Ran across this article from the book "Last Flight".
Randy, you seem to be under the impression that the article is quoting from 1937. It isn't.
The web page is promotion for "the forthcoming book"
Last Flight of Amelia Earhart. Three things should set off alarm bells:
• It's a product of Douglas Westfall's Paragon Agency.
• It appears to be the work of Nicole Swinford, author of
Amelia Earhart's Last Photo Shoot. Swinford wrote an entire book around the mistaken notion that a piece of movie film taken during a March 1937 photo op prior to the first world flight attempt was taken in May.
• No sources are cited.
In the article on day 4 of Amelia's flight to Miami, it talks about how the landing gear was tampered with after someone scratched their initials into the landing gear. This is the first I've heard of this...anyone else?
Yes, that apparently happened. When McKneeley inspected the gear after Earhart's hard landing in Miami he discovered the initials scratched into the strut. He consulted Lockheed and they said if the scratches were shallow enough to be polished out if was of no concern. McKneeley was able to polish them out. The only source for this is Elgen Long's book (page 123). He attributes the information to an interview he did with McKneeley in 1975.
In the article it shows the landing gear being inspected.
No it doesn't. The caption on the photo is wrong. That looks like McKneely, but he's nowhere near the strut. He's looking at the accessories at the rear of the engine. See photo below.
It also shows the inspector in the photo holding a piece of sheet metal.
He is not holding a piece of metal.
Also, in between this date and the 30th and 31st it shows where the Electra's antenna was moved several times to accomodate Amelia's need for better radio performance.
Not true. The antenna mast for the dorsal vee was moved forward on the (bad) advice of Joe Gurr before the plane left Burbank. In Miami, Pan Am's radio technician Michelfelder experimented with shortening the feed from the antenna to the transmitter.
The web page also repeats the fiction that the "trailing ball" (aka trailing wire) antenna was removed in Miami.
Worse yet, it makes the bizarre claim that the loop antenna was removed after a six-hour test flight on May 31 and re-installed the next morning prior to departure for San Juan. Never happened.
On the 30th it talks about how the window was skinned over and how odd it felt to others that this was done in the first place! Thought you might like to see this.
Yes. Thanks. There is no quote from anyone about how anyone felt. Any information Swinford has about the skinning over came from TIGHAR. Incredibly, rather than show an actual photo of the Electra with the patch, she used a March 18 photo of the Electra in the hangar at Wheeler Army Air Field in Hawaii and photoshopped out the navigator's window. See below.
Nothing in the Paragon webpage or the forthcoming book can be trusted.