Can anyone offer up any documentation or additional information, either way, to help clear up this obvious discrepancy? Thanks.
I was reporting what was told to me by the Pratt & Whitney VP for Communications in September, 1997. I was pushing to get sponsorship for our project and he was explaining to me why I was getting nowhere. "We're out of the Amelia Earhart business." The McGuire affair was an embarrassment and had soured the company on sponsoring Amelia Earhart projects.
It's not clear where the writer of the 2004 Air & Space article got his version of the story. The only informant he quotes is Bill Taylor. I knew Bill. Great guy. He was the mechanic in charge of restoring c/n 1052 for the New England Air Museum. Bill died about two years ago.
The Air & Space article has some inaccuracies. For example,
"In 1934 this particular Electra, a 10A, serial no. 1052, rolled off the Lockheed assembly line in Burbank, California,..." In fact, 1052 was delivered February 19, 1936.
"United Technologies (parent company of Pratt & Whitney, which had made the Electra’s engines) heard of her plan and offered to restore the 10E to flying condition."
This makes it sound like UT approached McGuire. According to the P&W executive I spoke to, that's not what happened. Corporate sponsorships almost never happen that way. You go to them. They don't come to you.
"In 1984, United Technologies bought Dolph Overton’s 10A and got to work."
I saw the airplane when it was still in the Lisbon, CT hangar (see photo below). Nobody "got to work" on 1052 until it went to Windsor Locks in 1994.
"Then McGuire fell ill with Lyme disease, and United Technologies changed management and ditched the McGuire project."
When I was first in touch with Grace she was still living in Rumson, NJ. I don't remember the year, but it had to be after 1988 when we began our Earhart investigation. United Technologies was already long out of the picture and she had not yet been diagnosed with Lyme.
Grace McGuire's hostility toward TIGHAR had nothing to do with my mistaken belief that her plane had been damaged in a fire. She disagreed with our theory. She was, and probably still is, convinced that AE crashed and sank because she had the wrong lat/long coordinates for Howland.
It may be possible to find out if Grace McGuire ever held a multi-engine rating.