Aerial observation techniques were highly developed during the "Great War" and there is no reason to think that the Army kept these techniques secret from their brothers in the Navy. Navy aviators did not just spot shell splashes they also scouted for other ships such as "the enemy."
I don't doubt that some of the aviators were good at seeing big objects at long range.
And this was not the first search for lost airmen conducted from planes. In 1927 planes were use to search for the missing pilots of the planes competing in the Dole Derby so search and rescue techniques were already developed ten years prior to the Earhart search.
The question is whether those techniques (if one search did, in fact, develop S.A.R. techniques comparable to those taught today) for doing a regular visual search for small objects were
taught to the Navy personnel who were over Niku.
Whatever disparagement of the skills of the Navy aviators the defenders of the Gardner hypothesis feel compelled to make, the commanders of the Colorado and the Lexington felt otherwise and they had current knowledge of the skill and training that the aviators possessed. If the commanders did not believe that the aviators had the necessary skill to spot Earhart then there would have been no reason to launch the search planes.
The commanders were commanded to go search. They used the resources they had on board. I don't deny their conviction that it would be easy to spot folks on tropical islands from the air. I question whether that is a reasonable conviction, since they hadn't had any practice at doing so in the Great War and the Little War hadn't yet begun to produce wrecks and survivors in the Pacific Theater.
Any time a piece of evidence points away from the TIGHAR hypothesis, the defenders of the faith jump up to disparage it.
And believers in a different faith jump up to state their creed.
Strange things do happen.
An improbability is not the same thing as an impossibility.
A probability is not the same thing as a certainty.
You credit the six men (like Malcolm, without providing evidence of S.A.R. training) with so much skill that you conclude it is highly unlikely that AE and FN were on the island. I do not give the men or their training that much credit, and rate the odds of them missing AE and FN (
if they were on the island) higher than you do.
This is something about which reasonable people may reasonably disagree.
No more faith is involved on one side than the other.
I have never claimed that the failure to spot them on the island proved that they were not on the island. Even with a high probability of detection, it is just that, a probability, and it is never a certainty.
OK. I made the same point above before reading these lines.
But it does provide one more piece of evidence on the not TIGHAR end of the scale, it doesn't prove it.
That sentence is a train wreck, and it doesn't quite follow from the concession you have just made about probabilities and certainties.
The TIGHAR enthusiasts pile everything they can find on the island (unless it has a clear date on it of 1938 or later) on their end of the scale as additional evidence of Earhart being on the island so it is certainly fair for me to bring up evidence pointing in the other direction.
Let's use parallel construction: you are also an enthusiast making judgments for which you are responsible. If you call the material you are using "evidence," then you should also call the material used by your opponents "evidence." If the proper description is "bringing up evidence" for what you do, then you should use that same neutral language for what your opponents do.
Otherwise, you are slanting the playing field rhetorically. You
say either view could be right, but portray those who view things differently from you as merely "piling up stuff on the scale," while you, the reasonable man, are "bringing up evidence."