HOPE FOR SOLVING AMELIA MYSTERY
Lots to learn if mass is '37 plane
Many 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, Fred Noonan, escape? Was she just a spy who used her disappearance as a cover?
Many questions could finally be answered if the plane-shaped mass discovered late last year at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is actually her 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 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,” Romeo, a pilot and a former Air Force intelligence officer who sold all his commercial properties to pay for his search, told The Post.
What condition will Earhart’s wreckage be in?
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 wreckage location a secret, he reveals it is submerged in 15,000-foot-deep waters, where low 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, SC, 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.”
Like most modern aircraft, Earhart’s 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 let seawater flood inside the cockpit as it sank, preventing an implosion like 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.”
What can we expect to learn from Earhart’s wreckage?
If Earhart’s maps, charts and notes survived, as Romeo also hopes, they could serve as a time capsule. The noise in the Electra was too loud for Earhart to converse with Noonan, so they likely passed notes that may say things like:
“Where are we?” “Why are we lost?” and “Where’s the island?” Romeo theorized.
The state of some objects in the cockpit could also indicate if 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?
These clues might also signal if they escaped before the aircraft sank.
Investigators will not find their remains in the cabin either way, because microorganisms and bacteria would have destroyed all trace of them over eight decades, Alam said.
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.
A broken wing or stabilizer, would indicate it slammed into the water, but a more intact vessel could mean Earhart made an emergency landing on the surface.
The wreck might even support — or dispute — the conspiracy theory that the aviation icon landed on a shallow reef near an island before the plane was washed out to deep sea.
“There’s gonna be a lot of really, really cool questions that are going to get answered,” Romeo said.
Who can claim Earhart’s plane?
The open sea is ruled by what Romeo called “finder’s keepers,” but claims to Earhart’s plane may be more complicated.
Because the uninsured Electra was owned by a private individual, Earhart’s surviving family — who are being consulted by the Deep Sea Vision team — could declare legal ownership.
Less likely, another team could sweep in and try to claim the wreckage.
“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 her intended destination, Howland Island, an unincorporated US territory in the central Pacific Ocean.