The 'rub' as it were gets to be that while much has been compiled and verified about a number of relics, to include investigations, little has happened with regard to the remaining points of recovery and placement with museums, etc. that conservation of history is actually being accomplished.
And why do you suppose that is? TIGHAR certainly has the demonstrated expertise to mount complex field operations, and TIGHAR certainly has the demonstrated ability to raise money. So it must be because TIGHAR has chosen not to recover aircraft for placement in museums. And why would that be? Because TIGHAR will recover aircraft only for true historic preservation and few aviation museums are interested in true historic preservation. After nearly 30 years of trying we have only recently been able to match up a recovery opportunity with a museum who will work with us to truly conserve an historic aircraft. I'm not free to discuss specifics yet but I should be soon.
Which leads to the last point: much also has been 'voiced', but nothing speaks like action.
There has been far more action than you know about.
While the Earhart chase is a fascination - and important, it has long dominated the field here.
Yes, because it lends itself to public discussion and participation. Other projects do not.
Now we stand on deck with one last line cluttering our ankles - the lawsuit, you are right as to that concern, and our eyes are fixed again on the slopes of Niku. I don't know the future, but my sense - such as it may be - is that we seem aimed at one last major shove toward finally exhausting the reef slopes for wreckage to prove the reef landing hypothesis correct. Oh, it doesn't have to be the final - but when to say when, examine one's own mission statement and move to the next. That's for bigger wallets and more patient adventurer's than moi, at this point.
Suit yourself.
Or, don't move to the next project at the expense of Earhart - but consider that TIGHAR might at least find more fertile peat by forming some sort of blue ribbon effort in parallel to the Earhart 'thing' to at least look more actively and formatively at these other veterans and developing partnerships to recover and conserve them - those which are known.
That was done years ago and we're hoping that that the effort will soon come to fruition.
As I've grown watching this place, this has come to heart: the Maid is not 'conserved' or even well protected where she is, she simply waits - a maiden on a bench in the dark in peril of time and the stumbling fool who might loot her, despite well-intended secrecy, such as it is.
True. Her time will come, or not. But we won't compromise her out of impatience.
What say ye, director and board? What of the significant talent TIGHAR has accumulated - and trained in the field? Can a management that would oversee Earhart also find the breadth to launch and oversea a parallel effort for one or more of these other fine possibilities, the Maid, etc.?
We're way ahead of you.
It is brutal to point out perhaps, but in closing, if in the end the public just won't support 'conservation of wreckage' then perhaps we should yield to the restorers - but do our best to oversee recovery that history and noble losses of life, etc. are at least documented and told of.
There's always someone in the trench who suggests it might be smarter to surrender than go over the top. TIGHAR has been going over the top for 28 years and at times we've been shot up pretty bad, but surrender just isn't in our DNA.
Thank you for the response, Ric.
No need for defensiveness, I wasn't on the offensive.
I well appreciate the difficulty you must face in getting museums to embrace 'true historic preservation' - as I myself suggested might be the problem. You have confirmed that - after all these years it is clear that there is just not enough 'wow' factor in the public to drop $5 bills into a glass jar at museums to preserve historic wrecks as interpretive material - apparently by comparison to what the average Joe Public can see on the museum floor in most cases, it would be no more than so much, well, wreckage - or junk.
To share a small, related story (and beyond the 'Yamamoto cartoon wreck' I mentioned already) -
I happen to be a great fan of the 'Forgotten Eagle' Wiley Post and what he did with the earlier wooden Lockheeds. An able but sometimes overly-ballsy man, most know he came to grief in Alaska in an ill-advised Lockheed hybrid he'd assembled from parts: an Explorer wing - large, long, on an Orion airframe - without the very necessary oversized tail-plane (horizontal) to offset the significant increase in pitch-over moment causedy by that efficient but huge 'borrowed' wing. This was complicated by the installation of floats intended for a larger airplane since the proper Edo float Post had ordered were not available, and he and Rogers were intent on progress. For whatever reason - carb ice, water / contamination or just a cold engine, they lost power on take-off at Point Barrow; even the mighty one-eyed Post could not recover in time to prevent a pitch-over (loss of thrust = loss of wash over tailplane = uncontrollable pitch over is one theory, comlicated by a possible stall / break and mass of oversized floats / nose-heaviness. The end result: Rogers crushed in his sleeping bag in aft cabin; Post crushed against his seat and the door / bulkhead behind it as the massive engine piled aft into his poor body.
From this accident there are a handful of artifacts from the ill-fated Lockheed hybrid that Post and Rogers died in that day near Point Barrow, Alaska: a red fragment of wing or fuselage skin - fabric covered wood with doped red finish; a metal access panel, similarly painted; most poignantly, a badly distorted seat from the airplane, by appearances the pilot's seat - and exactly then the one poor Post perished in as his mid-section was crushed. It is a sad thing to see, but as has been said of highway mishaps, one finds it hard to take the eyes off of it and think of Post's last moments. These things sit in a lonely glass case in a somewhat quiet area of the museum; if you didn't have some morbid curiosity or at least some realization of what it might be, you'd likely not be attracted. It was ignored by nearly everyone around me as I gazed at it for some moments. In microcosm, that may be the problem: the public likes shiny and new, not sad and bent, when they take the kids out to 'learn about aviation history'. Crap - they like looking at pretty airplanes.
One man's junk is another's treasure, I mentioned one of mine just now and I don't demean your passion. That is why I wondered of alternate paths and targeted 'paper' efforts by well-qualified persons. There is a very fine book on Post called the "Forgotten Eagle" and in the end, that may be the most profitable 'relic' of the man and his end, not the Orion / Sirrus / Explorer hybrid wreck, very little of which remains to be ignored by a fickle public.
So I'm very glad to hear that you and TIGHAR are way ahead of me on that sort of thing.
As to 'action' - my point was not that TIGHAR has not been active - far from it; on the contrary, I merely meant that nothing would speak so clearly as to bring these things to the fore. If it is premature for you to speak of what goes then fine, the visible effort is awaited. Things have been promised in the past under 'what's next' for TIGHAR, so we wait.
Quit Niku? Prematurely? I was merely being definitive - I admire the tenacity, but now we are promoting the biggest effort of all, designed to address lessons-learned from the last and then-largest effort to date and to seek even beyond - putting live observers in two submersables to search a very impressive area of the reef slope.
I believe that is 1 mile x 1000 meters or so deep - something approaching a square mile of dragnet for
where the bird must surely have shredded herself and left some identifiable elements, or herself even coming to rest somewhat intact on the way over the edge and down the slope if she landed on the reef at Niku. 28 years and all that has been done is admirable - but in mine and perhaps other's view (including apparently you or it wouldn't be happening) this is what it is going to take, as we can see it today, to prove the hypothesis by finding a clear and convincing artificat that the public will buy so that we can pass 'Kilroy' and say 'Earhart was here': feathers of the ghost, the grail itself.
So one may fairly look at that and make a judgment, I believe, for when to call it a day, that's all: the landed artifacts are what they are, and IMO, YMMV, of course, they are fairly wrung dry - barring some breakthrough in DNA technology that unambiguously puts
Earhart's turd on the table once and for all, etc. Short of that, need the bird, dude. I know you are trying your heart out.
But if roughly a square mile of almost certain target area (for distinguishable debris of a 1930's transport airplane going down a reef slope from surf sweeping off the reef flat above) is thoroughly searched and found empty, then what? Merely a question - but scale enters: does the approach change, do we start considering that she may have washed away and floated for some distance before sinking? If so, did she do that fast enough to escape TIGHAR's target area and yet sink quickly enough that Lambrecht and crew saw her not on the ocean blue?
It becomes then a myriad of possibilities as I see it - YMMV, of course. In my view should Niku VIII not produce the grail then TIGHAR is entering the same twighlight zone that Nauticos did up at Howland, mowing the lawn. Does it lie 2 meters outside our last pass...
Academic, of course - but I offered it for illustration and to suggest that for some, at least, there may 'come a day'. YMMV, and obviously does, but 28 years and now this elegant capstone effort are impressive and at some point beyond that, some may see madness for not moving on, not timidity.
Thanks for all you do. I do not overlook that TIGHAR has spoken volumes through her work putting up papers and gathering and cataloguing historic material - that itself is a huge part of what I suggested and certainly supports the credo in TIGHAR's mission statement in good part. But that too is part of the point: when does TIGHAR sensibly move to the next and even alter her mission strategies if people won't donate to support preserved wrecks and some denizens are just not ready to reveal themselves to us in our time? To me that is a question of 'how does TIGHAR remain vital and relevant as conditions sensibly press in new directions?'
But so much that I do not know by what you've said; that's good to know, I'm sure it will be good to find out when it is time.
All the best -