To get an accurate idea of how much fuel Earhart could have had after landing at Gardner we have to start from Lae and calculate how much fuel she should have used if she followed Kelly Johnson's recommendations. Bob Brandenburg is working on a paper on fuel consumption during the Lae/Howland(not) flight and, as often happens, his research has raised questions which have led us to an unrelated but rather startling discovery. Instead of just blurting it out, I'll give you the background information and ask a few questions that will let you connect the dots.
We have good primary source information for Kelly Johnson's recommendations for how Earhart should manage altitude/power settings/fuel consumption during each stage of the flight except the first hour. In his excellent 1989 article "Amelia Earhart's Last Flight" published in Lockheed Corporation's internal magazine Lockheed Horizons, Lockheed executive Roy Blay wrote that, if Johnson's recommendations were followed, fuel consumption would be
1 hour - 100 gph
3 hours - 60 gph
3 hours - 51 gph
3 hours - 43 gph
Thereafter - 38 gph
These numbers track well with Johnson's telegrams except Johnson makes no mention of the first hour. To verify Blay's 100 gph figure, Bob began examining Lockheed's quaintly titled Report #487 "
Range Study of Lockheed Electra Bimotor Airplane".
Report #487 was in response to a request from Earhart.
In May 1936, while Earhart's 10E Special was being built, Lockheed ran flight tests on another 10E to determine whether it was possible for a 10E to fly 4,500 miles unrefueled - the distance Earhart, at that time, planned to fly solo from Hawaii to Tokyo. They loaded the airplane to 16,500 pounds and flew their tests. Of course, one of the biggest challenges was just getting the airplane off the ground. Take a look at Summary and Recommendations on page 1 of the report, then look at the film of the Lae takeoff. I've put it up on Youtube at
http://youtu.be/ntkOyDanuRwSee anything interesting?