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[Ric Gillespie]

TIGHAR members on the Forum have been doing a fabulous job helping with the research for Finding Amelia -The True Story of the Earhart Electra and I wanted to take a moment to say Thank You and explain why this kind of detailed research is so important.
As we all know (most of us anyway), the Earhart/Noonan flight failed to find Howland Island because Earhart did not know how to use her radio direction finder.  The research we've been doing for the Electra book is giving us a clearer picture of how the outfitting of the Electra for the world flight evolved and how AE ended up relying on a piece of equipment that was beyond her ability to operate effectively. It's easy to write her failures off to hubris and negligence, but we're learning that there was much more to it than that. 
The pilot in command, like the captain of a ship, is ultimately responsible for the safe completion of the journey but when a trip ends in tragedy an appreciation of the human factors is essential to understanding not only what went wrong but why it went wrong.  When we study the Electra, we're studying Amelia Earhart.

[Alfred Hendrickson]

The past few weeks on the forum have been interesting indeed. I'm always amazed by the new information that keeps turning up.

[Ric Gillespie]

I'm always amazed by the new information that keeps turning up.

Me too.  And you'd think that I'd be used to it by now.  I remember when I started writing Finding Amelia - The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance I thought it would be just a matter of telling the story we knew, but the book took on a life of its own and took me to new parts of the story I never dreamed of.   This new book is doing the same thing.  Every time we answer a question it raises a new one.