Nearly a century later, the wreckage of American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart’s aircraft may have been found at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The North American company Deep Sea Vision (DSV) said this Tuesday that the image was captured after extensive searches in an area west of Howland Island, an uninhabited reef lost in the middle of the Pacific between Australia and Hawaii.
With her navigator Fred Noonan, Amelia Earhart took off on May 20, 1937 from Oakland, California, to become the first woman to fly around the world, five years after being the first woman to cross the Atlantic alone.
But the two disappeared on July 2, after taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, for a tiring four thousand kilometer flight. They were supposed to refuel on Howland Island, but they never got to that point.
This disappearance remained one of the most intriguing mysteries in the history of aviation, generating dozens of books, films and more or less far-fetched theories.
The prevailing hypothesis holds that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan experienced a fuel shortage and abandoned their twin-engine Lockheed L-10 Electra near Howland Island.
According to DSV, the image captured by the company’s underwater robot “reveals the contours that correspond to the twin tails and unique wingspan [do modelo] of its legendary aircraft.”
“We always thought she would have done everything she could to try to land the plane smoothly, and the signature of the plane we see in the sonar image suggests that was the case,” DSV chief Tony Romeo said in a statement.
The company claims that it spent 90 days researching 13,500 square kilometers of ocean floor and wants to keep the exact location of the discovery secret for now.