Amelia Earhart's family have broken their silence for the first time since images appearing to show her plane at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean were revealed.
The missing pilot's great-nephew has spoken out to say their family want her remains returned to her birthplace and her wrecked plane donated to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC.
It comes after a South Carolina-based, Deep Sea Vision last month released the sonar images.
The company say the images could be the remains of the plane she was flying when she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
Amelia Earhart's plane was last seen on July 2, 1937Insatgram (@deep.sea.vision)The photos were captured by an underwater submersible at a depth of 16,000ft.
Bram Kleppner, whose 92-year-old mother is one of the few relatives still alive who personally knew Earhart, said the family would like to see her remains returned and buried in Atchison, Kansas.
"It was where Amelia was born and where she spent a lot of her youth being cared for by her grandparents," he told The Times.
"With luck, it will end up in a place where anyone who's interested can go and spend some time with it."
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The 16-person Earhart mission began in September last year where the team spent 90 days searching 5,200 square miles of the Pacific Ocean floor.
The exact location of the find remains confidential for now but is within 100 miles of Howland Island.
DSV chief executive Tony Romeo, a former US Air Force intelligence officer, is said to be confident that they found the plane.
The pilot had bought the plane using money raised by the Purdue Research Foundation and had planned to eventually return it to Purdue University.
The mystery surrounding Amelia Earhart has persisted for more than 80 yearsGetty ImagesEarhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1937.
She hoped to become the first woman to fly around the world butvanished on July 2, 1937, with navigator Fred Noonan after taking off from Lae, Papua New Guinea.
Some experts suggest Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and ditched their twin-engine Lockheed Electra on the ocean surface near Howland Island.
