Was Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane found?
CHARLOTTE ( QUEEN CITY NEWS ) — It's a mystery—87 years in the making.
In 1937, famed aviator Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan went missing over the Pacific Ocean on what was to be a record-setting flight around the world. After millions of dollars and multiple search and rescue missions over nine decades, neither the pilots' remains nor the wreckage of their plane have ever been found. Until last year, when a fuzzy sonar image of what appeared to be the plane at the bottom of the ocean sparked an international frenzy. Just days ago, a clearer picture emerged, but is it Amelia's plane?
How clear could a photo be of an airplane-like object sitting more than 16,000 feet beneath the ocean's surface? Blurry at best, leaving it up to one's imagination regarding the true identity of the object. The object on the sea floor about 100 miles off Howland Island could be Amelia's plane—after ditching there if it ran out of fuel. Earhart and Noonan had departed New Guinea for Honolulu with a planned pit stop to refuel on Howland Island, but never arrived. It is widely speculated they went down in the area.
A South Carolina deep sea explorer has made it his mission to find Amelia's Lockheed Electra plane. Tony Romeo sold his Charleston-based real estate company's assets to fund his $11 million expedition in the Pacific to find the plane.
Romeo's deep sea vision team, which captured this sonar image of what looked like the plane, was optimistic yet uncertain of the first bleary images and vowed to return with higher resolution cameras with sophisticated unmanned submersibles to take another shot.
What did they see? This second expedition and the clearer sonar images revealed it was just a bunch of rocks, not Amelia's plane. just an aircraft-shaped rock formation.
In a statement, Romeo said the outcome isn't what we hoped for. Despite the disappointing findings, the company remains committed to its search for the wreckage.
