Amelia Earhart died in a plane crash in 1937.
Photo: NARA ARCHIVES/REX / SHUTTERSTOCK EDITORIAL TT NEWS AGENCY
Now, 86 years later, the plane may have been found.
Photo: HISTORY/REX / SHUTTERSTOCK EDITORIAL TT NEWS AGENCY
Amelia Earhart became the first woman in the world to fly solo over Atlantane.
Photo: EVERETT COLLECTION / EVERETT COLLECTION TT NEWS AGENCY
It is not the first time that Amelia Earhart’s fate has made headlines. Since she disappeared in 1937, her death has been a mystery.
Tony Romeo, former officer in the US Air Force and now head of “Deep sea vision”, last year combed the Pacific Ocean around the place where Earhart’s plane is believed to have crashed, to try to find answers.
And he who seeks finds, as the saying goes.
In December, his research team found images taken by the project’s underwater drone. The sonar data looks like an airplane and Tony Romeo is convinced it is the Lockheed 10-E Electra, Earhart’s plane.
The photos were taken about 100 miles from Howland Island, between Australia and Hawaii, and Earhart’s plan was to land on the island, along with her navigator Fred Noonan, to refuel.
But they never came forward and two years later both were pronounced dead. Since then, the world has wondered what happened.
– It will, firstly, be difficult to convince me that it is something other than a plan, and secondly, that it is not Amelia’s plan, Tony Romeo told NBC News, adding:
– There have been no other plane crashes in the area, and certainly not with any plane with the design typical of the period.
The next step is to get confirmation, says Tony Romeo – who calls Earhart’s fate “the greatest mystery of all time”.
But it is not the first time that researchers have been convinced that they have cracked the riddle.
A couple of years ago, a research group believed that remains found in 1940, which were thought to be of a man, were in fact Earhart’s.
– The legs are more consistent with Amelia Earhart than they are with anyone else, said Richard Jantz to American NBC’s Today, then.
After many big headlines in March, there has been quiet talk about the results.
Amelia Eahart
When Amelia Earharts jumps into the twin-engine propeller plane almost 87 years ago, she is already a world celebrity. Just five years earlier, she did what no other woman, and very few men, had done before her: She flew alone across the Atlantic.
So the interest in her round-the-world flight was great. On June 1, 1937, Earhart, along with navigator Fred Noonan, left Miami.
True, other pilots had flown around the world before Earhart, but her route was destined to be the longest.
A month after departure, the silver Lockheed 10-E Electra propeller plane disappears.
It was early suspected that the plane had crashed after missing its intended destination, Howland Island, and immediately after the disappearance, 100,000 square kilometers of the ocean surface were also searched to try to find them.
That no wreckage or bodies were found gave oxygen to long-lived theories that Amelia Earhart and her colleague survived the crash. The theories have been that they lived on for a while on a nearby island, that they died at sea – but not from the crash itself, or that they were captured by Japan as prisoners of war.
The most outrageous theories suggest that the crash was completely rigged and that Earhart made it back to the United States and lived the rest of her life in anonymity as a housewife in New Jersey.
Show moreREAD MORE: The new theory about the mysterious disappearance of the pilot
