Research needed - August-September 1936

[Jerry Germann]

Ok, was some reverse motion technique applied to this clip to give the impression of more movement than actually took place or ???
Notice the lettering on the building appears backward in these first few frames.... 057-058-059

https://youtu.be/7dvJFAlPdNM?t=58

[Jerry Germann]

At 047 of this clip, Gable Mantz seems to close the window ( after the open window shot of the pair conversing) and at 048 we see a pretty good view of the closed sliding window panes ( edges look a bit uneven to me)...Is there anything there that may give a clue to later replacement when looking at later ( 1937) photos?

https://youtu.be/7dvJFAlPdNM?t=48

[Daniel R. Brown]

Doubtful that the aircraft was in California 9/24-11/23/36. AE (and GP) landed briefly in Salt Lake City on 9/18, then she arrived at Purdue on 9/19 via North Platte, Nebraska. (It's interesting that GP is not mentioned later.) The Associated Press reported she planned to have the plane at Purdue for the next 6 weeks for testing. That fits with her speaking tour during October and a November return to the west coast.

Dan Brown, #2408

[Ric Gillespie]

Ok, was some reverse motion technique applied to this clip to give the impression of more movement than actually took place or ???
Notice the lettering on the building appears backward in these first few frames.... 057-058-059

See Russ Matthews' post on the Love On The Run thread.

[Ric Gillespie]

At 047 of this clip, Gable Mantz seems to close the window ( after the open window shot of the pair conversing) and at 048 we see a pretty good view of the closed sliding window panes ( edges look a bit uneven to me)...Is there anything there that may give a clue to later replacement when looking at later ( 1937) photos?

That's a studio mock up of the cockpit.  Ditto for the shot of the instrument panel.
But in any case, the cockpit windows were not changed.

[Ric Gillespie]

Doubtful that the aircraft was in California 9/24-11/23/36. AE (and GP) landed briefly in Salt Lake City on 9/18, then she arrived at Purdue on 9/19 via North Platte, Nebraska. (It's interesting that GP is not mentioned later.) The Associated Press reported she planned to have the plane at Purdue for the next 6 weeks for testing. That fits with her speaking tour during October and a November return to the west coast.

Thanks Dan.  I wonder what kind of "testing" could be done at Purdue. Who would do the testing? Did Purdue have any kind of aeronautical facility at that time? 

New chronology:

August 2
Earhart and McLeod make a 1 hour and 55 minute flight to Mills Field, San Francisco.

August 3
Earhart and McLeod fly the Electra across the bay to Alameda to see Elmer Dimity's big parachute and fog dispeller.  The airplane is marked X16020

August 7
The aircraft is inspected by the Bureau of Air Commerce and approved for registration number R16020.

August 18
The aircraft is issued a Bureau of Air Commerce license as R16020. "Restricted for long distance flights and research. No persons may be carried except bone-fide members of the crew."

August 29
AE flies the Electra nonstop from Burbank to Kansas City on her way to Floyd Bennett Field to enter the Bendix race. Mantz and McKneely are with her. (Butler, page 364.  No citation)

Sept. 4
Bendix race.  Helen Richey accompanies her as copilot.  She is back in California at the end of the race.

Sept. 18
AE (and GP) landed briefly in Salt Lake City (source?).

Sept. 19
AE arrived at Purdue on 9/19 via North Platte, Nebraska (source?)

Sept. 20
At Purdue with the Electra

Sept. 29
At a Roosevelt campaign event on Sept 29 in Syracuse NY

Oct. 2-30
Lecture tour by car.

November 7
Earhart attends a football game in Baltimore.  She isn't back on the west coast until on or about November 19

[Daniel R. Brown]

Sorry for string of posts, but it's taking a while to figure this out.

Sources for 9/18 and 9/19/36 are Salt Lake Tribune, Saturday 9/19/36 and Arizona Republic, Sunday 9/20/36 (Associated Press). The basic elements of the reports are repeated in various other Associated Press affiliates. GP and Bo McNeely were with her when she arrived at Purdue 9/19/36.

It seems she flew to Westchester County NY and then on to Amboy (Syracuse NY) Municipal Airport on Tuesday, 9/29/36 to participate in the political convention (Syracuse Herald, Monday 9/28/36). No report of how she got back to the midwest to start the October speaking tour.

Dan Brown, #2408

[Matt Revington]

Dan that makes sense, Putnam's house in Rye is in Westchester, she drove from there with the Democratic caravan on the 24th and 25th then returned and flew to Amboy.  I have been searching but can't find any photos of the Electra at Amboy.  Amboy is defunct as an airport but there is a group there trying to set up an Amboy Aviation Museum at the Erie Canal Park and they might have unreleased photos but I have not been able to contact them.
It seems either the Hooven compass would have been installed in the narrow one or two day window after Sept 21 or more likely after AE flew the Electra to somewhere , maybe Purdue or Dayton from Amboy early in October and left it there during her lecture tour.  The next clear reference to where the Electra was is the post on the November 1936 thread where AE is taking off from Lafayette on Nov 19 to go to South Bend.

[Harbert William Davenport]

Doubtful that the aircraft was in California 9/24-11/23/36. AE (and GP) landed briefly in Salt Lake City on 9/18, then she arrived at Purdue on 9/19 via North Platte, Nebraska. (It's interesting that GP is not mentioned later.) The Associated Press reported she planned to have the plane at Purdue for the next 6 weeks for testing. That fits with her speaking tour during October and a November return to the west coast.

  I wonder what kind of "testing" could be done at Purdue. Who would do the testing? Did Purdue have any kind of aeronautical facility at that time?

Here's a partial answer to Ric's question, from a Purdue Engineering website:
Professor George W. Haskins, the same Lieutenant Haskins who had flown to Purdue in 1919 from Dayton, returned in 1929 as an Associate Professor. He taught the aeronautical engineering courses, which were still offered as technical electives in mechanical engineering. An aeronautics laboratory was well established by this time in Heavilon Hall. It was equipped with a fully assembled airplane and operating engines, along with wind tunnels for aerodynamic measurements.

Several other aviation related developments occurred on campus during this period. In 1930 Purdue became the first U.S. university to offer college credit for flight training, and it opened the nation's first college-owned airport in 1934. President Elliott was later responsible for bringing Amelia Earhart to Purdue as a "Counselor on Careers for Women," a staff position she held from 1935 until her disappearance in 1937. Purdue was also instrumental in providing funds for Earhart's ill-fated "Flying Laboratory," the Lockheed Electra which she intended to fly around the world in 1937. The University library houses an extensive Earhart collection, which continues to be studied by those seeking to solve the mystery surrounding her final flight.

[Daniel R. Brown]

Clarification regarding the trip from Burbank to Purdue:

AMELIA EARHART LANDS LABORATORY AT PURDUE (By Associate Press) (San Antonio Express, Sunday, September 20, 1936)
LAFAYETTE, Ind., Sept. 19.— Amelia Earhart, noted woman flyer, arrived at Purdue University in her "flying laboratory" airplane from North Platte, Neb., this afternoon. She will stay at the school for six weeks to continue her experiments with the new airplane. Miss Earhart was accompanied here by her publisher-husband, George Palmer Putman [sic], and "Bo" McNeely, her mechanic. She flew the 800 miles from North Platte in 3 [and] 1/2 hours. She stopped in North Platte last night after having flown from Burbank, Calif.


Better understanding of the events  9/20-9/29/36:

Amelia Earhart to Fly Here To Participate Tuesday in Democratic State Conclave (Syracuse Herald, Monday, September 28, 1936)
"Amelia Earhart...will arrlve here [this is a prediction, not yet fact] by plane [not necessarily NR16020] Tuesday morning to attend the Democratic State Convention... She made her maiden political speech for Presldent Franklin D. Roosevelt and Gov. Herbert H. Lehman last week when she toured Columbia and Saratoga Counties with the Democratic Women's Caravan [this is what she's been doing since leaving NR16020 at Purdue]. She will [another prediction] fly to the Municipal Airport at Amboy from her home, it is announced [by whom?]." [Regardless, she did not in fact fly to Syracuse.]

Miss Earhart Greeted Here By Notables (Syracuse Herald, Tuesday, September 29, 1936)
[Excerpt from a long article]: "The plane is one she flew lately from California, with her husband as a passenger. It is at Purdue. He and she motored from Monticello [a village between Rye, just north of New York City, and Syracuse] overnight, after starting from Rye late Monday." "Mr. Putnam said they would leave probably Tuesday night returning to New York [City]."


Dan Brown, #2408

[Ric Gillespie]

The Bendix/Hooven Radio Comopass was installed at Purdue.
In the early years of the Earhart Project we carried on a correspondence with Fred Goerner, author of the 1966 best-seller The Search for Amelia Earhart.  Fred, of course, was trying to convince me that our Nikumaroro Hypothesis was wrong. This was pre-email so the correspondence is all snail-mail letters.  Digging through those paper files I found the attached letter, sent to me by Goerner, from Fred Hooven (inventor of the radio compass) to Fred Goerner. The original letter was written in 1966 but includes corrections from Hooven in 1979 and 1983.

Among other things, the letter and corrections explain that the Bendix/Hooven Radio compass was installed in October 1936 but not at Wright Field in Dayton as Hooven first remembered.  Per Hooven's 1979 correction, the installation was done at Purdue in Lafayette, Indiana. Hooven was not present.  As I suspected, he first met Earhart when she and Jackie Cochran stopped in Dayton on the way to California in December.

This solves the mystery of how the radio compass got installed.  We knew the airplane was at Purdue during October but Earhart was on the road, speaking at the political event in Syracuse and then on a lecture tour. We couldn't figure out who flew it to Dayton.   The answer is, nobody.  The installation was done at Purdue.

[Harbert William Davenport]

Wow, thanks for that letter, Ric!  It solves the installation mystery & supplements the Hooven report of 1982.
  A few layman's comments:
1.  The fact that Hooven himself was not present for the installation of his device in October might be part of the explanation as to why AE needed to fly to Dayton from NY in December to have it checked out.  Also, if AE herself was not present for the installation at Purdue, that means she was getting her instructions in its use second-hand, from the Purdue staff who were present, or only from written instructions?  Maybe she just wanted firsthand in-person training in its use?
2.  I find very persuasive Hooven's arguments that his device was superior in key respects to the one that replaced it in AE's plane.  And I can't wait to have your new book, Ric, in which you will get this all sorted out for us!
3.  Hooven's further hypothetical argument is that his device would have enabled AE to find Howland.  But Hooven may not have known that AE's plane had probably lost its belly receiving antenna.  A key technical question in assessing his hypothetical is whether his device had its own standard antenna built into the loop antenna apparatus, or whether it used the belly antenna as its standard antenna.  He explains that his device was dependent on a second antenna, in addition to the loop antenna.  (I will move to a Radio thread if I pursue this more technical question.)
Mystery after mystery getting solved, & new ones turning up!  Such fun!  Keep up the good work!

[Ric Gillespie]

3.  Hooven's further hypothetical argument is that his device would have enabled AE to find Howland.  But Hooven may not have known that AE's plane had probably lost its belly receiving antenna.  A key technical question in assessing his hypothetical is whether his device had its own standard antenna built into the loop antenna apparatus, or whether it used the belly antenna as its standard antenna.  He explains that his device was dependent on a second antenna, in addition to the loop antenna. 

The Hooven system required a "sense antenna" in addition to the loop.  Photos show that when the Hooven loop was added a new second belly antenna also appeared (the original belly antenna wihich served the Western Electric receiver ran down the starboard side of the belly.  The new antenna ran down the port side and probably functioned as the sense antenna for the radio compass.)

When the Hooven loop was removed and replaced with the Bendix loop in March, both belly antennas remained in place.  The second belly antenna probably now served the newly installed second receiver, a Bendix RA-1. 
Prior to the departure of the second world flight attempt in May, the RA-1 receiver was removed as well as the port side antenna.

So, to answer your question:  Had the Hooven Radio Compass not been replaced, the repairs to the airplane after the wreck in Hawaii should have included the re-installation of both belly antennas.  The question then becomes, would both belly antennas have been lost during the Lae takeoff?  That's probably an "imponderable."

[Harbert William Davenport]

Thanks for your answer, Ric.  It's very helpful to learn that the Hooven direction finder did involve a second belly antenna, without which it likely would not have worked as designed.  Yes, I agree, the question, what if she had kept the Hooven device, does become an imponderable, due to its needing that belly antenna.  This seems so, even if we accept Hooven's reasoning that in normal conditions his device would work better than the older design. 
   Excellent work on the collaborative study linked on the new thread, "Earhart's language"!

[Matt Revington]

Was there an accident onboard of the Electra during the Bendix race?
From page 38 in the book " Los Angeles International Airport",(I found it in google books)

"Vying for the Bendix trophy she was almost sucked out her plane when an emergency hatch failed.  The mishap caused her to finish fifth in that race."