Posted on 01/27/2024 1:08:49 PM PST by Libloather
A South Carolina man believes he may have discovered the plane Amelia Earhart was flying when she vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
Former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer Tony Romeo turned his fascination with the legendary pilot into an adventure when he embarked on an ambitious search for Earhart's lost plane.
Romeo, who sold his commercial property investments to fund his search, managed to take a sonar image of an aircraft-shaped object on the ocean floor in December.
Earhart and her Earhart's Lockheed 10-E Electra vanished at the height of her fame, a mystery that has spawned decades of searches and conspiracy theories.
Earhart's record-breaking run as a pioneering pilot at the very beginning of the aviation age made her an international celebrity.
She became the first woman to fly solo, nonstop across the continental US and the Atlantic, and the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to the mainland over the Pacific.
'This is maybe the most exciting thing I'll ever do in my life,' Romeo told the Wall Street Journal.
'I feel like a 10-year-old going on a treasure hunt.'
'For her to go missing was just unthinkable,' Romeo said.
Adding: 'Imagine Taylor Swift just disappearing today.'
Romeo spent $11 million to fund the trip and buy the high-tech gear needed for the search including an underwater 'Hugin' drone manufactured by the Norwegian company Kongsberg.
The expedition launched in in early September from Tarawa, Kiribati, a port near Howland Island, with a 16-person crew aboard a research vessel.
In outings that lasted 36 hours each, the unmanned submersible scanned 5,200 square miles of ocean floor.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
So, technology may prove she crashed in the ocean. As if we didn’t conclude that decades ago.
Interesting. Both your picture and the earlier drawings make no mention of a transmitting antenna which I think I saw decades ago on “In Search Of” running the length of the aircraft on the underside. At least I think it was this show, that showed a “puff” emitted from underneath during the grassy-field take-off just at the tail, which looked convincingly like the antenna end being popped lose. This was the last leg of her fatal flight.
I think the idea was that Earhart could transmit all she wanted, but no one could hear her. The attempts to contact receivers at the landing location were doomed to failure.
Finding the plane is the easy part, the hard part will be finding the crews remains. The Japs bombed the airstrip and buildings killing a few American civilians at the start of WW2, which lead to the theory the Japs found the crew and they died in captivity. Hostilities between Japan and the US were forming in 1937 due to the US sanctions put on them…plausible.
Howland Island is US territory, and has an interesting history.
p
Somewhere a huge ship is missing an anchor.
Yep, and it’s 3 miles deep, deeper than the Titanic. I had thought she belly landed on the coral by that small island, made it ashore, and the tide floated the Electra off the reef into deeper water.
It does look like the configuration of those jets with the swept back wings. But there would be a more precise record of losing one of those jets in more modern times I would think.
It may be a downed WW2 plane. Lots of combat in that area.
Yep, I saw that film to. The transmitter was dangling behind the plane attached to the wire as it took off in the field. I had remembered that a person in New York had a radio and claimed to receive transmissions from what he thought was Amelia late at night (New York time) who was in trouble.
Well, it’s not like no other planes ever went down around Tarawa. After all, the Battle of Tarawa only involved 17 US aircraft carriers, and of course the Japanese had fighters and attack aircraft at their airbase.
Want larger planes? the Army used B-24s in several attacks on the islands, and lost at least 4, at least one of which has an unknown crash site.
Crab food either way.
“Wing shape looks too modern.”
That’s exactly what I thought. Her Electra did NOT have swept wings. And, if anyone is claiming that the “sweep” was due to impact with the sea (i.e., the wings collapsed at the fuselage), the wings would have separated during the 5,000 meter fall to the ocean floor.
Her, Elvis and JFK are all alive and well on a tropical island.
Swept wings?
So you’re confirming Epstein is really dead? Good to know.
Swept-wing aircraft. Highly unlikely that her plane’s straight wings would have been perfectly pushed back like that during a water landing and stayed that way as it sank.
There is (was?) a Lockheed 12-A Electra Junior at the Yankee Plane museum in Chino CA. It is a sister plane of sorts to Earharts Lockheed 10-E Electra. It is an absolutely gorgeous airplane.
My bad, Yanks, not Yankee Air Museum. You would think I would have gotten that right after living 1 mile away for 25 years.
https://airmuseumguide.com/aviation-museums/usa/california/yanks-air-museum/
That’s what I’ve heard too. I wonder how close that sighting is to Nikumaroro?
Yes, you would think but sometimes hulks are jettisoned from aircraft carriers or get washed off ships in weather.
Sometimes other planes just go missing in the same general area. Even on dry land like the northwest, crashes are discovered long after they occur despite extensive searches. Think Steve Fossett.
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