Where did the idea come from that she left behind her life raft and other emergency equipment, like parachutes.
This article suggests she left some of the emergency equipment behind. If the plane's fuel tanks were designed to intentinonally dump/seal fuel in emergency, it wouldn't be far-fetched that she may have left behind the life raft too. Parachutes too - maybe?
Los Angeles Times | 9 July 1937
Mantz Continues to Hope for Safety of Aviatrix
Mantz, who personally supervised much of the technical preparations for the flyer's second attempt to gird the globe by air, disclosed for the first time that the expedition carried no water condenser. "It ws left behind," he said. "I learned yesterday that 'A.E.' deposited both the machine that manufactures water out of human breath and her hand-crank generator for the radio somewhere along her route from Miami to New Guinea.
I look at statements like this and then try to figure out if such things are even possible or if the statements are misquotes or just plain B.S.
Looking at the claim that, at some point she had a "hand-crank generator" that she could discard along the way, what category does this statement fall into?.
What radio was the generator supposed to provide power for? There is no indication that she had a separate emergency transmitter since they hadn't been invented yet. The
"Gibson Girl" emergency transmitter didn't come along until 1941. It weighed 33 pounds and was fairly large and was hand cranked but only put out FIVE WATTS of power. It was a big breakthrough by the Germans, such a big breakthrough that it was immediately copied by the Brits and the U.S. Based on this I don't think that there were any "emergency transmitters" that Earhart could have taken on her flight.
So then, what radio would she be powering with a hand-crank generator? Only one choice left, it must be her Western Electric Model 13 airplane radio transmitter. And what did this hand crank generator look like? We know that a hand crank generator for radios was developed near the end of WW2 and used through the 1970's. It was the GN-58 which was developed to power a low powered transmitter, the AN/GRC-9, that put out up to 7 watts AM and up to 15 watts CW (which then averages only 7.5 watts.)
Tube type radios need much more power input than the achieved power output. If you do the math to figure the number of watts the GN-58 made (multiply all the voltages by the currents to find watts and then add all of the different outputs together) you will find that it put out a total of 76.4 watts which was sufficient to power the AN/GRC-9 which was limited to an average of 7.5 watts. This power output was pretty much maximum effort for a big strong Army guy.
So, could we use this hand crank generator, or one with a similar output, an output within the capability of a human, to power the WE 13? Well it depends on how much power is required by the WE 13 transmitter. I have attached the specifications for that transmitter and the thing to notice is that it requires 65 amps at 12 volts. Multiply these two numbers together and you find that it needs 780 watts in order to put out its measly 50 watts of transmitted power. So can any human, hand crank a generator and make 780 watts? The answer is, absolutely not! And even if a human could, then that generator would have to be ten times larger and heavier than the GN-58, which weighed 40 pounds, so you would be looking at a hand crank generator weighing 400 pounds hidden somewhere in the Electra!
But wait, couldn't you just put out a weak signal by cranking out 76 watts with the generator and feeding that into the WE 13? Wouldn't that at least put out a five watt signal, one-tenth of the input power producing one-tenth of the output power? Uh, no. Vacuum tubes need power just to heat them up, quite a bit of power, before they can even start working at all. I remember warming my hands over my radio on cold nights and there was always that warm orange glow from the filaments in the tubes. So before we can get the WE 13 to transmit any signal at all we must power up the filaments in the five tubes and this takes
127 watts, 10.6 amps at 12 volts! So even if Earhart or Noonan could crank with all their strength on a hand crank generator they would not have been able to even warm up the tubes in their WE 13 transmitter so it couldn't transmit any signal whatsoever.
So would there have been any reason to have a hand crank generator on the plane, one that could be abandoned along the way, I think not.
Now the other claim, that she had a machine that condensed water out of a person's breath. Sounds good, but if it was so good why did they have to develop solar stills for use by our downed airmen in WW2? If you step back and give it a little thought you will realize that a water maker that just condenses the moisture in a person's breath is akin to inventing a "perpetual motion machine." As an absolute limit it could never produce more water than the person had already drank since that would be the maximum the person could ever breath out. But wait, people lose moisture through their skin and though their urine too, so all that water could never be breathed out and collected. And even the amount of moisture breathed out will not all be collected, some will escape the machine. So you would be in a downward spiral, losing more moisture through your breath, your skin and your urine than such a machine could ever make up. So in my opinion such a machine never existed and
could never exist, and I'll wait for somebody to correct me on this.
The bottom line is that I don't think you can take Mantz's statement and parlay that into a belief that Earhart left other "essential" survival equipment behind when she took off from Lae.
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