According to the lawsuit, the wire and rope are definitely Earhart's airplane! Don't forget the banjo, violin and skeletons in the video as well.
I will cut the searchers a little bit of slack on this particular video. The ROV was literally at the end of its tether and did not have enough power to overcome the weight of the cables of the boat bobbing on the surface. That particular ROV was not designed to operate at that depth and this dive was not part of the original plan.
The ROV used in 2012 could dive deeper on the occasions when it was operating properly. On the documentaries of underwater searches that I have seen, it seems that equipment failures always seems to eat up a significant percentage of the search time. The same thing happened on the 2012 search for Earhart. The cameras were down so much of the time that they never got to the area of the anomaly.
In fact, they had no idea that there was an anomaly during the expedition. The sonar images that included the anomaly could not be viewed in real-time and were not available to the searchers until they got home. The anomaly was discovered several months after the expedition, almost by accident.
I would truly like to have a job where noone expects my equipment to work properly.
