An ocean explorer claims to have solved aviation’s greatest mystery by finding the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s missing plane.

The American aviator’s aircraft vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 during her attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world.

Her unexplained fate has since become a source of widespread speculation as accident investigators were unable to locate her body or any wreckage.

But Tony Romeo, a former US air force intelligence officer who sold his property business to fund an $11 million deep-sea search for the missing plane, believes he has taken a sonar image which reveals its location.

“This is maybe the most exciting thing I’ll ever do in my life. I feel like a 10-year-old going on a treasure hunt,” Mr Romeo, from South Carolina, told the Wall Street Journal.

Mr Romeo and two of his brothers, all pilots, were motivated by the prospect of using their flying know-how to help solve “the perfect riddle”.

“We always felt that a group of pilots were the ones that are going to solve this, and not the mariners,” he said.

Mr Romeo’s company, Deep Sea Vision, used an unmanned submersible to scan 5,200 square miles of ocean floor with sonar technology in the suspected area of Earhart’s crash.

After reviewing data from the research voyage, the team discovered an image of a blurry, plane-like shape 5,000m down at the bottom of the Pacific.

The sonar image was taken about 100 miles from Howland Island, halfway between Australia and Hawaii.

Mr Romeo, who has since posted the picture on Instagram, believes it shows Earhart’s twin engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.

“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,” he told NBC News.

“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.”

Mr Romeo’s team plans to return to the site either later this year or early in 2025 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 added.

“I think myself that it is the great mystery of all time. Certainly the most enduring aviation mystery of all time.”

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had been expected to land at Howland Island in July 1937 to refuel during her quest to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.

But the pair failed to arrive and were declared dead two years later, with US accident investigators concluding that the plane had crashed somewhere in the Pacific. No remains were ever found.

Numerous attempts to find answers

Mr Romeo’s mission follows a number of previous attempts to solve the mystery.

In 1999, Dana Timmer, an America’s Cup sailor, led a deep-water search near Howland Island. Although a promising shadow was spotted on sonar, Mr Timmer was unable to raise the cash to go back and verify his find.

Ten years later, a team put together by Ted Waitt, founder of the Gateway computer company, conducted a new Pacific search but to no avail. “We’re confident we know where Earhart isn’t,” the team announced afterwards.

Nauticos, an ocean exploration firm, launched three fruitless searches, in 2002, 2006 and 2017. “It’s the only thing in my career that I’ve ever looked for and not found,” said Tom Dettweiler, a sonar expert who joined two of the searches and was part of the team that found the wreckage of the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland in 1985.

There are also believers in a wilder theory that the Japanese captured and killed the aviators, with the “evidence” ranging from a generator retrieved in a Saipan harbour in 1960 to a discredited photograph, purportedly from 1937, of the pair at a dock in the Marshall Islands, which was overseen at the time by Japanese forces.

Another claim, supported by a 2018 forensic analysis of bones found on the remote Pacific island of Nikumaroro, suggests Earhart could have died there.

The bones were discovered in 1940 and initially thought to be male. But a reinspection six years ago pointed to their measurements being female and similar to Earhart’s body shape.

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery has previously suggested Earhart died of starvation as a castaway on Nikumaroro, which lies to the east of the sonar image.

The US-based group has raised doubts about Mr Romeo’s supposed discovery.

“For the wings of an Electra to fold rearward as shown in the sonar image, the entire centre section would have to fail at the wing/fuselage junctions,” it said. “That’s just not possible.”