Jeff, it looks to me like that would happen. ...personally think it was bent (just my opinion). There has also been much discussion about whether one of the ventral antennas was removed before the second trip left Florida. The attached photo taken somewhere along the route, I'm not sure where, appears to show both of the rear antenna masts still installed. It is not obvious if the second antenna wire is still there. If both wires were still there, both A/S indicators could have been off. In whatever case, AE should have been able to maintain close to the correct airspeed just by using the proper power settings in conjunction with the other flight instruments.
I think you have discovered why Earhart ran out of gas just after the 2013 Z message. Both pitot masts were bent out of shape causing both airspeed indicators to read too low. (There is no way that they can be bent to make the airspeed read too high.) To get the recommended cruise speed to show up on the airspeed indicators Earhart added more power which increased the fuel flow and so reduced the specific range (miles per gallon) causing the plane to run out of gas much sooner than expected. You might think Earhart would be suspicious that such high power settings were needed but she probably just chalked it up to operating at a higher gross weight than she had ever flown the plane at before.
gl
That's very interesting, Gary - and nearly utter non-sense.
How do you KNOW such things to be true at all? Quite a leap.
First of all, a slight bent pitot tube won't necessarily cause such a gross error. We take great pains to keep tolerances on stuff like that for a good reason, but it's still far from certain that a bent tube would create that much error from what I've seen damaged and flown in the field over 4 decades. I don't buy your statement at all as a certainty. I also agree with Clarence Herndon that such errors can be readily spotted and dealt with well enough.
You, TIGHAR, nor I can know exactly what AE meant in that statement about running low on gas - maybe she meant the reserve she was able to spend searching before moving down the line - which of course you have always clearly rejected. This appears to be nothing more than a convenient grab for you to bolster your pet thought on the idea of sputtered and sank - you have no substantiation for your claim.
After the celestial nav ad nauseam you have posted here you also know that you don't even have to chase A/S with power like
that if any of your cel nav ideas are even near to the truth - so which is it? You can't have it both ways. If something is out of whack to that degree you sort it out - and they did have substantial mileage behind them at the 0718 position call (with identifiable land in sight). That was enough miles to know if they had such a problem. AE may have been dingy, but yes
I do think she'd be suspicious - the airplane wasn't that heavy after several hours of burn-off, and again - she had a position check per above. She'd come nearly around the world in the Electra by then - if the numbers were grossly crossed it's not likely she'd have chased the needles like that - with a navigator aboard, most especially. It's a long leap to say that she'd 'chalk it up' to something like that - you're being too dismissive IMO. You can have your opinion, of course - I just see it as flawed for obvious reasons.
Where do you get that
both pitot tubes would have been bent anyway? Maybe an astroid struck the bird... You talk about TIGHAR grabbing at the 1/2 fuel remaining comment (highly questionable record on that anyway), but you grab this non-sense and hold it up?
Irv's got the right track on this - it looks like you're just contriving another crash-splash-n-sink platform. But, NOW we know what your theory is!!! Happy day!
LTM -