A team of researchers claims to have identified at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, at a depth of over 4500 meters, the wreck of the plane on board which Amelia Earhart made her last flight on 2 July 1937 as she attempted to become the first woman to fly over the Pacific. In fact, during that flight the legendary American aviator disappeared and for 85 years she has been searching for the wreckage of her plane to solve the mystery of that last flight.
Now Deep Sea Vision, a company specializing in underwater research, claims to have captured with sonar the image of a plane that would coincide with the dimensions of the Lockheed Electra piloted by Earhart. “You have to work hard to convince me that it's not his plane,” said the company's founder, Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer, announcing that the image was captured during a 90-day mission conducted at end of last year by a team of 16 people who set out in search of the plane of the aviator who was the first woman to fly alone over the Atlantic.
It is not the first time that the discovery of the wreckage of the missing plane has been announced near Howland Island, halfway between Hawaii and Australia. Romeo's announcement was in fact taken with all the caution necessary by Dorothy Cochrane, curator of the National Air and Space Museum who recalls that a lot of work still needs to be done to establish that it is truly Earhart's plane. “It's hard to say what it is, they have to come back,” she said, explaining that the museum will likely be involved in the analysis of the identified object.
Romeo said the Deep Sea Vision team is ready to return, keeping secret the exact location where the sonar image was recorded. But he admitted that the process of identification, and possibly recovery, could take years. For this mission, the team set sail from the island of Kiribati, about 1,200 miles south of Hawaii, last September, and over the course of three months searched an area equal to 5,000 square miles of the ocean floor Pacific, using an autonomous underwater vehicle called Hugin 6000, which can go up to 6 thousand meters deep.
Mindi Love Pendergraft, executive director of the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum, also commented on the announcement, underlining that the disappearance of the aviator's plane, which she flew with navigator Fred Noonan, remains “one of the greatest mysteries of our time” . “I hope that they can be found and that the world can have a clearer understanding of what happened on that fateful day,” she concluded.
Earhart and Noonan had taken off from Lae, New Guinea, headed for Howland Island, a small island in the Pacific where they were supposed to meet the US Coast Guard to refuel. After sending a loud radio message, showing that the plane was near the island, Earhart and Noonan never made it to Howland and after a month of searching they were declared dead by US authorities.
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