We are on lockdown now, so I have been trying to recreate Amelia Earhart’s last flight in X-plane, which is a very good flight simulator. I’ve done “chunks “ of the flight so far, but never the entire thing in a small plane at 130 Knots. Here is my experience so far:
First, I downloaded a Lockheed Electra 10E from an X-plane user site. It was quite good, but it had more modern avionics than the original, and even the X-Plane facsimile of a Garmin GPS. X-plane comes with a variety of stock aircraft, so I was able to look at different aircraft, and even change fuel consumption rates to match the endurance of NR16020. Ultimately, I decided to fly with X-plane’s Columbia 400, which was nice since I once helped build a Lancair. The X-plane Coumbia 400 is equipped with the X1000, a really good facsimile of the Garmin G1000. I chose this because it was easier for me to simply set an airspeed, altitude and heading, then walk away from the computer for hours at a time.
Using the X-Plane scenery designer, I created an airfield at Howland Island. It gave me options for grass, gravel, or pavement, and I went with a regular concrete runway. I also added a rotating beacon and a helipad, but otherwise kept it simple. For grins, I also stuck a gravel runway on Nikumaroro, at approximately the location of the coral reef.
Since I don’t have sectionals from that area, I used a well-known flight planning site to plot a course. I assumed she would not have attempted to fly over the mountains to the northeast of the field, so I planned to fly southeast to Lae, overfly the city, and then set up on my course. I found that the course overflies a very distinctive peninsula on Bougainville (now an airport there), so that would have been a good first check of the wind speed and direction. This site was kind enough to provide magnetic headings, which will be important since the magnetic variance will swing from 5 degrees at the Lae airport to 10 degrees at Howland.
I can add weather as-needed, such as layers of wind, precipitation, or clouds. As in real life, if there is ANY kind of cloud cover, Howland is really easy to miss. Nikumaroro is much easier to see. Howland is a dime in a jar of pennies. Niku is a quarter.
Regarding the flight to Niku on the 157/337 line, I can plan backwards from Niku and see that the 337 line passes about 45 to 50 miles east of Howland, so we know they went too far, which was probably just a function of looking for the island. It’s just a matter of where they picked up the line. Were they North of Howland and flew 3 hours to Niku, or were they South and flew 2 hours? I’ve included screen captures of these two scenarios. One thing that is evident is that, if they missed to the South and flew 2 hours, that means they never crossed the equator on the flight from Lae, and missed Howland by about 1 degree South. That seems like a big error. I think it is more likely that the landfall took them well North and East, and they flew 3 hours on the 157 line to Niku.