Actually, you yourself make it sound pretty complicated. Again, I don't see this going down between two people half deaf from a 20 hour plane ride who are limiting to screaming at each other or writing words down on a chalk board (were they even passing paper notes, and as big as the one Gary described? I don't know, myself).
I think that's assigning a perfect world scenario to a chaotic, noisy environment where such communication was extremely limited and two people were tired, deaf and under extreme stress. This is rather the same problem I have with your take on the Lambrecht overflight, btw. So, again, with all due respect, I am unpersuaded, and I've stated clearly and logically why. Which, I think, is respectful and fair.
Well all the problems you state are pure speculation. You think that the computations are complicated, they are not and are child's play for any trained navigator. This method is the STANDARD and was used by navigators many, many times. My post showed that after Noonan worked out the headings and lengths of the legs (which, BTW, took me less than five minutes and Noonan was at least as good a navigator as I am) he had nothing to do except look out the windows for Howland since all the information was in that
ONE note passed to Earhart, either on the fishing pole or by Noonan crawling over the fuel tanks, which we know he did on prior legs.
All Earhart had to do was to set the first heading into the autopilot then look out the window for twenty minutes, glancing at the clock periodically, and then repeat this after twenty minutes more and then forty minutes, etc. This is a piece of cake for the pilot. You think that this is hard? Try flying a Standard Instrument Departure (SID) or a Standard Terminal Arrival Route (STAR) into or out of JFK or ORD or LAX. I have attached one example of each at Los Angles International Airport. There are 14 different STARs and 18 different SIDs at LAX, and it is similar at most large airports. These are flown thousands and thousands of times every day nationwide.
As to your concern about fatigue, I know that I have landed after ferrying a plane across the ocean after being awake for more than thirty six hours, flying solo without autopilots and doing celestial navigation at the same time. But stronger evidence on this point than my experience is the experience of the many other ferry pilots. I
posted here information showing that there have been at least 6,000 planes ferried across the Pacific to Australia by solo pilots in single engined airplanes that are slower than the Electra with the legs being longer than the Lae to Howland flight and many or most of those planes did not have autopilots. It is 2600 SM from Honolulu to Pago Pago and in a Cessna 172 that only cruises at 100 mph that is 26 hours, or longer if you have a headwind, so the 20 hour flight from Lae to Howland was nothing out of the ordinary for thousands of ferry pilots. In case you are missing the point I am trying to make, "solo" means that your are the only person in plane and if you don't have an autopilot and you fall asleep then you are rudely awakened by the ocean coming through the windshield. With two pilots on board, Noonan was also a pilot, they could take turns napping if necessary and Noonan's navigation duties did not require his full time attentions. On the flight to Hawaii he got star fixes approximately every two hours each of which take less than 20 minutes to accomplish, plenty of time in between to nap or to spell Earhart on the controls.
Deaf, put some cotton in your ears. It is always loud in twin engined planes because the props must be located only inches from the side cockpit windows due to center of gravity considerations. Yet many thousand of the planes are flown safely and the pilots manage to communicate. Prior to intercoms and headsets you turned to your copilot and leaned his way and spoke into his ear, if necessary, you raised your voice. The same when flight instructing in twins. If they needed to discuss something there is nothing to keep Noonan from slithering over the fuel tanks, probably only took 30 seconds, and we know that he did it and Manning did it too. The fishing pole with note attached was merely a convenience for short messages not requiring discussion. You
SPECULATE that they would be deaf but ask any multi engine pilot if they ended up deaf after flying in their plane and they will look at you like you are nuts. So, have you got any proof to back up your speculation? Earhart was met at every stop by news reporters, do you have any newspaper stories saying "Right after she landed we met her climbing out of her plane and we attempted to ask her some questions but she couldn't respond to our questions because she was deaf." Got any stories like that?
In 1935 Earhart flew solo from Hawaii to California, it took 18 hours. Was she deaf on arrival? Was she so fatigued that she just fell out of the plane to go immediately to sleep on the tarmac? The flight to Hawaii in 1937 took almost 16 hours. Were Earhart and Mantz, who sat next to her in between the engines, both deaf when they arrived? Did they fall immediately to sleep due to fatigue?
In 1935 two guys set an endurance record of 653 hours aloft, more than 27 days, without landing. The really exciting part of that record was the necessity of greasing the rocker arms on the engine every 50 hours. They had a bar mounted along each side of the plane, and every 50 hour one guy would climb out on the left side, move to the nose and use a grease gun on the nipples on his side. He then climbed back into the plane, handed the grease gun to the other guy who then did the same on his side of the engine. They had to do this 13 times. They didn't die from fatigue or go deaf. Then, in 1986, Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager flew around the world in 216 hours, more than nine days, and didn't go deaf or die from fatigue either.
You come up with speculative problems that do not really exist in practice.
(I just turned my TV on and the movie
Spirit of Saint Louis is on, and Lindbergh flew for 33 and half hours solo. And he didn't sleep in the plane the night before so he had to spend some hours prior to the takeoff so he had probably been up 36 to 40 hour by the time he landed at Le Bourget in Paris.)
gl