his career in commercial real estate. His father flew for Pan American Airlines, his brother is an Air Force pilot, and he himself has a private pilot’s license. Coming from an “aviation family,” he had long shown interest in the Earhart mystery.
Romeo said he sold his real estate interests to finance last year’s search and buy a $9 million underwater drone from a Norwegian company. The cutting-edge technology is called Hugin 6000, in reference to its ability to penetrate the deepest layer of the ocean at 6,000 meters (19,700 feet).
A crew of 16 began a roughly 100-day search in September 2023, scanning more than 13,468 square kilometers (5,200 square miles) of seafloor. They narrowed their probe to the area around Howland Island, an atoll in the mid-Pacific between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii.
But it wasn’t until the team reviewed sonar data in December that they saw the fuzzy yellow outline of what looks like a plane.
“In the end, we got an image of a target that we firmly believe is Amelia’s plane,” Romeo told The Associated Press.
The next step is to take a camera underwater to better examine the unidentified object. If the images confirm explorers’ highest hopes, Romeo said the goal would be to recover the long-lost Electra.
In the end, Romeo said his team undertook the costly adventure of “solving aviation’s greatest unsolved mystery.” An open hatch could indicate that Earhart and her flight companion escaped after the initial impact, Romeo said, and a dial in the cockpit could give insight into what exactly went wrong.
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared while flying from New Guinea to Howland Island as part of her attempt to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the world. She had radioed that she was running out of fuel.
The Navy searched but found no traces. The US government’s official position has been that Earhart and Noonan crashed their plane.
Since then, theories have grown absurd, including alien abduction or Earhart existing in New Jersey under an alias. Others speculate that she and Noonan were executed by the Japanese or died as castaways on an island.
“Amelia is America’s favorite missing person,” Romeo said.
Maritime archaeologist James Delgado said the possible discovery of Romeo would change the narrative, but “we need to see more.”
“Let’s drop some cameras in there and take a look,” said Delgado, senior vice president of archaeological firm SEARCH Inc.
Delgado said Romeo’s expedition employed once-classified, world-class, cutting-edge technology that is “revolutionizing our understanding of the deep ocean.”
But he said Romeo’s team must provide “a level of forensic documentation” to prove it is Earhart’s Lockheed. That could mean the patterns in the aluminum of the fuselage, the configuration of its tail and cockpit details.
David Jourdan said his exploration company Nauticos searched in vain on three separate expeditions between 2002 and 2017, examining an area of seafloor the size of Connecticut.
I would have expected to see straight wings and not swept wings, as the new sonar suggests, as well as engines. But this could be explained by damage to the plane or reflections that distort the image, he acknowledged.
“It could be a plane. It certainly looks like an airplane. It could be a geological feature that looks like an airplane,” he said.
Dorothy Cochrane, curator of aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum, said Romeo’s crew looked in the right place near Howland Island. That’s where Earhart desperately searched for a landing strip when he disappeared on the last leg of her flight.
If the object is indeed the historic plane, the question for Cochrane will be whether it is safe to raise. How much machinery is still intact would be determined in part by how easily Earhart landed, he added.
“That’s where you really have to look at this image and say, ‘What do we have here?’” Cochrane said.
If the blurry sonar images turn out to be the plane, international standards for underwater archeology would strongly suggest that the plane remain where it is, said Ole Varmer, a retired attorney for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a senior fellow at The Ocean Foundation.
A non-intrusive investigation can still be conducted to reveal why the plane possibly crashed, Varmer said.
“As much history as possible is preserved,” Varmer said. “It’s not just the accident. It is where it is and its context at the bottom of the sea. That’s part of the story of how and why it got there. “When you recover it, you are destroying part of the site, which can provide information.”
Lifting the plane and placing it in a museum would likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, Varmer said. And while it is possible for Romeo to pursue a salvage claim in court, the plane’s owner has the right to deny it.
Earhart bought Lockheed with money raised, at least in part, by the Purdue Research Foundation, according to a blog post from Purdue University in Indiana. And she planned to return the plane to the school.
Romeo said the team believes the plane belongs to the Smithsonian. Acknowledging the “uncharted territory” of potential legal problems, he said his exploration company “will deal with them as they arise.”
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Finley reported from Norfolk, Virginia. Pollard is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.