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Author Topic: Betty and Bob  (Read 119202 times)

Randy Conrad

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #75 on: April 06, 2013, 02:18:20 PM »

As I've been reading the past couple of days, I'm convinced with alot of you that Betty's notebook is definately genuine! Also, with her hearing two voices I'm wanting to know Ric that in 1937 when people spoke through two headsets, wouldn't you have to be at a designated distance to avoid feedback? Also, does anyone know for a fact if Fred was in the co-pilot's seat during the last few minutes of transmission on the morning she vanished. The reason I say that is if Fred was up in the nose of the plane with Amelia..he most likely would have walked away from the plane with her without minimal injures. Had he been at the back of the plane where  he did most of his navigating..then that would tell the story of why he was wanting to get out of the plane, because he suffered major injuries from being tossed around. I honestly feel that this explains why the two could speak so well without all the interference noise in the background...She was in the nose of the plane and he was at the back of the plane. Also, if Fred suffered injuries from what Betty described in her notebook, whats to say that the back half of the plane broke apart already! If this is the case..then can they still start the  engine without having the rest of the plane become imbalanced???
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Ted G Campbell

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #76 on: April 06, 2013, 05:39:15 PM »

It seems to me that the MIC on-off switch controlled the intercom.
Ted
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jgf1944

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #77 on: April 06, 2013, 05:57:16 PM »

I honestly feel that this explains why the two could speak so well without all the interference noise in the background...She was in the nose of the plane and he was at the back of the plane.
  Hi Randy. If FN was aft, why would he repeatedly command/order (check Betty's Notebook) AE to let him out of the aircraft? Being next to the door, he could have simply opened it and stepped out.
   John.
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Scott C. Mitchell

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #78 on: April 07, 2013, 10:24:43 AM »

When you review the transcript of Betty's Notebook, it is gripping how so many of the captured phrases deal with an anxious awareness of water levels and some kind of apparent movement of the aircraft, both in the intended transmission and background talk:  "Water's high". . ."it's going". . . "water's knee deep". . . "we can't bail out". . . "knee deep over". . . and Betty's notation:  "She [AE] was having trouble, getting water so high the plane was slipping."  You also hear what can be characterized as "last words" -- when you're in a hopeless situation and your remaining objective is to fling out a final personal message in the short time that is left - such as AE's "get the suitcase from my closet" and possibly Fred calling out to his wife.  It is chilling to contemplate that Betty not only picked up a message from AE, but what appears to be what AE and FN may have thought was their last transmission.

Scott
#3292
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Ric Gillespie

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #79 on: April 07, 2013, 08:08:23 PM »

It seems to me that the MIC on-off switch controlled the intercom.
Ted

There was no intercom.  The crew communicated by passing written notes even when they were both up front.  Verbal communication was almost impossible due to engine noise and deafness caused by long exposure to it.  When Merrill and Lambie flew the other 10E Special to England in May 1937 they landed deaf.  Linda Finch, on her 1997 commemorative flight around the world in a 10E, used a modern noise-cancelling headset but still had difficulty.
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richie conroy

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #80 on: April 08, 2013, 03:52:28 PM »

Hi All

I have narrowed down as best i can the following 5 pages on Purdue  http://earchives.lib.purdue.edu/cdm4/results.php?CISOOP1=exact&CISOFIELD1=CISOSEARCHALL&CISOROOT=/earhart&CISOBOX1=Search+%26+rescue+operations&CISOSTART=1,1

relating to telegrams in the search and rescue of Amelia and Fred hope this helps

Thanks Richie
We are an echo of the past


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Ric Gillespie

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #81 on: April 08, 2013, 05:27:18 PM »

I have narrowed down as best i can the following 5 pages on Purdue

What are you trying to nail down?
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richie conroy

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #82 on: April 08, 2013, 07:17:31 PM »

Nothing nailed, just telegrams from search and rescue documents that show even Howland Island were possible receive in, signal's from Amelia's plane on 5th or 4th July etc Not just Betty  :)



http://earchives.lib.purdue.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/earhart&CISOPTR=2014&CISOBOX=1&REC=9
We are an echo of the past


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Ric Gillespie

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #83 on: April 08, 2013, 08:19:52 PM »

Nothing nailed, just telegrams from search and rescue documents that show even Howland Island were possible receive in, signal's from Amelia's plane on 5th or 4th July etc Not just Betty  :)

Richie ol' buddy, you're re-inventing the wheel and we've already built a bullet train.  Brandenburg and I spent 12 years assembling, databasing and evaluating reported receptions of post-loss radio transmissions from Earhart. Everybody tends to focus on Betty's Notebook because there is so much information there to puzzle over, but other receptions are far more difficult to explain away.

One of my favorites:
Look at Record number 51, code 40650HD
During the search, the U.S. Department of Interior radio operators on both Howland and Baker were listening for Earhart on 3105 KHz.  At 8:20pm on the night of July 3rd, the radio operator on Baker Island heard a strong and clear transmission from "the Earhart plane." In the original log entry the signal is described as "strength 4 (out of 5), readability 7 (out of 10)."  The calculated probability of Baker Island being able to hear a signal sent on 3105 from Earhart's transmitter if she was on Gardner Island is .96 .  That's pretty close to a slam-dunk.
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Al Leonard

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #84 on: April 12, 2013, 10:36:27 PM »


Remember that Betty did not hear an uninterrupted dialogue and there is no indication in the notebook of how much of a pause or delay there was between the transcribed words and phrases.
Notations at the top of the pages indicate that Betty heard what she heard starting at 16:30 and ending at 18:15  EST - which would be 10:30 to 12:15 at Niku and 21:30 to 23:15 GMT.  Unfortunately Betty didn't jot down the date so we have to look for clues within the transcription as to which day it might have been. 


This is something that I've been confused about. The introduction to Betty's Notebook seems to indicate that Betty started listening at about 3PM her time and listened till about 6:15 PM, i.e., "One afternoon in July – the exact date is not known – at about 3 p.m. Betty was sitting on the floor in front of her family’s radio console...The transmissions continued to come in, off and on, for about three hours until 6:15 p.m". But here Ric is saying that Betty started hearing what she heard at 4:30 PM her time, and Bob Brandenburg's probability calculations in Harmony and Power only cover the period from 4:30 to 6:15 PM, as per Ric's comment above.

I suspect a 4:30 PM start is assumed here (and by Brandenburg) because of the "since 4:30  5:10" written at the top of the third page of Betty's notes. But I was under the impression that the two previous pages of the notebook record what Betty heard from about 3 to 4:30 PM.

Am I missing something? What is the timeline for Betty's Notes? (I'm not asking about dates here, just times)



« Last Edit: April 12, 2013, 10:41:18 PM by Al Leonard »
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Al Leonard

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #85 on: April 13, 2013, 10:48:34 AM »

I might as well ask my follow-up question:

What are the probabilities of Betty receiving a transmission from the Electra during the 3:15 to 4:30 PM time period on July 5 and the other weekdays?

Alf
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Ric Gillespie

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #86 on: April 13, 2013, 11:03:22 AM »

This is something that I've been confused about. The introduction to Betty's Notebook seems to indicate that Betty started listening at about 3PM her time and listened till about 6:15 PM, i.e., "One afternoon in July – the exact date is not known – at about 3 p.m. Betty was sitting on the floor in front of her family’s radio console...The transmissions continued to come in, off and on, for about three hours until 6:15 p.m". But here Ric is saying that Betty started hearing what she heard at 4:30 PM her time, and Bob Brandenburg's probability calculations in Harmony and Power only cover the period from 4:30 to 6:15 PM, as per Ric's comment above.

I suspect a 4:30 PM start is assumed here (and by Brandenburg) because of the "since 4:30  5:10" written at the top of the third page of Betty's notes. But I was under the impression that the two previous pages of the notebook record what Betty heard from about 3 to 4:30 PM.

Am I missing something? What is the timeline for Betty's Notes? (I'm not asking about dates here, just times)

The answer is simple.  I was wrong about the three hours.  That Research Bulletin was written in 2000 when we first found out about the notebook.  We've learned a lot since then, but it's our policy to not go back and correct errors in Research Bulletins and technical papers.  They are historical records of what we thought at that time.
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Al Leonard

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #87 on: April 13, 2013, 11:05:11 PM »

This is something that I've been confused about. The introduction to Betty's Notebook seems to indicate that Betty started listening at about 3PM her time and listened till about 6:15 PM, i.e., "One afternoon in July – the exact date is not known – at about 3 p.m. Betty was sitting on the floor in front of her family’s radio console...The transmissions continued to come in, off and on, for about three hours until 6:15 p.m". But here Ric is saying that Betty started hearing what she heard at 4:30 PM her time, and Bob Brandenburg's probability calculations in Harmony and Power only cover the period from 4:30 to 6:15 PM, as per Ric's comment above.

I suspect a 4:30 PM start is assumed here (and by Brandenburg) because of the "since 4:30  5:10" written at the top of the third page of Betty's notes. But I was under the impression that the two previous pages of the notebook record what Betty heard from about 3 to 4:30 PM.

Am I missing something? What is the timeline for Betty's Notes? (I'm not asking about dates here, just times)

The answer is simple.  I was wrong about the three hours.  That Research Bulletin was written in 2000 when we first found out about the notebook.  We've learned a lot since then, but it's our policy to not go back and correct errors in Research Bulletins and technical papers.  They are historical records of what we thought at that time.

Ric, what was it that initially had you thinking she was listening for three hours, and what was it you learned since 2000 that makes you now think you were wrong about the three hours? Is there a discussion of this somewhere on the site?

Based on the times written at the tops of pages 3 through 5, it seems pretty clear that these pages record what she heard between 4:30 PM and 6:15 PM. My thought was that pages 1 and 2 were written prior to 4:30, since Pages 1 and 2 precede pages 3 through 5. What is the rationale for believing pages 1 and 2 were recorded after 4:30 PM?

If we can’t be very certain that Betty’s first two pages were written 4:30 PM, isn’t it important to know what transmission probability Bob Brandenburg calculated before 4:30 PM? Did Bob do a calculation for say, the 3:30 to 4:30 PM time period? If so, what were his results?
« Last Edit: April 13, 2013, 11:07:03 PM by Al Leonard »
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Ric Gillespie

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #88 on: April 14, 2013, 08:08:19 AM »

Ric, what was it that initially had you thinking she was listening for three hours, and what was it you learned since 2000 that makes you now think you were wrong about the three hours? Is there a discussion of this somewhere on the site?

I'm trying remember why I wrote that she had been listening for three hours.  It may be that John Hathaway, the guy who first contacted us about his neighbor Betty, had originally told me that she listened for three hours and I hadn't worked out the time for myself yet.  But, from the beginning, Betty was clear that she started hearing Earhart at around 4:30.  The time isn't precise because it was only after she had been listening for a while that it occurred to her that she should note time - so there no time notations at top of the first two pages and at the top of page three we have "since 4:30" and "5:10."  I don't know any way to interpret these numbers other than "I just realized I should be keeping track of the time.  It is now 5:10.  I've been hearing this since 4:30."  At the top of page four she writes, "5:30 1 hr."  I interpret that to mean, "It is now 5:30.  These signals have been going on for one hour." At the top of the page five, the final page, she writes "6:00".  I interpret that to mean, "It is now 6:00."  Then she writes, "end at 6:15."  Obviously she had to have gone back and inserted this after she was sure that there were going to be no more transmissions so, like 4:30, it is an estimate rather than real-time notation.

These time notations are useful in that they give us some idea of how the various phrases were spread out over time.  The paper in the notebook is lined. Each line contains a phrase that Betty chose to enter on it's own line.
• The phrases on the first two pages (38 lines) were heard between 4:30 and 5:10 - 40 minutes, call it an average of about one line per minute. 
• The phrases on page three (19 lines) were heard between 5:10 and 5:30 - 20 minutes, again roughly a line a minute. 
• The phrases on page four (18 lines) were heard between 5:30 and 6:00 - 30 minutes. That's roughly one line every minute and a half.
• The phrases on page five (16 lines) were heard between 6:00 and 6:15 - 15 minutes.  We're back to about a line per minute.

So the notebook is fairly consistent in the average rate of reception (one transcribable phrase per minute) except for page four where the rate of reception was about 50% slower.  One phrase per minute is pretty darn slow.  Of course, within each page, many of the phrases are clearly conversations between AE and FN with each line representing the words of one speaker, so what we really have are bursts of receptions with spans of several minutes between - which is consistent with Betty's recollection of sometimes having time to go to other pages and work on her sketches between transmissions from Earhart.

We could probably go further with this kind of time-span analysis of the notebook.  Fascinating stuff.

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Al Leonard

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Re: Betty and Bob
« Reply #89 on: April 15, 2013, 12:06:41 AM »

Ric,

Although Betty remembered decades later that she started listening at 4:30, as you often point out yourself, people’s recollection of past life events can be flawed. I think I read that when you visited Mr. Bevington in England a few years ago, he misremembered some significant things about his time on Nikumaroro; I know for sure than in the Ameliapedia article on the Norwich City, you point out that Dick Evans, a veteran of the Niku/Gardner Loran misremembered things about the wreck of the Norwich City. So, I don’t know how sure we can be that Betty was correct about what time it was when she started to listen. It occurs to me for instance that, the ‘4:30’ entry on page 3 of her notebook might be what made Betty think that 4:30 was when she started listening, i.e., her recall of that decades-old event was influenced by having re-read her notes of the event.

As for interpreting the time information in Betty’s notes, the time information is ambiguous, isn’t it? If it is inadvisable to rely on Betty’s decades-old recollection about when she was listening, why assume that 4:30 corresponds to the start of page 1? Why didn’t Betty just flip back to page 1 and write ‘since 4:30’ at the top of page 1, if that was when she started her note taking? To me, it seems equally plausible that ‘since 4:30’ at the top of page 3 indicates that 4:30 was the time Betty started page 3, and pages 1 and 2 are things she recorded prior to 4:30; Betty wasn’t keeping track of time prior to 4:30 and thus there are no time entries on those two pages. Page 4 has “5:30 1 hr” written at the top, but the 5:30 isn’t paired with another time.  You’re assuming the end time of page 4 was 6 PM so that it meshes with the “6:00 end at 6:15” written at the top of page 5. I can understand why that seems reasonable to you.

But, a somewhat different timeline seems just as plausible to me. I take the “4:30 and 5:10” on page 3 to mean she started page 3 at 4:30 and the last intelligible line she heard was at 5:10; for the next 20 minutes or so Betty heard only garbled transmissions. Betty started a new page (page 4) at 5:30 and recorded on page 4 till 6 PM. Page 5 then represents what Betty heard in the 6PM to 6:15 time interval.

To summarize this timeline:

-Page 3 corresponds to 4:30 to 5:10 PM; 19 lines/40 minutes = 0.5 lines per minute (lpm)
-Page 4 corresponds to 5:30 to 6:00; 18 lines/30 minutes = 0.6 lpm.
-Page 5 corresponds to 6:00 to 6:15; 16 lines/15 minutes = 1 lpm.

Averaging over pages 3 to 5 we have 53 lines in about 90 minutes, about 0.6 lpm. 

Pages 1 and 2 would have been recorded in about 1 hour  (38 lines/0.6 lpm=  60 minutes) and thus these two pages could represent the 3:30 to 4:30 time period based on the average lpm for this alternate timeline.

Now, I’m not saying that this timeline is more plausible than the one you suggested, Ric, but it seems as plausible as the one you suggested.

So, I think it’s plausible that the first two pages of Betty’s notebook record things she heard prior to 4:30 PM. Did Bob Brandenburg calculate probabilities for 3:30 to 4:30 PM? If so, it would be worth going back and seeing what his results were.

In the spirit of the confidence assessment exercise you announced earlier today, I think this is worth looking at.
« Last Edit: April 15, 2013, 12:09:16 AM by Al Leonard »
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