A former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, Tony Romeo, claims to have identified the potential wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s plane, missing for nine decades, using sonar data from a deep-sea drone in the Pacific Ocean. Romeo, the CEO of the private exploration company Deep Sea Vision, plans a mission later this year or next to confirm the discovery and potentially retrieve the plane, a task that eluded a massive U.S. search in 1937.
Amelia Earhart, renowned for being the first woman to complete a solo nonstop transatlantic flight in 1932, vanished during her attempt to circumnavigate the globe with navigator Fred Noonan. If successful, she would have been the first female pilot to achieve this feat.
The suspected wreckage lies more than 5,000 meters beneath the Pacific’s surface, approximately 160 km from Howland Island. Deep Sea Vision’s drone captured blurry sonar images, revealing a plane-like shape with a distinctive feature matching Earhart’s Lockheed Model 10-E Electra—the twin vertical stabilizers on the tail.
After a 100-day search covering over 13,400 square km, Romeo believes Earhart may have landed the plane on the ocean surface due to fuel exhaustion, and it subsequently sank, remaining relatively undisturbed by currents. Romeo emphasizes the need to confirm the discovery and envisions the possibility of raising and restoring the plane, acknowledging that the process could span several years. He expresses the hope that solving this 87-year-old mystery would provide closure and bring Amelia Earhart’s story to a conclusion.