John,
That was an extremely well-written and informative novella, please don’t apologize – just keep them coming. A couple of minor points to add though:
A prudent aviator ...
Well then, this may well be the crux of the problem, as has been pointed out numerous times by many throughout this forum. Although FN may have been a prudent navigator, he wasn’t the PIC.
Your writing reflects that you are a well-trained military pilot with excellent reasoning and solid decision making skills. AE? Not so much. She bet the farm, and her life, on completing this flight, and prudence is not what comes to mind when reviewing, admittedly with the benefit of hindsight, her planning and preparations. Fame and fortune, and contemplations of same, clearly tend to affect one’s judgment and decision making – they certainly did for AE. By the time she reached Lae, she was low on cash, running out of relevance, and as has been pointed out by others on this forum (Gary?), had already banged up her shiny new plane once and would not be able to find a wealthy benefactor to repair it again. While you and I may think that any landing you can walk away from is a good one, she probably could not avoid thinking that if she made a survivable landing on one of the Phoenix Islands, she would have been a very famous and bankrupt laughing stock, a discredit to her gender. If Fred planned out his COAs in advance as you suggest, it seems unlikely he would have done so without discussing them with AE, and she may have weighed in heavily on the plans.
Also, your COA 3 assumes you have an extra 140 gallons of gas floating around in the tanks. I like the idea of leaving an extra 40 gallons for mom and the kids, shows prudence and good judgment on your part again. But if you only had 90-100 gallons or so left when you thought you should be on Howland, that may drastically alter your thinking, and no one really knows how much gas she had left at the point she said “should be on you.” Gary and others have also mentioned that as you are flying south to the Phoenix Islands, you’d be picking up fixes from speed lines and sun and moon shots, giving you a much better idea of exactly where you are and making it much less likely that you’d want to continue on to the Phoenix Islands, not to mention that they are spaced fairly widely apart and you could just as easily as not miss all of them as well. However, my navigational knowledge is quite limited and I’ll let others discuss and debate the navigational wisdom of the various COA’s.
But we all get to choose what we want to THINK FN did. Until we find otherwise that's all we can do.
Yeah, very well said, and I think it’s great that TIGHAR invites all viewpoints. Most of us keep open minds, too (although some more so than others). I’m not sure I agree with your conclusions, but I like the information you provided, not to mention your writing and your reasoning. I continue to be humbled by the array of accumulated knowledge on this forum, and I too support pursuing the hypothesis and sharing of ideas without bashing or being bashed.
If I was going to be a passenger on a re-creation of AEs RTW flight, I would feel much more comfortable with you as pilot than with AE. If we had found ourselves in the same situation and not been able to find Howland, I’m sure you could have put us down safely somewhere in the Phoenix group. I’m equally sure that between us we could have gotten the radio going and would have broadcast our position over and over repeatedly, even just the fact that we were somewhere in the Phoenix group if we didn’t know which island. I’m gonna warn you now though, if you start wasting our precious limited gas/electricity to start babbling about your suitcase that you left at home in your closet instead of saying “Phoenix Islands, Phoenix Islands,” I’m gonna grab the mic out of your hands, let go of the push to talk button (because that’s what one does if one is talking on the radio and is interrupted by some distraction which one needs to attend to momentarily), and beat you over the head with it (provided I wasn’t loopy from a bump on the noggin during the landing). Until then, I very much enjoyed reading your posts (I might even look up Halsey and The World Wonders), and please continue to share your thoughts.
Almost certainly,
Diego Vásquez