Amelia Earhart’s disappearance is a decades-old mystery. Sonar images have just shed new light on the case

Amelia Earhart made her final airborne radio call at 8.43am, local time, approximately one hour after she warned the Coast Guard cutter Itasca that she was running out of fuel and could not see her target destination, Howland Island.

“We are on the line 157 337,” she said from the cockpit of her Lockheed 10-E Electra aircraft. “We will repeat this message. We will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles. Wait.”

She did not repeat the message.

Earhart’s fate has been one of America’s great enduring mysteries. Her doomed 1937 attempt to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world by aircraft spawned the most expansive — and expensive — rescue operation in the history of the US Navy and Coast Guard.

Since then, countless researchers, reporters, and historians have attempted to find out what really happened to Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, high over the Pacific on the day of their disappearance.

Advances in deep sea scanning tech — and a hefty $11m investment — may finally provide some definitive answers.

Deep Sea Vision, a Charleston, South Carolina-based company, believes it may have finally found Earhart’s plane resting on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

The company began scanning the ocean floor in September. Its powerful sonar, attached to a $9m submersible named Hugin, searched the murky depths, scanning in total more than 5,200 square miles of the region where Earhart is believed to have crashed.

Approximately 16,000 feet below the Pacific’s surface, resting among the silt and marine sediment, Hugin’s sonar spotted something unusual; the shape of an airplane.

“Well 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,” Deep Sea Vision’s founder, Tony Romeo, said in an interview with NBC’s Today show. “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.”

Mr Romeo, a former US Air Force intelligence officer, sold off his real estate assets and poured $11m into funding the expedition to find Earhart’s lost plane.

“This is maybe the most exciting thing I’ll ever do in my life,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “I feel like a 10-year-old going on a treasure hunt.”

Mr Romeo, while excited, maintained his expectations after the initial discovery. He admitted that the images could be that of rocks or some other underwater object. He noted, however, that the image does reflect the shape and dimension of the aircraft Earhart flew on her final voyage.

Unfortunately for Deep Sea Vision, the image was one of many thousands taken during their scans, and the anomaly was not discovered until three months after it had been taken. By then, the crew had traveled far from the discovery site.

With an image and coordinates in hand, the next step in unraveling the mystery will require examination of the physical remains.

Earhart’s disappearance was the culmination of a decade of newspaper and radio stories documenting her record-setting flights.

On June 17, 1928, at the age of 30, she became the first woman to pilot a plane — a bright red Lockheed Vega 5B, which she called “old Bessie, the fire steed”— across the Atlantic. The endeavor made headlines across the nation.

Later, she became the first person to complete a solo flight across the Pacific, flying from California to the Hawaiian islands in 1934.

Earhart was initially treated as an aviation oddity due to her gender; news reports at the time called her the first “girl” to fly across the Atlantic, and another referred to her as an “aviatrix”. At the time, the skies were dominated by men. But as she continued to prove her prowess in the cockpit she gained notoriety as a great pilot, rather than as a curious outlier. Even still, she used her growing prominence to push for equality in the skies; in an interview with the Evening Star in 1929, Earhart pleaded with the public to “give women a chance in the air.”

Xural.com