I have read that Marty thanks. I just find it hard to believe that the search North West of Howland by Itasca in the first 24 hours was instigated because it was deemed to be the place with 'visibility issues'?
I was looking for more substantial reasons I.e. Radio transmission indications, direction finding indications, reported position indications, range of transmission indications.
Something more substantial that indicated where to head towards other than the visibility issue that Itasca quoted.
Well, in which direction would you have searched based only on the information that Thompson had available at the time?
There was a famous correspondence between Liebniz and Issac Newton about the character of space. Liebniz's argument was that if space was everywhere uniform, as Newton believed, then God, who is perfect, would not be able to decide in what part of that space to create the universe.
But in real life people have to make real decisions, and people are not perfect. If you are in the exact center of a room with doors on each side of the room that are all exactly the same distance from you and the room is on fire, according to Liebniz you would die there because you couldn't make a logical decision about which door to use to escape the fire. But real, imperfect, people
will choose one of those doors and get away from the fire.
Thompson had Earhart's report that they were on the 157°-337° LOP which, by standard navigational methods, is centered on the destination, Howland island. With just this piece of information Thompson had the choice of either 157° or 337° to search, any other direction is a less likely place for the plane to be. If the plane was on the 157° line SSE of Howland then the plane would have been flying in clear skys where Noonan could be taking observations of the sun and moon (Thompson could see ol' mister moon shinning up there in the sky) and doing accurate navigation and so should have had no trouble finding Howland. Looking NNW up the 337° branch of the LOP, Thompson saw clouds that could be preventing Noonan doing accurate navigation so, logically, they were more likely to be in that direction to the NNW of Howland.
So, back to my question to you, "Well, in which direction would you have searched based only on the information that Thompson had available at the time?" and why?
gl