Malcolm says:
"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."
You say that the idea that the Navy fliers "couldn't see anything" is unsupported. I don't think anyone has said the Navy fliers "couldn't see anything", just that the odds of being seeing a person are pretty small and that in the limited time they were overhead they did not spot anyone on the ground. They did, as you point out spot "signs of recent habitation", so your use of "couldn't see anything" is wildly exaggerated in an apparent effort to make the TIGHAR scenario of missing persons on the ground seem absurd.
The difficulty of spotting folks on the ground is supported by the aerial tour which was flown at lower altitude than the Navy flight, and despite the fact that we know were some of the people on the ground should be, they are not visible in the video. Some folks are relatively easy to spot, especially when the camera knows where they are and zooms in, but there are others there who are not visible. Have you seen the aerial tour? How many people can you spot?
In addition, as a trained airborne SAR Incident Commander, I can tell you that the probability of detection that I would assign to such a search - i.e. spotting a person on the ground during a couple of passes over the dense vegetation of Nikumaroro by non SAR trained personnel flying in open cockpit biplanes - would be extremely small.
So when you say that the notion that the Navy overflight was unsuccessful is "utterly unsupported" you are both discounting the available support for such a notion, some of which is visually available to yourself, and exposing your own bias towards not considering the possible reasons why such an overflight might not be successful at spotting persons on the ground.
Furthermore, you've completely discounted the possibility that the signs of recent habitation might actually be related to Earhart and Noonan. I find it unusual that you, as a scientist, so easily dismiss the possibility that signs of recent habitation on an uninhabited island could be related to two persons known to be missing in the area. Yes, there are other possible explanations, but you have to admit that one possible scenario is that such signs were made by Earhart and/ or Noonan. Isn't that scenario worth investigating? Why are you so resistant to consider or explore that possibility?
You've reduced the discussion to binary absurdities - Navy fliers would have seen anything that was there - vs - Navy fliers "couldn't see anything". Neither one is realistic, but the fact that you choose one over the other would indicate that you are not the objective third party you proclaim to be. You've chosen one of the binary ends that itself has no actual supporting evidence, only your personal unsupported opinion.
This is a hypotheses we're working on here, something that is not yet proven, but a scenario that has to accommodate all the known facts, "wonky" or not. If all the facts were as binary as you prefer to make them, it would be a lot easier. The signs of recent habitation and the fact that no persons were seen by the Navy overflight are two facts that are easily dealt with in the area of messy reality between your sanitized binary ends.
Andrew