Gary
"Zamperini conducted his experiment..."
An Experiment? I'd hardly call a plane crash that killed 8 crewmen outright and resulted in the death of another(McNamara) in the raft after 33 days, and the capture and imprisonment of Zamperini and Phillips after 47 days "his experiment".
And to say that the B-24 crashed in the exact area, i.e. in the South wake current area, is a stretchi. They were in a B-24, the "Green Hornet", a dog of a plane not capable of getting off the ground with a full load of bombs and therefore referred to as a "Lemon". They were looking for survivors of another B-24 that crashed, prolly to the West of Hawaii out of the Wake currents and in the Westerly Pacific Gyre.
I looked at your Google Earth image and I have attached a portion of it. Once you put in the lat/long grid you can see that none of those whorls crossed the equator and so could not have moved Doran's raft from the northern hemisphere into the southern so as to have any chance of drifting to Gardner. Look again at the Pilot Chart and see if you can find any current of 3.5 knots, the equivalent to the 4 mph that you claimed the current reached in the Pacific. The highest speed I could find on the chart was 1.1 knots, 1.25 mph, about half of the low speed 2 mph current you claimed and only about one-third of the 4 mph high speed current that you claimed. You don't have currents that high in mid-ocean. Also look closely at the currents depicted on the Pilot Chart, none go south.
These Pilot Charts are published by the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office based on data that it has been collecting since 1842, literally millions of data points. It is amazing that the Navy never found the south flowing, 2 to 4 mph, currents that you were able to find.
You are the one who put out the theory than Doran crashed about 600 miles south of Hawaii and I have plotted this on the Google Earth image and attached a KMZ file also. Contrary to your understanding that Zamperini crashed west of Hawaii, his plane was searching about 225 miles north of Palmyra Atoll which is
south of Hawaii and I have plotted this position also. These two positions are only about 312 miles apart and located in the same westward flowing equatorial current, that's "exact" enough for me. Zamperini was south of Doran and closer to Gardner but he ended up in the Marshalls, not at Gardner.
gl