I find your remarks of rebuttal quite argumentative ...
Shouldn't a man devoted to logic expect arguments in reply to arguments?
... and simply not convincing. I have looked at the so called post lost messages ...
How many? In what source? Have you got a copy of
Finding Amelia so that you can look at the data on the CD?
... and fail to see any instance where Earhart or Noonan attempted to give a location.
Many of the transmissions had no intelligible content--just a transmission on an Earhart frequency by a man or a woman and some of which appear to have come from within the Phoenix islands. Your failure "to see any instance where Earhart and Noonan attempted to give a location" is not a responsible or logical induction from those transmissions for which no transcript is available. Since we don't know what they were trying to say in those transmissions, we don't know what they may or may not have tried to transmit about their location. Many of the other transmissions where there is some intelligible content are fragmentary. You have no grounds to criticize Earhart or Noonan on the basis of those messages.
"One must have a very good imagination to interpret some of those entries in Betty’s notebook as providing convincing evidence that the messages were coming from Gardner Island and that Earhart was telling the world where she was."
If all we had was Betty's notebook, I would be inclined to agree with you. But it fits a pattern of post-loss messages that cannot be ruled out on technical grounds or because of clearly impossible statements (e.g., the alleged transmissions from a floating plane).
Why shouldn't a young girl doodling in her notebook miss parts of what she heard? She reports that she could not hear everything that was said.
Noonan had the reputation as the world’s foremost aerial navigator so is it not logical to assume that he knew or should have known what island that he was on?
Only on the assumption that Noonan carried all of the maps you think he had and that he was able to work out a better fix from sun-lines on the flight down to Gardner. If he was injured in the landing or if it was cloudy on the first night(s), he may not have been able to work out a good fix for where they were. You can't do celestial navigation starting from nowhere. If he had known where he was when they headed to Gardner, they would have known enough to make it to Howland. Not even "the world's foremost aerial navigator" could defy the laws of celestial navigation. If you're lost, you're lost, and you haven't got any way to get yourself re-located on the map until you get two or more LOPs crossing each other--and that takes time.
To say that they did not know their position flies in the face of the hypothesis that they flew down the LOP looking for land.
They knew the Phoenix Islands were thataway, more or less. That is not the same thing as being able to transmit a latitude and longitude for the plane or to name the atoll that they'd found.
The reports by Pan American of the bearings that they compiled indicating an intersection in the vicinity of the Phoenix group is not evidence that those carrier waves were coming from Earhart or Noonan. The veracity and accuracy of those reports could very easily be considered suspect. It would have been of great benefit for Pan American to be given credit for performing a service that led to the rescue of our heroes.
So now you need the coordination of a conspiracy among four widely spaced Pan Am stations in the Pacific, with some help thrown in from the Coast Guard. Bob Branden's introduction to
"Analysis of RDF Bearings"... says: "This paper presents an analysis of radio direction finder bearings obtained by Pan American Airways (PAA) direction finder (DF) sites, at Wake Island, Midway Island, and Mokapu Point at Oahu, Hawaii, and by a temporary U. S. Coast Guard DF site at Howland Island, during the search for Amelia Earhart in July 1937. All bearings were taken on signals heard at night, on or near 3105 kHz, the Earhart night frequency.
Our conspirators must have accomplished their nefarious scheme by radio or telegraph transmissions, unless you're willing to grant them powers of ESP. And all hands at all stations would have to agree to the conspiracy within a day or two of July 2nd in order to cook the books properly.
You may imagine that this is "probable." For me, I don't find your (undocumented) allegation the least bit persuasive. And the only way to get credit for finding Amelia (your alleged motivation for this conspiracy) is to, uh, you know, like
find Amelia. If desiring to be The Man Who Saved Amelia from Certain Death motivated them, it should have motivated them to tell the truth about what they heard with their ears and observed with their instruments.
In regards to the Naval aviators and contrary to your comments, the float planes that were on the Battleships were there for the purpose of reconnaissance.
"Reconnaissance" meant "spotting enemy ships and targets of opportunity." It did not mean "finding two people and aircraft wreckage on a small Pacific atoll while flying at an altitude of 400' to avoid bird strikes." It is nonsense to say that the skills needed to spot ships of war are identical to those required for search-and-rescue. There is some overlap, of course: don't crash your search plane; know where you are; keep your head on a swivel; look out of the corner of your eyes; alternate unassisted visual sweeps with use of binoculars; etc.
Searching for downed aircraft and survivors of wrecks is an art, not a science. The art has developed greatly since 1937. It's very different from finding something trying to torpedo your destroyer or that your destroyer can torpedo.
The pilots and observers were trained in searching and reconnaissance so it was not foreign to them, as you suggest, to go search airways and islands for lost airplanes and aviators. As the world’s foremost aerial navigator it should not be hard to assume that Noonan would expect someone to come looking for him, likewise, Earhart.
There's no reason why he should have expected anybody other that the boat waiting for them to come to the rescue. Your imagination has filled Fred's imagination with thoughts that I find unrealistic: "Of course, since I'm the World's Foremost Aerial Navigator ..."--my heavens, what would
Harold Gatty, Charles Lindbergh, or Wiley Post have thought of that claim!--we return now to your fantasy about what was in Fred's head--"Of course, since I'm the World's Foremost Aerial Navigator, the navy will certainly send a destroyer with its reconnaissance warcraft to look for me. I must see about forming an SOS on the beach quite promptly."
The comparison you give of the video in regards to your perceived difficulty is searching for people and equipment on an island is not accurate. Looking at the video of the helicopter flying around Gardner does not indicate that flyers could not see objects on the ground.
I did not say they could not see objects on the ground. I said it was difficult to do so. If you have the video, watch how the footprints leading to people on the beach--and the people themselves!--disappear from view as the helicopter ascends.
The helicopter in the video is a Hughes 500 and the airspeed appears to be about 80 kts which is normal for that aircraft. The airspeed of the Navy float planes from the Colorado is comparable to the Hughes 500.
Only the heli pilot and Ric know their actual airspeed--I'm not sure it's specified in the video. The field of view in the heli is vastly better than that in the biplanes.
Look at the way the lower wing and nose block the pilot's view of the search area! They could look over one side or the other, but not both. While they were looking over the right side of the plane, something might slide by on the left.
I can assure you that aviators trained in reconnaissance techniques can see people and other objects on the ground and in the wooded areas.
Yes, today's training is splendid. It did not exist in 1937. You are guilty of equivocation in your use of the word "reconnaissance."
To the untrained eye such as yours, everything seems to be a blur, however, not so to a trained scout pilot.
And lots of trained and motivated searchers missed the remains of Steve Faucett's wrecked Citabria and (presumably) his body as well. Scout pilots are not infallible.
Your statement that “perhaps your imagination needs training” is misplaced and unwarranted.
You made the powers of your imagination the issue when you said, "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." You are assuming both that AE and FN would have created such markers visible from the air and that people in the Vought O3U-3 carried by the Colorado. The fact that they were trained in reconnoitering for ships does not mean that they had your training in reconnoitering for survivors.
I have over forty years of professional flying experience from flying scouts in Vietnam to extensive over water flying in commercial aviation.
I have a Masters degree in Philosophy and Ph.D. in Systematic Theology. I've published two books. I'm not a neophyte when it comes to reasoning. I've been part of TIGHAR since 2000. I'm the webmaster of the site, one of the principal authors of the wiki, and the person who set up the software for this forum. I know a thing or two about reasoning.
What you learned from 1960 to 2000 gives you a splendid basis for your opinion that if someone with your skills had searched the island from the air, you could judge that the absence of evidence was evidence of absence. I don't see any reason why I should bow to what you claim to have learned in that era as grounds for judging what was possible and what was done in 1937. You may pull rank on me if we are discussion which one of us is best to pilot an aircraft; your rank means nothing when it comes to reasoning properly about the evidence that is available to us. I hope you fly a lot better than you argue.
I think that I know what an aviator should be able to see and not see when flying over an island and it is my opinion that if Earhart and Noonan were on Gardner, they would have been discovered by the scout planes from the Colorado.
My opinion (and that of the many professional pilots involved in TIGHAR's search from the beginning, some of whom have been on the island on foot as well) is that it isn't hard at all to understand how easy it would have been to miss AE and FN.
It appears to me that you are a little too sensitive to other opinions that do not completely support your position and you tend to become very defensive and condescending.
Thanks for your insensitive, non-defensive, and non-condescending judgment of my personality. It is a model of netiquette.
Perhaps you have been at this a little too long.
Yes. I took about an hour this morning and an hour just now to reply to your post with indications of where you might find some answers to your questions.
Of course, you may mean to say, "There is no point in taking what I say seriously or dealing my questions in detail. Nothing you can say can change my mind because I am a pilot and you are not. I know what I'm talking about and you don't."
Relax a bit.
I will when I finish this post, thanks.
You speak of a “total failure of Niku VI” and what it would indicate.
Yes, I did. It was a supposition about a worst-case scenario and what conclusions might be drawn from it. The proper conclusion is not the one you recorded in this forum and to which I was replying: "The work on Gardner presently underway is certainly justified if for nothing else but to ascertain that Earhart and Noonan were never there." The work on Gardner presently underway is incapable, by itself, of providing evidence that Earhart and Noonan were never on the island; it would only show that Niku VI could not find evidence of their presence where the team was able to look.
I don’t think that not finding evidence that Earhart and Noonan were ever on Gardner would be a failure. It should be considered successful even if the expedition concluded that our flyers were never there. Then you could go and look someplace else.
TIGHAR
has looked in other places and eliminated them from the search.
Of course, if you have a line of evidence that points to some place else, state your case. If it's persuasive--and not just a series of assertions based on your personal authority as someone trained in SAR in 1960-2000--TIGHAR may help you out, as they did with
the search for graves on Tinian in 2004.