What happened to Amelia Earhart, the famed aviator whose plane disappeared in 1937 as she was trying to fly around the world? After surveying 5,200 square miles of the Pacific Ocean, searchers say they may have picked up the sonar signature of Earhart’s sunken aircraft.
If their hypothesis holds up, the find could well solve one of the aviation world’s greatest mysteries. But if it doesn’t hold up, it wouldn’t be the first dead end in the 87-year-long search.
The 90-day sonar survey was conducted last year by Deep Sea Vision, a team of underwater archaeologists and robotics experts led by Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer who reportedly sold his real estate investments to fund the $11 million expedition.
In a news release issued today, Deep Sea Vision said it made use of a customized underwater robot to search wide swaths of the ocean floor with side-scan sonar. As the survey was winding up, the team identified a blurry shape that appeared to match the dimensions of Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.
“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,” Romeo said on NBC’s “Today” show.
The searchers said they were guided by a hypothesis about Earhart’s disappearance known as the “Date Line Theory.” On July 2, 1937, Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, took off from New Guinea, beginning what was expected to be an 18-hour flight. They were targeting an airstrip on Howland Island, but had to deal with overcast skies, spotty radio reception and a dwindling fuel supply along the way.
Earhart and Noonan never reached the Howland Island airstrip, and an extensive search by the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard turned up no trace. A Navy report concluded that the plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the open ocean, beyond help.
The Date Line Theory proposes that amid all the stresses that cropped up during their troubled flight, Noonan failed to account for the fact that the calendar date switched from July 3 back to July 2 when they crossed the International Date Line. That sort of miscalculation could have created a westward navigational error of 60 miles.
Deep Sea Vision decided to survey the area that was described by the theory — an area that was said to have been overlooked by previous searches. The team said it was not disclosing the exact location of their find, out of concern for confidentiality, but The Wall Street Journal reported that the sonar signature was detected within 100 miles of Howland Island at a depth of 5,000 meters (16,500 feet).
Romeo and his search team plan to return to the site, perhaps later this year or early next year, to capture sharper underwater images. They hope follow-up observations will confirm that the shape they’ve detected is actually Earhart’s plane.
Outside experts are circumspect about Deep Sea Vision’s claims but agree that further investigation is warranted. “We are intrigued with DSV’s initial imagery and believe it merits another expedition in the continuing search for Amelia Earhart’s aircraft near Howland Island,” said Dorothy Cochrane, aeronautics curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.
In recent years, the search for Amelia Earhart has gone through a succession of fits and starts. A different research group — the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, also known as TIGHAR — has been assembling evidence to support a scenario in which Earhart and Noonan lost their way and had to ditch their plane near Nikumaroro Island, 400 miles southeast of Howland Island.
In 2018, a forensic anthropologist associated with TIGHAR reported that the recorded measurements of bones found on the island in 1940 seem to be consistent with the estimated size of Earhart’s bones. But neither that analysis, nor other long-debated bits of evidence gathered by TIGHAR, have led historians to declare the case closed.
Yet another hypothesis suggests that Earhart and Noonan were somehow captured by the Japanese during their journey. In 2017, some proponents of the hypothesis claimed that a picture dredged up from the vaults of the National Archives showed Earhart sitting on a dock in the Marshall Islands during Japanese occupation.
Not long after the photo went viral, online sleuths pointed out that the same picture appears in a travel book that was published almost two years before Earhart’s disappearance.
