by Thomas Curwen / © 2024, Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

After nearly 100 days at sea, the crew had given up. They had logged nearly 12,000 miles aboard the Offshore Surveyor, [a chartered 110-foot research vessel out of Papua New Guinea], crisscrossing the equator near the 180th meridian.

  They had worked hard under a tropical sun, days becoming weeks, a familiar routine offloading their unmanned submersible—[a $9-million Hugin 6000]—and watching as its sonar became their eyes on the ocean floor, recording all that it saw.

  There’d been hiccups along the way. Crew had gotten sick. The underwater camera had broken, and after one dive, the data had come back presumably corrupted.

  But the team of Deep Sea Vision hadn’t let any of that get in the way. They were out to solve the greatest aviation mystery of all: the disappearance of Amelia Earhart on July 2, 1937, during her epic flight around the world.

Maintaining optimism

  Deep Sea Vision’s chief executive officer, Tony Romeo, a former real estate entrepreneur out of Charleston, South Carolina, had a plan.

  He had studied the maps, read the history and come up with the money to try to prove that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had miscalculated their location, run out of gas and perished after ditching their plane in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

  Proof would be the watery grave of Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed Electra.

  But [after three months], Deep Sea Vision had nothing. Steaming away from their hopes toward their next destination, American Samoa, Romeo tried not to be too discouraged. He was having dinner with his crew, and the sun was setting on another beautiful day at sea. Soon he would be with his family, sharing stories of this adventure.

  Then he heard someone calling. Craig Wallace, chief of operations, poked his head into the galley.

“Hey, you guys have to take a look at this.”

...

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