An Air Force officer who spent $11M searching Earhart's plane may have found it

https://www.businessinsider.com/sonar-image-pilot-amelia-earhart-plane-found-pacific-ocean-2024

by rntn • 2 years ago

212 166 2 years ago

zelos• 2 years ago

Surely to search a plane have to have already found it?

Arainach• 2 years ago

Nonsense. For instance, I do a search every morning for "tomorrow's winning lottery numbers" on several search engines and haven't found them yet.

lainga• 2 years ago

for

echelon• 2 years ago

Tangent - wouldn't it be absolutely fantastical (and perhaps scary) if we could break the deterministic universe?

Time travel movies about sending people and things never made sense to me. To receive information from the future alone would be all you needed. Not only could you get stock prices or a lead on innovation, but you could also perhaps perform instantaneous, constant time computation of any function. And you'd have perfect foresight of anyone trying to disrupt you and take away your advantage.

But then maybe the future sends instructions for a machine that destroys you. Or it could be even simpler - it knows where to send you to die. So maybe you can't trust what it tells you at all. It has all the time to plan around your choices, and if you're still listening in any capacity it can coerce you to do its bidding.

Wild science fiction ideas searching for novelization, I suppose.

paulddraper4• 2 years ago

The article title currently says "for"

kylebenzle• 2 years ago

There would be hundreds of WWII planes in that area that would be indifferentiable from what Mr. Tony Romeo says he's looking for. More likey he's just looking to fund his retirement hobby.

OJFord• 2 years ago

That's what I thought, not even WW2 specifically, but (and I'm no expert) the image supposedly showing 'the distinctive shape of the fuselage, tail, and wings' is not that compelling? To paraphrase Jaws: it certainly looks like an aircraft, but not the aircraft.

It could be! Wings broken off/up a bit. But is it that likely? It could also be some other aircraft. Seems a bit sensationalist until they go back for a better look.

wharvle5• 2 years ago

Maybe. Looks to be a bit (... by Pacific standards, so, hundreds of miles) off the Easternmost part of the Pacific that would have seen lots of air traffic in the war, which should leave it relatively clear, but I may be wrong.

[EDIT] I still doubt it's the plane, but this area may be far less-cluttered with 1930s-40s aircraft wreckage than others, is all I mean.

ianburrell2• 2 years ago

Howland island was pretty far from the fighting in WW2. The Phoenix Islands were not used by the military. All the fighting was to the west or the north (Hawaii).

HumblyTossed4• 2 years ago

Air Force pays goooood[0].

But seriously:

> but then we're thinking: 'How do we lift the plane? How do we salvage it?'"

Don't. Just leave it. Be happy it was found, but just be respectful and leave it.

[0] Yes, I RTFA.

deadbabe3• 2 years ago

It can be raised respectfully.

yardstick3• 2 years ago

Probably can. Should it though?

Like the Titanic, maybe we just let it rest in peace? Send a sub down to confirm what it is. Then maybe update a few of the monuments to her to indicate her final resting place has been found…

My only concern would be looters. If it is quite feasible to access “easily” then yeah maybe we should recover it just to protect against looters and pillagers.

cozzyd• 2 years ago

Yeah, but then amateur submariners can't offer expensive tours in their homebuilt craft.

jdawg777• 2 years ago

Salvaging the plane could give interesting clues about what led to the crash.

HumblyTossed4• 2 years ago

That's just morbid curiosity...

poulsbohemian• 2 years ago

Every time Earhart is mentioned here, someone pops up with authoritative info that she and Noonan were not well prepared / equipment was faulty / more Hollywood salesmanship than navigation skills / that island was always going to be a stretch on gas... point being that while in the collective memory they are heroes, my lay understanding is that scholarship on the subject has already determined there were major problems with their flight plan

filleduchaos• 2 years ago

It's been several decades in saltwater at unbelievable pressure - I somehow doubt that.

not-my-account2• 2 years ago

If we raise it, it will almost certainly end up in a museum where many many people will see it and connect with Earhart and her story. Earhart would near deification, I’d guess. Plus the inspiration of many young boys and girls to adventure. I don’t quite see where the lack of respect would come from. Or, if it is disrespectful to raise the crash, that disrespect would be repaid many times over with honour in a museum, no?

digging• 2 years ago

Earhart would near deification, I’d guess.

Let's not get hyperbolic. She's already well known. Agreed though that displaying her plane in a museum would seem respectful to me.

jncfhnb3• 2 years ago

Frankly I think her story is a bit less inspiring without the mystery

s_dev• 2 years ago

Don't. Just leave it. Be happy it was found, but just be respectful and leave it.

I don't see anything inherently disrespectful about rasing the plane from the seabed. I recall people telling James Cameron that he should leave the Titanic alone but he made a great movie and brought the ship back in to the public imagination and didn't disrespect the fact many souls were lost tragically. The ship was deemed not economically viable to salvage but this plane is much much smaller and it may be worth putting in a museum.

I'm presuming you are offended on behalf of other people but if not can you elaborate why you find the idea so offensive or disrespectful?

HumblyTossed4• 2 years ago

Because there's little to be gained save morbid curiosity. She did amazing things alive, celebrate that. Putting a wreck in a museum will emphasize her death.

Enjoy disagreeing...

TylerE3• 2 years ago

The big problem with Titanic is how deep it is. Very, even by ocean standards.

aeturnum2• 2 years ago

I recall people telling James Cameron that he should leave the Titanic alone

I think HumblyTossed is suggesting this group do exactly what Cameron did: investigate and document but not remove. If this is Earhart's plane, it's probably also her grave. We generally frown on disturbing the resting places of the dead for commercial purposes.

What "worth" do you see in placing it in a museum?

whycome2• 2 years ago

Good use case for Apple Vision Pro, etc. Capture the plane in situ and then have it available to view as an AR model (at home, or in a 'museum' space). Let users 'walk' or 'swim' around the wreck.

Cthulhu_2• 2 years ago

It looks like there's something similar for the Titanic already, so, not a weird suggestion to make.

TylerE3• 2 years ago

No so sure. Titanic is essentially unique, her two sisters not lasting much longer, the last going to the scrappers in 1935.

There were quite a few model 10 Electras built. Over a dozen survive, with several still flying. The Earhart museum already has a 10E, even.

paulddraper4• 2 years ago

just be respectful

IDK if littering wrecks is more respectful than putting them in a museum.

whartung• 2 years ago

Indeed. Just leave it.

Document it, photograph it, leave it.

There's no reason to lift it, to "restore it", etc.

It's a wreck. Leave it alone.

Go find a "modern" Electra, and make that as "close to Earharts" plane for your display. But there's no reason to drag this thing up.

If this plane were shot down, it would be considered a war grave and left untouched. No reason to not treat this the same.

Rejoice if she has, indeed, been found. Peace for the families, finally.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 2 years ago

In a surprise twist, when they explore it in detail, it turns out to be MH 370.

georgeecollins• 2 years ago

That's what I was thinking. Someday I or my kids will read about finding MH370. Will they put that in a museum?

rand1239• 2 years ago

No because it's not mysterious anymore. Also not many museums in the world that can fit one.

bell-cot• 2 years ago

I - Howland Island (near which they seemingly found this wreckage) is in the Central Pacific Ocean. Vs. MH370 seems sure to have gone down in the Central-ish Indian Ocean.

II - If they have even the vaguest sense of scale from their image - MH370 was a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777-200ER. Vs. Earhart was flying a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_10E. There is a ~10X difference in wing area, and ~50X difference in weight.

CommieBobDole• 2 years ago

The interesting thing about this is that it doesn't appear to involve TIGHAR at all.

TIGHAR, for those unfamiliar, are the people who pop up every few years with tantalizing new evidence that certainly will prove once and for all some novel theory about Earhart's disappearance and raises a couple of million dollars to mount an expedition which of course reveals nothing but some tantalizing new evidence that requires a new expensive expedition to investigate.

So, there might be something to this.

RajT88• 2 years ago

I seem to recall these guys. Last time I read an article about them, it read like they were in cahoots with the government of Kiribati to promote tourism. Fun read though!

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

For others curious about the acronym:

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIGHAR

Kon-Peki3• 2 years ago

I have no idea how to interpret that sonar image. Am I supposed to see what looks like an airplane when viewed from above? Because the Lockheed Electra didn't have swept-back wings. I don't think any airplane had swept-back wings until the 1950s.

Cthulhu_2• 2 years ago

Could it be either sonar distortion or that the wings were damaged in the crash?

Speaking of which, it looks pretty intact, which means (armchair air crash specialist here) it wouldn't have crashed but done an emergency landing on the water.

jlbooker• 2 years ago

That would match with the leading mis-navigation theory. She and her navigator were fine and healthy, as was the plane. They were looking for the island to land on, but had messed up the navigation and were sufficiently off-course. There were US Navy boats in the area of the island that heard their radio calls. There was no emergency -- they just reported to be searching for the land that they should've found. Presumably they flew until they ran out of fuel and likely set it down in the water as gently as possible.

jncfhnb3• 2 years ago

There’s literally a side by side diagram showing you how to look at. Not that your wings comment is wrong.

Kon-Peki3• 2 years ago

Ha, I clearly didn't scroll far enough. Thanks :)

entangledqubit• 2 years ago

Still, seeing as how I don't look at these kinds of images all day it's really hard for me to gauge if the sea floor is littered with false positive images that may seem to be a good match. I could also imagine a true match to also have some other confounding blob attached to it. It'd be nice to have some kind of score to summarize that aspect.

ZiiS• 2 years ago

Post crash many planes have swept-back wings

WalterBright4• 2 years ago

Swept wings wasn't a thing until after WW2. The Me262 had swept wings because the engines came in heavier than expected, and sweeping the wings back was the easiest fix.

whycome2• 2 years ago

Title reaction: How much does an 'Air Force Officer' make?!

Answer:

But Romeo, a former real-estate investor who sold commercial properties to raise the $11 million needed to begin funding the search, returned in December from a roughly 100-day voyage at sea with a sonar image that he believes shows the lost plane in the ocean's depths.

(Also, article title uses 'former air force officer')

wharvle5• 2 years ago

20 years in + take retirement + also work for a government contractor at 3x+ your former pay rate (while collecting retirement!), can equal a lot of money in a hurry at a relatively young age (say, money to fund a real estate investment venture without risking being penniless in old age).

FireBeyond2• 2 years ago

government contractor at 3x+ your former pay rate

And then some. Friend of mine rode backseat in F-15s. After retirement, he spent two-three years as a contractor for Boeing training allied military in the Middle East and paid off his mortgage, and much much more (I want to say at least 1, maybe 2 investment properties owned effectively outright).

karaterobot• 2 years ago

Relevant search: this presumed plane is at 16,500 feet of depth, and the record for deep sea salvage is, according to a quick search, about 19,000 feet. I had wondered whether it was feasible on the face of it to try salvaging this plane, and it may be. No comment on the advisability.

fred_is_fred• 2 years ago

How would/could you distinguish this from any of the hundreds or maybe thousands of planes that went down during WW2 in the Pacific? Assuming it's even a plane.

jandrese• 2 years ago

I think the author is excited because he found the plane in roughly the area he expected to find it if she was thrown off course by an instrumentation fault that occurs when crossing the international date line. Also, it was about the right shape.

Also, it wasn't near the fighting in WWII, and the shape doesn't match that of WWII carrier aircraft.

I'll be more excited when they get out there with a deep sea probe and take some photographs.

rconti2• 2 years ago

From the source linked in another comment: (edit, ugh, I hate HN formatting, can never get it right even after all these years)

----

One piece of good news for Romeo’s search is that there are probably very few other planes anywhere near Howland. An airstrip was built on Howland in the 1930s in anticipation of commercial trans-Pacific flights, but Earhart was going to be the first to actually use it. During the war it was bombed by the Japanese to prevent its use, and that’s the extent of its aviation history. None of the WWII air-sea battles were fought in the vicinity, and it’s much too remote for general aviation planes to ever go near.

----

https://briandunning.substack.com/p/i-remain-very-guarded-ab...

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

Who is Brian Dunning and what do they know about the subject?

NikkiA• 2 years ago

He's wrong because that is an area that the USN actively did carrier training in from 1945 to today, and lots of planes ended up in the ocean after missing a landing, a take-off failure, or just because the pilot had to bail for whatever reason.

Heck, during the evacuation of Hanoi they were pushing perfectly good jets into the ocean just to clear enough room for helicopters and the odd cessna, but that would have been further west.

https://theaviationgeekclub.com/that-time-a-south-vietnamese...

maplet• 2 years ago

Roughly a month into the trip, the team captured a sonar image of the plane-shaped object about 100 miles from Howland Island — but didn't discover the image in the submersible's data until the 90th day of the voyage, making it impractical to turn back to get a closer look.

To be a skeptic, this sounds like confirmation bias.

gleenn• 2 years ago

Or maybe the computer they had analyzing the data takes a while to search and it had nothing to do with people at all.

Sniffnoy2• 2 years ago

The theory, which Romeo relied on partly to guide his search, suggests that when Earhart crossed over the international dateline during her 20-hour flight, her navigation system became inaccurate and misdirected her by about 60 miles, potentially leading to a tragic end.

How would this happen? It's not like her plane would have contained a misprogrammed computer.

ciscoriordan• 2 years ago

An electrical issue could cause a gauge to misreport. E.g. vibrations cause a bad ground.

Sniffnoy2• 2 years ago

An electrical issue wouldn't be caused by crossing the international date line.

Jgrubb• 2 years ago

Google brings me here - http://www.datelinetheory.com/p/time-and-celestial-navigatio...

chernevik• 2 years ago

Probably a polite way of saying she screwed up.

She had a reputation as an indifferent navigator and aviator which is consistently downplayed.

bb6112• 2 years ago

Fred Noonan was hired as the navigator specifically for this leg of the flight because of his navigation skills, which he proved by establishing Pan Am's transpacific routes, so it's not obvious to me why a navigational error would rest on Earhart's lack of skills in that area.

jameshart4• 2 years ago

Journalistic misinterpretation of what an expert told them leading them to write something dumb.

Earhart’s “navigation system” was Fred Noonan, an almanac, and a chronometer.

Fred looking on the wrong page of the Almanack because he forgot which side of the dateline they were going to be on is what’s implied here.

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

'Navigation system' could be paper, maps, compass, etc. It's modern bias to assume that means 'computer' or 'electronic'.

bb6112• 2 years ago

No computer (device), but definitely a computer (person who computes) the location of the plane and destination in a formula that relies on the correct date for accurate long distance navigation.

Rebelgecko• 2 years ago

Navigators used tables to determine the longitude that depend on the day. The theory[0] is that because their flight involved multiple day changes, Noonan might've done some on the fly calculation that plugged star positions into the wrong day's table, putting them off by 1 degree of longitude.

[0] http://www.datelinetheory.com/, no idea how plausible this is

CSMastermind2• 2 years ago

To quote Brian Dunning of Skeptoid:

The biggest secret of the Amelia Earhart mystery is that there is no mystery, and never has been. The USCG Itasca was on station at Howland and in partial radio contact with Earhart when she and Fred Noonan ran out of fuel and ditched after having slightly overshot the island in the dawn lighting conditions. The USN and USCG analyzed their data and identified this area as where the plane went down...
So the best news about Tony Romeo’s find is that he’s looking in the right place, unlike the TV networks and the random crackpots whose claims they promote. Romeo hasn’t divulged the exact location, for obvious reasons; but his location has the endorsement of Dorothy Cochrane, a curator in the aeronautics department of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. She knows where the USN and USCG have said where the plane is, so that tells me Romeo is probably right.

https://briandunning.substack.com/p/i-remain-very-guarded-ab...

rconti2• 2 years ago

I was curious, but the link doesn't elaborate on how much is known about the "ran out of fuel and ditched after having slightly overshot the island" -- whether that's all fact, or partially fact, or all speculation.

CSMastermind2• 2 years ago

Here's the US Navy's full report: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305240

Which references the radio logs from the day of the disappearance: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/6210268

tl;dr we know they overshot the island and were running a search pattern for it while running out of fuel because they told the radio operator on the other end as much. The only question is what specifically happened (did they manage to get life rafts out, etc.

Apocryphon2• 2 years ago

So like the fate of the Roanoke colony, the cause of the Tunguska explosion, the Dyatlov Pass incident, the explanation is what's right in front of everyone?

bhickey• 2 years ago

the fate of the Roanoke colony

What is the prosaic explanation for the Roanoke colony?

francisofascii• 2 years ago

the exact location is a big part of the mystery

saalweachter• 2 years ago

And to quote his article with the bit that matches my first impressions:

I am not super gung-ho about the image. Yes, it is vaguely airplane-shaped (though not a great match for the Lockheed Electra). It’s also vaguely anchor-shaped, or the shape of most any random pile of rocks on the ocean floor — you can see at the bottom left of the image there’s another object right next to it, which would be improbable if this was indeed a lone aircraft sitting on the ocean floor. It could be anything.

hondo77• 2 years ago

What? That image looks just like Bigfoot!

WalterBright4• 2 years ago

Romeo hasn’t divulged the exact location, for obvious reasons

The most obvious reason being he doesn't know the exact location.

qxfys• 2 years ago

Can we do the same with MH370? I've got a classmate inside that plane. His family has been deprived of any form of closure or peace regarding his fate.

stirlo• 2 years ago

Around $150 million was spent searching including with high resolution sonar[1]. But obviously nothing was found. The area they're searching is far larger unfortunately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_Malaysia_Airlines_F...

ianburrell2• 2 years ago

A company, Ocean Infinity, is continuig searching with robots.

chasd00• 2 years ago

iirc when it was missing there was a lot of wild speculation and then someone (maybe it was on twitter) discretely said it was on the bottom of the ocean at some location i can't remember and nothing else. The conclusion was this person was from some three letter agency and knew exactly where it was because of all the listening devices in the various oceans hunting for submarines. They(agency) will never say where it is because it exposes their capability. I think a similar thing happened when that submarine imploded on the way to the titanic.

GenerWork• 2 years ago

Is there a screenshot of this Twitter post?

wolverine8765• 2 years ago

The conclusion

Whose conclusion? On what basis?

codezero2• 2 years ago

They readily shared the implosion detection data with search and rescue teams.

dralley2• 2 years ago

The precise location of the wreckage nonwithstanding, the fate is pretty clear. Several pieces of MH370 have been discovered washed up along the coast of Africa and Madagascar over the past few years.

wkat4242• 2 years ago

The fate is clear, the how and why is not. Of course that's important for families.

And $150M is less than the plane itself would have cost to buy.

pfdietz• 2 years ago

This is likely Earhart's plane, as it has a fuselage and two wings.

Also, I am likely the Pope, because like the Pope I have two arms and two legs.

0xDEADFED5• 2 years ago

here you go, you earned it!

https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Pope_cards

dreamcompiler• 2 years ago

the object, which rests more than 16,500 feet beneath the surface

So 4000 feet deeper than the Titanic.

Izkata• 2 years ago

So around 400 miles* from where (likely) her bones and shoes were found?

https://www.npr.org/1998/12/02/1032135/bones-shoes-may-have-...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/08/591950171...

* Eyeballing it on Google Maps, distance from Howland island to Nikumaroro island

justinclift• 2 years ago

Doesn't the mention of titanium here seem wrong?

    If the Electra had been built of other metals, say aluminum and titanium, there
    wouldn’t be anything left but free atoms floating around.

Titanium is supposed to be resistant to corrosion in seawater due to the oxide layer that forms: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.5301/jabfm.5000387

    Titanium is reported to be highly resistant to general corrosion in seawater.

    ...

    These properties make titanium suitable for a variety of applications involving
    seawater, starting from thin-walled heat exchanger tubing, with consequent good heat
    transfer properties, up to submarine hulls, ships, platforms, desalination plants,
    salt production evaporators and water jet propulsion systems.

BarbaryCoast• 2 years ago

If he's "searching Earhart's plane", doesn't that imply that he's found it? Or is he searching a plane he _thinks_ was Earhart's, trying to find confirmation from the contents of it?

On the other hand, if he's "searching FOR Earhart's plane", this contradiction resolves itself.

RecycledEle• 2 years ago

Like dozens or hundreds of others before him, this guy thinks he has found her plane. Good luck to him, but I doubt he really found it.

amai• 2 years ago

Since the journalist doesn’t seem to know about metric units: The plane was found at 16,500 feet = 5.029 km beneath the surface of the sea.

boilerupnc• 2 years ago

Nice background story on Earhart from my alma mater, Purdue University. [0] Boilerup!

[0] https://stories.purdue.edu/amelia-earhart-aviator-legend-boi...

An Air Force officer who spent $11M searching Earhart's plane may have found it

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