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South Carolina-based Deep Sea Vision (DSV) said the image was captured after a long search in the Pacific Ocean west of remote Howland Island, Earhart’s intended location.

Earhart disappeared during her pioneering flight around the world with navigator Fred Noonan. His disappearance is one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history, captivating historians for decades and giving rise to numerous books, films and theories.

The popular belief is that Earhart, 39, and Noonan, 44, ran out of fuel and abandoned their twin-engine Lockheed Electra near Howland Island in the Pacific on one of the last legs of their epic journey.

DSV said the blurry image, taken by an unmanned underwater vehicle using side-view sonar at a depth of 5,000 metres, “reveals the unique twin tails of the legendary aircraft and lines reflecting its scale”.

We always thought he would do everything in his power to slowly lower the plane into the water, and the signature of the plane we saw in the sonar image suggests that this may be the case.
DSV CEO Tony Romeo said in a statement.

The research team spent 90 days surveying 13,500 square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean floor, “more than all previous searches combined,” DSV said. The company still keeps the exact location of the find a secret and plans further search operations because there is still no certainty that it is the Lockheed Electra. “There’s a possibility it could be a different aircraft, even a World War II aircraft.”, – said Romeo. However, he added that there were no other known cases of missing aircraft in the region.

But Romeo said the discovery was made using the “dateline theory” first proposed in 2010 by Liz Smith, a former NASA employee. This theory states that Noonan forgot to set the calendar back one day as they flew over the International Date Line, causing him to miscalculate his navigation based on the stars in the sky and miscalculate his navigation westward by 100 kilometers.

Earhart, who gained fame as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932, set off from Oakland, California, on May 20, 1937, hoping to become the first woman to fly around the world. He and Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937, after taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea, on a grueling 4,000-kilometer flight to refuel at Howland Island, part of a U.S. territory between Australia and Hawaii. They never succeeded.