A pilot and explorer believes he has solved one of aviation’s greatest mysteries and discovered the location of Amelia Earhart’s plane.
Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer and the CEO of Deep Sea Vision, sold commercial real estate to fund his deep-sea search of the Pacific last year.
He combed the ocean floor with sonar technology in the suspected area of Earhart’s crash in a bid to find the aircraft, which vanished in 1937.
His team reviewed sonar data in December caught by an underwater drone from the research voyage and found an image of a blurry, plane-like shape Mr Romeo believes is the lost aviator’s twin engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.
The image was taken about 100 miles from Howland Island, halfway between Australia and Hawaii.
Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had been expected to land there in July 1937 to refuel during her bid to be the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.
But they never arrived and were declared dead two years later, after the US concluded she had crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, and her remains were never found.
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Mr Romeo is adamant the plane he has found is Earhart’s, despite the blurry quality of the photograph, telling Sky News sister station NBC News: “You’d be hard-pressed to convince me that’s anything but an aircraft, for one, and two, that it’s not Amelia’s aircraft.
“There’s no other known crashes in the area, and certainly not of that era in that kind of design with the tail that you see clearly in the image.”
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Mr Romeo’s team plan to return to the site this year or early next year with a camera and a drone to investigate further.
“The next step is confirmation, and there’s a lot we need to know about it. And it looks like there’s some damage. I mean, it’s been sitting there for 87 years at this point,” he said.
In his last voyage, the team used an unmanned submersible to scan 5,200 square miles of ocean floor.
The image of the suspected plane was found resting 5,000m underwater, according to the Wall St Journal.
“I think myself that it is the great mystery of all time,” Mr Romeo said. “Certainly the most enduring aviation mystery of all time.”
“Super high-IQ revolutionaries” who are willing to work 80+ hours a week are being urged to join Elon Musk’s new cost-cutting department in Donald Trump’s incoming US government.
The X and Tesla owner will co-lead the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
In a reply to an interested party, Mr Musk suggested the lucky applicants would be working for free.
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“Indeed, this will be tedious work, make lost of enemies & compensation is zero,” the world’s richest man wrote.
“What a great deal!”
When announcing the new department, President-elect Donald Trump said Mr Musk and Mr Ramaswamy “will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies”.
Mr Musk has previously made clear his desire to see cuts to “government waste” and in a post on his X platform suggested he could axe as many as three-quarters of the more than 400 federal departments in the US, writing: “99 is enough.”
At least 10 people have been killed after a fire broke out at a retirement home in northern Spain in the early hours of this morning, officials have said.
A further two people were seriously injured in the blaze at the residence in the town of Villafranca de Ebro in Zaragoza, according to the Spanish news website Diario Sur.
They remain in a critical condition, while several others received treatment for smoke inhalation.
Firefighters were alerted to the blaze at the residence – the Jardines de Villafranca – at 5am (4am UK time) on Friday.
Those who were killed in the fire died from smoke inhalation, Spanish newspaper Heraldo reported.
At least 10 people have been killed after a fire broke out at a retirement home in northern Spain in the early hours of this morning, officials have said.
A further two people were seriously injured in the blaze at the residence in the town of Villafranca de Ebro in Zaragoza, according to the Spanish news website Diario Sur.
They remain in a critical condition, while several others received treatment for smoke inhalation.
Firefighters were alerted to the blaze at the residence – the Jardines de Villafranca – at 5am (4am UK time) on Friday.
Those who were killed in the fire died from smoke inhalation, Spanish newspaper Heraldo reported.