You know, too bad FN didn't have more windows, at least - Hooven goes pretty hard on AE in his report: FN crammed in back with small windows, etc., and she insisted on having all RDF controls up front with her - clear to Hooven that she wouldn't allow a man to do that part for her. He also notes that she was a poor student at the RDF familiarization - poor interest. Sounds like took a lot for granted.
I wonder how accurate Hooven's observations were about AE's motives and habits on that front? She was fiercly independent supposedly. But some of his remarks seem harsher than warranted too - I don't think the African coast mis-fall was as he described (seems somebody sorted that out differently later), etc. And of course he saw the Japanese kidnapping as the best reason why they weren't found on Gardner, too...
LTM -
I had read the Hooven report before and I just re-read it. Hooven wrote:
"Caption to Figure 1: The Earhart Lockheed with the
old-fashioned open loop, slightly turned, over the cockpit.
If you were flying over the Pacific ocean, and tuned in a station in San Francisco, you would not be in doubt which way to go to reach the station, but if you tuned in a station on a very small island, and found it was either north or south of the plane,
you would have no way to tell which way to turn to reach the island....
Unfortunately the direction finder was unable to tell which direction to turn to go toward Howland due to the ambiguity of its loop signal. If they were north of the island, a northward turn would have taken them over the open sea, while a southward turn would either take them to Howland, or to the Winslow reef if they were south of Howland, so they turned south and flew along the 157-337 line. "
What I get from him is that, even after all those years, he was still P.O.ed that they had removed HIS better RDF (his baby) and replaced it with an "old fashioned" RDF. His explanation is that the inherent 180° ambiguity with the old fashioned RDF led to the loss of the plane. He had to know that there was a simple, universally known, procedure to resolve this ambiguity which takes only five to ten minutes, so he was being disingenuous with this complaint. In addition, his explanation is contradictory since he states that Earhart's RDF couldn't take bearings at the high frequencies that Itasca was transmitting on, frequencies requested by Earhart, so the ambiguity didn't enter into it all. Earhart couldn't take any bearings so she certainly couldn't take two opposite bearing, which is what leads to the ambiguity. He also doesn't mention that HIS RDF also would not have been able to take bearings on the high frequency signals either. So even if HIS RDF would have produced an unambiguous bearing on signals it could receive, since it couldn't receive the signals either, it would not have produced any useful bearing either.
And he was wrong, or disingenuous, claiming that the "old fashioned" RDF had a 180° ambiguity because it did not, and he should have known that. I have attached a description of the MN-5 that Amelia had and you will see that it incorporated a sense antenna which eliminated the ambiguity.
Personally, I don't think too much of Hooven's report.
gl