So if you think that this can't be done then you are disagreeing with the navigation experts in the U.S. Navy and with Noonan.
I wouldn't dream of it. So Noonan had flares, was able to use them effectively, got accurate winds aloft information, and was able to navigate accurately to Howland. What are a relief.
This is always your retort.
Every once in a while an airliner crashes but that doesn't mean that the technology and the procedures are wrong and that airliners can't actually fly. Prior to those flights on which an airliner crashed, neither the dispatcher nor the pilot nor anybody else expected the resulting crash. The same with Noonan and Earhart. Neither they, nor the people on the ground, had any reason to believe that the navigation methods used by Noonan would not get them safely to Howland until sometime after 20:13 Z when they failed to arrive and they stopped transmitting.
Stuff happens.
What happened, I don't know and nobody else knows either.
Here's another example of an unexpected ending. Eddie Rickenbacker was on a special mission during WW2. On takeoff in a B-17, the plane blew a tire and swerved off the runway and the navigator's octant flew across the cabin floor. The navigator examined it and thought it was O.K. They then departed in a second B-17 and ended up ditching way off course and Rickenbacker and crew drifted for 24 days in life rafts. The octant had apparently suffered some hidden damage. If the navigator had suspected any problem prior to takeoff he would have gotten a different octant so neither he nor anybody else suspected the eventual ditching. Like I said, stuff happens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Rickenbacker "Adrift at sea
One of Rickenbacker's most famous near-death experiences occurred in October 1942.[23] He was sent on a tour of the Pacific Theater of Operations to review both living conditions and military operations, and also to deliver personally a secret message to General Douglas MacArthur from the President. After visiting several air and sea bases in Hawaii, Rickenbacker was a passenger in the B-17D Flying Fortress numbered 40-3089, which strayed hundreds of miles off course while on its way to a refueling stop on Canton Island in the Central Pacific Ocean. The B-17 was forced to ditch in a remote and little-traveled part of the Central Pacific.
The failure in navigation has been ascribed to an out-of-adjustment celestial navigation instrument, a bubble octant, that gave a systematic bias to all of its readings. That octant reportedly had suffered a severe shock in a pre-takeoff mishap. This unnecessary ditching spurred on the development of improved navigational instruments and also better survival gear for the aircrewmen. The B-17's pilot-in-command, Captain William T. Cherry, Jr., was forced to ditch his B-17 in the Pacific Ocean, rather close to Japanese-held islands, also. However, the Americans were never spotted by Japanese patrol planes, and they were to drift on the ocean for thousands of miles.
For 24 days, Rickenbacker, the Army captain Hans C. Adamson, his friend and business partner, and the rest of the crewmen drifted in life rafts at sea."
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