A pilot and deep-sea explorer believes he has solved one of aviation's greatest mysteries and discovered the location of Amelia Earhart's plane.
Tony Romeo, a pilot, former US air force intelligence officer, and CEO of Deep Sea Vision, believes he found the resting place of Earhart’s plane after his team combed the ocean floor with sonar technology in the suspected area of her crash.
Romeo told Wall Street he sold his commercial real estate to fund his expedition of the Pacific Ocean last year.
He said his team captured the sonar image of what he believes to be Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.
Romeo posted the blurry images taken about 100 miles from the Howland Island on his Instagram.
He told NBC news: "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.
"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."
Who was Amelia Earhart?
Born on July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas, Amelia Earhart was an American aviator and the first woman to fly a plane solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
She became interested in planes after watching an acrobatic display, and went on her first flight in the final days of 1920, prompting her to buy her first plane a year later. Two years after that, she earned her pilot licence.
In the mid 1920s, Earhart worked as a social worker in Massachusetts but continued to pursue her interest in aviation. In 1928, she became the first female passenger to cross the Atlantic by plane.
In 1932, she made a nonstop solo transatlantic flight, piloting a Lockheed Vega 5B, becoming the first woman to ever do so. She was awarded the United States Distinguished Flying Cross for this achievement.
Earhart was also a writer, and the founder of Ninety-Nines, an organisation of female pilots.
When did she disappear?
Earhart along with her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared on July 2, 1937, while attempting to circumnavigate the globe in a Lockheed 10-E Electra.
What do we know about her disappearance?
The duo began their journey on June 1, departing from Miami and reaching Lae, New Guinea, on June 29. They were last seen on July 2, during a refuelling stop on their way to Howland Island. However, they never made it to their next stop.
Earhart was in brief radio contact with Itasca, a US Coast Guard cutter near Howland.
She warned them they were running out of fuel. That was the last transmission received from her.
Despite the US Navy and the Coast Guard’s best efforts, the pair was never found.
They were declared dead on January 5, 1939. The US government concluded they had run out of fuel and crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
No concrete evidence has ever been found to solve the mystery of Earhart and Noonan’s disappearance. But some believe they crashed on an uninhabited remote island called Nikumaroro, in the western Pacific Ocean.
In 1940, bones were found on Nikumaroro and, after a forensic analysis in 2018, suspected to belong to Earhart. However, this was not confirmed, and the bones were never identified as Earhart’s.
