Mystery word

[Pat Fontaine]

Greg,
I may well be wrong, but I don't see it. 
If it's 'tested': to me there are four letters after the 'T', and I can't stretch 'ed' out to four letter spacing.
While 'incl' has four letters and fits in that regard, it lacks the spacing between words ('test' and 'incl') that to me is prominent between all other words.
But I really like the idea of the first letter being 'A' - I've run through the alphabet a few times using each letter to see what sparked... never came up with 'Air'
Thanks for the spark - let me re-think things.

[Greg Daspit]

Pat, I agree with everything you noted. Interesting the way the uppercase a in Amelia is written.
edit:
Does it seem like the same person who wrote Amelia wrote the remarks?

[Ric Gillespie]

As it turns out, we have three sets of AE-related documents sent by the FAA to various TIGHAR researchers who sent them on to me.  Apparently when somebody asks the FAA to "send me everything you have on Amelia Earhart" whoever gets tasked with fulfilling the request goes and gets the file and makes photocopies.  Different copy machines, different quality.

Here is a scan of the best photocopy we have of that sentence.  It's quite a bit better than what we have been working with.

[Ric Gillespie]

This could be as many as 13 friggin' letters.

[Ric Gillespie]

Does it seem like the same person who wrote Amelia wrote the remarks?

It's all the same guy.  He's the Bureau of Air Commerce inspector.  He makes some of entries on the form in cursive and he prints others.

[Ric Gillespie]

My brilliant wife just nailed.  The word is Understand.

[Pat Fontaine]

I can see that now - interesting exercise, though, and well worth the time examining history!  Wouldn't have missed it for the world.

[Ric Gillespie]

"Understand" makes perfect sense.  The earlier inspections were done at the Lockheed plant in Burbank.  This inspection was done in New York or New Jersey while AE was on the East coast having radio installation work done by Bell Labs.  The inspector does not have access to the Lockheed engineers who could verify Earhart's claim that the fuel tanks were re-installed at the factory so he qualifies his statement with "understand."

[Martin X. Moleski, SJ]

"Understand" makes perfect sense.  The earlier inspections were done at the Lockheed plant in Burbank.  This inspection was done in New York or New Jersey while AE was on the East coast having radio installation work done by Bell Labs.  The inspector does not have access to the Lockheed engineers who could verify Earhart's claim that the fuel tanks were re-installed at the factory so he qualifies his statement with "understand."

Does this mean renublictioned is out of the running?   :-X

[Randy Jacobson]

My reading of the original report is that this is "Reinspection of fuel tanks installed by original mfgrs."

[Greg Daspit]

It's funny how clear understand looks now when nothing was before. Pat is brilliant!