Deep sea explorers explain why they're sure they've found Amelia Earhart's plane 87 years after iconic aviator vanished

Two deep sea explorer brothers who 'found' the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's missing plane say they are convinced the 87-year-old  mystery has finally been unraveled.

Deep Sea Vision CEO Tony Romeo and his brother Lloyd set off to find the plane and solve the mystery of Earhart's disappearance in September and snapped countless images of the sea floor three miles down.

Two months later, their team mate Craig Wallace recovered a data file of images believed to be corrupted and almost deleted them. 

But they were wrong. As the brothers crowded around Wallace's computer, multiple images depicting a plane-shaped blob stared back at them.

They were reasonably confident they'd found Earhart's plane but weren't ready to confirm it 100 percent. Now, they say the images they captured are an exact match to the dimensions of Earhart's plane.

Deep Sea Vision CEO Tony Romeo and his brother Lloyd in March released a sonar image from their recent $11 million Pacific Ocean expedition, showing a ghostly outline resembling Earhart's Lockheed Electra, which vanished in 1937

DSV focused their search close to Howland Island, based on the 'Date Line' theory that would cause a navigational error of about 60 miles 

The images were also taken in the area where experts believe she crashed - in a 100-mile radius around Howland Island. 

Deep Sea Vision is keeping the exact location secret, to prevent treasure hunters from beating them back to the site.

The remote 395-acre island is almost halfway between Hawaii and Australia, and Earhart may have been targeting the airstrip on it when she vanished.

Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937 during an attempted around-the-world flight, as they flew on a leg between Lae, Papua New Guinea and Howland Island.

Her disappearance generated a myriad of conspiracy theories, with some proposing she was a US spy captured by the Japanese military, or that she secretly returned to the US to live under an assumed name.

Another more recent theory suggested that Earhart crashed or made an emergency landing on an uninhabited Pacific Island, Nikomaroro, now Gardner Island. 

Amelia Earhart and her Lockheed 10-E Electra vanished at the height of her fame

Tony Romeo (left) is seen with DSV operations chief Corey Friend upon leaving Tarawa, Kiribati on September 8, 2023

Deep Sea Vision team (L to R) Mahesh Pichandi, Harald Aagedal, Craig Wallace, Tony Romeo, John Haig, Corey Friend, Lloyd Romeo

Bones were found on the island in 1940 that scientists later said could be consistent with a woman of Earhart's size, but they were never confirmed to be hers.

Since Earhart was a Kansas native, there's always been a lot of interest in her case in the midwestern state. 

This past weekend, the annual Amelia Earhart Festival was held in Atchison - where the famous aviator was born in 1897 - and Tony Romeo made an appearance to speak about his jaw-dropping discovery.

As he talked with local media in the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum, he stood beneath the Muriel plane, the world's last Lockheed Electra 10-E - an identical plane to the one Earhart piloted on her final flight.

'We were out there for about 80 days. We scanned about 5200 square miles,' Tony said.

He added that the drone they used was dropped 50 meters above the sea floor and 'mowed the grass,' essentially going back and forth within set parameters until it found something.

Pictured: The Muriel plane, the world's last Lockheed Electra 10-E. It's an identical plane to the one Earhart piloted during her last flight and sits in the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum in Atchison, Kansas.

Team gathers around for review of data returning from sonar system when the system returns to the surface. Due to the amount of data collected a thorough review of all the sea floor imagery can take days to complete.

Earhart was flying a Lockheed Model 10 Electra when the plane vanished on July 2, 1937. In the last in-flight radio message heard by Itasca, Earhart said: 'We are on the line 157 337 …. We are running on line north and south.' The numbers 157 and 337 refer to compass headings – 157° and 337° – and describe a line that passes through the intended destination, Howland Island.

He also went into how perilous their mission was, given how far away the Earhart crash site is away from civilization.

'Once you get out there, you're three days away from anything, so if anything goes wrong, you're in trouble. You can't bring a helicopter out there,' he said. 'Everything you're going to need out there has to be in place.'

Tony reiterated his ultimate goal of returning to the site and pulling the plane out of the water. He previously said he wants to donate the remains to the Smithsonian.

But before any extraction operations can commence, he said the crash location needs to be canvassed and photographed in color. 

'We need to see...is it still intact? Are the wings folded down. We need to see how it's sitting in the sediment, is in mud, is it in sand?

'And then we need to see if there's a debris field,' he added. 'Are there shoes outside the plane, are there pieces of the plane nearby that we need to worry about salvaging?'

And there's a huge sense of urgency according to Tony, because the longer the plane sits at the bottom of the ocean, the worse shape it'll be in when it's recovered. 

'We want to do it as quickly as possible,' he said, when asked how long this process would take. 

'The plane is sitting there, and it's slowly disintegrating just like the Titanic.'