Explorers believe they've found early aviator Earhart's plane
A team of deep-sea explorers believe they may have located the wreckage of famed pilot Amelia Earhart’s aircraft resting largely intact on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, though further work will be needed to prove that claim.
Deep Sea Vision (DSV), a company headed by entrepreneur Tony Romeo, has released a sonar image they believe shows the outline of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra, which went missing during her attempt at a round-the-world flight in July of 1937. Radio contact with her plane was lost after 39-year-old Earhart reported running low on fuel.
If the object resting on the ocean floor is indeed Earhart’s plane, Romeo told Reuters on Tuesday (January 30), he hopes they can “bring closure” to the story of “America's favourite missing person”.
Romeo, a former pilot and Air Force intelligence officer, led a crew of what DSV calls “underwater archaeologists and marine robotics experts”, on a three-month quest along a section of what they believed to be Earhart’s flight path from Papua New Guinea to Howland Island in the central Pacific Ocean.
Examining Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan’s flight path, their trail of radio signals, as well as analyzing the winds and other factors, allowed them to zero in on the possible crash site, Rome said.
The team have not released the location of the site but say it lies around 100 miles (161 kilometers) west of Howland Island, where Earhart had hoped to refuel. In a press release, DSV say the team relied in part on a theory that Earhart’s navigator may have forgotten to turn the calendar back when they crossed the International Date Line, leading to navigational errors.
Employing a state-of-the-art submersible, DSV scoured a vast 5,200 square mile (13,468km) swathe of the Pacific Ocean floor, using sonar to map up 1,600 meters (5,250 feet) at a time. They believe their gruelling efforts paid off, in what Romeo says is a sonar image of an object nearly 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) underwater similar in size and dimensions to Earhart’s aircraft.
“You see the twin vertical stabilizers in the back, and you see those very clearly in the image,” Romeo told Reuters, demonstrating with a model of Earhart’s iconic Lockheed Electra.
The team hopes to return to the site soon to obtain better images with a deep water remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) and to eventually bring the suspected wreckage to the surface. That process could take years and might reveal it to be another undersea object or even a different plane.
After Earhart went missing, a massive air-and-sea search, the most extensive such U.S. operation at that time, was unsuccessful. Earhart's plane was presumed to have gone down, but it has never been known whether she survived, and if so, for how long.
Reuters
