An exploration team may have just made a major breakthrough in a mystery that has captured the world for nearly a century—the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
Deep Sea Vision has been on a quest to find the pilot’s long-lost plane, and sonar data gathered from the Pacific Ocean has revealed something CEO Tony Romeo believes to be it.
“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 TODAY on 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.”
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were traveling in a Lockheed 10-E Electra twin-engined plane when they disappeared. Deep Sea Vision shared some of the images their technology captured on the ocean floor, and while it’s hardly definitive, there is a resemblance. And any discrepancies could be related to the fact that, if it is Earhart’s plane, it’s been sitting underwater for 87 years.
The potential discovery has been enough to get experts excited — it’s in roughly the right location, after all, roughly halfway between Australia and Hawaii.
“The next step is confirmation, and there’s a lot we need to know about it,” Romeo said.
The team initially utilized an unmanned underwater drone to survey over 5200 square miles of the ocean floor last year, and plans to return to the specific area where the images of what they hope is Earhart’s plane were captured either later this year, or sometime in 2025 to try to obtain better images.
Romeo called Earhart’s disappearance “the great mystery of all time…certainly the most enduring aviation mystery of all time,” and is already thinking ahead to what it will take to retrieve her plane, should it turn out to be what they’ve found.
“I don’t think we’re there yet,” he told Business Insider. “But I do think Americans want to see this in the Smithsonian; that’s where it belongs. Not the bottom of the ocean.
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