Amelia Earhart’s plane found?

Amelia Earhart made her final airborne radio call at 8.43am, local time, approximately one hour after she warned the Coast Guard cutter Itasca that she was running out of fuel and could not see her target destination, Howland Island.

“We are on the line 157 337," she said from the cockpit of her Lockheed 10-E Electra aircraft. "We will repeat this message. We will repeat this on 6210 kilocycles. Wait.”

She did not repeat the message.

Earhart's fate has been one of America's great enduring mysteries. Her doomed 1937 attempt to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world by aircraft spawned the most expansive — and expensive — rescue operation in the history of the US Navy and Coast Guard.

Since then, countless researchers, reporters, and historians have attempted to find out what really happened to Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, high over the Pacific on the day of their disappearance.

Advances in deep sea scanning tech — and a hefty $11m investment — may finally provide some definitive answers.

Deep Sea Vision, a Charleston, South Carolina-based company, believes it may have finally found Earhart's plane resting on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

The company began scanning the ocean floor in September. Its powerful sonar, attached to a $9m submersible named Hugin, searched the murky depths, scanning in total more than 5,200 square miles of the region where Earhart is believed to have crashed.

Approximately 16,000 feet below the Pacific's surface, resting among the silt and marine sediment, Hugin's sonar spotted something unusual; the shape of an airplane.

“Well 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,” Deep Sea Vision’s founder, Tony Romeo, said in an interview with NBC's Today show. “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, a former US Air Force intelligence officer, sold off his real estate assets and poured $11m into funding the expedition to find Earhart's lost plane.…….

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/amelia-earhart-plane-found-news-b2486935.html