Ric,
As I said in my email to you - I don't believe what I have to offer will be conclusive but
strongly supportive of my theory. By the nature of the subject matter, there will always
be ambiguity, opportunity for "second guessing" and nit picking - not that that makes
my theory correct.
You say that I rejected the 12 hour offset as correct because it did not fit my theory and
of course you are correct. But in order to reject it I had to find a plausible explanation
as to why it was not correct. And I believe I did.
The TZ is a critical part of my theory but it does no stand alone. Taken together with the 7:18 message
and the flight profile, a clear picture emerges.
Of course one could argue that in the 7:18 message that the Lae clock could have been incorrect.
So it's like a circumstantial evidence criminal case- only when all the parts are taken together can
reasonable doubt can be dispelled and discrepancies resolved.
I don't want this to turn into a personal battle of egos so I've tried not to be too snarky
lest I get locked out again.
You have a vast knowledge of this subject and I am a relative novice. So you will always
be able to find some minor error in my postings.
But for most of my life I have been involved in problem solving of a highly technical nature as an
aircraft radio repairman on b-47's, a data processing customer engineer, a network systems
analyst, and communications computer programmer. In the fields of my endeavors, success
or failure was easy to measure - it either worked or it did not. and you did not get to go home
until it did.
And one thing I have learned in the "school of hard knocks" is that when faced with an intractable
problem that everything goes back on the table and there are no "settled issues".
Here, I began with an overview of the problem and immediately formed and opinion of where
the most likely source of the problem was.
As the leg between Lae and Howland was more a feat of navigation rather than of pilotage that
this was the most likely source of the problem. Not that the navigational calculations were
any more complex or different than any other navigational task but rather that island was so small that
the margins for error were very slim. The major portion of this flight would be in darkness with no opportunity
for checking the navigational results against landmarks. FN's work had to be flawless and he knew it.
And then the message from AE "we should be on you" indicating that from her point of view that the flight had
succeeded in terms of the celestial navigation and sun LOP - she and FN thought they were at Howland.
But obviously they were not.
And so with equipment failure ruled out, I turned to the navigation. Where could FN have gone wrong.
I suspected that a clock error could certainly have been the culprit. It is a problem of the most insidious
type. because it would only manifest itself at the first navigational opportunity as either an increase or
decrease in expected progress. This could easily be attributed to either a stronger expected headwind
or tail wind.
The progress of the remainder of the flight would seem perfectly normal until the end when your
destination was nowhere in sight.
And so I began searching for the terms clock and Earhart and found the message from AE at Lae
to New York that FN was concerned about his clock as he had not been able to set it at Darwin.
And then I knew that there was a strong possibility that he had set his own clock using his sextant.
He should have been able to do so to a precision of well under a minute. He was very experienced
translating time into location but probably not nearly so in going in the other direction.
And so I went through the calculations involved looking for a place where an error could have occurred.
And found it in the conversion from 14.2 hours to 14 hours 20 minutes instead of 14 hours 12 minutes.
I also found a reference to that type of error in a marine navigational manual. It stated that this type
of conversion error simple as it may seem was all to often made and with disastrous results.
And so following that scent is how I got to where I am now.
As to the Chater 3 second off clock, I was aware of that and came up with an possible explanation for that.
FN was using a pocket chronometer which unlike a ship clock was not temperature controlled and shock mounted and therefore likely to gain or lose time easily. FN would have been aware of the problem hence his concern about it. So if in fact he said it was only three seconds off he must have reset it himself at Howland.
An then knowing that his average error in celestial navigation was on around ten miles, which would resolve to
40 seconds clock time, he was confidant of a even higher precision from the ground. In short he was concerned
with seconds because every 4 seconds would add 1 nm to his average error and depending on
weather conditions at Howland , it could be decisive. Now my tenuous explanation would be that what he meant was that his minute time was only three seconds off the time hack. In the days before digital time on my cable
box, I would often break out my short wave to get the time hack from WWV. Most of the time part of the broadcast was unintelligible but I could easily make out the minute tone. Not great but the best I can come up with.
As for the dateline issue, it's not something that I have delved into so I'll check it out.
regards - frank