‘Promising’ new sonar discovery could finally solve Amelia Earhart plane mystery

People searching for missing pilot Amelia Earhart and her plane may have made a breakthrough in their search.

A 90-day expedition was launched near Howland Island - close to where the famed pilot vanished - to investigate the 87-year-old mystery.

Earhart was known as a pioneering pilot, and was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

However, her career ended in tragedy when Earhart vanished during an ambitious global flight in 1937.

Bram Kleppner, the great nephew of Earhart and a spokesperson for the family, said that he was thankful for the efforts of US Air Force veteran Tony Romeo after he launched the expedition.

And now, the expedition has turned up what could be a lead in the search for Earhart.

Romeo's Deep Sea Vision crew has detected what could be a sunken plane some 16,000ft below the surface of the ocean.

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Kleppner told Fox News Digital: “There have been many, many searches, and really, not a single shred of evidence has ever turned up.

“It feels like this is a more promising lead than anything we’ve seen to date. The image they got does look like a plane, and it is in about the right place where Amelia would’ve crashed."

Kleppner has kept his expectations reasonable, given that locating one flight from 87 years ago is something of a mammoth task.

Nonetheless, Kleppner has expressed his thanks to Romeo for the work and transparency on the project.

He said: “I really appreciate the fact that he actually made the courtesy to our family to track down my mother, which is not easy to do, and reached out to her, but she doesn’t really talk to the public anymore."

But how can they confirm whether they have actually found the right plane?

Well, you can start by trying to get an actual image of the plane.

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Kleppner told the Daily Mail: “We need to get a camera on it. When we see those numbers NR16020 on the wing, that’s when we’ll know for sure what it is."

NR16020 is the number of the flight on the aircraft that Earhart was piloting.

Deep Sea Vision is now preparing for a follow-up expedition.

Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan wet missing while flying on a 2,500 mile leg from Lae to Howland Island far out in the Pacific Ocean, where they would refuel.

But the pair never arrived at the destination, and despite an enormous search and rescue operation to find them, the plane has never been found.

Earhart was declared officially dead on January 5, 1939.