Sure you did Ric. On August 31st your wrote:
"Amelia Earhart played the same game. She was no Charles Lindbergh and she hit Ireland about 120 nautical miles off course. So, let's see .... if we use that as a measure of her ability to maintain a DR course (without any help from a navigator) it looks like she's about .07 nm off for every mile she flies by DR. Worst case: If she DRed the entire distance between Howland and Gardner (about 350 nm) with no help from Noonan she should be off by roughly 24 miles. That's hardly a scientific assessment but it's an interesting exercise."
0.07 nm off for each mile she flies is a 7% uncertainty.
For crying out loud ... I said it was hardly a scientific assessment but it's an interesting exercise. You're playing games. I don't have time for games.
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This is not a game, just normal navigational analysis. You show that she had been able to come within 7% of her destination on a much longer flight but now, on the much shorter leg from a 1627 Z fix, you claim that she can't DR within 50%, (a seven times larger error) which would have been the necessary error for them to end up closer to Gardner than to Howland. In prior discussions you used this 7% accuracy to claim that she could have easily DRed to Gardner but if she DRed as inaccurately as you are now saying that she did on this short leg then she would have missed Gardner by 175 NM.
If you don't like a 1627 Z fix then go all the way back to the takeoff at Lae. If Earhart and Noonan flew all the way from
Lae to Howland, 2222 NM, inside solid clouds without the opportunity to see any visual landmarks or to take any celestial sights, then it is highly unlikely that they were more than 222.2 NM away from Howland at 1912 Z. (Of course this is not a real scenario since Earhart wrote that "Noonan must have star sights" so they would have turned around if they could not see the stars.)
But wait, we know that they had a fix at 0718 Z near Nikumanu Island and it is only 1480 NM from there to Howland so the expected uncertainty would only be 148 NM if that was the last time they were able to get a fix. And then they saw the Ontario at 1030 Z which was only 1100 NM from Howland making the uncertainty at 1912 Z only 110 NM. Then they passed Nauru at about 1130 Z and it is only 990 NM from there to Howland, the uncertainty became 99 NM. Then they flew over Tabituea which is only 530 NM from Howland, further reducing the dead reckoning uncertainty to only 53 NM. And these numbers are based on using the standard 10% uncertainty, simply multiply these values by 0.7 to find the likely error using Earhart's 7% measurement. For example, using your 7% number for Earhart's DR acuracy they would have come within 155 NM of Howland even if they had to DR all the way from Lae.
So take your pick, normal DR should have brought them much closer to Holwand than to Gardner when they hit the sun line LOP. This is the same kind of analysis any flight navigator, including Noonan, makes and would have convinced Noonan that they were close to Howland so they would
not have decided to give up searching for Howland and instead flown off to the far away Gardner.
gl
gl