When Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan vanished in 1937, Navy and Coast Guard search-and-rescue missions combed 250,000 square miles in search of them. By the final week of the search this undertaking cost $250,000 per day, or $5.3 million per day adjusted for inflation by 2024, as Time reported. But cost didn’t matter — it was Amelia Earhart, after all. She was an icon of American culture and an inspiration for young women across the globe. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, won the Distinguished Flying Cross for “heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in an aerial flight,” founded the Ninety-Nines to advance the goals of women in aviation, set speed and altitude records, and more. In her 1932 memoir “The Fun of It,” she wrote, “Flying may not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.”
It’s a testament to Earhart’s profound impact that we still talk about her — and search for her — today. This is why Tony Romeo, a former Air Force intelligence officer, set out to investigate the suspected location where Earhart’s Lockheed Electra might have crashed. As NBC News says, his expedition cost $11 million and involved the use of sonar to scan the ocean floor. After reviewing images taken last December 2023, Romeo believes he’s caught sight of the distinctive shape of Earhart’s twin-engine, front-heavy airplane.
