The most perplexing issues

[Ricker H Jones]

Following the completion the the Pan American Clipper flight to Hawaii, Noonan corresponded with P.V.H. Weems regarding his navigation methods and equipment, including his chart methods.  The Plotting Sheets he refers to are blank charts with no geographical data.  Whether he used Earhart's prepared charts on the World Flight, or arranged for his own charts, he still may have used the plotting sheets for resolving celestial positions, transferring their coordinates to a marine chart. 
From his letter to Weems:"A set of marine charts, general, coastwise, and harbor, was carried; also aviation strip charts of the California coast.  The actual chart work was carried out on VP-3 and 4 Aircraft Plotting Sheets.  By working along the track from Alameda to the left-hand border of the chart, then transferring that termination of the track back to the right hand border in the same latitude, and continuing in this manner, two sheets sufficed for the entire crossing."
Rick J

[Ricker H Jones]

An Oct 1922 edition of the U.S. Hydrographic Office chart, updated through Jan '36, was used by Noonan on the Atlantic crossing.

[John Ousterhout]

Thanks Ricker, that was the chart I was referring to above.  Find the Cape Verde Islands on this map.  Now find Sta. Lusia and St. Nicolao islands in the Cape Verde group.  In between them are two tiny dots.  Those two islands are not named on this map, yet are about the size of Gardner Island.  Now imagine a similar arrangement on a map of the Phoenix islands - the smaller islands, such as Gardner, are little more than dots, but with specific lat/long locations.  How do you tell someone by radio that you're on one of them?

[Christine Schulte]

It occured to me last night that other European nations besides Great Britain must have had nice charts of the Pacific, too ;). There was a lot of Dutch influence in the region, and part of New Guinea was at the time a Dutch colony and had a Dutch (KLM?) airfield at Lae. Fred Noonan mentions having friends there in his letter to Helen Day. Maybe he didn't just spend his time emptying bottles of Genever with them but discussed navigation, too? ("Jaa Freddie, natuurlijk hebben wij een zeekaart... jaa zeker kan du ervon gebruik maken..." ). Of course, Lae seems to have been the easternmost outpost of Dutch influence, but it still might be worth considering.
(I spent a semester at the school of Japanese Studies of Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden in 1989 and was absolutely overwhelmed at the wealth of documents etc. that they had not just about Japan, but the South Pacific, too :)).

[Ric Gillespie]

It occured to me last night that other European nations besides Great Britain must have had nice charts of the Pacific, too ;). There was a lot of Dutch influence in the region, and part of New Guinea was at the time a Dutch colony and had a Dutch (KLM?) airfield at Lae. Fred Noonan mentions having friends there in his letter to Helen Day.

Fred's letter to Helen Day mentions that he had friends in Batavia (now Jakarta), not Lae.  Airline operations in the Dutch East Indies colony (now Indonesia) were flown by a subsidiary of KLM known as KNILM - Koninklijke Nederlandsch-Indische Luchtvaart Maatschappij. (Say that fast three times.) 

Lae was in the British Territory of New Guinea administered by Australia.  Air service was provided by Guinea Airways.  I'm aware on no Dutch connection.

Other nations may have published charts of the Pacific but Britannia had ruled the waves for a couple hundred years and the His Majesty's Admiralty was the undisputed leader in nautical charts.

[Christine Schulte]

Oh dear, I managed to get every single fact wrong on this. I apologize, and I'm mortified. I really should know much, much better than to just state something without checking the facts. :-[

To summarize what you're saying to make sure I got that right at least,  you think it's very likely that Fred Noonan used essentially the same chart that the searchers used, and the Phoenix group isn't on this chart. The British Admiralty chart, which is a naval chart, might have been used by Fred Noonan to cover the section between Lae and the height of Guam where the Pan Am chart starts. If it could be shown to be the most likely candidate, this would also suggest that Fred Noonan couldn't have been sure they landed on Gardner/Nikumaroro because the shape given on the chart doesn't match the shape they'd have seen from the air. This in turn would make it more likely that they'd only have broadcast their longitude and latitude so as not to mislead the searchers.

I'll go brush up my geography now  :-[.

[Ric Gillespie]

To summarize what you're saying to make sure I got that right at least,  you think it's very likely that Fred Noonan used essentially the same chart that the searchers used, and the Phoenix group isn't on this chart.

Correct.

The British Admiralty chart, which is a naval chart, might have been used by Fred Noonan to cover the section between Lae and the height of Guam where the Pan Am chart starts.

I do suspect that Noonan may have used an Admiralty chart for the western portion of the flight from Lae to Howland but I don't know how large an area that chart covered.

If it could be shown to be the most likely candidate, this would also suggest that Fred Noonan couldn't have been sure they landed on Gardner/Nikumaroro because the shape given on the chart doesn't match the shape they'd have seen from the air. This in turn would make it more likely that they'd only have broadcast their longitude and latitude so as not to mislead the searchers.

I just don't have an information about what the Admiralty chart looked like; whether it extended as far as the Phoenix Group or what the islands look like on the chart but it would not be possible for a chart at that time to have an accurate shape for Gardner Island.

[Jeff Victor Hayden]

'Explore the islands and coastlines of the Pacific with this thorough map of the region. With inset maps of dozens of islands and instructive details such as ship routes, naval bases, time zone boundaries and more, this map makes a wonderful collectors piece. Published in December 1936, it accompanied an article entitled "Flying the Pacific."


http://www.maps.com/map.aspx?pid=15967

Maybe FN bought a copy of National Geographic in 1936?

You can zoom in on any part of the map.

[Ric Gillespie]

Maybe FN bought a copy of national Geographic in 1936?

A cool map but not adequate for navigation.  At some point Earhart did have one of maps.  It's in the Purdue collection.  It has pencil markings the purposes of which are not clear nor is it evident exactly when they were made. 

[Christine Schulte]

This (i.e. finding all maps available for a certain region at a given time) is doable if tedious and time-consuming in my experience (limited to books but maps will probably be treated the same as books by librarians).
Is a bibliography of the Central South Pacific available for the pre-war period? It should list maps as primary sources.

If there isn't, you'd have to go through a catalogue of books in print from something like 1920 to 1936/1937. Unless your system is totally different from ours, maps that were available to the public should appear there. Once you've found the maps you're looking for, it shouldn't  be difficult to find out which libraries have them. The Admiralty map should be among the maps you find if it was generally available.

I'd be happy to volunteer but I'm afraid this needs to be done by someone in the United States. I suspect the Internet won't be much use as catalogues this old are possibly not digitalized. If you have contacts at a university, this should be a good exercise for a history major or someone who is studying to become a librarian.

[Charlie Chisholm]

'Explore the islands and coastlines of the Pacific with this thorough map of the region. With inset maps of dozens of islands and instructive details such as ship routes, naval bases, time zone boundaries and more, this map makes a wonderful collectors piece. Published in December 1936, it accompanied an article entitled "Flying the Pacific."


http://www.maps.com/map.aspx?pid=15967

Maybe FN bought a copy of National Geographic in 1936?

You can zoom in on any part of the map.

What a sweet map. I would buy one right now if it wasn't 50 bucks for the cheapest version...

[Jeff Victor Hayden]

'Explore the islands and coastlines of the Pacific with this thorough map of the region. With inset maps of dozens of islands and instructive details such as ship routes, naval bases, time zone boundaries and more, this map makes a wonderful collectors piece. Published in December 1936, it accompanied an article entitled "Flying the Pacific."


http://www.maps.com/map.aspx?pid=15967

Maybe FN bought a copy of National Geographic in 1936?

You can zoom in on any part of the map.

What a sweet map. I would buy one right now if it wasn't 50 bucks for the cheapest version...

Yes, it's a pretty good map but, as Ric said not much use for navigation. On the plus side though it was a map widely available to the general public. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch of the imagination to suspect that admiralty charts and US charts would also have these islands and groups of islands named and, their locations. FN would be aware of the Phoenix Islands and their location in relation to Howland/Baker, he was a naval rating/bosuns mate with 22 years at sea who went on to aeronautical navigation for Pan Am.
We don't know which map they took with them on the Lae to Howland leg but, I would be astonished if it turns out that FN had no idea where, in relation to Howland/Baker, or what the Phoenix Islands were called. The names and locations were widely available.

[Ted G Campbell]

Charlie,
Buy the map and donate it to TIGHAR and take the tax deduction.
Ted

[Jeff Victor Hayden]

281 NORTH HOWLAND CALL KHAQQ BEYOND NORTH DONT HOLD WITH US MUCH LONGER ABOVE WATER SHUT OFF

For the fun of it.   Remember, this was sent in poorly keyed code. Add or change as little as possible to make it make sense.


A question for those more proficient in morse code. Poorly keyed code? What is meant by that?
The words and spellings are complete as are the numbers. The message doesn't make sense though, is that the poorly keyed code part? Charlie?

[Charlie Chisholm]

A question for those more proficient in morse code. Poorly keyed code? What is meant by that?
The words and spellings are complete as are the numbers. The message doesn't make sense though, is that the poorly keyed code part? Charlie?

Poorly keyed code is just code where the dit's and dah's are the wrong length or are missing.

So a dot can become a dash, but more often a dash becomes a dot.

It's not hard to see how "don't" can become "can't".

Some of the words are probably wrong, like the word "beyond".

And "DON'T HOLD WITH US MUCH LONGER" is probably something similar just stating they can't hold on much longer or can't hold here much longer.

The fact that they state it is poorly keyed code tells us they are not 100 percent sure of what was heard.

Clearly the 281, the two NORTH's, HOWLAND, CALL, KHAQQ, MUCH LONGER, ABOVE WATER, and SHUT OFF are probably exactly what was sent. The rest were probably corrupted to some extent.

In addition the first "NORTH" probably did not immediately follow "281".

The few words we have were copied in a period of one whole hour - many parts of the message could actually have been sent many minutes apart, and I suspect we are also missing quite a bit of what was sent during that hour.

If I get some time I will look at it, but even having a couple minutes to visit the forum is difficult for me to find. I work very long hours...