The public is invited to a special Temecula Valley Historical Society program at 6 p.m. on Jan. 27 when Temecula resident Lloyd Romeo tells about his search for Amelia Earhart’s lost plane in the South Pacific.
Lloyd Romeo, the Project Manager for Deep Sea Vision, was originally from Long Island in New York and as the son of a PanAm pilot also lived in Japan, Yugoslavia, and Hong Kong. Lloyd received his pilot’s license at age twenty, earned an Aeronautics Degree from Farmingdale SUNY, and later studied micro-computer engineering at the University of California at Irvine. He retired in 2022 after 35 years of service as a Controls Engineer at industrial controls company, Opto 22. He has lived in Temecula since 1991 where he enjoys building and flying radio control airplanes.
Lloyd joined with his brother Tony Romeo to search for the famous aviatrix’s plane. Tony, a commercial real estate investor in Charlestown, South Carolina, a pilot, and a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, sold his real estate holdings to fund the project to find the plane carrying Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan when it was lost in the South Pacific in 1937.
The exploration company “Deep Sea Vision” conducted an underwater search for several months with a sixteen-man crew during 2023 and 2024. They scanned over 7,000 square miles of the ocean floor using a Hugin 6000 unmanned submersible unit. They sometimes felt like boys on a treasure hunt.
They found something. While reviewing sonar images, one was the shape of an airplane in a plausible location to be Earhart’s plane.
To find out what exactly they found, the public is welcome to attend this presentation at no charge at 6 p.m. on January 27 in the Little Temecula History Museum next to Kohls in south Temecula, or watch the live streaming of the program on the Historical Society’s Facebook page. Any questions about the program can be directed to Rebecca Farnbach at info@temeculahistory.org.
