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[Ric Gillespie]

I don't think it was totally insane for them to have "planned" to use floats at first.

I agree. 

Wiley Post was using a homebrew float plane when he and Will Rogers were killed in Alaska.

That was a Lockheed and it was a fairly recent event.  They crashed in August 1935.

Lindbergh and his wife flew a Lockheed floatplane to Asia (Lockheed Model 8 Sirius "Tingmissartoq"--beautiful lines!).

Yep,  and for the first flight around the world the Army had floats on the Douglas World Cruisers for some of the legs.

So maybe it wasn't immediately apparent that taking a floatplane "around the equator" was ludicrous.

Yeah. I just don't think they had thought it through.

[Ric Gillespie]

I spent the day yesterday at the NASM Archives going through the Doris Rich (author of "Amelia Earhart - A Biography") papers.  Lots of new original source information including correspondence between Putnam and Mantz regarding the airplane.  I came back with hundreds of documents and it will take a few days to sort through and digest everything.  There's some crazy stuff there and some questions we'll need to try to answer.