Stubborn old coot that I have become and imbued with the self assurance that comes to those
who are well endowed with more than their share of "common sense" I refuse to yield one solar
minute on this subject. Thankfully age has not robbed me of all "sense of humour" either.
Wether it be the ship's , GMT or UTC clocks, all minute hands, wherever they be, point alike -
exempting of course Einstein's clock and those controlled by solar miscreants.
As in other spheres, a literal interpretation where not intended can cause confusion or even worse.
Care must be taken not to conflate the beginning of a TZ with the minute offset of that time zone's clock.
If a time zone starts 30 minutes (7.5 degrees) from the models conventional hour ( 15 degree)
boundary) this does not imply that a 30 minute clock change is in order else it will be but
with great difficultly that you will ever again find your own door.
- Kepler's last admonition to me on his death bed, as I recall.
Truth must stand on its own feet and is independent of its source.
An esteemed attribution does not in itself confer validity and the inverse is also true.
Therefore I will in the future continue to post inferences without attribution on this subject
and defend those statements on their merit based on logic.
Of course in this endeavour we must work based on probability as we can not possibly know
with absolute certainty exactly what happened in 1937.
We must postulate and hypothesise and if necessary use unfounded assumptions in so doing
and then of test our theory as best and if we can.
Hopefully we can arrive at a theory which has a high probability of being correct.
As an example of what I mean - consider AE's 100 and 200mnm mile transmissions.
The time between those transmissions was about 30 minutes which means
that she was averaging about 200 nm/hour. That is at or above the max speed
for that aircraft. So if she was running low on fuel, what was that all about?
I would suggest that she was coming down from altitude in order to prepare for
intercepting the sunrise as low and close to Howland as possible to minimise the
altitude factor in the timing of the sunrise and decrease the effects of crosswind drift.
Here she was trading altitude for time and distance.
Also notice that from the 100nm mark to her destination that the time duration
was around one hour.
Clearly she had slowed considerably, probably to fly at the most fuel efficient speed
after catching the sunrise.
This fits in perfectly with my assumption that the 100nm transmission was in
response to the sunrise.
Remember that I am not accepting the 30 minute clock offset as valid.
And so once again, she was there right on schedule but she believed
that were still 100 nm out. That points to a clock setting error of around eight
minutes.
Let the games begin...