With the release of a grainy gold image, news headlines around the world are trumpeting the possible discovery of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10e, the plane she was flying in 1937 when she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared during the most difficult leg of their round-the-world flight.
Deep Sea Vision, a new venture founded by pilot and commercial real estate investor Tony Romeo, captured the sonar image during a hundred-day expedition in the central Pacific, the region where Earhart was lost. “It was definitely a surreal moment for all of us,” says Romeo, who sold his real estate holdings to purchase a cutting-edge autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) equipped with highly advanced sonar technologies.
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Still, it’s too soon to say whether this discovery of an object 16,000 feet deep means one of the great historical mysteries has been solved. Here’s what we do know.
1. Sonar images have limitations.
Sonar images are not photographs. The sound waves sent by sonar are at a low frequency, which translates to low resolution.
“The sound wave, because it’s so big, can’t see fine detail,” says David Jourdan, an engineer whose company Nauticos has led three expeditions in search of Earhart. “It can be distorted by reflections, like taking a picture of a mirror.” Promising images, on a second look, sometimes turn out to be something else entirely, like a geological formation.
2. Deep Sea Vision didn’t confirm the object’s identity.
Romeo and his team found the image in their data storage files as they were transitioning to another expedition. They thought that data from one of the AUV’s earlier sorties had been corrupted. When they discovered it wasn’t—and that they had a potential blockbuster find—it was too late to return to the site.
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“We were out of time. We were out of resources,” says Romeo. “And we didn’t have a camera on our [AUV]. It broke really early in the expedition.” Returning to go over the target again with just sonar didn’t seem worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars he estimated it would cost. Deep Sea Vision plans to go back to the sonar image site this year, this time with an operational camera on the AUV to confirm the finding.
3. Some experts say the plane, if it is a plane, doesn’t resemble the Electra.
“The proportions aren’t quite right,” says Jourdan, pointing to the way the wings are swept back rather than straight across, as the Electra’s were.
Others are even more skeptical. “For the wings of an Electra to fold rearward as shown in the sonar image, the entire center section would have to fail at the wing/fuselage junctions,” according to an email blast from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), an organization that has put forward the theory that Earhart died a castaway on an island to the east of the sonar image site. “That’s just not possible.”
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Romeo dismisses this criticism. Both the wings and the tail look swept back due to distortion caused by the AUV moving through the water, he says, pointing to the twin fins on the back of the plane instead. “That’s very distinctive of her aircraft,” he says. “There’s only a couple of planes that’ve ever been made like that.”
4. The object’s location is roughly on Earhart’s flight path—but beyond the range suggested by her radio signals.
Earhart and Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937, flying from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, a one-and-a-half-mile long island some 2,500 miles away. After flying 20 hours, Earhart thought they were close and radioed the Itasca, the Coast Guard ship awaiting them at Howland, “We must be on you but cannot see you.” Her voice was so loud, the Coast Guard radiomen thought she was very near too. She wasn’t, but the strength of the radio signals suggest that she was just beyond visual range.
Deep Sea Vision’s search area was roughly a hundred miles west; Romeo won’t reveal exactly where to avoid someone else making the crucial find. But he does acknowledge that they were guided by a theory that Noonan had failed to account for how the International Date Line would affect his calculations. That theory, however, doesn’t account for the strength of Earhart’s radio signals.
5. Others have claimed to solve this mystery.
Over the nearly 90 years since Earhart and Noonan vanished, many people have claimed to have proof of what happened to them.
People who believe the Japanese captured and killed the aviators have pointed to everything from a generator retrieved in a Saipan harbor in 1960 to a photograph on a Jaluit dock revealed in 2017. TIGHAR, meanwhile, has claimed various smoking guns over the years but now argues that a preponderance of historical and archaeological evidence puts Earhart on Nikumaroro Island, 400 hundred miles south of Howland, where they believe she starved to death.
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Then there’s the simplest explanation: that the aviators simply crashed into the ocean. Elgen Long, an airline pilot who with his wife Marie did the most extensive research into where that might have happened, wrote a book called Amelia Earhart: The Mystery Solved. Over three expeditions, Jourdan has looked where Long suggested (and elsewhere) and come up empty.
6. The mystery is still unsolved. That doesn’t mean its unsolvable.
Jourdan’s team believes they’ve narrowed down where the Electra went down based on recent radio signal testing. Meanwhile, when Deep Sea Vision returns to the site this year, they will bring a documentary crew to capture the moment. “This is definitely something that we need to go back and look at,” says Romeo. “We’ve got to get out there before … you know, there is some urgency.”
