What earlier this year had been suspected to be the wreck of the plane belonging to missing 1930s aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, has turned out to be no more than a natural rock formation.
At the start of February, Divernet reported that a US team had found what they thought was Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, producing a sonar image from a depth of some 5km.
Eleven months later, however, artificial clarification of the image has brought disappointment for the team from US marine robotics company Deep Sea Vision (DSV).
They had been carrying out a comprehensive search, most recently to the west of Howland Island, in hopes of solving one of the 20th century’s abiding mysteries.
Howland, halfway between Australia and Hawaii. had been Earhart’s destination when she set off from Lae, New Guinea on one of her last legs of her 1937 bid to become the first woman to fly around the world.
Accompanied by navigator Fred Noonan, Earhart had set out from California six weeks earlier. One of numerous theories about the pair’s fate is that they ran out of fuel on the 4,000km leg because of a dateline error, and had been forced to ditch the plane before reaching Howland.
From the research vessel Offshore Surveyor, the DSV team had used their modified Kongsberg Discovery HUGIN 6000 AUV with synthetic aperture sonar-scanning system to capture the ambiguous image.
While the outline was plane-like, and aviation experts had agreed that it could be the missing Electra, because the image was so indistinct time had to be spent clarifying it. The DSV team say that, having already cleared almost 20,000sq km of ocean, they are continuing their search for the aircraft,
Also on Divernet: 5km deep: Is this Earhart’s lost Electra aircraft?, Ballard out to solve Earhart puzzle, Divers locate ‘ahead of time’ 1906 Defender sub
