Dozens — if not hundreds — of questions come to mind at the mention of Amelia Earhart’s name.
What happened to her plane? What caused the crash? Did Earhart and her navigator escape in time? Was she just a spy who used her disappearance as a cover?
All those questions could finally be answered if the plane-shaped mass discovered late last year at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is actually her infamous Lockheed 10-E Electra that vanished on what was to be a record-setting trip around the world in 1937.
Tony Romeo and his Deep Sea Vision team — who captured the sonar image of the familiar-looking object during a December expedition to find the plane — are now planning a second trip to the site.
They hope to finally crack the case that has baffled millions for 87 years.
“We do feel like based on where we found it, we can reverse engineer what happened, how she ended up there,” Tony Romeo, a pilot and a former US Air Force intelligence officer who sold all his commercial properties to pay for his search, told The Post.
Other than the damage caused by the suspected crash onto the surface of the water — or on a coral reef before being swept out to the depths, as one theory suggests — and the general wear of the constantly moving ocean, the aircraft could still be in impeccable condition.
Although Romeo and his team are keeping the location of the wreckage a secret, he reveals it is submerged in 15,000-foot-deep waters, where cold temperatures and limited natural light are working to shield the doomed plane.
“It’s very stable. There’s no current. You’ve got basically no kind of oxidation that’s happening that you would see in very shallow water,” the Charleston, South Carolina, resident said.
“If this plane crashed in 100 feet of water, it would have been disintegrated, but at that depth — amazingly enough — it actually preserves it really well.”
The construction of Earhart’s plane itself could also protect its original structure, ocean engineering expert M. Reza Alam pointed out.
Like most modern aircraft, her plane was covered with aluminum, which is designed to withstand significant corrosion. The tough metal would have some decay, however, from sitting thousands of feet below the ocean floor for nearly a century.
More importantly, the old plane was likely outfitted with an airway deposit that allowed seawater to flood inside the cockpit as it sank, preventing an implosion as seen with the Titan Sub disaster last year.
If it worked properly during the disaster, the cabin could hold a trove of answers.
“The pressure inside and outside of the glass will be balanced, so the glass will not get necessarily damaged. If pressure on one side is much harder than the pressure on the other side, then that’s when we’re going to have crushing,” said Alam, the American Bureau of Shipping chair for Ocean Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
“So there’s a good chance that the cabin may be fully preserved.”
The maps, charts and notes from Earhart’s ill-fated historic flight, if they survived as Romeo also hopes, could serve as a time capsule.
The Electra was too loud for Earhart to converse with navigator Fred Noonan, so the aviators likely would have passed notes detailing their impending doom back and forth just before the crash.
“Where are we?” “Why are we lost?” and “Where’s the island?” are just some of the messages Romeo theorized the two passed in the frantic moment.
“All these notes that they were scribbling back and forth would still be in the plane and legible, believe it or not. So when we pull the plane out, you know there’s going to be hopefully a whole trove of really valuable information that helps us unwind what happened,” he said.
The state of some objects that may be found inside the cockpit could also indicate whether Earhart and Noonan knew they were doomed — were there life jackets and were they left inflated? Did they switch to a different radio frequency in a desperate attempt to reach help? Was the hatch opened?
“We do feel like based on where we found it, we can reverse engineer what happened, how she ended up there.”
Tony Romeo
These clues will be vital in revealing whether they escaped before the aircraft sank. Investigators will not find their remains inside the cabin either way — microorganisms and bacteria would have slipped in with the gushing water and eaten away at any trace of Earhart and Noonan over the past eight decades, Alam revealed.
Even if the plane isn’t in the great condition experts hope it to be, the amount of damage could reveal how it entered the water and why.
Heavy damage, such as a broken wing or stabilizer, would indicate that it slammed into the water, but a more intact vessel could mean Earhart made an emergency landing on the surface before it sank to the floor.
The wreck would even support — or dispute — the conspiracy that the aviation icon landed on a shallow reef near an island before the plane was washed out to deep sea.
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“There’s gonna be a lot of really, really cool questions that are going to get answered,” Romeo said.
The open sea is ruled by what Romeo called “finder’s keepers,” but the question of who can lay claim to Earhart’s plane could be much more complicated.
Because the uninsured Electra was owned by a private individual, Earhart’s surviving family — who is being consulted by the Deep Sea Vision team — could declare legal ownership of the wreck.
There is also the possibility another team could swoop in and try to claim the assumed airplane — and while Romeo admits the prospect is not likely, he is keeping the location where the sonar images were captured top secret.
There are very few marine teams across the globe that have the technology and resources to reach the depth where the mass was discovered, and those who can have formed a close community that understands the magnitude of the Deep Sea Vision-Earhart family connection.
“This isn’t a big bag of coins out sitting,” Romeo said. “It is valuable, but it’s also a very sensitive thing. In my experience in dealing with these communities is that everybody’s very respectful of this and they want it solved.”
The only clue Romeo’s team is willing to offer at this time is that the assumed downed plane was found within 100 miles of Howland Island, an unincorporated territory of the US in the central Pacific Ocean.