IN-DEPTH: How 2 Brothers May Have Finally Solved the Mystery of Amelia Earhart’s Disappearance

Deep Sea Vision crew members review data collected during their exploration for Amelia Earhart's missing aircraft. Courtesy Deep Sea Vision

Two brothers and a team of explorers from South Carolina recently discovered what they believe is Amelia Earhart’s missing plane that crashed into the Pacific Ocean nearly 90 years ago.

Tony Romeo, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, private pilot, and CEO of Deep Sea Vision, told The Epoch Times that he had been fascinated with Ms. Earhart’s disappearance since he was a child, but it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that he began toying with the idea of solving one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the 43-year-old father of two said he read an article about magnet fishing and decided to try it out with his young children.

“You know, they lost their minds,” he told The Epoch Times. “You pull it up, and you get a hook on their [magnet] or a pair of scissors, and they’d just lose their mind,” adding that it was a lot of fun until the magnet got stuck to the side of the car.

But it got him thinking about the possibilities of what else could be found using magnets.

“So, I called my brother Lloyd [Romeo] and said, ‘Hey, what else can we find in the ocean with magnets?’” he said. “Maybe we could make a long string of magnets and drop them in the ocean and find cool stuff … maybe even Amelia Earhart’s plane.”

Ms. Earhart was a pioneer aviator whose plane crashed into the ocean on July 2, 1937, during an attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world. Search and rescue efforts failed to recover Ms. Earhart, her navigator, or her plane.

The conversation with his brother “triggered a whole series of events,” he explained.

Lloyd Romeo, 67, told The Epoch Times that he thought his brother’s idea was interesting, but then, “it kind of snowballed.”

The two brothers, whose father was a commercial pilot for Pan Am Airlines, began reading books about Ms. Earhart’s fateful flight, researching past search efforts, and analyzing crash theories. They found a lot of the information and clues to be a bit “wonky,” but they kept digging.

Dateline Theory

The pair zoned in on the dateline theory, originally theorized by Liz Smith, a former NASA employee, in 2010. Ms. Smith’s theory was based on the possibility of miscalculations made by Ms. Earhart’s navigator, Fred Noonan.

The theory is based on celestial navigation, which uses the position of the stars and sun to determine location. Some researchers have dismissed it, claiming that Mr. Noonan would not have made such a serious mistake calculating his position during the flight to Howland Island.

Mr. Noonan had spent more than two decades as a seaman before receiving his pilot’s license in 1930. During the early 1930s, he worked as a navigation instructor for Pan American World Airways, later known as Pan Am Airways.

Ms. Earhart selected Mr. Noonan for the navigator’s seat because of his extensive experience and reputation as a “top-notch navigator,” according to the History Channel.

“Everybody says, well, he was too good of a navigator to have made that mistake,” Tony said. “Well, clearly, a mistake was made here.”

The Earth rotates on its axis while revolving around the sun, which requires the exact time and date to accurately determine your longitudinal position.

“Time differences play a direct factor in determining longitude for celestial navigation,” Ms. Smith explains on her dateline theory website. “Because the earth rotates on its axis and longitude lines are drawn between the north and south poles, each degree of longitude correlates to a specific number of hours and minutes.

“There’s 360 degrees on a circle around the Earth, and we have 24 hours in a day (which is a full rotation of these 360 degrees), so 1 degree of longitude is equal to 4 minutes.”

It is possible that Mr. Noonan did not adjust his calendar after they crossed the International Date Line.

“The Sun’s right ascension changes (due to the Earth’s revolution around it) at a rate of two hours per month, or 4 minutes every day,” Ms. Smith wrote, adding that four minutes equates to 60 nautical miles.

If Mr. Noonan had forgotten to change the date back from July 3 to July 2 after they crossed the International Date Line, his miscalculations would have created a westward navigational error of 60 miles, according to the theory.

Considering that he and Ms. Earhart were more than 17 hours into their flight, it is not an unimaginable error.

Developing a Plan

The Romeo brothers made mathematical calculations based on the dateline theory and began hatching their search.

They also researched technology that could be used to go miles below the ocean’s surface to search for remnants of the wreckage.

“Then [Tony] was like, ‘Well, you know this is actually something doable … especially with the technology,’” Lloyd said, referring to autonomous underwater vehicles.

The Romeo brothers purchased a Hugin 6000, an autonomous underwater vehicle rated for a depth of 6,000 meters or 19,685 feet, and traveled to Norway, where they were trained to operate it.

Still, there were numerous licensing and other issues to manage before they could begin their extensive search. Lloyd said they were a “little naive” in the beginning, but his brother was “relentless.”

“He [Tony] worked really hard to get through a lot of really difficult hurdles, where I may have just said, you know what, they’ve made it impossible ... getting that kind of equipment ... getting the export licenses, getting through a lot of hassles, but we got it,” Lloyd said.

Exploration

The pair put together a team of more than a dozen experts for the 90-day exploration. They flew from Fiji to Tarawa in the central Pacific Ocean, where they picked up their 111-foot-long boat and launched their voyage to an area that had not been searched until now.

Ms. Earhart was scheduled to refuel her Lockheed Electra on Howland Island, a tiny, remote island in the mid-Pacific.

Lloyd said they faced several setbacks, including cracked and broken equipment.

“We stopped at Tarawa twice because we need to get some repairs ... Not every little island out there has the infrastructure to reweld; a welder, and the equipment and gases to actually weld this thing,” he said.

Although they could see Howland Island, the team was prohibited from setting foot on it.

“It’s not really a hurdle, I guess, but it was another limitation on us that we were not allowed to actually set foot on the island because it’s a bird sanctuary,” Lloyd continued, adding that they could see what was left of a runway and lighthouse, which was built to honor Ms. Earhart after her death.

At another point, Tony said they had an engine fire, which could have been catastrophic due to their remote location.

“You’re talking we’re two days away from anybody here, so if that ship goes down, that’s a lot of people in one life raft,” he said.

“We started looking around at who we were going to kick off first,” Tony joked.

Lloyd said their team was fortunate to have internet access from their remote location in the event of an emergency, pointing out that Ms. Earhart had to depend on unreliable radio communications during her flight.

“They would be like, well, let’s use this frequency here,” Lloyd explained. “When the sun comes up, it ruins that frequency ... so they were constantly jumping back and forth through the different kill cycles.”

The Deep Sea Vision team worked around the clock analyzing data collected from the UAV.

“Each dive of the sonar equipment lasted two days and collected several terabytes of data scanning the ocean floor,” according to a press release.

The discovery, which they believe is Ms. Earhart’s missing plane, was made at the end of the expedition, and described as a “testament to technology triumph and the unyielding pursuit of closure for an American icon.”

The sonar image shows an object resembling a nearly intact plane, similar to the Lockheed Electra flown by Ms. Earhart.

“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,” the company said.

(Left) Deep Sea Vision explorers captured a sonar image of an object that resembles an aircraft on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. (Right) Diagram of the Lockheed Electra flown by Amelia Earhart when she crashed in the ocean, on July 2, 1937. Courtesy of Deep Sea Vision

Final Flight

Ms. Earhart had previously broken several world records, including becoming the first woman to make a non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1932, before making her tragic final flight.

On May 21, 1937, Ms. Earhart, along with her navigator Fred Noonan, began her flight around the world in a Lockheed Electra from Oakland, Calif. The duo would make various refueling stops along the 29,000-mile journey.

Ms. Earhart’s flight plan was to stay as close to the equator as possible during their eastward flight around the world.

After making their way across the United States, they departed Miami, Fla., on June 1. Four weeks later, and 22,000 miles into their mission, they reached Lae, New Guinea. On July 2, Ms. Earhart and Mr. Noonan set off on the next leg of their flight toward Howland Island, about 2,600 miles from Lae, but they never made it.

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca was stationed offshore of the island, while two other ships, ordered to burn every light on board, were strategically positioned to help mark the flight path. Radio transmissions with the ships were sketchy and unreliable, at best.

An undated picture taken in the 1930s shows American female aviator Amelia Earhart at the controls of her plane. AFP/Getty Images

Ms. Earhart and Mr. Noonan were likely exhausted as they approached the end of the flight.

“They really had to work the airplane,” Lloyd said. “They had been up for 20-plus hours … And a lot of the things that people don’t realize is we’re used to a jet where it’s noisy, but this thing was a couple of noise levels above that with two big engines right next to them.

“It was so noisy they had to pass notes to each other … So, that kind of noise would certainly throw a lot of fatigue on after 20 hours. It was a grueling experience for sure.”

Late into their flight, Ms. Earhart made radio contact with Itasca, saying they were low on fuel.

“We must be on you, but we cannot see you,” she said. Fuel is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet.”

The ship tried to reply, but there was no response. About an hour later, they received a final message.

“We are running north and south,” Ms. Earhart told the ship. Air and sea rescue teams searched extensively, spending nearly $4 million before the U.S. government called off the operation.

Next Steps

The Romeo brothers plan to put another type of camera on the wreckage to confirm their findings.

“And then, the second step is … possibly lifting, raising the plane, restoring it, and then bringing her home,” Tony said.

A documentary is also in the works, which they hope to release later this year.