A Pressing Off-Topic Question - the remains of Amelia Earhart
Since we have discussed Amelia from time-to-time, what's this about her bones being discovered in the SW Pacific?
I saw a headline, but haven't had the chance to read into it. If it's anything like the Cooper saga, headlines are very misleading. Is there anything to it?
As Robert99 has said many times, for Amelia Earhart's bones to be found on Nakumarroro Island, she would have to been way of course. That's 400 miles from Howland Island.
The story says they are doing an analysis of bones that were discarded in 1940. So, it can't be proven either way.
Robert99 is really the expert on this, so I usually defer to him, but from my reading, the way they would determine which direction to fly when close to the target is rotate the antenna while the destination was broadcasting -- and whichever direction it was loudest, that was the direction to travel. When Earhart did that, she supposedly turned the antenna all the away around and it was loud every at every point. She even says something to the effect of "I must be right on top of you, but I can't see you." If that's the case, and she was flying at about 140 miles per hour, it would have taken her almost three hours to get Nakumarroro from "on top" of Howland Island. There wouldn't have been time for that.
But, as always, I'm curious what Robert99 has to say.
Mark, I hope to do some write ups someday on this matter but until I have more free time, here is a very brief outline of what I think happened to Amelia Earhardt and Fred Noonan. I'll comment at a later time on their possible radio problems, the poor coordination between Amelia and the Coast Guard (Amelia didn't attend the coordination meeting, Putnam did but he didn't have any aeronautical qualifications in the first place), and other matters.
The first two radio transmissions from Amelia that are of the greatest interest to me are the ones where she said they were 200 miles from Howland and then exactly 30 minutes later another transmission said that they were 100 miles from Howland. While it is likely that those distances were just estimates, it is unlikely that the airliner was capable of flying at 200 MPH. About 150 MPH would be more like it.
So in my opinion, Amelia and Fred were very unsure of their position as the sun was coming up and they were having to switch from night star fixes to other types of fixes during daylight. And, of course, they were expected at Howland just after sunrise so these two things come together at the worst time. Presumably, they could have arrived at Howland by using the "offset" method which requires flying to a point offset from Howland (probably to the NNW in this case) then turning toward Howland. This type of approach requires knowing where you are reasonably well when you start it. Then flying a precise heading for a precise time which should put you abeam of Howland, and then turning 90 degrees (to the right in this case) and continue to fly a precise heading for another precise period of time which should put you over Howland.
There are indications from a later transmission that they were flying along a line using headings that were perpendicular from the direct course line between Lae and Howland. This meant that they had used the offset approach to begin with or had improvised one after their radio navigation efforts were unsuccessful. According to pilots who have flown over Howland Island, it is very difficult to locate visually even from less than 10 miles away.
So to make a long story very short, in my opinion, Amelia and Fred OVERSHOT Howland Island and ended up in the water and probably in the Northeast quadrant from Howland.
It is the TIGHAR (I think I got all the letters in it) organization that has long been claiming that Amelia and Fred ended up at Nakumarroro Island. This organization has claimed that they found a woman's shoe heel that was suppose to be Amelia's size on the Island, that they also found a glass jar that could have been Amelia's freckle cream jar (I have never seen another mention of Amelia and freckles in the same sentence anywhere), that they found Fred's navigation "desk" (it wasn't), that a picture of something faintly visible sticking out of the water just off shore of Nakumarroro was the wheel of the upside down aircraft (it was probably just a defect in a decades old photograph), and other such claims that proved to be baseless. A few years ago, a wealthy individual who had donated one million bucks to TIGHAR to support the Amelia research, sued them to get his money back and claimed that they had lied to him in order to obtain the money. Of course, TIGHAR denied everything.
On the current story about the bone, the claim seems to be that it was originally identified around 1940 as being from a man. Now it is claimed to be from a woman whose arms were about the same length as Amelia's. So TIGHAR is apparently trying to raise money for another expedition to Nakumarroro.
Or to put it another way, the claims about the arm, heel, jar, and everything else is baloney.
