Plane-shaped sonar image may be vital clue in Amelia Earhart mystery

For dozens of explorers, Amelia Earhart is the one who got away — seemingly permanently.

However, a commercial real estate investor from Charleston, South Carolina, believes he might finally have found a vital piece of the 87-year-old puzzle.

The pioneering female aviator, a household name at the time, disappeared with her flight navigator on what was to be a record-setting trip around the world in 1937.

Despite many attempts and millions of dollars spent over nine decades, neither Earhart’s remains nor the wreckage of her plane have ever definitively been located.

But Tony Romeo, a pilot and a former US Air Force intelligence officer who sold all his commercial properties to pay for his search, told The Wall Street Journal he thinks he found part of Earhart’s plane resting on the ocean floor.

Romeo says that his sonar image of an aircraft-shaped object in the Pacific Ocean may well be Earhart’s Lockheed 10-E Electra — and experts who have viewed the image say it’s worth investigating.

“This is maybe the most exciting thing I’ll ever do in my life,” Romeo told the Journal.

“I feel like a 10-year-old going on a treasure hunt.”  

Earhart’s daredevil piloting made her world-famous.

She was the first woman to fly solo, nonstop across the continental US and Atlantic Ocean as well as the first person to fly alone over the Pacific from Hawaii to the mainland. 

“For her to go missing was just unthinkable,” Romeo said. “Imagine Taylor Swift just disappearing today.”

Romeo and two of his brothers, all pilots, felt they would have better luck finding Earhart than the slew of past adventurers, many of whom were sailors.

“We always felt that a group of pilots were the ones that are going to solve this, and not the mariners,” Romeo told WSJ.

They tried to game Earhart’s flight path by studying her direction, location and fuel levels based on radio messages received by Itasca, the US Coast Guard vessel stationed near Howland Island to assist Earhart in landing and refueling.

They then drew up a search area based on where they thought Earhart was most likely to have crashed. 

Romeo spent $11 million to fund the trip and the high-tech gear.

Key to the search was an underwater “Hugin” drone.

His 16-person expedition launched in early September from Tarawa, Kiribati, a port near Howland Island, aboard a research vessel. 

The team’s unmanned submersible scanned 5,200 square miles of ocean floor, and after about a month, it captured a blurry image of an airplane-like object 5,000 meters beneath the surface within 100 miles of Howland Island.

However, the Earhart hunters didn’t find the intriguing drone image until three months into their trip, and by then it wasn’t feasible to backtrack, Romeo said.

He told WSJ he plans to make another excursion to get better pictures to hopefully help experts solve the decades-old mystery.

Dorothy Cochrane, a curator in the aeronautics department of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, told the outlet the area where the image was taken lines up with where Earhart scholars believe she might have been before she vanished.

“Until you physically take a look at this, there’s no way to say for sure what that is,” Andrew Pietruszka, an underwater archaeologist who helms deep-ocean searches for missing military aircraft and their soldiers, told the Journal.

On July 2, 1937, Earhart and Fred Noonan, her navigator, took off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, and planned to refuel on uninhabited Howland Island. A runway and refueling station had been built for them so they could journey on to Honolulu and Oakland, Calif., their final destination.

The two encountered a strong headwind in Lae, and operators monitored Earhart’s radio messages as she flew toward Howland — until she went silent.

After 16 days, the US Navy and Coast Guard ended their search for the missing trailblazer, who was declared dead on Jan. 5, 1939.