I 100% agree.
But not because it might be Earhart’s plane. That’s the least interesting thing it could possibly be. There’s no mystery about Earhart: We all know what happened to her. She crashed into the ocean, and where precisely in the very large ocean it was is basically irrelevant.
But if we go down and find it’s something else, then we’ll learn more about the things we don’t know about on the ocean floor. And there’s a heck of a lot of things we don’t know about on the ocean floor.
You’re talking about Atlantis, right?
If only Stockton Rush’s Titan submersible hadn’t had a bit of a leak–he could sell tourist tickets to visit the site!
OK, buddy, you just lost your Illuminati privileges.
Why, Sullie’s didn’t.
As far as I know, there’s no reason to think she didn’t perform a smooth, controlled, survivable ditch. Maybe the plane broke up, maybe it didn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if they got out and their bodies were a long ways from the plane.
The obvious question would be - how did they land smoothly enough to survive, yet in deep enough water that the plane is not found, yet close enough to land to survive, and have time to pull off a chunk of metal which was attached with multiple rivets (double rows?), and that was the one thing they took with them?
Deep water is very smooth.
They could stay afloat for a long time because their seat cushions doubled as life preservers.
Just as they began to lose altitude she held up that piece of metal and asked “Was this part important?”
Yes… look before you leap, still waters run deep…
It might be relevant to mention the sonar image of the Loch Ness monster - that wasn’t
They were very clever.
2 possible explanations:
I’m not supremely confident in either of those explanations, but they’re within the realm of possibility.
Seaplanes are made to land underwater. They just misjudged the depth of the runway.
Well, I think the aluminum panel hypothesis has been ruled out. I meant something like they drifted 10-15 miles from the ditch site hoping for a pickup before they drowned.
That image could be anything, but have they got an accurate measurement of the wingspan and mapped it to the Electra?
I saw this article when it first came out in the WSJ (guest link here), and my thought was that while the sonar image looks kind of like an airplane, it doesn’t look much like Amelia Earhart’s airplane. I can’t find drawings of the Lockheed Electra 10E like she flew, but Wikipedia has a top-view technical drawing of the similar 10A model. To my eyes, it looks almost nothing like the sonar image. For one thing, the sonar “plane” looks to have swept wings, but Earhart’s plane had straight wings. I am no expert on sonar or plane crashes so I may be missing something.
My thoughts exactly.
Trying to seriously address the ditching …
There are a few different scenarios.
They lost control, perhaps flying through a thunderstorm, or they fell asleep, and screwed into the ocean at speed. In that case the airplane would break up on impact and there’s be no recognizable shape to find.
They ran out of fuel during the day in benign weather & sea state. And they got lucky enough to perform a nice ditching. The airplane is 99% intact, and unless they were injured in the sudden stop amid the shitty crashworthiness and seat belts of the era, they got into their raft and died of exposure & thirst some days / weeks later having drifted distance X in net direction Y from the point of ditching. Meanwhile, the airplane duly sank as a mostly/entirely intact unit, but picked up speed on the way down and hit the seafloor pretty hard, bending a few things. Assuming it wasn’t badly bent at touchdown, its inherent stability as an air vehicle would keep it more or less “gliding” downwards as a one-time use submarine until it met the sea floor.
Scenario #2 but at night or in poor weather or high sea state, or an engine quit, or some such. With the result that they ditched under mostly under control, but f***ed up the landing, cartwheeled or some such, and the airplane was badly bent or lost a big chunk of something. And then sank, eventually hitting the sea floor after gosh knows what gyrations.
I could certainly see scenario 2 or even a mild variant of 3 as consistent with the sonar image. The engines are big blocks of drag, and an almost-good ditching could have bent the wings aft a smidgen. Ref Lockheed Model 10 Electra - Wikipedia, the leading edges slant aft a bit. Since the thing that resembles a horizontal tail is tweaked too, this image falls IMO solidly in the realm of “plausible damage to a plausible Lockheed Model 10”
Not proof by any stretch, but it’s not dreadfully inconsistent either. Assuming of course it isn’t a doctored image.
At 16,500 feet down I expect the subsequent consequences of sea growth to be small enough it’d be mostly intact. If this image was claimed to be found in 100 feet of water in a lagoon I’d be shouting “BS!” from the rooftops; wreckage in that environment would long since have been overrun by sessile sea critters and deformed, destroyed, or digested / encrusted into unrecognizability.
The searcher guy explains away the swept back wings by saying it’s a sonar distortion caused because the AUV was moving.
Of course, he also points to what looks like a twin tail as supporting evidence it’s the Earhart plane. Why the swept back wings are a distortion and the twin tail isn’t, I don’t know.
Because nobody gets additional interest/funding by saying “hey look at this cool shape! totally not Amelia’s plane at all, but it’s so cool!”
The leading edges are swept back. They’re not swept back like a modern fighter but theoretically we’re talking about an older plane. It’s a pretty poor image to work with. If it’s reflective metal then the what other planes would be in the area from WW-II ?
I’m wondering why they didn’t go ahead and make a deep sea attempt to view it while they were there. It’s 16,000 feet down.