There are a couple of things that do not add up to me in regards to the first few nights on Gardner. The first is in regards to all of the post lost radio signals that were received from the vicinity of Gardner.
If you concede that the signals were from Gardner, your next few questions are moot (interesting, arguable, and irrelevant).
If you think your next questions are unanswerable, then you have to explain who generated the radio traffic from the Phoenix Islands.
One of the reports stated that Earhart’s voice was recognizable and in Betty’s notebook reference is made of a man’s voice. What is missing is that there is no report of either Earhart or Noonan trying to give their location or what they thought that their location might be.
For the most detailed treatment of the post-loss messages, you should read
Finding Amelia. I don't think it is correct to say "there is no report of either Earhart or Noonan trying to give their location." There are many such reports in the credible messages--efforts to describe their situation in different ways.
You would think that it would be the first thing you would try to send in an sos message. Surely Noonan had some idea where he was and the name of the Island. He knew that by flying down the LOP that he would hit land so he should have known that he was on Gardner Island.
The credible messages in the days after July 2, if real, were all "SOS messages"--cries for help. If they were, in fact, from AE and FN, it appears that they did not know the name of the island nor have an exact location to transmit.
The second totally perplexing thing to me is the failure of the Navy to located them on Gardner Island when they flew over and searched on July 9. The Navy flyers were probably concentrating on looking for the airplane itself and not seeing the plane assumed that Earhart and Noonan did not land there. If indeed the two were still there, it is difficult to imagine that there were so signs or markers visible to alert the Navy flyers of their presence.
Perhaps your imagination needs training. I've seen the
helicopter video which shows what it is like to fly over Niku at 400 feet and how hard it is to recognize people at that altitude; I don't think the helicopter duplicated the speed of the naval aircraft.
Lambrecht reported about Gardner: "Here signs of recent habitation were clearly visible 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." If you find it hard to imagine that the aviators might have been looking at the campsite while missing the campers, you haven't watched enough survival TV. It happens frequently even in our own day that people who are lost fail to attract the attention of search and rescue aircraft.
Earhart and Noonan knew or should have known that there would be searchers out looking for them ...
Why would they assume an aerial search in 1937? It's common now, but it was not at all common then.
There are many things we know that they "should have known." It appears that they did not live up to our expectations. If they had
prepared properly for the task of radio navigation, they would not have gotten lost in the first place.
Such is life. It is hard to imagine that such a beautiful and photogenic woman could have been such an airhead [pun intended; you may laugh now] when it came to learning what she needed to know about her equipment and taking the steps necessary to find Howland Island. But we must bend our imagination to the facts that are known, such as they are, and not bend the facts to fit our presuppositions.
... and that it might be several days before they came to Gardner, therefore, it is logical to assume that they would have made some form of preparation for that occurrence ...
Ah, logic! What a splendid tool of investigation. Your deduction is perfect; the issue is with your premise. And logic does not secure its premises. It only shows what to do with them once you have them. ("Never grant a Jesuit his premises.")
The Navy flyers reported seeing “markers” and “signs of recent habitation” but not enough to cause them to continue the search. When they flew to Hull island to the east, one of the planes landed in the lagoon and made contact with the people there.
A landing in the Gardner lagoon apparently was not justified in the opinion of the flight leader.
It was a good decision. The atoll has miles and miles of shoreline and huge acreage inland. What could six naval aviators have done by way of a land search with the equipment and daylight at their disposal? How would they have anchored their aircraft safely? How would they have made it to land and back again? Landing where there are people with canoes makes sense. Landing where no people are observed also makes sense--apparently to Lambrecht and definitely to me.
To accept the theory that Earhart and Noonan were stranded on the Island and the Navy flyers simply overlooked them because they were not looking hard enough or in too big of a hurry, one would have to believe that the flyers were incompetent and negligent in the performance of their duties.
You attribute a position to TIGHAR that TIGHAR has never taken. TIGHAR argues that the naval aviators failed to observe them; it has no official "because" statement. That's an open question that is moot. If the
Niku Hypothesis is correct, then the aviators missed them for one reason or another. If the Niku Hypothesis is false, then some other explanation must be given for the post-loss messages.
I have seen no evidence to support a theory that the Navy was incompetent and negligent.
TIGHAR does not hold that view. Given the state of search-and-rescue techniques of 1937 and the type of aircraft available, the aviators did what they could.
To the contrary, it was the Navy operations in Hawaii that proposed the theory that the wind blew the Electra south of course and that Noonan probably flew down the 157 line to an Island in the Phoenix chain and landed. It would be inconsistent to think that the same Navy operations personnel would not know how to thoroughly search an island with three float planes flying off of a battleship.
They are not the same personnel by any stretch of the imagination--and I have a very stretchable imagination. Lambrecht's report on Gardner might have triggered a second and more thorough search of the island. Putnam repeatedly asked for such a search.
Friends tried to arrange such a search. Of course, since they hadn't been on the island on foot (as TIGHAR has in nine expeditions since 1989), they literally had no idea of the difficulties such searches would entail, the first of which is simply to get folks ashore safely (long before the
boat channel was blasted through the reef).
Based on the aforementioned, it appears that Earhart and Noonan either did not land on Gardner or if they did land there they were no longer there on July 9.
That does not follow. The competent and careful search by good men may just have happened to miss seeing them.
By not attempting to send out the location where they were, it would indicated that they did not know their location. Apparently the carrier waves received by Pan American did not have discernible voices but were strong enough to get approximate bearing.
Since we don't know the content of that message, we don't know what it did or did not contain.
There has to be a question of the reliability of these Pan Am bearings, because if they all intersected in the vicinity of Gardner, then that is probably where the radio transmissions came from, however, a few days later when the Navy arrives, there is no airplane, Earhart nor Noonan to be found.
You may
examine the evidence for yourself of how the bearings intersect. It seems pretty striking to me. I don't find it hard to imagine how the aviators might have missed what they were looking for; you do. This is not a matter of logic but a matter of judgment about reality.
All of this strongly suggests that our heroes were simply lost at sea. Perhaps they were trying to make it down the 157 line to Gardner but misfortune befell them before they got there.
To hold that view, you have to suppose a different source for the radio transmissions or incompetence and lack of diligence on the part of professional radio operators who were (I imagine) hopeful that their work would lead to the rescue of the United States' most popular female aviator. You also need to account for the dozens of other post-loss radio messages that cannot be discounted on other grounds (some of them were clearly hoaxes).
The work on Gardner presently underway is certainly justified if for nothing else but to ascertain that Earhart and Noonan were never there. The search continues.
The complete failure of Niku VI would not warrant your conclusion. The team will only be able to search a tiny part of the island and the side of the sea mount. The evidence they seek could be one meter beyond the area that they are able to search. All that TIGHAR could conclude from such a total failure would be that the evidence we desire was not in the area that we searched.