Earhart's Plane Found?! (1 Viewer)

[stona]

It may have had something to do with her taking off with the reported less than full fuel load?

Putnam said that taking off with 1,000 gallons 'strained' the aircraft, whatever that means.

Noonan said they would leave Lae with 950 gallons. As the navigator he should surely have needed to know what their fuel supply and thus endurance would be.

Earhart wrote that she would 'probably' carry 1,000 gallons for the Lae-Howland leg.

Whether this reduction in fuel load from the maximum theoretically possible was due to the problems with ground handling and take off of the overloaded aircraft (and the ground loop in March at Luke Field may well have had something to do with the decision) or not we don't know. But there is substantial evidence that those calculating her endurance based on the full 1,150 (1,156?) gallon capacity are using the wrong data.

Cheers

Steve

 

[stona]

I reckon I know where Earhart's plane is.
I have prepared a map (well, at minimal expense, google earth and microsoft paint has) to show the area , all I need now is a few million dollars and I'll be off. There are a couple of very minor problems, it is literally in the middle of nowhere and in about 5000m of water, but let's not be discouraged. My evidence is at least as good as any of the other organisations looking for the aircraft, I think it's a lot better

Any donations to:
Steven A Conman Esquire
Conspiracy Street
Consville
England

With a bit of luck, and enough gullible people, I could make a decent living out of this!

Thanks

Steve

 

[stona]

IIRC her radio required a working engine, so if they had stopped due to being out of fuel then they could not have called out.

It's why the Gardner Island theory is dependent upon Earhart making a wheels down emergency landing on the island, making some radio transmissions before her aircraft was washed off into the sea, conveniently before the USN searched the island (from the air) a few days later, finding no trace of her, Noonan or the aircraft. The island is small and certainly had no kind of prepared strip on which such a landing would normally be attempted. It also implies that she had some fuel left to run whichever engine powered the generator.
Occam's razor again. That's a lot of hypotheses, and some unlikely ones too.
Cheers
Steve

 

[FLYBOYJ]

I posted this 10 years ago;

AP diary adds clue to Earhart mystery By RICHARD PYLE, Associated Press Writer
Sat Mar 31, 6:03 PM ET

It's the coldest of cold cases, and yet it keeps warming to life. Seventy years after Amelia Earhart disappeared, clues are still turning up. Long-dismissed notes taken of a shortwave distress call beginning, "This is Amelia Earhart...," are getting another look.

The previously unknown diary of an Associated Press reporter reveals a new perspective.

A team that has already found aircraft parts and pieces of a woman's shoe on a remote South Pacific atoll hopes to return there this year to search for more evidence, maybe even DNA.

If what's known now had been conveyed to searchers then, might Earhart and her navigator have been found alive? It's one of a thousand questions that keep the case from being declared dead, as Earhart herself was a year and a half after she vanished.

For nearly 18 hours, Earhart's twin-engine Lockheed Electra drummed steadily eastward over the Pacific, and as sunrise etched a molten strip of light along the horizon, navigator Fred J. Noonan marked the time and calculated the remaining distance to Howland Island.

The date was July 2, 1937, and the pair were near the end of a 2,550-mile trek from Lae, New Guinea, the longest and most perilous leg of a much-publicized "World Flight" begun 44 days earlier in Oakland, Calif.

At the journey's end there a few days hence, Earhart, already the most famous aviator of the decade, was to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe.

Noonan, a former Pan American Airways navigator, estimated when the plane would reach an imaginary "line of position" running northwest-southeast through Howland, where they were to land, rest and refuel for the onward flight to Hawaii.

Earhart pushed the talk button on her radio mike and said, "200 miles out."

Her voice — described as a "whispery drawl," evoking her Kansas roots — was heard by the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, rocking gently in calm seas off Howland. The U.S. government had built an airstrip on the treeless, 500-acre coral spit, and at the request of Earhart's husband and manager, publisher George Putnam, dispatched the cutter from Hawaii to help her find her way.

During the night, Itasca's radio operators had become increasingly exasperated. Earhart's voice had come through in only a few, brief, static-marred transmissions — "sky overcast" was one — and hadn't acknowledged any of Itasca's messages or its steady stream of Morse code A's sent as a homing signal: dot-dash, dot-dash... They decided the glamorous 39-year-old "Lady Lindy" was either arrogant or incompetent.

What nobody knew — not Earhart, and not Itasca — was that her plane's radio-reception antenna had been ripped away during the takeoff from Lae's bumpy dirt runway. The Itasca could hear Earhart, but she was unable to hear anything, voice or code.

Also listening in the Itasca's radio room was James W. Carey, one of two reporters aboard. The 23-year-old University of Hawaii student had been hired by The Associated Press to cover Earhart's Howland stopover. His job was to send brief radiograms to the AP in Honolulu and San Francisco.

But during the eight days since arriving at Howland, Carey also had been keeping a diary.

In small notebooks, he jotted down comments about the island's "gooney birds," beachcombing and poker games in Itasca's wardroom. He also noted how Earhart's delayed departure from Lae was affecting crewmembers' morale, writing on June 30: "They are getting tired of waiting for a `gooney' dame who doesn't seem to be aware of the annoyance the delays have made."

Carey's diary was unknown to Earhart scholars until last September, when a typewritten copy turned up on eBay and was bought by a member of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR. The non-profit organization believes Earhart and Noonan were not lost at sea, but landed on an uninhabited atoll called Gardner Island, and lived for an unknown period as castaways.

"Even though the diary doesn't answer the big question, it's an incredible discovery," said TIGHAR executive director Ric Gillespie, who has led eight expeditions to the island since 1989, and plans another this July if his group can raise enough money.

"We have long had the transcripts of the radio traffic, but this is the first document that puts a real person aboard Itasca and tells us something from a firsthand witness about what went on during those desperate hours and days."

___

On July 1, word came from New Guinea that the Electra was finally airborne.

Early on Friday, July 2, Carey wrote in his diary: "Up all last night following radio reports — scanty ... heard voice for first time 2:48 a.m. — `sky overcast.' All I heard. At 6:15 am reported `200 miles out.'"

By the time Earhart, her voice stronger, reported she was "100 miles out," a welcoming committee had gone ashore and was "waiting restlessly," Carey wrote.

If Noonan's dead-reckoning did not bring the plane directly over Howland at the "line of position," Earhart would fly up and down the 337-157 degree line until she found the island.

"To the north, the first landfall is Siberia," says Gillespie, "so if they didn't find it soon, they'd have turned back south, knowing that even if they missed Howland, there were other islands beyond it — Baker, McKean and Gardner — on that same line."

But nothing was that simple. By now, Earhart would be burning into her five-hour fuel reserve, and even in daylight, islands could be obscured by billowy clouds and their shadows on the water.

At 7:42 a.m. local time, Earhart's voice suddenly came loud and clear: "KHAQQ to Itasca. We must be on you but cannot see you. But gas is running low. Been unable to reach you by radio. We are flying at 1,000 feet."

At 7:58 a.m., there was a nervous edge to Earhart's normal calm. A log entry had her saying, "we are drifting but cannot hear you." An operator changed this to "we are circling." Gillespie believes she actually said, "we are listening."

As birds wheeled over the Howland shoreline, human ears strained for the sound of engines, and binoculars scanned for any sign of the silver Electra. Itasca continued sending Morse code A's.

About 8:30 a.m., believing Earhart must be out of gas, Itasca's captain, Cmdr. Warner K. Thompson, ordered the welcoming committee back to the ship. "Flash news from ship Itasca: `Amelia down,'" Carey wrote in his diary.

Suddenly, at 8:55 a.m., Earhart was back on: "We are on the line 157 337... we are running on line north and south." The radiomen agreed she sounded distraught; one thought she was near hysteria.

Then the radio went silent.

Having won a coin-toss with his United Press rival, Howard Hanzlick, to decide whose news bulletin would go first, Carey had prepared two versions: "Earhart landed __ Howland time," and "Flash Earhart crackup landing __ Howland time."

He had not anticipated a third alternative, that she might not land at all.

Now, with all frequencies reserved for possible distress calls, neither reporter could send anything. While AP broke the "Earhart missing" story from Honolulu, quoting Coast Guard officials there, it would be 18 hours before Carey's first report reached San Francisco.

In the meantime, he kept busy with the diary: "Itasca set off `full speed ahead' to search the northwest quadrant off Howland," the most likely area for the plane to be afloat on empty gas tanks.

Nothing was sighted, and by evening the ship's mood, Carey wrote, had "taken a turn to the more serious side."

Part 2...

Seventy years later, the mystery lingers. Millions have been spent on expeditions and deep-sea probes, and although legally declared dead by a California court in early 1939, Earhart has been the subject of more than 50 nonfiction books.

"In 1937 she was a celebrity — today she's an icon," says Gillespie, of Wilmington, Del., whose own book, "Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance," was published last year.

Theories have ranged from the official version — that the Electra ran out of gas and crashed at sea — to the absurd, including abduction by aliens, or Earhart living in New Jersey under an alias.

A 1943 Hollywood movie, "Flight for Freedom," echoed groundless claims that the pair were on a secret government spying mission against the Japanese and were captured and executed. A 1999 book asserted, without proof, that "the solution to the Earhart mystery lies on the ocean floor under 17,000 feet of water."

Gillespie's book, along with "Amelia Earhart's Shoes," a 2001 book written by four other TIGHAR volunteers, offers a bold, reasoned thesis that Earhart and Noonan crash-landed on a flat reef on Gardner, in the Phoenix Islands, 350 miles south of Howland, and survived, perhaps for months, on scant food and rainwater.

Searches of the remote atoll, now called Nikumaroro, have produced a tantalizing, if inconclusive, body of evidence.

In 1940, Gerard Gallagher, a British overseer on Gardner, recovered a partial human skeleton, a woman's shoe and an empty sextant box at what appeared to be a former campsite, littered with turtle, clamshell and bird remains.

Earhart being his first thought, Gallagher sent the items to Fiji, where a British doctor, examining the human bones secretly to avoid "unfounded rumors," decided they belonged to a stocky European or mixed-blood male, ruling out any Earhart-Noonan connection.

The bones later vanished, but in 1998, TIGHAR investigators located the doctor's notes in London.

Dr. Karen Ramey Burns, a forensic osteologist at the University of Georgia, found the Fiji doctor's bone measurements were more "consistent with" a female of northern European descent, about Earhart's age and height. Burns' report was independently seconded by Dr. Richard Jantz, a University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist.

On their own visits to Gardner, TIGHAR teams recovered an aluminum panel that could be from an Electra, another piece of woman's shoe and "Cat's Paw" heel dating from the 1930s; another shoe heel, possibly a man's, and an oddly cut piece of clear Plexiglas.

The sextant box might have been Noonan's. The woman's shoe and heel resemble a blucher-style oxford seen in a pre-takeoff photo of Earhart. The plastic shard is the exact thickness and curvature of an Electra's side window.

The evidence is promising but, as Gillespie is careful to note, remains circumstantial. "We don't have serial numbers," he says.

___

As the news that the aviators were missing flashed around the world, confusion, official bungling and missed opportunities had only begun.

Itasca searched along the "line of position" northwest of Howland, wrongly assuming the plane's empty fuel tanks would keep it afloat.

The Navy ordered six warships into the hunt, including the battleship USS Colorado from Pearl Harbor and the aircraft carrier USS Lexington from San Diego, 4,000 miles away.

On July 3, a day after Earhart vanished, her technical adviser, Paul Mantz, suggested to reporters that she had crash-landed in the Phoenix Islands. Even if the plane's undercarriage was damaged, Mantz said, "the fliers could have walked away ... uninjured."

Meanwhile, several shortwave radio listeners as far away as the U.S. mainland were picking up the faint voices of a woman and a man, sending apparent distress calls. And both the Itasca and a New Zealand cruiser, HMS Achilles, reported what seemed to be Morse code "dashes."

When Pan Am's Pacific stations triangulated the signals to the Phoenix Islands, the Achilles, less than 48 hours away at its top speed of 32 knots, was ignored. Instead, the Colorado was sent south, but by the time it reached the area a week later, the radio calls had ceased.

After a float-plane search of eight atolls, senior pilot Lt. John O. Lambrecht reported that "signs of recent habitation were clearly visible" at Gardner Island, but "repeated circling and zooming failed to elicit any answering wave from possible inhabitants, and it was finally taken for granted that none were there."

Had Lambrecht known that the island had been uninhabited for more than 40 years, he might have looked more closely. In an interview years later, he described the signs only as "markers," without elaboration. Inexplicably, the final report by Colorado's captain said no sign of habitation had been found.

Among reports of voice messages, two from teenagers using shortwave antennas rigged by their fathers were most disturbingly credible.

In Rock Springs, Wyo., Dana Randolph, 16, heard a voice say, "This is Amelia Earhart. Ship is on a reef south of the equator." Radio experts, aware that "harmonic" frequencies in mid-ocean often could be heard far inland, viewed the report as genuine.

Turning the shortwave dial in St. Petersburg, Fla., 15-year-old Betty Klenck was startled to hear a woman say, "This is Amelia Earhart Putnam," followed by pleas for help and agitated conversation with a man who, the girl thought, sounded irrational.

Having heard Earhart's voice in movie newsreels, she had no doubt that it was her.

"In my mind, a picture of her and what she was saying lasted for years. I remembered it every night of my life," Betty Klenck Brown, now 84 and widowed, said in a recent telephone interview from her home in California.

The man, she recalls, "seemed coherent at times, then would go out of his head. He said his head hurt ... She was trying mainly to keep him from getting out of the plane, telling him to come back to his seat, because she couldn't leave the radio.

"She was trying to get somebody to hear her, and as the hours went by she became more frantic."

Betty listened for nearly two hours, taking notes in a school composition notebook as the signals faded in and out. They ended when the fliers "were leaving the plane, because the water was knee-deep on her side," she said.

She believes she may be the last living person to have heard Earhart's distress calls.

Her father, Kenneth, who also heard the voices, contacted the Coast Guard at St. Petersburg, but was brushed off with assurances that the service was fully engaged in searching for the fliers, she said. "He got mad and chucked the whole thing because of the way he was treated."

Both teenagers' accounts would support TIGHAR's premise that Earhart crash-landed on Gardner's flat reef at low tide, was able to run its right engine to power the radio, and escaped the aircraft before tides eventually carried it off the reef into deep water.

On July 18, 16 days after Earhart and Noonan disappeared, the Navy and Coast Guard ended what the AP called "the greatest search ever undertaken in behalf of a lost flier." To justify the official finding that the Electra was lost at sea, the government dismissed the radio distress calls as hoaxes or misunderstandings.

Betty Klenck Brown's response today: "I know I am right."

Last September, Arthur Rypinski, a TIGHAR volunteer who regularly scans the Internet for Earhart-related material, found a woman in West Virginia offering an "Amelia Earhart Original Flight Plan" for sale on eBay.

"I was deeply intrigued," says Rypinski, of Rockville, Md., and he bought the document for $26.

The "flight plan" proved instead to be a copy of Carey's diary, along with news clippings and other items. Stamps showed it was once owned by the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pa. The seller, Dolores Brown, told Rypinski she probably had found it at a Goodwill store.

According to Carey's son, Tim Carey of Woodbridge, Va., his father served as a naval officer in the Pacific in World War II and had a career in public relations before his death in 1988.

His role as an AP reporter on the Earhart story became part of family history, his son says. And he adds: "The diary was completely in character for him. He was a real note-keeper."

Now raising funds for a ninth TIGHAR expedition to Nikumaroro in July, Gillespie says the Carey diary serves as a reminder to always "expect the unexpected" in the Earhart case.

"Pacific islanders don't wear shoes, so we know there was one foreign castaway, and maybe two, a man and a woman, on Gardner ... We hope this summer to recover human remains for DNA testing and find aircraft pieces that could be conclusively identified as from Amelia's plane.

"This is the expedition that could at last solve the mystery. I think we are right on the edge of knowing for a certainty what happened."

 

[vikingBerserker]

That's pretty interesting. I wonder if they fired off flares.

 

[stona]

By most accounts Earhart had removed all emergency equipment from the aircraft before setting off. She and Noonan had none of the emergency equipment one would normally carry on a long over water flight, not even a life raft, so I very much doubt that they had any flares or other signals. It's a convenient part of the TIGHAR theory, that the castaways could not signal to the USN aircraft over flying Gardner Island after their aircraft was washed off the island. Why they couldn't manage a signal fire or some other signal with brush or stones, scrape SOS in the sand/soil ffs, etc., (as even the most basic survival courses teach) is conveniently overlooked. The removal of the emergency equipment was just one of the many risks they took, and why I have always felt that they were either over confident or seriously underestimated the potential hazards of the task ahead or both.
Contemporary accounts also suggest that the sea was far from calm, one describing 6' waves. Alighting in such conditions, even when trained to do so (as naval aviators are) is difficult at best and quite possibly beyond Earhart's ability, particularly if she had lost power.

From the Smithsonian article I quoted above:

"Whether or not Weems' instruction would have helped Earhart cannot be known. Perhaps it may have made her realize that her "flying laboratory" was that in name only. The Lockheed was not well fitted for navigation. It lacked a rooftop hatch or viewing port for unobstructed celestial observations and none of their navigational equipment, save for a Bendix direction finding radio, could be considered state-of-the-art. Unfortunately, Earhart struggled with the Bendix radio during the flight. Its newness, mechanical unreliability and Earhart's inexperience with the equipment likely reduced its utility. However, the most vivid illustration of how poorly equipped the Electra was can be seen in the following year with Howard Hughes' around-the-world flight in a Lockheed 14 that was similar to Earhart's 10E, but which was truly a flying laboratory that accommodated two navigators and a host of new navigational equipment. This included a new averaging sextant, a new drift sight, new dead reckoning computers, a special observation portal, and a remarkable (and secret) line of position computer made by Fairchild-Maxson."

Cheers

Steve

 

[stona]

What nobody knew — not Earhart, and not Itasca — was that her plane's radio-reception antenna had been ripped away during the takeoff from Lae's bumpy dirt runway. The Itasca could hear Earhart, but she was unable to hear anything, voice or code.

I've never bought into this one either. A supposed puff of dust on a poor quality film of the take off is the only evidence. Given the known position of the antenna masts and wire (there are photos online) it seems most unlikely unless the undercarriage collapsed.
Also, one asks rhetorically, wouldn't someone have picked up the wire and possibly other debris from the runway and asked 'what the f#ck is this?' There are no such reports, though TIGHAR likes to refer to some untestable, unverifiable and unreliable 'anecdotal evidence', something typical of many conspiracy theories.
How many of you model makers can see the radio or IFF antenna wires fitted to many British fighters in the early years of WW2 in photographs? Very often they simply don't show up. It's why the Wright brothers, in their obsessive quest for secrecy, painted many parts of their aircraft control systems in aluminium paint. It was hard to discern in photographs.

More likely cause of communication problems is Earhart and Noonan's inability to use the radio equipment they had properly. Neither knew how this really worked:

Cheers
Steve

 

[Peter Gunn]

*SNIP*

With a bit of luck, and enough gullible people, I could make a decent living out of this!

Thanks

Steve

Hey why not, it's worked for TIGHAR for what? Decades now? Except once the millions start rolling in, I think you should share the wealth here...

 

[Airframes]

Mr. Conman, I am willing to donate $3 million in Monopoly money, if that will help to get the project underway ..............

 

[vikingBerserker]

I meant I wondered if the Coast Guard ever sent up flares.

 

[FLYBOYJ]

I've never bought into this one either. A supposed puff of dust on a poor quality film of the take off is the only evidence. Given the known position of the antenna masts and wire (there are photos online) it seems most unlikely unless the undercarriage collapsed.
Also, one asks rhetorically, wouldn't someone have picked up the wire and possibly other debris from the runway and asked 'what the f#ck is this?' There are no such reports, though TIGHAR likes to refer to some untestable, unverifiable and unreliable 'anecdotal evidence', something typical of many conspiracy theories.
How many of you model makers can see the radio or IFF antenna wires fitted to many British fighters in the early years of WW2 in photographs? Very often they simply don't show up. It's why the Wright brothers, in their obsessive quest for secrecy, painted many parts of their aircraft control systems in aluminium paint. It was hard to discern in photographs.

More likely cause of communication problems is Earhart and Noonan's inability to use the radio equipment they had properly. Neither knew how this really worked:

View attachment 379604


Cheers
Steve

Agree - if someone found the antenna on the runway,a whole different story

 

[FLYBOYJ]

It's why the Wright brothers, in their obsessive quest for secrecy, painted many parts of their aircraft control systems in aluminium paint. It was hard to discern in photographs.

Cheers
Steve

Actually it was to cover up their lies!

 

[stona]

Mr. Conman, I am willing to donate $3 million in Monopoly money, if that will help to get the project underway ..............

with that kind of money I might actually win a game

 

[stona]

I meant I wondered if the Coast Guard ever sent up flares.

Itasca laid a smoke screen, supposedly visible from miles and for a long time. Obviously not from more than 30 miles. The smoke was recorded in the log as
"stretching out for ten miles and not thinning out greatly."
There is much debate about just how effective or visible this smoke may have been. I think the Itasca probably started making it too early, and as no note of the cessation of smoke is in the log, we don't know for how long it was continued.

Earhart and Noonan's inability to properly use their radios cannot be over emphasised. On San Francisco's instructions the radiomen on Itasca slowed their morse transmissions to just ten words per minute, a rate a boy scout should be able to understand, but it was to no avail. Earhart and Noonan's inability to understand morse meant that about 90% of the Itasca's efforts to establish two way communication were pointless.
For the estimated two and a half hours that Earhart was in range, Itasca transmitted on 500 and 7500 kilocycles exclusively in code, which nobody on the aircraft could understand or properly reply to. A spoken message on 3105 kilocycles was transmitted for one minute in a three minute period after the hour or half hour.
The radiomen were competent operators and followed what, for them, was normal procedures. They could not know that they had a couple of amateurs on the receiving end of their transmissions.
Earhart's last message came on 3105 and she said she would repeat it on 6210 (here is not the place to get into harmonic radio frequencies), nothing was heard from her again. I can easily imagine a sudden fuel emergency developing as she or Noonan were fiddling with the radio, changing frequencies, at 1,000 ft, but that is TIGHAR style conjecture

Cheers

Steve

 

[mikewint]

WINDS!

Duly noted and factored in. Joe, I'm not a pilot an therefore some of my terminology may be weird but, I am well acquainted with vectors and taking their components. An airline pilot is concerned with keeping a schedule and therefor when facing a headwind or any component thereof increases the power to compensate for the reduced Ground Speed increasing his Air Speed and increasing fuel consumption. AE on the other hand had no schedule to keep. Howland and the CG were going nowhere therefore she did not increase power but kept to her Long Range Flight Plan of maximum fuel efficiency. This would mean that the Electra's ground speed (ocean?) would be reduced by the headwind or its component. In 1935 Lockheed had issued memo 465 giving fuel/power settings for all Electras and then in June of 1936 a specific memo 487 for Long Range Electras. This was further enhanced by Kelly Johnson (see telegrams) stating that the Electra's best economy was at a TAS of 130 knots or 150 MPH. In nil wind the two speeds are the same and the 2556 miles to Howland take 17.04 hours. A 10mph headwind reduces the G/S to 140mph and Howland is now 18.25 hours away. NOW I do understand that this increased TIME also burns fuel but at a lesser rate that upping the power to keep the G/S at 150mph since air resistance is proportional to the velocity (of the air) squared.

Forecast received at Lae on June 30th:
EARHART LAE
WEATHER LAE AND HOWLAND GENERALLY AVERAGE MOSTLY CLEAR FIRST 600 MILES WIND ESE10-15 HEAVY LOCAL RAIN SQUALLS TO WESTWARD ON ONTARIO DETOUR AROUND AS CENTER DANGEROUS CLOUDY ONTARIO TO LONG 175 EAST OCCASIONAL HEAVY SHOWERS WINDS EAST AT 10 THENCE TO HOWLAND PARTLY CLOUDY UNLIMITED VISIBILITY WIND ESE 15-20 ADVISE CONSULTING LOCAL WEATHER OFFICIALS AS NO REPORTS YOUR VICINITY AVAILABLE HERE
FLEET AIR BASE PEARL HARBOUR

Another forecast received at Lae on July 1st:
EARHART LAE
FORECAST THURSDAY LAE TO ONTARIO PARTLY CLOUDED RAIN SQUALLS 250 MILES EAST OF LAE WIND EAST SOUTH EAST TWELVE TO FIFTEEN PERIOD ONTARIO TO LONG ONE SEVEN FIVE PARTLY CLOUDY CUMULUS CLOUDS ABOUT TEN THOUSAND FEET MOSTLY UNLIMITED WIND EAST NORTH EAST EIGHTEEN THENCE TO HOWLAND PARTLY CLOUDY SCATTERED HEAVY SHOWERS WIND EAST NORTH EAST FIFTEEN PERIOD AVOID TOWERING CUMULUS AND SQUALLS BY DETOURS AS CENTRES FREQUENTLY DANGEROUS
FLEET AIR BASE PEARL HARBOUR

Altogether, the winds are not favorable for the flight to Howland Island. For the reports that did not reach Earhart and Noonan before they left, the Lae Radio Operator, Harry Balfour, continually broadcast these reports to the Electra but did not receive any acknowledgement that they had been heard.

The fuel loads that we know of, and the mileages that they were intended for:
a. Oakland to Honolulu: 947 USG for 2400 statute miles which included a 40% excess range, i.e. 960 "more miles" making the total 3360 statute miles on 947 USG. A telegram from Kelly Johnson of Lockheed to Earhart states that 900 USG is "ample" for this flight and the 40% excess range.
b. Luke Field, Honolulu to Lae: 900 USG for 1900 miles plus a reserve of 200 USG.
c. Lae to Howland Island: 1100 USG (or 1151 USG) for 2556 Statute Miles plus a further 600 miles if the Contingency Plan was invoked and a turn-back for the Gilbert Islands was made. Total would then be 3156. Note that this 3156 Statute Miles requirement is less than the range possible on 900 USG of the Johnson telegram mentioned at a., above.

On the "First Attempt" flight from Oakland to Honolulu, Earhart made notations that were later put into the book "Last Flight" by her husband George Palmer Putnam. In my copy of the book on pages 33-34, there are notations. There is a section of these notes which are for a point 6 hours and 35 minutes into the flight, she writes:

"Harry (Manning) reports we're ahead of the dead reckoning. Noonan is just figuring position. Gas so far is o.k. The ship now flies like an airplane with almost 2000lbs rt up."

The letters "rt" in "rt up" in the print font, are taken from Earhart's handwriting, and her "r" and "e" are similar. Her handwritten note could have been "et up" which means "eaten up" or perhaps in long form, "used right up,". This indicates that at the 6 hour, 35 minute "into the flight point" or at the latest, the 7 hour point, nearly 2000 lbs of fuel have been used which means "nearly" 333 USG gone. At this 6:35 hour point and according to the Lockheed Long Range Plan, the Electra should have used 413 USG. It had to be 333 because it is defined by "almost 2000 lbs" and 433 USG would weigh 2598 lbs while 333 USG would be 1998 lbs. This could mean that Earhart did not use a high power climb-out but "cruise-climbed" at a lower power setting, thereby using less fuel.

For the Electra at Sea Level, Lockheed states that VL/D. at Sea Level for a weight of 9,300 pounds is 11.85: 1 at 110 mph IAS.
For 12,900 pounds it is 11.85: 1 at 120 mph IAS
For 16,500 pounds AUW it is 11.9: 1 at 150 mph IAS.
In comparison, a Cessna 150 has a Lift Drag Ratio of 7:1, a Boeing 747 has an L/D of 17:1.

 

[mikewint]

Low on fuel surely means exactly that

Steve, words like LOW and HIGH or TALL and SHORT are NOT quantitative terms. They are RELATIVE terms and even with a specific referent convey little actual information. This has nothing to do with conspiracy and everything to do with language. If I want to take my boat 30 miles down the lake, 1/2 tank is LOW on fuel and I'll gas-up but if were going 2 miles to a beach I'm no longer LOW.
Earhart's stated contingency plan was to turn West to the Gilberts if not able to find Howland. The Gilberts were 600 miles from Howland which is 4 hours flying time at her best cruise speed of 150 mph G/S. Since the Islands lay in a convergence zone the winds are from the East most of the time so she could count on a tail wind. Once reaching the Gilberst she'd have to "look around" a bit to find a suitable "landing" spot so some loiter time needs to be included. Based on her previous fuel usage I figure she needs 200 - 250 USG remaining at/near Howland. SO when she gets to this point she is getting LOW on fuel

 

[mikewint]

So, does that mean that on her original planned course she had a head wind?

Would that mean that either she had to run the engines at higher power to make the schedule, or she was short of her objective?

Yes almost invariably since the islands lie in a convergence zone. That's why the original plan was to fly west to east
No she didn't she had no set schedule to keep so the Electra was kept at its best economy power a TAS of 150 mph

 

[mikewint]

It may have had something to do with her taking off with the reported less than full fuel load?

All tanks were filled except for the 100 octane tank. Lae did not have that grade of fuel so AE elected NOT to dilute what remained of her 100 octane in that tank. Reportedly it was 1/2 full and the Lae refueler recorded 1100 USG. The 50 USG of 100 octane were used at takeoff so that the engines produced their highest horsepower

 

[mikewint]

I can't comment on her piloting skills, except to note that at least some contemporaries had some doubts about some aspects of her performance.
The evidence of her lack of navigational and radio skills are well documented. It may be that in selecting Noonan as navigator (and his traditional navigational skills are not in doubt) she may nonetheless have picked the wrong guy.

From a letter written by Fred Hooven (inventor of the Radio Compass Earhart removed to save 30lbs):
Miss Earhart was furthermore the product of the age of "seat-of-the-pants" piloting, when any self-respecting pilot felt that the use of any instrument was a reflection on his piloting ability. She had only recently, during her current round-the-world flight, ignored the advice of her navigator and made a considerable navigation error. Crossing the Atlantic, heading for Dakar, Noonan had advised her to turn south, as she was north of her course. She nevertheless turned north, and landed 165 miles off course in St. Louis, Senegal.

The people responsible for installing the radio equipment and instructing Miss Earhart in its use reported that they had difficulty in retaining her attention, and it became obvious as the flight progressed that she did not understand the frequency limitations of her direction finder, nor how to make proper use of it.1

Fred Noonan was a first-class navigator in the classical sense. He could take positions from observations of the sun and stars, and had developed ingenuous [sic] methods for working out these observations in a short time, to accomodate [sic] to the high speed of aircraft. However, for the flight, he was confined to the rear of the plane's passenger compartment, the entire front part of which was completely occupied by tanks. He had no view of the sky except that available through a small window in the side of the compartment. There was no communication between the navigator and pilot except a long stick with a notch in the end which could be used for passing notes along the narrow space between the tanks and the fuselage wall.

 

[mikewint]

her radio required a working engine, so if they had stopped due to being out of fuel then they could not have called out.

Not quite, no more than your car radio requires that you have your engine running. The Electra had a standard automotive -type system of generator/batteries, The batteries (2) were Exide 6-FHM-13-1, 12-volt, lead-acid type, with 85 AH capacity. The transmitter operated from the 12-volt DC electrical system aboard the aircraft. The tube filaments and the relays in the control circuitry were powered directly from 12 volts. High-voltage power for the tubes was provided by a dynamotor, a motor-generator unit which operated from the 12-volt system and produced 1050 volts DC at approximately 300 milliamperes.
Primary power requirements for the transmitter were approximately 11 amperes on standby (tube filaments alone), and 65 amperes on transmit using voice (tube filaments, relays, and dynamotor).
So on just one battery AE could transmit for over an hour. The engine generator was necessary to recharge the batteries just as in your auto. The generator was limited to 50 amp output. When transmitting the load rose to 68 amps thus the batteries provided the extra 18 amps. For each minute of transmitting it required 13 minutes of recharge at 6 USG per hour fuel burn