"Amelia Didn't Know Radio"

[Martin X. Moleski, SJ]

A very good article from 1993 Naval History Volume 7 number 4.

"Amelia Didn't Know Radio" by Captain Almon A. Gray, USNR (Retired)

In many respects, his statement of the facts and interpretation of events corresponds to what TIGHAR has found and reported in the 37 years since his article was written.

He does not provide any footnotes in this article, so it is hard to evaluate all of his assertions.

So, for example, he says that "After the flight left Lae for Howland, two-way communication with Lae was maintained until about 0720 2 July Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) [now Universal Coordinated Time], when she shifted to her 3105 Kcs. night frequency." I don't see any evidence of that in the transcripts of transmissions heard from NR16020. For him, this means that he has to imagine an inflight failure in the transmit-receive relay in the radio system. By contrast, TIGHAR has found no evidence of an acknowledgment of AE and FN hearing any transmissions made to them, which fits better with the theory that the receiving antenna for voice transmissions was out of service for the entire flight.

Gray does attribute the loss of the aircraft to AE providing a useless frequency for direction finding and failing to find a way around the problems with the receiver and DF systems when approaching Howland. He also recognizes that valid radio messages from the aircraft imply that the plane was on land.

These are his conclusions about the cause of the loss:

"The direct cause of the flight's failure was Earhart's unwitting error in designating 7.50 Mcs. as the beacon frequency for the Itasca.

"The probable cause for the antenna system failure was malfunctioning of the 'send-receive' relay, located physically in the transmitter unit, which left the receiver without an antenna. The relay probably malfunctioned because of damage by lightning or heavy static discharge."