Aviation's most enduring mystery remains just that. The company that was so sure it had found Emilia Earhart and Fred Noonan's Lockheed Electra now say the airplane shape they spotted on sonar was a diabolically arranged natural rock formation. “Talk about the cruelest formation ever created by nature,” said Tony Romeo, CEO of ocean exploration company Deep Sea Vision told CNN. “It’s almost like somebody did set those rocks out in this nice little pattern of her plane, just to mess with somebody out there looking for her.”
The Earhart flight was a self promotional “stunt”.
It continues to have resulted in one of the most expensive searches in history.
Her costs will go on.
The image more closely resembled a swept-wing single-engine fighter as were common in training exercises well after Earhart’s disappearance, not a twin engine twin tail airplane like Earhart’s.
If the fool had read of sonar searches by the TIGHAR organization he’d have learned how easy it is to fool yourself - TIGHAR saw a fuselage shape near Gardner Island, but further imaging showed it was just a rock ledge.
That money would have been better spent looking in deep water off of the reef at Gardner Island that TIGHAR thinks Earhart landed on.
Tony Romeo had ‘get home itis’, as Earhart and Coast Guard searches did at various times. She pressed on ill-prepared, after her disappearance CG’s search from the air over Gardner was limited.
The whole saga including competence of Earhart and navigator, Earhart’s husband in promoting, and CG/USN in searching is chronicled in Ric Gillespie’s book ‘One More Good Flight’. I recommend it.
I don’t agree with Gillespie’s ‘99% certain’ estimate but he makes a very strong case for Earhart and Noonan having searched along a ‘line of position’ (navigation term) to find their destination Howland Island, perhaps not going far enough north but there is no land that way beyond Howland, instead turning south toward the Phoenix Islands.
The estimate is that they crash-landed on a reef, were able to transmit at low tide for a few days, but a storm destroyed their airplane.
Credible DF on radio signals pointed to Gardner Island. (Notably those by experienced Pan American stations. Pan Am flew the Pacific to the north of that area. Radio signals were at frequencies giving long range at certain times.)
The bleep couldn’t even tell the difference in shape of the image between Earhart’s twin engine twin tail airplane and swept wing fighters common in the region later.
I agree wholeheartedly with Mr./Ms. Fast-Doc. Earhart’s lack of preparation would be an embarrassment to a student pilot on a 50-mile solo – let alone a trip across the ocean.
Um, seems to me that many in these forums are calling crash pilots fools and incompetents.
Wasn’t the peddler of the erroneous sonar image a pilot once? Yet he could not tell the difference between shape of Earhart’s twin-engine twin-tail airplane and a swept wing single-tail fighter airplane. How would you describe his epistemology?
‘Can’t we all get along now?’ kills people in aviation.