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[Richard Miller]

I recently watched a PBS Documentary on Amelia.
It was an episode in their "American Experience" series.
In it the narrator claimed that her charts were off by 5 1/2 miles regarding the location of Howland Is.

Here is a very brief quote from the show's transcript.

Narrator: On July 2, 1937, Earhart and Noonan took off from Lei, New Guinea. Only luck could guide them to Howland Island. She had no Morse code key or trailing wire antenna. Celestial navigation wouldn’t help because the location of Howland Island on her chart was off by five and a half miles, and neither she nor Noonan knew much about radio communication.

The entire transcript can be found here.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/earhart/transcript/1/

Has anyone heard this before?
It is also claimed that Earhart conveyed to friend Gore Vidal (via coded message) that Noonan was back drinking again.

[Martin X. Moleski, SJ]

I recently watched a PBS Documentary on Amelia.
It was an episode in their "American Experience" series.

I caught the last 20 minutes.  I think I've seen it before.

After doing some research:  This was first shown in 1993.  Ric did a thorough review of the show in TIGHAR Tracks 9 (1993) 13-14.

In it the narrator claimed that her charts were off by 5 1/2 miles regarding the location of Howland Is.

Some maps around that time were; others had been corrected.  We don't know exactly what set of maps AE and FN had on the plane with them on the final flight.

This may already be in a FAQ ...

Upon further review: I've added Rollin Reineck's refutation of this claim to the wiki article on Howland Island.

The entire transcript can be found here.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/earhart/transcript/1/

Very nice.  Thanks for the link!

It is also claimed that Earhart conveyed to friend Gore Vidal (via coded message) that Noonan was back drinking again.

The alleged code was in a telegram to her husband, not Gene Vidal (father of Gore and alleged lover of Earhart): "personnel difficulties."

I think his claim does not stand up to scrutiny.  I've drafted some remarks in the Noonan article.

Who knows for sure what Gene told Gore over the years?  We don't have independent confirmation of the legend that this was a prearranged code.  Nor do we have evidence that Putnam or others tried to have AE call off the flight at that stage because of Noonan's condition.  On the contrary, Putnam was trying to get a grip on the date of arrival so that he could orchestrate the press coverage.  If all had gone well, the landing might have taken place on July 4th--a good day to get a big crowd out at the airfield.

[Anthony Allen Roach]

I'm glad I read this thread first.  One of my questions was whether anyone knew which charts Noonan took with him for the Lae, New Guinea to Howland Island leg.  I know from reading Mr. Gillespie's book that some of the charts for the world trip were sent back to the United States, and are in the Purdue archives.  I know navigators do not take an entire set of charts for every inch of the world's surface, just the ones they will need for the areas they intend to go as determined during the pre-voyage navigational planning.

But if we don't have anyway of knowing which particular charts he had with him, that adds another unknown into the mix. 

[Gary LaPook]

This may already be in a FAQ ...

Upon further review: I've added Rollin Reineck's refutation of this claim to the wiki article on Howland Island.

In the Wiki you have:
"Ms. Butler says "The chart of the area then in use #1198, Published by the hydrographic office within the Navy"

I have only heard about chart #1198 in the Butler book and nowhere else. Does TIGHAR have a copy of this chart?

gl

[Martin X. Moleski, SJ]

I have only heard about chart #1198 in the Butler book and nowhere else. Does TIGHAR have a copy of this chart?

I don't know. 

Ric and Pat have collected a huge amount of material since the 1980s.

Now is not a particularly good time to ask them.  They're both pretty busy with other things at the moment. 

[Gary LaPook]

Marty, your Noonan article says that the link to the "finding tiny islands..." doesn't work, here is a link to that article:

https://sites.google.com/site/fredienoonan/resources/noonan-article/Noonan1936article.pdf?attredirects=0

gl

[Martin X. Moleski, SJ]

Marty, your Noonan article says that the link to the "finding tiny islands..." doesn't work, here is a link to that article:
https://sites.google.com/site/fredienoonan/resources/noonan-article/Noonan1936article.pdf?attredirects=0

Thanks, Gary.  I've substituted your link in the article.

[Anthony Allen Roach]

That was a great article.  Thanks for the link.  Although it doesn't resolve the question of where Howland Island was plotted on contemporary charts, it confirms my confidence in the direction finding capabilities of Pan Am.

[John Hart]

I have looked hard and found no dialogue on this subject. Decided this was best place to put it. It is a discussion about maps, grids, and Datums. This is important to understand how to visualize errors in maps and resultant plotting, navigating, and location errors.

I start with the conviction that you can go to Howland with your handheld GPS and find coordinates that do not match any given in historical records for the island. This is perfectly expected and explainable.

Start with Datum and work our way to grid. Think of the Datum as the model of the Earth's surface. In a perfect world it is a perfect sphere. In reality it is not. More like a grapefruit. Imperfections abound. It is also always changing. We became very aware of this when we started to use GPS with extreme accuracy but found we were still off, especially trying to drop that bomb accurately on GPS. The quality of the coordinates is critical and it isn't all about how many digits right of the decimal point. There have been many models of the Earth, Clark 1866, North American Datum 1927 (NAD27), World Geodetic Survey 1984 (WGS84), etc. Look on a map and you will find the Datum. The difference between these Datums could be zero or a lot depending on where you are looking.

Then we take a grid system and overlay it on that model of the Earth. It could be Lat/Long or another system. For this discussion will stick to LL.

So where something (Howland) is in relation to you is always the same but where it is on your map will vary depending on the Datum and it's accuracy. I have no idea what Datum was used on FNs maps of S Pacific but I can guarantee it was not as accurate as the new WGS Datums used by GPS.

To this point I have only discussed grid/Datum errors. Add plotting errors and you can see how you might draw a line on a 1937 map, plot the course, and not arrive at your destination even with the best nav. Where an island was plotted in 1937 probably was not very accurate so the deltas add up. All that being said, the error was usually within the navigational error of the day. Ok if you are looking for USA or even Hawaii. Harder when you are aiming for an island the size of the terminal at Atlanta IAP.

So, 20 hours of flight, 1937 quality nav, unknown WX with good potential for rain squalls that could hide your tiny island for hours. Having no options other than looking till you run out of gas is found in my dictionary under STOOPID.  I don't think FN was.


That's my technical assessment.

TWW
JB

[Gary LaPook]

I have looked hard and found no dialogue on this subject. Decided this was best place to put it. It is a discussion about maps, grids, and Datums. This is important to understand how to visualize errors in maps and resultant plotting, navigating, and location errors.

To this point I have only discussed grid/Datum errors. Add plotting errors and you can see how you might draw a line on a 1937 map, plot the course, and not arrive at your destination even with the best nav. Where an island was plotted in 1937 probably was not very accurate so the deltas add up. All that being said, the error was usually within the navigational error of the day. Ok if you are looking for USA or even Hawaii. Harder when you are aiming for an island the size of the terminal at Atlanta IAP.



That's my technical assessment.

TWW
JB

The exact position where Howland was plotted on the charts of the day is not particularly important nor was the the choice of datums. This is because the coordinates used by Williams and by Noonan were not scaled off of a chart but were provided by navigators using the same celestial navigation methods as Noonan was using. If their positions do not match the ones on WGS 84 it doesn't matter, Noonan was aiming for the same coordinates that other celestial navigators had used in finding Howland. Also, no matter which of the datums that you use, the depicted position of Howland changes less than two-tenths of a nautical mile. The choice  of datum is only important in producing maps of land surfaces and has only become that way, for most people, since the advent of GPS which has the precision to show these very small discrepancies in positioning of surface objects on a map. Celestial navigation makes no use of datums but assumes that the earth is a perfect sphere and the very small differences caused by this assumption are lost in the inaccuracy inherent in measurements taken with sextants, both bubble and marine, which are many times greater than the difference in positions referenced astronomically compared to geodetically.

See my prior posts at:

https://tighar.org/smf/index.php/topic,452.msg5687.html#msg5687

https://tighar.org/smf/index.php/topic,452.msg5695.html#msg5695

https://tighar.org/smf/index.php/topic,452.msg5699.html#msg5699


I decided to do some checking on the accuracy of Google Earth coordinates to make sure they were accurate in the Pacific. I found the published coordinates of Mili airport, 6º 05' N, 171º 44'E;  Mujuro airport, 7º  03' 44'' N, 171º 16' 19" E; and Kosrae airport, 5º 21' 25" N, 162º 53' 30"E since these were the closest to Howland. Then going to them with Google Earth I found that the Google Earth coordinates were exactly right, correct to the accuracy of the positions given in the airport database. Mili was only given to the nearest minute but the others were to the second. ( A second is only 100 feet!) You can check for yourself, just go to Google Earth with those coordinates which you will see fall on the runways. Google Earth uses WGS 84 but that doesn't explain the difference in the published location of Howland and the WGS 84 coordinates since whichever of the datums they used in 1937 to plot Howland the conversion to WGS 84 wouldn't change the postion by more than 0.2 NM.

gl

[John Hart]

Gary,

You are welcome. I go away for a while and return to find the forum's favorite contrarian had been reduced to jousting about the price of homes and radios in 1937. Definitely beneath you.  So I thought I'd kick it back up to a technical level worthy of your eminence.

Actually my real intent was to let the laymen know how a current map or GPS coord might not match a 1937 map in a very logical fashion. But I could not expect such a post to go unanswered by you so naturally I had to throw out the lunge (shifting from joust to fencing metiphors) contained in my closing. Clearly I hope readers caught my caveats, even if you ignored them, that the delta could be zero and would certainly fit within the nav errors of the time. All the cumulative errors are more than accommodated in your eloquent descriptions of nav errors.

Ultimately where we diverge is upon arrival at intended destination with no landing zone in sight. I guess I could summarize and be done with it.

1.  The nav was a challenge. More or less depending on WX and exacerbated by the size of the target.

2.  WX could also affect the ability to acquire the destination. Hence my point about ATL terminal. Everyone reading this who has flown to ATL or DFW in summer raise your hand if WX has affected your trip. You can have WX affecting one rnwy at either place and still land but sometimes even they get fully closed in summer. How bout the airport the size of the terminal?  And no GPS to find it?

I don't think you have debated these points with me. If you did it would be hard cause they didn't find Howland. So where do we diverge?  The decision made as to the plan if the destination is not found. I think FN knew all the above and the poor WX info. He knew the terminal at ATL (I'm exaggerating now) could be hidden by WX upon arrival and for sometime thereafter. I think he had an alternative plan. You think his plan was to look till he found it knowing his awareness of where he was decreased each moment and if he did not he was swimming.

In the end neither of us can prove our theory until we find the A/C. That may not happen until "the sea gives up her dead". Knowing my background I probably won't be privy to that as I will be in my car dodging empty cars with "in case of rapture..." bumper stickers.

I have heard it is fun talking to you over a beer. Hope we can do that some day. Maybe we can invite Marty and Malcolm along and, if we don't introduce them, they might like each other. We could talk about good single malts, bitters, and sour mash. As for future jousting/fencing I rarely have time to dig out my lance/épée so may miss you for a while.

JB
TWW

[John Hart]

Post script. Would add that, while celestial coords for the island may be provided, he still needed to plot his location on a map, draw a line to next destination, plot the true course using the map grid, and apply the mag variation (which may not be real accurate) to get heading for AE to fly. Then she needed to fly it accurately (did he have a hdg repeater in back to monitor?). All a very interesting set of variables over 20 hours of flying.

And that, to quote another mental giant of fighter pilot stature like me....Forrest Gump...is all I got to say about that....

JB

[Gary LaPook]

Post script. Would add that, while celestial coords for the island may be provided, he still needed to plot his location on a map, draw a line to next destination, plot the true course using the map grid, and apply the mag variation (which may not be real accurate) to get heading for AE to fly.

Actually a navigator does NOT have to plot on a chart, he can use the normal formulas that he uses for his celestial computations to compute the course and distances between the listed coordinates of the departure and the destination. Look at the Williams strip charts, he computed the points along the great circle and the courses between them and made a list of them and that list was all that was needed to fly that great circle course, no need to plot anything. After making a list of these points he then, for illustration purposes, plotted them on a chart but this was not necessary to accomplish the flight. How do you think the magenta line on your nav display was derived? Do you think a little guy inside your Litton GPS lays a plotter on a paper chart? No, it does the same kind of computation that a navigator can do, pure trig. It is even a whole lot easier to compute a rhumb line course.

Then she needed to fly it accurately (did he have a hdg repeater in back to monitor?). All a very interesting set of variables over 20 hours of flying.

And that, to quote another mental giant of fighter pilot stature like me....Forrest Gump...is all I got to say about that....

JB

Noonan had an aperiodic compass at this station so he could make sure Earhart was following his instructions. See:


https://tighar.org/smf/index.php/topic,555.msg8006.html#msg8006

Notice, the aperiodic compas is marked every degree compared to Earhart's pilot's compass which was marked only every five degrees and on a much smaller diameter compass card, see attached photo of her compass mounted above the Cambridge mixture gauge.

gl

[John Hart]

Good parry. Wasn't that more fun than the price of homes in 1937?

Preferred and flew more with Honeywells. After pilot training never plotted a course either. Used a computer.

Good to hear he had a compass to keep an eye on her. You navs have to watch out for those lousy drivers.

Got to work this weekend so gotta go.

JB