Hey Gary...
You wrote a bunch of stuff, I checked it out, but really, it all falls under the category of my earlier criticism. You just like to show that stuff is possible under adverse circumstances, and use that as evidence to say those adverse circumstances don't matter at all. Ever. And shouldn't be taken into account. I find that way of thinking, with all due respect, silly. You go as far as to say that extraordinary feats of courage, stamina, endurance, etc., aren't extraordinary at all. It happens all the time. Well, yeah...I suppose "I Should Have Died" doesn't do stories on all the people that DID die. Doesn't make good television.
Look no further than the Air France flight out of Africa that crashed a few years back because one of the pilots didn't bother to tell the others he was yanking on the joystick the whole time. No fatigue there, no line of communication errors, no nothin'. Inexperienced pilot and a protocol misunderstanding. In a perfect world, there are all kinds of ways it could have and should have been averted. But in the real world, the plane still crashed and everyone died.
People do not always perform optimally. They do not always do what we think they should have done, what we expect them to do. Particularly -- once again -- when we apply our own biases to their behavior.
The bottom line, guys: it does not take much imagination to think of a totally plausible scenario by which those two did not do what you think they should have done. To assert that "there's no reason to think that they would have..." is to basically blind one's eyes to all manner of possibilities that are totally reasonable to arise from the situation that they may have been in.
TIGHAR has suggested various possibilities for the Lambrecht miss, all based on their own first hand investigation on the ground and their own experience: the planes probably could not be heard until they were right overhead; the scaveola was dense and it is possible that the duo could not make it to the beach in time, and further possible one or both was incapacitated; and further that actual visual sighting of the two of them from the air was more difficult than it looks. And, as I pointed out, the duo was likely probably expecting a sea and not air rescue.
All these explanations strike me as completely reasonable and plausible. Most of the criticisms of them have sprung from this kind of "best case" thinking...since something COULD have been done (assuming circumstances allowed it, which we do not know), that's what they WOULD have done, and since it WASN'T done, it didn't happen. That is not a logical argument. It's bunk.
I mean, yeah. It's weird Lambrecht didn't see them. But it's not THAT weird. The argument that's been put forth is that it's so improbable for them not to have been seen (because of course we know that they must have been totally able bodied and would have had a signal fire, etc., etc., or if not Fred Noonan would have heroically overcome his injuries and sent up a flare, etc.) that any explanation is totally far-fetched. And that is just totally unsupported by the evidence provided, and also by common fair logic. We simply don't know what happened. You don't, and I don't. But I can think of a lot of reasons off the top of my head why they weren't seen that are far more plausible than a fully rested pilot downing a passenger jet because he was yanking on a joystick and didn't mention it to his copilots. And yet...it happened!