A former pilot and submarine explorer believes he has found the wreckage of the plane in which legendary aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart lost her life in 1937. Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer, embarked on an exploration of the Pacific ocean floor last year, scanning the ocean floor with sonar and drones to solve one of the great mysteries in the history of aviation. Data collected by an underwater drone in December produced an image that closely resembles Earhart's twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.
The image was taken at a depth of almost 5,000 meters, 160 kilometers from Howland Island, halfway between Australia and Hawaii, where Amalia and her navigator Fred Noonan were to land in July 1937 in one of the final stages of the disease. The fateful attempt to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world. The searches for the planes and the wreckage were the most expensive that the US Navy and Coast Guard had organized at the time, but they led nowhere. Earhart and Noonan, who disappeared without a trace, were declared dead two years later, but their remains and those of the plane were never found. Romeo is now convinced that the plane in the photo is the right one because of the special shape of the tail: “You have to convince me that it's not a plane and that it's not Amelia's,” he told NBC.
“There have been no other accidents in this area, and certainly not involving an aircraft from this period with this particular tail design, which can be clearly seen in the photo.” The hunt for Amelia has so far cost Romeo $11 million, financed through sales of real estate. “It's probably the most exciting thing I'll ever do in my life,” the former intelligence officer told the Wall Street Journal. “I feel like a 10-year-old playing treasure hunt.” There are other theories about Earhart's disappearance: According to Ric Gillespie, an explorer who has studied the flight for decades, Amelia's twin-engine plane made an emergency landing on Gardner Island – about 350 nautical miles from Howland Iceland away – and the pilot he had tried to send a distress call for a week before the plane was sucked into the water.
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