This Charleston company may have found Amelia Earhart’s plane. What it has meant for business

Listen to this article

It turns out that discovering what could possibly be Amelia Earhart’s plane in the depths of the Pacific Ocean is a boon for a deep-sea exploration company’s business.

Deep Sea Vision, a Charleston-based underwater surveying company, announced in January that its high-tech commercial autonomous vehicle went on an underwater expedition specifically to locate Earhart’s plane in late 2023 and revealed compelling sonar images that possibly show the missing aviator’s plane based on the size, scale and location.

The discovery became national news, putting a spotlight on Deep Sea Vision and the capability of its $9 million bright orange 18-foot long HUGIN 6000 underwater vehicle that can scan and survey the seafloor at depths of up to 6,000 meters (about 20,000 feet), which is 4,000 feet deeper than where the Titanic landed.

“Deep Sea Vision went from 80 Instagram followers to 15,000 followers in the span of a week,” said Tony Romeo, CEO and founder. “We got lot of hits on our website. We got a call from someone who lost her cell phone in Lake Michigan and wanted us to go look for it…we got all kinds of wild stuff that people want us to go search for in the oceans.”

Blurry sonar images of Earhart’s purported plane were captured by the HUGIN 6000 on day 32 of its expedition at a depth of 5,000 meters underwater and 60 miles from the missing aviator’s last location.

Romeo believes Earhart’s navigator on board miscalculated the star navigation as they passed over the international dateline, which would have created an error of 60 miles.

“You’d be hard-pressed to look at the data and say it is anything but a plane. We are very cognizant that sonar images can stretch and distort objects depending on their distance, but we feel very good about our target,” Romeo said. “We know it is a hard surface and not a fish, sand or even mud that appears like a plane due to the reflectivity of the sonar image. We also have found no evidence of any aircraft that have been reported missing or have disappeared in that area. So, we believe this is very likely to be Earhart’s plane.”

The discovery was a dream realized for Romeo, who left the commercial real estate industry two years ago to follow his dream as an entrepreneur, shipwreck and plane wreck hunter.

Romeo said his family had always had a fascination with the world’s most famous female aviator, who went missing over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 during her attempt to fly around the world. Romeo’s dad was a pilot with PanAm for four decades and he is an Air Force Academy graduate and former Air Force member.

“I believe her story is the greatest unsolved mystery of all time and perfect for those who like unsolved riddles,” Romeo said.

An underwater business niche

Romeo’s Deep Sea Vision business model was always to buy an elite autonomous sea vehicle with deep sonar technology specifically to find Earhart’s plane, but also to lease the equipment out to large companies to subsidize his passion for wreck hunting.

“I was (previously) in a cash-flowing, real estate, leasing-type businesses and the opportunity came to buy complex, sophisticated equipment and lease it out,” Romeo said.

The company has invested $9 million in the HUGIN 600, which Romeo purchased from a company in Norway (a somewhat complicated transaction that needed involvement with the U.S. Embassy due to the vehicle’s scale and capabilities).

“Getting into the business, learning how to lease this equipment, learning how to put a team together who knows how to use it, how to find a vessel to charter it…we’ve made a successful business and I’m really proud of it,” Romeo said.

Deep Sea Vision now has six employees.

The HUGIN 6000’s lucrative “day job” is its use as an exploratory underwater vehicle for large companies and governmental clients, which lease the equipment for $25,000-$30,000 per day for various deep sonar exploratory missions, including deep sea cable and the emerging sea minerals industry, Romeo said.

The HUGIN 6000 has become so in-demand that it is leased through the end of 2024, Romeo said, with a Deep Sea Vision employee accompanying the vehicle at every site to make sure the equipment is being operated properly.

“Shipwreck stuff is five to 10 percent of our business,” Romeo said. “Deep Sea Vision aims to become a market leader in mineral exploration and habitat mapping over the next decade.”

The HUGIN 6000 runs off lithium batteries and is programmed to troll underwater in a certain area and for a certain number of days. It’s brought out to the area by boat and then workers slide it off the back of the vessel where it completes an underwater expedition on its own, with no direct human component.

“It’s flying untethered at about 50 feet above the sea floor, ‘mowing the lawn,’ taking pictures with its sonar,” Romeo said.

When the expedition is done, the HUGIN 6000 floats back up to the surface and sends a signal to a satellite to track its location, where workers intercept it and haul it back onto the boat, Romeo said. That’s when the data transfer begins, to see what the vehicle discovered.

“When it comes to the surface and you plug a cable into it, you download the data,” Romeo said. “There’s only a handful of sea vehicles in the entire world that can go down to 6,000 meters and only five or six in the world that offer our full software and hardware suite.”

What’s next for Amelia Earhart’s plane?

Romeo said the HUGIN 6000 will return to the site where they believe Amelia Earhart’s plane is located to further explore — possibly with documentary filmmakers in tow.

“We’ll go back and take pictures of it and maybe make an IMAX-type (production) with a lot more media to share with the world,” Romeo said. “We kind of opened the Amelia Earhart saga a little bit and got folks interested in her again, which is cool.’

The HUGIN 600 has the ability to read metal signatures using a surface magnetometer, which can verify serial numbers on the plane. The goal — if the plane is able to be verified — is to help raise the plane and get it into a museum, Romeo said.

“We opened the Amelia Earhart saga and got folks interested in her again. This (announcement) was to get everybody excited and let everybody know what we thought we found. The next step will be raising it, possibly bringing it up and restoring it,” Romeo said. “There are (likely) going to be interested parties with Amelia who will probably make a claim on the plane, and we’ll just have to work through that.”

Aside from Earhart’s plane, there’s a number of additional underwater wreck passion projects on Romeo’s radar, including The Royal Merchant ship and Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

“It’s one that we’re looking at carefully,” Romeo said. He adds that the uses for the HUGIN 6000’s technology are endless.

“If somebody wants to go into the Charleston Harbor and see everything that’s underneath the Ravenel Bridge and along the coast, we would fully do that. Local governments could use it for different things; military (clients) could use it to find downed aircrafts, black boxes; companies could use it for laying internet cables across the oceans,” Romeo said.

Still, he remains steadfast in the original mission in founding the company.

If upon further inspection, the discovery is not, in fact, Earhart’s plane, “We will 100 percent continue our search for America’s favorite missing person,” Romeo said.