My point precisely, Ric.
Only I fear she may have even failed at that. Based upon what I know of the circumstantial evidence, my own guess at the course of events are as follows....
They missed Howland....not only was there no DF signal where she expected it to be, there was no voice either. When you reach your destination and instead all you can see in any direction is a whole lot of wet, that is a pretty scary proposition. It can shake your confidence not only in yourself...but in your navigation (or in this case...in Fred.)
After a certain amount of prodding and coaxing (and pointing at fuel gauges), she gives up on Howland and turns outbound for Gardner. That they indeed found Gardner I believe says more good about FN than AE. Only this doesn't really look like Gardner as it is depicted on the charts, does it? Nevertheless, it's here and it's reasonably dry. (At this point.....even if we'd seen 40 foot tall dragons wandering about the interior, this is still where we are going to terminate.)
And at least someone has been here before, look at that big honking shipwreck. Someone someplace knows where and what this island is...so if it's not Gardner, at least it probably has been charted. Things are finally looking up.
They make one pass lengthwise up the middle of the lagoon. No place to put it down there.
Then they fly one...no more than two...circuits around the outer shoreline. Nothing looks better than that big wide long bit of beach next to the shipwreck. MAYBE a low pass along the beach to check how smooth it might be.....but I doubt it. This beach really is the only game in town, so why waste gas on looking for something that isn't going to change your mind anyway?
So....we line up inbound over the shipwreck, BUT...we're a little high. An understandable error.....we've been awake very nearly 24 hours by this time, and most of that was spent flying. Exhausted is exhausted, no matter how you slice it. No doubt the fear of swimming home to California had only added to that exhaustion.
We land long, but we are down and rolling. And here is where our small amount of luck leaves us: on rollout, we drop the left main mount into a huge crevasse in the reef that we'd not seen. Fred, whether he was sitting up front or at his station in the back, was on the right side of the plane. So my guess is that, when we rolled out into the hole, everything came to a sudden stop. And it is at this point that FN is thrown against the starboard bulkhead sustaining a significant head injury. How significant depends on how fast they were rolling when they fell into Nessie. AE, being on the left side is forced away from the bulkhead rather than toward it....hence, no injury beyond possibly some seatbelt bruising and maybe a stiff neck.
Either way, here we are. We are down and stopped with one landing gear lodged irretrievably in the reef. The bad news is that Fred (not to mention the Electra) is injured.
The good news is that it's the left wheel in the hole and not the right. That leaves the starboard prop clear enough from the surf to run the engine and use the radio.
All of this would explain how Fred could be injured to the point of dementia and yet AE and the Electra still being well enough to run an engine to make the broadcasts which would be heard and transcribed by Betty Klenck. And it would explain the wreckage which would later be observed (and possibly photographed) still sticking out of the water years later.
It's all conjecture, I admit. But, being the simplest theory which explains most if not all of the circumstantial evidence, it satisfies both myself and Occam. Feel free to poke holes in as much of it as possible.
LTM,
.....TB