It wasn’t fame, notoriety or the promise of recognition that led Tony Romeo, CEO of Deep Sea Viewto begin your search for the long-lost pilot’s plane Amelia Earhart.
It was magnetic fishing.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Romeo took his son magnet fishing, which is the process of fishing with strong magnets to pull pieces of metal from bodies of water, according to Magnetic Fishing Planet. The father and son wondered if they would be able to find boats and other large structures during their trip — including Earhart’s missing plane.
Tony Romeo went home and began researching Earhart, wondering why the plane hadn’t been found yet.
“She didn’t fly out of the earth, she wasn’t abducted by UFOs, we can rule those two out,” Tony Romeo said.
“She is not abandoned on any island, that’s for sure. And we have all this information and we still haven’t found it,” he said. “And the more I started reading and the more I started researching, this isn’t a question of where it is, it’s a question of logistics.”
The search for Amelia Earhart’s plane
Tony Romeo, along with his brother, Lloyd Romeo, formed a team to search for Earhart’s plane in the Pacific Ocean. Near the end of the expedition, in late January, the team was able to generate a sonar image of a plane that looks like Earhart’s missing Lockheed Electra 10-E.
The Romeos, among other members of their team and Amelia Earhart researchers, gathered Friday at the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum to celebrate the discovery and celebrate Amelia Earhart’s birthday at the annual Amelia Earhart Festival in Atchison.
The Romeos have aviation backgrounds and grew up hearing the story of Amelia Earhart, Tony Romeo said.
“It wasn’t anything I was really going to solve on my own,” Tony Romeo said. “But there came a point in my life where I had the resources, the time and the desire to do it. We started looking at the technology available and said, ‘This isn’t going to be unsolved much longer.’”
The team’s discovery in late January made national headlines in publications such as Wall Street Journalfollowing an extensive expedition by Deep Sea Vision to find Earhart’s plane that lasted at least three or four years, Tony Romeo said.
Romeu’s next big project?
Verifying that the plane is actually Earhart’s.
The image itself does not prove that the plane is Earhart’s. According to the curator of the Aeronautical Division at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, Dorothy Cochrane, there are specific features of Earhart’s plane that could identify her ownership. The best thing researchers could find, Cochrane said, was the plane’s registration number, a Lockheed star. Other identifiers could be the plane’s fuselage or fuel tanks.
“If he comes back and verifies that this is actually her aircraft, and we can talk about how to do that, that would be huge,” Cochrane said. “We are very excited. We were delighted.”
Cochrane said he appreciates Deep Sea Vision and another company that has been exploring the area Nauticalfor using evidence and factual information to find the plane.
Tony Romeo said he hopes to one day see the plane at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
“That’s where it belongs, it’s an American treasure,” Tony Romeo said. “She wants to go home. She’s America’s favorite missing person, as I like to call her. She needs to go home.
A Kansas Aviation Legend
Amelia Earhart grew up in Atchison and Des Moines, Iowa. She was the daughter of an alcoholic and dropped out of college to help support her family, according to previous report from The Star. In 1923, she became the 16th woman in the US to obtain her pilot’s license.
Earhart was a strong supporter of women’s rights and gained notoriety for attempting to become the first woman to fly a plane around the world. It was during this attempt in 1937 that Earhart, 39, disappeared over the Pacific Ocean with her navigator, Fred Noonan.
Atchison is home to a number of exhibits and artwork dedicated to Earhart, including the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum, the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum and Trinity Episcopal Church, where Earhart was baptized, according to a city guide.
Theories and conspiracies swirl around the duo’s disappearance 87 years ago.
On Friday, the Romeos, along with fellow Earhart experts Rod Blacksome, Gary LaPook and Liz Smith gathered at Atchison’s Fox Theater for “Adventure Amelia,” a panel moderated by Cochrane. For more than an hour and a half, the panel spoke about their efforts and experiences trying to find Earhart’s plane and the disappearance of the woman herself.
The entire theater, including two individuals dressed as Earhart herself, sat raptly as each speaker spoke about their journey with Earhart.
“You have to be careful when initiating a person with Amelia on the subject,” said pilot and documentary filmmaker Liz Smith. “This could go on forever.”
Also present at the Amelia Earhart Festival was Amelia Rose Earhart, the first person to recreate her namesake’s flight around the world, according to a press release. Earhart, who is not related to the famous pilot who disappeared 87 years ago, was named after her because her mother wanted to give her daughter a strong female role model to follow, she said.
“She said, ‘Selfishly, when you go to a party, no one is going to forget that they met Amelia Earhart,” Earhart said.
Earhart has participated in the festival since 2013, when she won the Pioneering Achievement Award, she said. This year, Earhart served as an interviewer on a Saturday panel with the Romeo brothers. Earhart also ran the Fly With Amelia Foundation for ten years. The foundation, based in Colorado, has put young women through flight school, she said.
The celebration, which is already registered for 2024, takes place in Atchison every July. O Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum It is open from Wednesday to Saturday from 10:00 to 17:00 and on Sundays from 12:00 to 17:00
The Star’s Daniel Desrochers contributed to this report.
