A sonar picture suspected of exhibiting the stays of the aircraft of Amelia Earhart, the famed American aviatrix who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937, has turned out to be a rock formation.
Deep Sea Imaginative and prescient (DSV), a South Carolina-based agency, launched the blurry picture in January captured by an unmanned submersible of what it mentioned could also be Earhart’s aircraft on the seafloor.
Not so, the corporate mentioned in an replace on Instagram this month.
“After 11 months the waiting has finally ended and unfortunately our target was not Amelia’s Electra 10E (just a natural rock formation),” Deep Sea Imaginative and prescient mentioned.
“As we speak DSV continues to search,” it mentioned. “The plot thickens with still no evidence of her disappearance ever found.”
The picture was taken by DSV throughout an intensive search in an space of the Pacific to the west of Earhart’s deliberate vacation spot, distant Howland Island.
Earhart went lacking whereas on a pioneering round-the-world flight with navigator Fred Noonan.
Her disappearance is without doubt one of the most tantalizing mysteries in aviation lore, fascinating historians for many years and spawning books, films and theories galore.
The prevailing perception is that Earhart, 39, and Noonan, 44, ran out of gasoline and ditched their twin-engine Lockheed Electra within the Pacific close to Howland Island whereas on one of many ultimate legs of their epic journey.
Earhart, who gained fame in 1932 as the primary girl to fly solo throughout the Atlantic, took off on Might 20, 1937 from Oakland, California, hoping to turn into the primary girl to fly around the globe.
She and Noonan vanished on July 2, 1937 after taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on a difficult 2,500-mile (4,000-kilometer) flight to refuel on Howland Island, a speck of a US territory between Australia and Hawaii.
They by no means made it.