A former pilot and submarine explorer is convinced he has located the wreckage of the plane in which the legendary air pioneer Amelia Earhart lost her life in 1937.
Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer, last year embarked on an exploration of the Pacific seabed, scanning the seabed with sonar and drones to try to solve one of the great mysteries in the history of aviation.
Data collected by an underwater drone in December revealed an image that closely resembles Earhart's twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.
The image would have been taken at almost 5000 meters deep, 160 kilometers from Howland Island, halfway between Australia and Hawaii, where, in July 1937, Amalia and her navigator Fred Noonan were supposed to land in one of the last stages of the ill-fated attempt to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe.
The search operations for the aviators and the wreckage were the most expensive organized by the US Navy and the Coast Guard at the time, but they led to nothing.
Earhart and Noonan, who vanished without a trace, were declared dead two years later but their remains and those of the plane were never found.
Romeo is now convinced that the plane in the photo is the right one due to the particular shape of the tail: "You have to convince me that it is not a plane and that it is not Amelia's," he told NBC.
“There have been no other accidents in that area and certainly not of an aircraft of that era with that particular tail design that can clearly be seen in the photo.”
The hunt for Amelia has so far cost Romeo eleven million dollars financed by selling real estate.
“It's probably the most exciting thing I'll ever do in my life,” the former intelligence officer told the Wall Street Journal.
“I feel like a ten-year-old playing treasure hunt.”
There are other theories about Earhart's disappearance: according to Ric Gillespie, an explorer who has researched that flight for decades, Amelia's twin-engine plane made an emergency landing on Gardner Island — about 350 nautical miles from Howland Island — and the pilot he would have tried to send an SOS for a week before the plane was sucked into the water.
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