Explorers claim to have found Amelia Earhart’s plane on the ocean floor

A company of explorers, Deep Sea Vision, claims to have found the missing plane of aviator Amelia Earhart after taking a sonar image of the Pacific Ocean’s floor.

Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared in July 1937 after leaving New Guinea for Howland Island, which lies about halfway between Hawaii and Australia. She was attempting to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world by plane.

To try and find the plane, Deep Sea Vision used the “date line theory,” which suggests Noonan forgot to change the date back to July 2, 1937, after crossing the international date line. 

This would have led Noonan to miscalculate the plane’s route using the stars to navigate, flying 60 miles off course going westward, the company explained in a press release.

DSV investigated the area of ocean where, going by the theory, the plane would have ended up. 

Using an autonomous underwater drone, DSV searched 5,200 square miles of seafloor over 90 days and picked up an image of an intact, airplane-shaped object.

“We always felt that she would have made every attempt to land the aircraft gently on the water, and the aircraft signature that we see in the sonar image suggests that may be the case,” DSV CEO Tony Romeo said.

The sonar images have been referred to experts, in the hopes that the potential discovery of Earhart’s plane will be validated.

“We are intrigued with DSV’s initial imagery and believe it merits another expedition in the continuing search for Amelia Earhart’s aircraft near Howland Island,” Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Aeronautics Curator Dorothy Cochrane said in the DSV release.

Confirmation, however, could require dredging up the object from the deep.

“Until you physically take a look at this, there’s no way to say for sure what that is,” University of California-San Diego underwater archaeologist Andrew Pietruszka told The Wall Street Journal.