"ONE FIFTY <pause> SEVEN, " is a far cry from the normal flowing "ONE FIFTY SEVEN". It could have easily have been "ONE HUNDRED FIFTY DEGREES EAST SEVEN MINUTES SOUTH". As I stated before, this is simply impossible to know since Balfour was probably sitting there by himself.
Except that your newest proffered interpretation suffers the same problem as all of your other interpretations of the 0519 Z position report, that they all end up requiring completely impossible ground speeds. This newest incarnation places the plane, as reported at 0519 Z, 487 SM from takeoff meaning it only maintained a ground speed of 92 mph and also flying a course that was 54° off the direct course to Howland placing it 400 SM north of course, and you always advocate that they would have stayed on the direct course. Then, the second leg from this new position to the position reported at 0718 Z is 726 SM, requiring a ground speed of 363 mph! There is also the problem of how would Noonan have been able to determine those co-ordinates since there is no land nearby for a visual fix and, as I explained before, this position could not have been determined by celestial observations.
You will come back and say that the position was actually reported at an earlier transmission time and that the just forgot what time they heard it and put down the time of the 0519 Z scheduled report. Let me give you some free legal advice. If you are ever drafting your will and you want to make sure that your ungrateful son gets nothing, DON'T just leave him out of the will completely without him being mentioned at all. If you do he will claim that he was not mentioned only due to some mistake or inadvertence and will sue to break the will and get his greedy hands on your money. What you do to make sure that he can't make this argument is to mention him in your will and leave him one dollar. Since he is in the will he can't claim that he was left out by mistake.
Chater wrote:
"Arrangements had been made between the plane and Lae station to call at 18 minutes past each hour and arrangements made to pass any late weather information,
but local interference prevented signals from the plane being intelligible until 2.18 p.m. The Lae Operator heard the following on 6210 KC –“HEIGHT 7000 FEET SPEED 140 KNOTS” and some remark concerning “LAE” then “EVERYTHING OKAY”. The plane was called and asked to repeat position but we still could not get it. The next report was received at 3.19 pm on 6210 KC – “HEIGHT 10000 FEET POSITION 150.7 east 7.3 south CUMULUS CLOUDS EVERYTHING OKAY”. The next report received at 5.18 p.m. “POSITION 4.33 SOUTH 159.7 EAST HEIGHT 8000 FEET OVER CUMULUS CLOUDS WIND 23 KNOTS”.
Chater clearly mentioned the one hour earlier report, 0418 Z (2:18 p.m.), so we know that the "ONE FIFTY SEVEN" report was not received then. Chater also clearly
did not accidentally omit mention of the earlier expected reports to be received at 0118 Z, 0218 Z and 0318 Z and stated that local interference prevented hearing them. You would have to be claiming that the 150° 07' longitude report was received at one of these earlier times that were covered up by local static. If these co-ordinates (or any of the other permutations that you have proposed) had been received at the immediately prior reporting time, 0318 Z (0118 p.m.,) then you end up with ground speeds that are way too high and even worse if you claim it was at an even earlier time.
In order to support your theory, you have had to make multiple changes to the reported evidence, all without any reasonable explanation supporting those changes. If you have to make multiple changes then it is unlikely that you have the correct explanation, an example of Occam's Razor. My theory requires correcting only one piece of data and I have given a reasonable explanation supporting this change based on mishearing "ONE FIFTY SEVEN" as "ONE FIFTY SEVEN", the type of error that is quite common and understandable to anybody with an open mind. This interpretation is supported as the correct interpretation since the resulting ground speeds then fall right into the reasonable range based on what we know about the winds and the airspeed of the plane and this interpretation also explains how Noonan could determine those co-ordinates by a visual fix on Choiseul Island since celestial navigation was not possible at that time of day.
gl