...or...
They could have survived at least for the ten days that the crew of the Lady Be Good did, and that crew did it in 130 degree desert temperatures with only half a canteen of water for the eight of them and five of them walked 85 miles, one went 26 miles further and one other made it a total 132 miles through the desert.
These things can be done so there is no reason to believe that if Earhart landed on Gardner that they would not have survived quite a long time.
gl
That is a good point Gary. One of the deeper problems I have with the Nikumaroro hypothesis, and one that is hard to exactly define is that the search aircraft overflight spots nothing other than the vague reference to signs of recent habitation which could be anything including seeing the remains of the Arundel settlement, the traces that the
Norwich City survivors left, or even, hypothetically, traces of Earhart and Noonan. However given that the first two instances saw fairly large scale activity while Earhart and Noonan would have needed professional landscape gardeners to create signs of habitation visible as described in the few days that intervened between the disappearance and the overflight then I suspect that it is to the first two that the Navy fliers refer.
So we then we left with no choice but to posit a rapid deterioration and death scenario for the pair to explain their apparent invisibility. The weak point with that however is that the island is not exactly completely bereft of food supplies or water. These may require some effort to obtain, but no more effort than other similarly placed people have overcome. Even without a fire there would always be coconuts (which do contain liquid) and raw fish - unpalatable if you don't like
sushi but if it is a choice between starvation and uncooked fish then I can't see them refusing it. So what kills them off or renders them comatose in such a short time?
People have survived for far far longer periods in worse places. They are two relatively well-nourished people without any prior medical conditions that would have rendered them too weak to last more than a couple of days. Sure Earhart picked-up the usual Asiatic curse of the squitters but that had been fixed - from experience of these complaints I can't see her undertaking the flight knowing that every hour or so she would have to crawl over the fuel tanks in the cabin to get to the dunny. Experience tells me you have to move fast.
She was fit enough to pilot the aircraft and I am pretty positive that Noonan would have refused to undertake the flight if he saw that Earhart was too weak or enfeebled while at Lae to carry out her job.
Every time the failure of the naval aviators to spot them is raised we are offered the convenient but utterly unsupported claim that the Navy fliers basically couldn't see anything because they were trained for observing shell splashes rather than people. But that to me is not a reason, just a convenient excuse to support a wonky "fact" used to create a hypothesis. We must remember that on the one hand people claim that the Navy fliers couldn't spot an elephant in an empty barn while on the other hand we accept that they saw signs of recent habitation.
We have the Betty's notebook induced intellectual coma that is the plucky Amelia and the injured Fred scenario, and we have the big wave washing the Electra off the reef just in time to be missed by the blind as bats Navy observers. Am I alone in not quite buying this - it seems more French farce than reality.
Personally I find this rapid deterioration and death scenario just a tad too convenient a scenario to explain why the Navy didn't spot them. Which still leaves the fundamental question - where they ever there?