That's just my point, Gary...they wouldn't make a TV show about such situations if they didn't represent an incredible and unusual story -- a situation where people would otherwise be expected to have a bad outcome. It's right there in the title: "I shouldn't be alive." My problem with your analysis of nearly every situation is your dismissal of mitigating factors simply because someone, at some point, managed to overcome them...therefore it's as if they didn't exist.
They are
unusual stories in that few people face these situations, they are
not unusual stories in that people commonly survive these situations. These are stories about just ordinary people thrust into very difficult situations and surviving. One of the shows was about a guy who survived 76 days, that's right, SEVENTY-SIX days in life raft, all by himself, drifted all the way across the Atlantic and made landfall in the Lesser Antilles. He was hungry and thirsty, he lost a lot of weight, but he was still alive. Earhart and Noonan were not just ordinary people. Noonan had survived having three ships torpedoed out from under him in WW1 so I doubt that he just sat in the corner and cried himself to death on Gardner. Don't come back with the Betty story that he was injured, very unlikely in a plane that ended up standing on its own legs, and the Betty story is like all the other alleged messages, none had a location, no mention of Gardner, no mention of the word "Phoenix" as in the phrase "we are on one of the Phoenix islands, come and pick us up," and from an alleged transmission that even Brandenberg, after applying lots of lotion and massaging his figures for many days, could only give it a one chance in one and a half million that Betty could have heard a transmission from Gardner. So there is no real reason to believe that Noonan was injured and unable to contribute to a joint effort at survival.
Although I believe that Earhart made some serious errors in ignoring her own radio planning for the world flight, I believe that everybody would admit that she was one tough cookie. There is no reason to believe that either one of these people would go to pieces in a survival situation and it is even less likely with a team of two working together to solve their problems. There is no reason to believe that these two people would just go to pieces, curl up into fetal positions and just wait to die. Lambrecht was overhead only seven days after Earhart would have landed on Gardner and it is
impossible to starve to death in only seven days. Each pound of fat (and even Earhart had some fat on her) contains 3,500 calories so will keep you alive almost two days if you are active and almost four days if you aren't and even after all your fat is used up the body can use muscle tissue for a long time. You might be real hungry but you will still be alive. And there is the old wisdom "that you can't starve on a seashore" because there are always things to eat clinging to the rocks, swimming in the tide pools after the tide goes out, and buried in the sand. On Gardner there were all those delicious crabs to eat, delicacies to the natives, and birds. On another TV show, "Survivorman" last night the hero was dropped off on a deserted island in the Cook Islands and he had to survive for a week. In addition to all the stuff in the sea he also ate a booby bird after smashing its head with a stick. (
See how Mythbusters handled the same situation here.) He said as he was eating the bird "it's ironic that I am eating the breast of a booby."
Your response is that it might be very difficult to actually kill a bird. Well guess what, the full time job of all animals on earth is to find food and most animals do that almost 24/7, only humans in the western world just walk to the refrigerator. So they had all day to score one bird. Let's say you miss with the stone you throw at the birds one thousand times in a row in a twelve hour period but then you connect with the one thousandth and one, DINNER! and enough food to keep you alive for another day.
As to water, according to the official Air Force manual you can survive for at least nine days without any water in the conditions on Gardner. The PISS settlers found drinkable water, maybe not palatable but good enough to keep you alive. And the TIGHAR theory has a storm knocking the plane off the reef, how about collecting rainwater from the storm?
I wrote this before, "Well this is kinda important. They had some water on the plane but we don't know how much. Based on the Air Force manual they would last 9 days with no water at all and longer based on the amount of water they had. If they went down at sea I don't see how they would be able to obtain fresh water except from infrequent rain showers because emergency inflatable solar stills for use at sea were not produced until 8 years later. But we also know that infrequent rain can allow survival for 47 days as proven by Zamperini. If they made it to land then it would be a lot easier to find one quart a day than two gallons a day as Harry claims they needed. On the sea shore they could make a crude still out a piece of aluminum to make a pot to boil seawater and another piece to hold over the pot to collect fresh water condensation. If they were on Gardner then it would appear that they could last virtually indefinitely, finding or making the needed amount of water and with unlimited crab cakes to eat. They should have still been alive when Maude arrived only three months later. And Maude's people were able to find drinkable water by digging several wells."
I also wrote this before:"Look at the table in AFM 64-5 and the line for 80° F and no activity and you find you can last 9 days without any water. You can also see that for every extra quart of water you have you will last another day. So what good is just one pint of water obtained per day? During the nine days you should last without any water your solar still will make 4 1/2 quarts so bringing your survival time up to 13 1/2 days. But in 13 1/2 days the still will make 6 3/4 quarts so you should actually last 15 3/4 days which then makes 7 7/8 quarts so you last 16 7/8 days but then you run out of time so one pint a day adds about 8 days to your survival at 80° F
in the desert. Something else you can get from this table is that with one quart a day you can last indefinitely so two stills should keep you alive forever in the desert. The caption under the table points out that it takes two to three times as much water to survive in the desert than it does in other environments, so on a sea shore or at sea a person could survive on only one-half to one-third of the amounts of water listed in this table.
Go here to read the original post and see the Air Force Manual.So, sure, they might have been killed by a meteorite or they could have been gobbled up by a shark as they wadded across the boat channel on the way ashore from the plane but those types of events are extremely unlikely so there is no reason that they would not still be alive when Lambrecht flew over and, in fact, they should still have been there when Maude arrived in October. Your imagined scenarios are much less likely than that they simply survived like many others have accomplished.
gl