Washington:
A deep-sea exploration company has released a sonar image they say may be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart, the famous American female pilot who disappeared in the Pacific in 1937.
South Carolina-based Deep Sea Vision (DSV) said the image was taken after an extensive search in the Pacific west of remote Howland Island, Earhart’s planned destination.
Earhart disappeared while on a round-the-world flight with navigator Fred Noonan.
Her disappearance is one of the most tantalizing mysteries in aviation lore, one that has fascinated historians for decades and spawned a plethora of books, movies and theories.
Earhart, 39, and Noonan, 44, are widely believed to have run out of fuel and abandoned their twin-engine Lockheed in the Pacific near Howland Island during the final leg of their epic journey. Electra plane.
DSV said the fuzzy images captured by the unmanned underwater vehicle at a depth of 16,000 feet (5,000 meters) using side-scan sonar “reveal the outline of its legendary aircraft’s distinctive twin tailfins and scale.”
DSV chief executive Tony Romeo said in a statement: “We always assumed she would make every effort to land the aircraft gently on the water, and the characteristics of the aircraft we saw in the sonar images suggested that might be the case. in this way.”
DSV said the exploration team spent 90 days searching 5,200 square miles (13,500 square kilometers) of the Pacific Ocean floor, “more than all previous searches combined.”
DSV said it was keeping the exact location of the discovery confidential and planned further search efforts.
But Romeo said the discovery was based on the so-called “dateline theory” first proposed in 2010 by former NASA employee Liz Smith.
The theory is that Noonan forgot to set the calendar back one day when flying over the International Date Line, causing his celestial navigation to miscalculate and steer westward by 60 miles (100 kilometers).
Earhart, best known as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932, took off from Oakland, California on May 20, 1937, hoping to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world.
On 2 July 1937, she and Noonan took off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, flying 2,500 miles (4,000 km) to refuel at Howland Island, a small point on U.S. territory between Australia and Hawaii, before Just disappeared.
They never succeeded.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
