Failure to communicate

draft

The short answer to the question "What went wrong?" is "What we have here is ... failure to communicate."[1]

Noonan's techniques--a combination of celestial navigation and dead reckoning brought the Electra close to Howland Island. The Itasca radio logs. show that the aircraft was steadily approaching Howland. The men aboard the Itasca could hear Earhart loud and clear (S5). But Earhart and Noonan heard only one transmission from the Itasca on 7500 Khz. Earhart was unable to obtain a null on that frequency. The Itasca, for its part, could not obtain a null on Earhart's transmissions; although the crew could not have transmitted the bearing to the Electra because of the radio problems aboard the aircraft, getting a bearing on Earhart's transmissions could have aided the search for Earhart and Noonan.

Confusing instructions en route

Message: 3 Subject: Re: Failure to Communicate Date: 2/26/01 From: Bob Brandenburg [2] I should have pointed out that on June 26th, Earhart sent the following to Richard Black:

   SUGGEST ONTARIO STANDBY ON FOUR HUNDRED KCS TO TRANSMIT LETTER N FIVE MINUTES ON REQUEST WITH STATION CALL SIGN LETTER REPEATED TWELVE END EVERY MINUTE.

Note that here she is asking Ontario to transmit on request. But since Ontario could only communicate on frequencies below 600 kHz, and only on CW, there was no way Earhart could have made such a request.

I neglected to mention that, on July 1st, Earhart sent the following to Black, modifying the previous plan:

   ASK ONTARIO BROADCAST LETTER N FOR FIVE MINUTES TEN MINUTES AFTER HOUR GMT FOUR HUNDRED KCS WITH OWN CALL LETTERS REPEATED TWICE END EVERY MINUTE.

This message could indicate that Earhart realized that she had no way to request Ontario to transmit the desired signal, so she changed the procedure from "on request" to "broadcast". This would have fixed the problem had the message been relayed to the Ontario. But there's no record of Black having relayed the message to the Ontario. The message was relayed from Earhart in Lae to Black on the Itasca via the Navy radio station at Tutuila, so it is possible that Tutuila took the initiative and relayed the message directly to the Ontario - - although there is no record of that having happened.

In any case, it would be reasonable for Earhart to assume that the second message was relayed to the Ontario, and that the Ontario would be broadcasting the requested signal on the requested schedule. If Ontario did get the message, the broadcast would have occurred and if, as we suspect, Earhart's DF gear was rendered inoperable on takeoff at Lae, she would not have been able to get a bearing on the Ontario - - and she could have turned back to Lae. If Ontario did not get the message, the signal expected by Earhart in her second message would not have been sent by Ontario, and Earhart would have heard nothing. In this case, as well, Earhart would have had a warning that her DF gear wasn't working, and could have turned back to Lae.

Inadequate problem solving: Earhart and Noonan

Safe on dry land, untroubled by more than twenty hours in a noisy, stressful environment, and with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to second-guess what Earhart and Noonan should or could have done about their radio problems.

The single message received by the aircraft was the repeated transmission of the letter "A" (dot-dash) as Earhart requested. From this transmission, Earhart and Noonan should have realized that the Itasca was hearing them on 3105 Khz. They might have reasoned that there was a problem with their receiver when it was configured to use the normal receiving antenna and tuned the DF system to 3105 Khz. Switching from an antenna that was known to be working to one that had not yet worked seems to have been a bad decision. If the Itasca radio operators had been able to talk to Earhart, they could have told her to hold her microphone key long enough for them to get a null, determine the bearing, and tell Earhart what direction to fly to reach safety.

So near, and yet so far!