An American explorer claims his company has the technology to locate the doomed MH370 on the tenth anniversary of its still unsolved disappearance.
Tony Romeo and his company, Deep Sea Vision, first made global headlines earlier this year when they claimed to have found the remains of Amelia Earhart’s plane.
March 8 marked ten years since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from radar after taking off from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board.
In a new interview with Australia’s 60 Minutes, Deep Sea CEO Romeo said he believed his company was capable of making the breakthrough.
The company plans to send one of its underwater drones, the Hugin 6000, to the ocean floor to search for the missing plane.
CEO of Deep Sea Vision, Tony Romeo, is pictured on 60 Minutes
The missing plane – a Boeing 777-200ER aircraft – takes off in France in 2011
One of the drones Deep Sea Vision plans to use to search for MH370 is pictured
Romeo, who sold his commercial real estate investments to fund his search, managed to capture a sonar image of an airplane-shaped object on the ocean floor in December.
Romeo spent $11 million to finance the trip and buy the high-tech equipment needed for the search, including an underwater ‘Hugin’ drone manufactured by Norwegian company Kongsberg
“He’s flying 50 meters above the seabed and just going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth,” Romeo told 60 Minutes on Sunday.
‘Big eyes, looking at everything it can see, sucking in data and storing it, coming back to the surface, we put a USB stick in it, get the data out and we look at it on a computer exactly as it looked .’
Romeo described the company’s technology as ‘incredible’ and fell just short of reading a credit card number on the seabed.
He said the company’s modified drones could search four times the area covered in previous attempts to find MH370.
When asked if he thought he could find MH370, Romeo said: ‘I think we can.
“I feel like we’ve proven our credibility, we’ve proven our competency,” he told 60 Minutes.
“We have proven that we can use equipment and use new techniques.”
Deep Sea Visions is preparing to submit a search proposal to the Malaysian government.
“And I believe the Malaysian government wants answers,” Romeo said.
British pilot Simon Hardy (pictured) has said he believes the plane sank in the ocean in a spot that has never been searched before
The most persistent theory focused on the pilot – Zaharie Ahmad Shah (pictured) – and the suggestion that MH370’s disappearance was a deliberate act on his part.
“I refuse to believe that they don’t want a major accident, a major accident like this, to remain unsolved. It’s just not fair, it wouldn’t be fair to the families.”
According to his LinkedIn page, Romeo is an entrepreneur who worked in the real estate industry in South Carolina before founding Deep Sea Vision in 2022. He is a qualified attorney with a law degree from Charleston School of Law.
Romeo also attended the Air Force Intelligence School and is a former US Navy intelligence officer.
In January Romeo said USA today that the search for Earhart’s plane took him and his team more than 100 days.
‘The Pacific Ocean is enormous, as Amelia Earhart discovered for herself. It’s an incredible distance to travel. We were out there for a hundred days, in rough seas, and there weren’t many ports to resupply. We need different equipment there so we can get a closer look, see how it sits on the sand and collaborate with others who are interested.”
Earhart’s plane disappeared in 1937. She and navigator Fred Noonan were en route to Howland Island from Lae, New Guinea, where they were to rendezvous with the U.S. Coast Guard for refueling. The pair never made it to the rendezvous.
In a separate interview with the Washington Post, Romeo said finding Earhart’s plane was “something I’ve dreamed of since I was a little kid.”