New sonar detection sparks ‘promising’ hope in Amelia Earhart plane mystery
Amelia Earhart’s family is once again hopeful that the 87-year-old mystery over the aviator’s disappearance will finally be solved after a search in the Pacific pinged what could be her long-lost airplane.
Bram Kleppner, Earhart’s great nephew and de facto spokesperson for his family, said he was grateful for the efforts of Air Force veteran Tony Romeo, who launched a 90-day expedition near Howland Island where the pilot vanished on July 2, 1937.
On the final day of the search, Romeo’s Deep Sea Vision crew detected what appeared to be a sunken plane 16,000 feet underwater, with Romeo texting the family and renewing their hope to finally get some answers.
“There have been many, many searches, and really, not a single shred of evidence has ever turned up,” Kleppner told Fox News Digital. “It feels like this is a more promising lead than anything we’ve seen to date.
“The image they got does look like a plane, and it is in about the right place where Amelia would’ve crashed,” he added.
Although Kleppner said the family was keeping its expectations leveled after being presented with countless theories over the years, he said they appreciated the work and transparency Romeo had put into the project.
The family said they were contacted by the Deep Sea Vision CEO before the expedition after Romeo had found a way to track down Kleppner’s 92-year-old mother, who was just 5 when Earhart disappeared.
“I really appreciate the fact that he actually made the courtesy to our family to track down my mother, which is not easy to do, and reached out to her, but she doesn’t really talk to the public anymore,” Kleppner told Fox.
Romeo had plans to search the waters near Howland Island — where Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were set to refuel before their radio transmissions went silent.
Romeo’s search was going off the “Date Line” theory proposed in 2010 by Liz Smith, a former NASA employee and amateur pilot, who believed that Noonan suffered from fatigue over what was supposed to be a record-setting voyage around the world and failed to calculate for the change over the international dateline.
The theory posits that the error led the pair about 60 miles off course from Howard Island, within the radius Romeo and his team were searching in.
Deep Sea Vision is currently working with experts in the field to review their findings as they prepare for a follow-up expedition.
Romeo told the Daily Mail earlier this month that the sonar could have picked up images of another aircraft or even a rock formation, so nothing is definite until they get a clearer picture.
“We need to get a camera on it. When we see those numbers NR16020 on the wing, that’s when we’ll know for sure what it is,” he said.
