An underwater exploration company claims to have located the remains of pioneer Amelia Earhart's plane, which disappeared in 1937.

Last flightthe book published in the United States in 1937 with its diary entries and other notes by aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, during her failed attempt that year to fly solo over the Pacific, is priced at almost 200 euros on the market. second-hand in its Spanish edition, a relic of the old collection of travel literature from Ediciones B. It is one of the few titles about Earhart published in Spanish, unlike the avalanche of works in her country, where her disappearance in 1937, at 39 years, in ocean waters, gave rise to the birth of a myth.

Aviator, adventurer, designer; Beautiful and vivacious like a silent film actress, Amelia Earhart, born in 1897 in Atchison (Kansas), was already a legend before the Lockheed monoplane she piloted, with Fred Noonan as second in command, disappeared without a trace on December 2. July 1937 during the flight between Lae (New Guinea) and the small island of Howland, a coral atoll located in the middle of the Pacific, between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii, where it was going to refuel on its planned trip around the world, which She would have been the first under the command of a woman. But the endless end of the device and its two occupants forged a myth enlarged by the questions that the event left. Many more than answers: in 2018, a forensic investigation revealed that the bones found in the Nikumaroro atoll could correspond to the pioneer who overshadowed Charles Lindbergh himself.

A South Carolina underwater exploration company specializing in underwater surveys now claims to have found the wreckage of the plane, about 4,800 meters deep, in an undisclosed location in the southwest Pacific, but which coincides with the last known flight plan of the plane. twin engine. The childhood obsession of Tony Romeo, owner of this company, Deep Sea Vision, with the Earhart mystery made him sell his real estate company and reinvest the profits in the mission of solving the mystery. A diffuse yellow sonar image, which appears to outline the outline of an aircraft similar to Earhart's iconic Lockheed 10-E Electra, has been the reward almost in extremis of the 100-day mission that a Deep Sea Vision team undertook in September.

Romeo, son and brother of pilots, owner of a private aviation license, assures that the contour detected coincides almost 100% with the design of the two-seater, including its characteristic double tail, but among experts and explorers there are reasons for skepticism, given the precedents of numerous expeditions that have returned empty-handed: more than twenty since 1988, with special emphasis on 2012, when the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, supported the new search of the International Recovery Group of Historical Aircraft. The many fans of pioneering exploits welcome Romeo's attempt, if only to reclaim Earhart's achievements. Be that as it may, the search for the remains of the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean at the command of the friendshipin 1928, has begun again without the echoes of her life having ever been extinguished: two years ago, the auction in Cleveland of a leather hat that the aviator wore during her Atlantic crossing reached 825,000 dollars (762,000) euros.

A nine million dollar drone

Romeo bought an underwater drone from a Norwegian company for which he paid nine million dollars. The device is called Hugin 6000 and as its English name indicates, it has the capacity to penetrate the deepest layer of the ocean, 6,000 meters deep. In September, a crew of 16 began a roughly 100-day search, combing more than 13,468 square kilometers of the seafloor. The survey was limited to the area surrounding Howland Island. When the team reviewed the sonar data in December they saw the blurry yellow outline of what appears to be a plane. “In the end, we got an image of what we firmly believe is Amelia's plane,” Romeo told the Associated Press agency. “Amelia is America's favorite missing person,” she maintains; an enigma surrounded by a lot of false clues.

Although the work could take years if it is proven that the grainy image corresponds to the monoplane, the next steps, costly and arduous, would begin by using a guided camera like the one used this summer to find the remains of the Titanthe tourist submersible that imploded during a descent to the wreck of the Titanic, causing the death of all its occupants. If the photographic images confirm Romeo's intuition, the goal would be to bring him to the surface. Solving “the greatest mystery in the history of aviation,” in the explorer's words, can answer questions such as whether Earhart and her co-pilot managed to break the hatch and escape after the device hit the water. But the businessman goes further and wants to find out what went wrong on July 2, 1937, after the aviator radioed that she was preparing to refuel on Howland Island because she was running out of fuel.

The fruitless search of the US Navy in the place gave rise to the most absurd theories: that they were abducted by extraterrestrials (since HG Wells had caused a sensation in the US, the popular subgenre of science fiction pulp); that Amelia survived and took refuge in New Jersey under a false identity; that both were shot by the Japanese, or even died of starvation after landing on an island as castaways. The official government version was that Earhart and Noonan's plane fell into the sea.