Amelia Earharts missing plane may have been found deep in the Pacific -

Since Amelia Earhart disappeared more than 85 years ago while attempting to fly around the world, people have been searching for her plane with hopes of solving the mystery behind her final flight.

Now, an underwater exploration company says it may have found it about 15,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

Deep Sea Vision says it captured a sonar image of a plane that matches the dimensions of the Lockheed Electra aircraft Earhart was flying on July 2, 1937.

The company, which announced its findings on Saturday, is the latest to claim a breakthrough in the decades-old mystery. Company founder Tony Romeo, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, said a 16-person crew captured the image late last year during a 90-day expedition in search of Earhart’s aircraft.

“You’d be hard-pressed to convince me it’s not the plane,” Romeo said.

But much work remains to determine whether the finding is actually Earhart’s plane, said Dorothy Cochrane, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum. The process of identifying Deep Sea Vision’s finding and possibly relocating it could take years, Romeo said.

Cochrane added that the museum will probably be involved in reviews of the object.

“It’s hard to say what it is,” she said. “They need to go back.”

The Deep Sea Vision crew will do just that, Romeo said. They have kept the exact location of the sonar image confidential but will return to the site for further research.

The team set sail from the island of Kiribati, about 1,200 miles south of Hawaii, in September. Over the course of three months, they searched more than 5,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean’s floor, using an autonomous underwater vehicle called the HUGIN 6000, which can reach depths of nearly 20,000 feet.

Using sonar sensors, the underwater vehicle spent nearly two days at a time scanning the sea floor, according to a Deep Sea Vision news release. The expedition analyzed the images the vehicle collected from an area the company said was “untouched by known wrecks.”

During the expedition, the vehicle captured the image of an item with “contours that mirror the unique dual tails and scale of [Earhart’s] storied aircraft,” the release said.

If the discovery is validated, it would be a crucial clue in the trailblazing pilot’s disappearance.

The whereabouts of Earhart, her navigator and the plane they’d flown remains “one of the greatest mysteries of our time,” Mindi Love Pendergraft, executive director of the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum in Atchison, Kan., said in a statement Monday.

“We hope they can be found, and the world has a clearer understanding on what happened that fateful day,” she said.

Earhart embarked on her quest to fly around the world in the summer of 1937 with her navigator, Fred Noonan. They took off from Lae, New Guinea, and headed toward Howland Island, a small island in the Pacific where they would meet the U.S. Coast Guard to refuel.

On Howland, the Coast Guard received strong radio messages from Earhart, signaling that she was probably close by, Cochrane said. But Earhart and Noonan never made it to the refueling stop and were declared dead by U.S. government officials after a months-long search.

Since then, the mystery has captivated generations, spurring scores of theories about what went wrong.

Some say the plane ran out of fuel and Earhart and Noonan drowned in the Pacific before they could reach Howland. Others have theorized that Earhart died a castaway after crash-landing on a remote island. Theories about what happened during Earhart’s last flight continue today.

“I’d like to be able to solve the mystery so that she can then be remembered as the remarkable woman and woman pilot that she was,” Cochrane said.

It was the first mystery that Romeo, who grew up in a family of pilots, set out to solve when he founded Deep Sea Vision in 2022.

Romeo and the crew based their strategy on the “date line theory” that some claim explains Earhart’s disappearance. The theory holds that while she and Noonan flew across the international date line, Noonan miscalculated, sending them about 60 nautical miles off course. While some say Noonan was too experienced to miscalculate the route, Romeo said it’s possible that fatigue played a role.

“They didn’t make it to the island, so somebody, somewhere made a mistake,” he said. “And that’s a very plausible one.”

Romeo and his crew spent 90 days searching for Earhart’s plane from a 120-foot-long research vessel. As they neared the end of their mission, they thought they’d be returning without any new leads, he said.

Then, in late November, the crew was reviewing some of the data the underwater vehicle’s sonar sensors had collected. An image showed something with contours similar to Earhart’s aircraft — including the Lockheed Electra’s uniquely shaped dual tails.

The idea that the image might have brought them closer to solving Earhart’s disappearance after so many decades is “just absolutely thrilling,” he said.

“It’s something I’ve been dreaming about since I was a little kid,” he said.

But the real answers could still be years away. Romeo said Deep Sea Vision has plans for a future expedition to confirm their findings and capture additional imagery. If it was indeed a plane and the aircraft is still structurally sound, it could also be recovered from the water, he said.

But if it isn’t Earhart’s Lockheed Electra, or a plane at all, Romeo knows what he and his crew will do next.

“We keep searching,” he said.

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