I think that everyone has always assumed that Lae was a sleepy little backwater airport, maybe one or two planes a day.
I can't speak for everyone but I've been aware that Lae was active in supporting the gold mining industry. Note that the
Chater Report is addresses to M.E.Griffin at Placer Management Limited. Placer was (and is) a mining company.
Several months ago I brought up the question of why Earhart didn't takeoff from Rabaul which was almost 400 miles closer to Howland. Ric did not know that there was an airport at Rabaul (there were actually three) in 1937 and expressed the opinion that there was no reason to believe that Earhart knew about them. There were many flights every day between Rabaul and Lae so it is impossible that Earhart did not know about Rabaul. It would be like being at the Cincinnati airport and not knowing that there was an airport in Chicago.
I didn't know there was an airport in Rabaul and you haven't shown that Earhart knew either. Yes, once she got to Lae she undoubtedly found out but by then it was too late to change her departure point for Howland even if she wanted to.
So, I agree with you, the TWO puffs of dust were created by the TWO main wheels hitting the road crossing the runway. Ric's explanation that it was just one puff broken into two by prop wash reminds me of the old story about the new guy on his first day working at the airport. An old timer sends him off with a bucket to get some "prop wash" and he is run all around the airport by the other old timers in search of the mysterious prop wash.
We can disagree about about what the photos show but, as I've said before, it ultimately doesn't matter whether there is one puff of dust caused by the dragging antenna mast snagging in the dirt or two puffs of dust caused by the wheels. The simple fact is that the belly antenna is there when the airplane taxis out and it's gone when it comes back by on the takeoff run. All of the discussion about how that happened is speculation. Fun to puzzle over but we'll never know for sure.
It is highly unlikely that at an airport that handled that much traffic that somebody would not have detected and removed every obstruction from the runway and from the taxiway that was large enough and strong enough to break the belly antenna of Earhart's plane.
Who said anything about "obstructions?" It was a heavily-used dirt/turf runway. In my experience, heavily-used unpaved runways tend to get beat up. The aircraft was heavier than it had ever been. You can see in the film that when the plane taxied out, the aft antenna mast barely cleared the ground. It's not hard for me to believe that it could have been knocked off by striking the ground, especially if Earhart taxied into the over-run at the end of the runway to turn around so as have as much runway as possible. And it's not hard for me to believe that the mast being dragged along the ground by the still-attached wire might, at some point, snag in the dirt (maybe where the road went across the runway) and tear the antenna loose. But again, it's all speculation.
Because of this, it is an unlikely event that the belly antenna mast was broken off while taxiing and impossible after the tail was up. Then, in Ric's scenario, the dragging antenna gets snagged a second time, on a different obstruction, another unlikely event for the same reasons already mentioned. Two unlikely events in series results in a very unlikely event.
I would argue that the first event (the ground strike of the aft antenna mast) was not an unlikely event due to its proximity to the ground, the weight of the aircraft, and the nature of the field. Once that happens and the mast if being dragged along the ground, the second event (the mast catching on something) is almost inevitable.
And then there is the question (assuming for the sake of argument that Ric is right) of just where the antenna would fail if it did get snagged. There is no reason to believe that the antenna wire was more likely to fail at the forward end than at the back end where it was connected to the rear antenna mast. In fact, it is more likely that the wire would fail where it was connected to the rear mast resulting in the rear mast being torn off but leaving the antenna wire still connected to the forward mast. This is due to the stress risers created by twisting or tieing off the wire at the rear mast and these stress risers lead to a weakness and a failure at that point.
I have no idea what you're talking about. All I'm suggesting is that the aft mast struck the ground during taxi resulting in the broken-off mast being dragged along the ground by the wire antenna. When the mast ultimately snags on something the wire pulls free.
Then there is also the likelihood that the belly antenna was not used for HF radio reception in the first place. Since a tuned transmitting antenna is the most effective antenna for reception it is most likely that the receiver utilized the transmitting antenna on the top of the plane.
By that logic, Earhart and Noonan surely were adept at sending and receiving Morse code since code was the standard method of radio communication at that time.