Parachuting into water is frought with difficulties and should only be attempted by those trained to do so.
Main problem being that if you are still in the harness when you hit the water (you will go under) you will end up with dozens of rigging lines and a huge silk mushroom on top of you and, wrapped around you. Now, you will have to exit the harness, untangle the rigging lines and escape from the silk while underwater, good luck. The idea is to unstrap and exit harness at 20 to 50 feet thus leaving you clean on entry into water.
As I mentioned previously we stopped training jumps over water due to a number of factors which resulted in near fatal and fatal incidents.
So for safety don't jump at night over water and, always have a reference point so you can judge your height when exiting harness. We had dummies exiting the harness in excess of 100 feet! OUCH!!!
How many times did you land a parachute in the water? There may very well be a good reason to not make
training jumps into the water since they carry a higher risk than jumps onto land, so
why not avoid that extra risk, especially since jumping into water is
NOT part of the mission of paratroops? It
is part of the mission of Navy SEALS and they do make lots of jumps into water for training and for real. If Earhart did decide to jump from the plane into the Pacific, it would
not be
a training jump, she would already be in a dangerous situation. There are no good choice when the engines stop making noise over the ocean so you are forced to choose the lesser of two evils. Yes there is danger parachuting into the ocean and yes there is even greater danger ditching a land plane into the ocean. Thousands of pilots have chosen option "A" and survived parachuting into the ocean and the only training they had was a verbal briefing on how to land in the water or only from
reading their manual.However, that is not the end of the discussion on whether parachutes were in the plane. We know that there were parachutes with Earhart in Darwin, either two she had with her previously, or two that she picked up in Darwin or four, the total from both sources. Putnam only accounted for the first two in his publishing of
Last Flight and that story itself is suspect since it was not published in the story written by Earhart and cabled from Darwin to the Herald Tribune. So even if Putnam is correct, what happened to the two parachutes that she picked up in Darwin? The two Australian newspapers
did not say "she picked up two parachutes that were awaiting her in Darwin
and gave instructions to ship them back since she didn't think they were of use over the ocean," which looks like a pretty newsworthy part of the story
IF THAT IS WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. No particularly good reason to leave them behind even if she didn't plan to use them over the ocean, they were going to be flying over some more jungle in New Guinea where she obviously thought they were of use as she said that flying over jungle was the part that most scared her about the world flight. So that is one good reason why they were still aboard. Another good reason is that she had to get them back to California one way or another, why not just keep them in the plane. And don't give me the old story that she was concerned about the slight amount of weight of the chutes. People have jumped on the "weight bandwagon" based on the long takeoff at Lae but that long takeoff was a result of Earhart's failure to follow the instructions from Lockheed contained in Report 487 by failing to set the flaps to the takeoff position, something she would not have foreseen prior to the actual takeoff. And the plane was only about 500 pounds heavier at Lae as it had been at Oakland and that takeoff went exactly like the data in Report 487 said it should and the plane had plenty of climb capability at the weight it was at on takeoff at Lae.
gl