Fresh hope in hunt for MH370 as US explorer who claims he found Amelia Earhart's plane now thinks his company can finally solve mystery of missing plane ten years after it vanished from radar with 239 people on board

A US explorer claims his company has the technology to locate the doomed MH370 on the tenth anniversary of its still unsolved disappearance.

Tony Romeo and his company, Deep Sea Vision, first made headlines worldwide earlier this year then they claimed to have found the remains of Amelia Earhart's plane.

March 8 marked the 10-year anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight 370 which vanished from radar after taking off from Kuala Lumpur with  239 people on board.

In a new interview with 60 Minutes in Australia, Romeo, the CEO of Deep Sea, said he believed his company was capable of making the breakthrough.

The company is planning to send one of its underwater drones, called the Hugin 6000, down to the ocean floor to search for the missing aircraft.

Deep Sea Vision CEO Tony Romeo is pictured on 60 Minutes

The missing aircraft - a Boeing 777-200ER plane - is seen taking off in France in 2011

One of Deep Sea Vision's drones it plans to use to search for MH370 is pictured 

Romeo, who sold his commercial property investments to fund his search, managed to take a sonar image of an aircraft-shaped object on the ocean floor in December

Romeo spent $11 million to fund the trip and buy the high-tech gear needed for the search including an underwater 'Hugin' drone manufactured by the Norwegian company Kongsberg

'It flies at 50 meters above the seafloor and it just goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,' Romeo told 60 Minutes on Sunday.

'Big eyes, looking at everything it can see, sucks and stores data, comes back up to the surface, we pluck a thumb drive into it, pull the data out, and we watch it on a computer exactly what it looked at.'

Romeo described the company's technology as being 'unbelievable' and just short of being able to read a credit card number on the seafloor. 

He said the company's modified drones could scour four times the area covered in previous attempts to find MH370.

Asked if he thought he could find MH370, Romeo said: 'I think we can.

'I feel like we've proved our credibility, we've proved our competence,' he told 60 Minutes.

'We've proved our ability to take equipment and use novel techniques.'

Deep Sea Visions is preparing to submit a search proposal to the Malaysian government.

'And I believe that the Malaysian government wants answers,' Romeo said.

British pilot Simon Hardy (pictured) has said he believes that the plane was sunk into the ocean at a spot that has never been searched before

The most persistent theory has centred on the pilot - Zaharie Ahmad Shah (pictured) - and suggestions that MH370's disappearance was a deliberate act by him

 'I refuse to believe that they do not want a huge accident, a huge crash like this to go unresolved. It just isn't fair, it wouldn't be fair to the families.'

According to his LinkedIn page, Romeo is an entrepreneur who worked in real estate in South Carolina before founding Deep Sea Vision in 2022. He is a qualified attorney with a law degree from the Charleston School of Law. 

Romeo also studied at the Air Force Intelligence School and is a former US Navy intelligence officer. 

In January, Romeo told USA Today that the search for Earhart's plane took him and his team over 100 days. 

'The Pacific Ocean is huge, which Amelia Earhart found out for herself. It’s an incredible distance to cover. We were out there for 100 days, over rough seas, and not a lot of ports to reprovision. That’s where we need different equipment so we can take a closer look, see how it’s laying on the sand, and work with others who have an interest in this.' 

Earhart's plane disappeared in 1937. She and navigator Fred Noonan where headed to Howland Island from Lae, New Guinea, where they were due to meet up with the US Coast Guard to refuel. The pair never made the rendezvous. 

In a separate interview with the Washington Post, Romeo said that finding Earhart's plane was 'something I've been dreaming about since I was a little kid.' 

MH370 inexplicably returned over Malaysia, passing Thai, south Indian, and Indonesian radar

Estimated MH370 flight path, with the island of Sumatra in the top right

Indian sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik creates a sand sculpture of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 on Puri beach in eastern Odisha state on March 7, 2015

Just what happened to MH370 remains one of the world's great mysteries. 

Peter Waring, 41, was drafted into the international search effort to find the 239 people on flight MH370 six months after it disappeared on March 8 2014.

The plane is believed to have gone down in the South Indian Ocean. But several government-backed and private searches over nearly ten years have failed to turn up any substantial information.

The official story given claims that Zaharie Ahad Shah, the pilot in charge of the vessel, executed a sudden U-turn less than an hour into the flight, before it plummeted into the Indian Ocean near an area known as the 7th Arc.

But Waring, an expert in mapping sea floors, believes MH370 was deliberately crashed into an area known as the Geelvinck Fracture Zone, nearly a thousand miles away from the 7th Arc. 

He told the Sun that investigators have wrongly worked under the assumption that the plane was out of Shah's control after its final contact with authorities on March 8 2014.

'I think [the search team] may have gone wrong with the assumption that the aircraft wasn't under control at the end,' he said.

'We were taking this quite seriously during the search, that the aircraft may have continued to be under control in one form or another after it crossed the 7th Arc.

'Once that had happened that means that the aircraft was probably further south.

'...if the aircraft was still under control at the seventh arc then the size of the Indian Ocean they could of of reached is so unimaginably large that you wouldn't have been able to afford to search it all.

'There was a whole lot wasted effort looking in the wrong areas.'

The pair's proposed trajectory for the downing of MH370

 Despite a frantic search by governments and private companies the plane was never found and the fate of its 237 passengers remains unknown

Officers carrying pieces of debris from an unidentified aircraft apparently washed ashore in Saint-Andre de la Reunion, eastern La Reunion island, France on July 29, 2015

 He says he believes the theory of Simon Hardy, a Boeing 777 expert who posits that Shah was 'suicidal' and deliberately flew the plane towards the Geelvinck Fracture Zone. 

Hardy, brought into the search effort in Waring's final months with the team, suggested he flew into the trench, around half a mile deep and seven miles wide on the sea floor, knowing it would be difficult to find.

Hardy believes that Shah was in control of the plane when it went down around 1,500 miles off the west coast of Australia.

Shah, who is missing and presumed dead along with all the others on the plane, has been accused of planning murder due to personal problems.

Some theorise that he locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit, closed down all communications, depressurised the main cabin and then disabled the aircraft so that it continued flying on auto-pilot until it ran out of fuel.

His personal problems, rumours in Kuala Lumpur said, included a split with his wife Fizah Khan, and his fury that a relative, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, had been given a five-year jail sentence for sodomy shortly before he boarded the plane for the flight to Beijing. 

But the pilot's wife angrily denied any personal problems and other family members and his friends said he was a devoted family man and loved his job.

Peter said on his podcast, The Search for MH370 - Deepest Dive, that the search team's success was measured in how much of the ocean they scanned, rather than whether the search area was correct.

He said: 'It was clear to me, that no matter what new evidence arose or what new analysis was undertaken, that the box [search area] would remain the same.'

Frustrated, he left the project for a new posting in September 2015.

He also criticised the search team's disregard for safety protocols.

'This is arguably the most rough area of ocean in terms of sea state in the world, ships are moving so slowly you could walk faster,' the former naval officer said.

'Not only was the ship moving very slowly, which you don't do in bad weather, but they were dragging this thing[search equipment] behind them that was two miles deep in the water.

'It's really dangerous, we were very lucky no one got hurt and or killed and it annoyed me that we were so flippant with their [crew's] safety.'

Waring added that the search was rushed and incorrectly done, given the immense pressure on the Malaysian government to find the plane as soon as possible.

'There was a lot of political pressure to have milestones, part of my job was to report each day on how much of the search area had been covered the previous day,' he said.

'The metric of success was only how much of that box we had completed, not if the box was in the right place to begin with.'