Explorer claims to have found missing plane of Amelia Earhart at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean

Tony Romeo, CEO of Deep Sea Vision, told CNN that the discovery was 'a surreal moment'

A pilot and explorer has claimed to have discovered the lost plane of Amelia Earhart at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Tony Romeo, CEO of Deep Sea Vision and an ex-US Air Force pilot, with the help of his team, combed the ocean floor using an underwater vehicle in December.

After reviewing the footage, the group found it caught sonar images of an object seemingly similar to the one Earhart was flying when it went missing in 1937.

Mr Romeo believes it is the lost aviator's twin engine Lockheed 10-E Electra.

He bankrolled the expedition with $11 million of his own money - which he says has now paid off.

"It was a surreal moment," Mr Romeo said.

"We'd been going for 90 days and the team was frustrated and, you know, everybody's kind of on each other's nerves at this point, disappointed.

"But you see that come across the screen and suddenly it's like, wow, that's different.

"You see weird rock formations and things on the bottom of the ocean, but you're not gonna see like that nice T-shape that an airplane forms."

The image was taken from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, about 100 miles from the uninhabited Howland Island.

During an attempt at becoming the first woman to complete a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island.

The two were last seen in Lae, New Guinea, on July 2, 1937, on the last land stop before Howland Island and one of their final legs of the flight.

It is generally presumed that she and Noonan died somewhere in the Pacific during the circumnavigation. Nearly one year and six months after she and Noonan disappeared, Earhart was officially declared dead.

"You'd be hard-pressed to convince me that's anything but an aircraft, for one, and two, that it's not Amelia's aircraft," Mr Romeo told NBC News.

"There's no other known crashes in the area, and certainly not of that era in that kind of design with the tail that you see clearly in the image."

The Deep Sea Vision team plan to return to the site this year or early next year with a camera and a drone to investigate further.

"The next step is confirmation, and there's a lot we need to know about it. And it looks like there's some damage. I mean, it's been sitting there for 87 years at this point," he said.

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