Why did the Itasca search to the Northwest of Howland?

[John Hart]

Some interesting stuff. She did not get underway until 1040, two hours after last transmission. In my theory they would have long since been flying SSE.

Very close dry and wet bulb temps and warm water (83-84 degrees). Would have been very humid and hazy.

I see CU and Alto CU but not sure what "moving from" column means as it shows mostly E, NE. I can't imagine that means the puffies were E of them moving W.

More interesting detail to ponder.

TWW...

JB

[Jeff Victor Hayden]

Itasca

http://www.uscg.mil/history/webcutters/Itasca_1930.pdf

[C.W. Herndon]

Very interesting.  ::)

[Jeff Victor Hayden]

Was just browsing through the Itasca deck logs and noticed the headings and course changes
Looked kind of strange. I was expecting to see some type of search pattern around the LOP
157/337 to the north.
A quick sketch on a note pad of the course taken by Itasca looked like a drunken fly had crawled around the note pad!
Is there a map somewhere in Tighars archives I can check my headings and route against?
I must be doing something wrong?

[C.W. Herndon]

Jeff, here is a Google Earth Picture that Eric posted in the Thread "Google Earth Coordinates, reply#25".

Hope this helps.   :)

[Jeff Victor Hayden]

Thanks Woody, my understanding of the course appears to be correct! Wow!
I can now see how much the poor visibility NW of Howland influenced the search, at the expense of a search pattern around the northern part of the LOP of course.
It was a long shot I guess, assuming that the failure of AE and FN to locate Howland was due to visibility issues but, what else could they do?

[C.W. Herndon]

Here is a later version that Eric published. I'm not sure why he changed it. Probably need to read the whole discussion.  ???

[Bruce Thomas]

Was just browsing through the Itasca deck logs and noticed the headings and course changes
Looked kind of strange. I was expecting to see some type of search pattern around the LOP
157/337 to the north.
A quick sketch on a note pad of the course taken by Itasca looked like a drunken fly had crawled around the note pad!
Is there a map somewhere in Tighars archives I can check my headings and route against?
I must be doing something wrong?

Check out all the search maps.

[C.W. Herndon]

Thanks Bruce. That's Great.  :D

[Gary LaPook]

Some interesting stuff. She did not get underway until 1040, two hours after last transmission. In my theory they would have long since been flying SSE.

Very close dry and wet bulb temps and warm water (83-84 degrees). Would have been very humid and hazy.

I see CU and Alto CU but not sure what "moving from" column means as it shows mostly E, NE. I can't imagine that means the puffies were E of them moving W.

More interesting detail to ponder.

TWW...

JB

We also discussed reading the weather code used for reporting the weather which you might find of interest.

https://tighar.org/smf/index.php/topic,587.msg9031.html#msg9031

gl

[Jeff Victor Hayden]

Thanks for the link Bruce. The map of the combined search area, very interesting from the ditch/crash and sink scenario point of view given the time of arrival on site of each search vessel.