Why there was an air of hope in Atchison that Amelia Earhart’s plane has been found

It wasn’t fame, notoriety, or the promise of recognition that led Tony Romeo, the chief executive officer at Deep Sea Vision , to begin his search for the plane of long-lost pilot Amelia Earhart.

It was magnet fishing.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Romeo took his young son magnet fishing, which is the process of fishing with strong magnets to pull pieces of metal from bodies of water, according to Magnet Fishing Planet . The father and son wondered if they could find boats and other large structures during the trip — including Earhart’s missing plane.

Tony Romeo went home and began to research Earhart, and wondered why the plane hadn’t yet been found.

“She didn’t fly off the edge of the earth, she wasn’t abducted by UFO’s, we can rule those two out,” Tony Romeo said.

“She’s not marooned on an island anywhere, that’s certain. And we have all this information and we still haven’t found her,” he said. “And the more I started reading and the more I started researching it, this one is not a question of where it’s at, it’s a question of logistics.”

The search for Amelia Earhart’s plane

Tony Romeo, along with his brother, Lloyd Romeo, put together a team to go search for Earhart’s plane in the Pacific Ocean. Towards the end of their expedition in late January, the team was able to generate a sonar image of a plane that looks similar to Earhart’s missing Lockheed Electra 10-E.

The Romeo’s, among other members of their team and Amelia Earhart researchers, gathered Friday at the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum to commemorate the find and celebrate Amelia Earhart’s birthday at the annual Amelia Earhart Festival in Atchison.

The Romeo’s come from an aviation background and grew up listening to the story of Amelia Earhart, Tony Romeo said.

“It wasn’t anything I was ever actually gonna go out and solve myself,” Tony Romeo said. “But it got to a point in my life where I had the resources and the time and the willingness to do it. We started looking at the technology available and said, ‘This one is not going to remain unsolved for too much longer.’”

The team’s discovery in late January made national headlines in publications like The Wall Street Journal , after an extensive expedition by the Deep Sea Vision to find Earhart’s plane which stretched on for at least three or four years, Tony Romeo said.

The Romeo’s next big project?

Verifying the plane is actually Earhart’s.

The image itself doesn’t prove the plane is Earhart’s. According to the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum Aeronautics Division Curator Dorothy Cochrane, there are specific characteristics of Earhart’s plane that could identify its ownership. The best things searchers could find, Cochrane said, is the plane’s registration number, a Lockheed star. Other identifiers could be a fuselage or the plane’s fuel tanks.

“If he goes back and verifies that this is indeed her aircraft, and we can talk about how you do that, that’s just huge,” Cochrane said. “We are very excited. We’ve been delighted.”

Cochrane said she appreciates Deep Sea Vision, and another company that has been exploring the area, Nauticos , for using factual evidence and information to find the plane.

Tony Romeo said he hopes to one day see the plane in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

“That’s where it belongs, it’s an American treasure,” Tony Romeo said. “She wants to come home. She’s America’s favorite missing person, as I like to call her. She needs to come home.”

A Kansas aviation legend

Amelia Earhart grew up in both Atchison and Des Moines, Iowa. She was the daughter of an alcoholic, and quit college to help provide for her family, according to previous reporting from The Star . In 1923, she became the 16th woman in the U.S. to earn her pilot’s license.

Earhart was a staunch advocate for women’s rights, and gained notoriety for attempting to become the first woman to fly a plane around the world. It was during this attempt in 1937 that Earhart, 39, disappeared over the Pacific Ocean with her navigator, Fred Noonan .

Atchison is host to a number of exhibits and artworks dedicated to Earhart, including the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum, the Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum and the Trinity Episcopal Church, where Earhart was baptized, according to a city guide.

Theories and conspiracies have swirled around the pair’s disappearance for 87 years.

On Friday, the Romeo’s, along with other Earhart experts Rod Blacksome, Gary LaPook and Liz Smith gathered at Atchison’s Fox Theatre for “Adventure Amelia,” a panel moderated by Cochrane. Over an hour and a half, the panel spoke about their efforts and experiences in attempting to find Earhart’s plane and the disappearance of the woman herself.

The full theater, including two individuals dressed as Earhart herself, sat at rapt attention as each panelist talked about their journey with Earhart.

“You have to be careful when you start an Amelia person on the topic,” pilot and documentary filmmaker Liz Smith said. “It can go on forever.”

Also in attendance for the Amelia Earhart Festival was Amelia Rose Earhart, the first person to recreate her namesake’s flight around the world, according to a news release. Earhart, who is not related to the famed pilot who went missing 87 years ago, was named after her because her mother wanted to give her daughter a strong female role model to look up to, she said.

“She said, ‘selfishly, when you go to a party, no one’s ever going to forget that they met Amelia Earhart,” Earhart said.

Earhart has been attending the festival since 2013, when she won the Pioneering Achievement Award, she said. This year, Earhart served as an interviewer for a Saturday panel featuring the Romeo brothers. Earhart also ran the Fly With Amelia Foundation for ten years. The foundation, based in Colorado, put young women through flight school, she said.

The celebration, which is in the books already for 2024, occurs in Atchison each July. The Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. and on Sundays from 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

The Star’s Daniel Desrochers contributed to reporting.