7 ms·

Finding Amelia Earhart’s Plane Seemed Impossible – Then Came a Startling Clue

119 points by tlb 7y ago

krustyburger 7y ago
The island he’s singled out was flown over within days of her disappearance and the pilot did not see any signs of an airplane. It would be wonderful to finally solve this mystery, but it’s not as though this idea is some recent breakthrough. It was thought of at the time, which is why the pilot was sent to look.
- secabeen 7y ago
  The idea they're having, which is hidden in the article, is that she crashed in the shallow water around the island, and the wreckage slipped down the underwater slope, out of sight. At a later time, landing gear was pictured on the beach, broken loose from the rest of the debris, still underwater.
- Etheryte 7y ago
  The article addresses this point, in case you missed it. > According to the official report, a search pilot saw “signs of recent habitation” there. But because nobody waved them down, the search team left and the Navy dismissed the theory. What the sailors didn’t know was that the island had been uninhabited for 40 years. > Earhart landed on the very edge of the island, Dr. Ballard believes. As tides rose, her plane may have slipped down the underwater slope.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    > What the sailors didn’t know was that the island had been uninhabited for 40 years. It seems that it was occupied for several days by the 24 survivors of the shipwrecked SS Norwich City in November 1929, who were forced to abandon the wreck as it caught fire. I believe it is the ship in the photograph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikumaroro#SS_Norwich_City_wreck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikumaroro#SS_Norwich_City_wre...
- thaumaturgy 7y ago
  I was on a SAR mission a couple of years ago for a lost aircraft outside of Truckee, CA. In that case, there was flight radar data available for most of the flight path, Civil Air Patrol was out in force with multiple overhead flyovers, CHP and Air National Guard were also out, we were receiving intermittent ELT signals, there were hundreds of ground searchers and UTVs/ATVs/snowmobiles, and all of our search activity was recorded and coordinated through a well-organized incident command with specific search assignments for each day. We still failed to locate the aircraft. It was found a month or so later by some random recreationalists. Any number of circumstances may have prevented it from being spotted the first time. It's far, far harder to locate missing aircraft than most people realize.
  - chx 7y ago
    Just a thought exercise to show why this is so hard: let's say you know where the aircraft was a minute before crashing but not the direction of it. If an aircraft is flying at a modest 200 km/h (that's a Cessna 172 cruising) then in a single minute it can fly more than 3km. The area of a circle with a radius of that is close to 35km^2. That's half of Manhattan Island.
    - pacala 7y ago
      How difficult would be to fly one hd filming plane above, then scour the imagery with a fine comb, possibly computer vision aided?
      - wil421 7y ago
        You would need different angles especially if there was tree cover or mountainous terrain.
      - thaumaturgy 7y ago
        Very. A similar tactic was used when Steve Fossett disappeared (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fossett#Disappearance_and_search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fossett#Disappearance_an...), and it was entirely unsuccessful. There are a few challenges: 1. There is a direct relationship between the time and effort required to take imagery, and the image resolution. Which is to say, if you want imagery that's detailed enough that you can find likely evidence without a lot of false positives, then you have to spend a ton of time in the air at low altitude, and if you want to effectively search a large area, then you have to spend time at higher altitude where you're too high up to get useful imagery. 2. Humans aren't good at sorting out natural features from unnatural ones. My favorite example of this is the face on Mars. Same deal when trying to search through imagery for debris. People have a preconception of what a plane crash looks like, and it's usually wrong. They'll confuse light-colored rocks, trees broken by snow loading, and all kinds of other things for evidence, while completely missing actual evidence. So the problem with these systems for search managers is that once someone flags something in a picture, you're kinda obligated to check on it, which takes resources away from more likely search areas. 3. The technology isn't there (yet). Computer vision may get better than humans at this soon, but not yet, and certainly not in the kind of technology that even well-funded search organizations or adventurers has access to. NSA? Maybe. Us? Nah, best we get is grainy photographs of features 1m across from high up. IR imagery currently has similar problems, there's just too much background noise in most cases. Some kind of multi-spectrum imagery fed into a big convolutional NN might be able to do a better job of telling the difference between a rock and some twisted metal and plastic composites at 1m resolution, but I don't know if anybody's actually invented that yet. I'm using 1m resolution here as a substitute value for whatever would be appropriate to cover a large area with reasonable resources. After the Camp Fire, Alameda County brought a really cool tech team out that covered large areas of the burn with imagery from drones. They got a 1cm aerial resolution that was good enough to satisfy insurance investigators. But, it required a lot of flight time and computing power to do that, and they covered a relatively small area compared to the search area for a missing aircraft.
blakespot 7y ago
I subscribe to the Wash Post. Not the NYT. Wish I could read it, though.
- melling 7y ago
  I ended up subscribing to both. Here's another version of the story: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/08/inside-search-for-amelia-earhart-airplane/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/08/inside-se...
- jazzyjackson 7y ago
  The paywalls are implemented in javascript FYI, no javascript: no paywall.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    I thought NYT at least had switched to “the content loading beyond the teaser is implemented in JS, so no JS => no article”.
atdrummond 7y ago
http://archive.li/BKq3S http://archive.li/BKq3S
- deckar01 7y ago
  The text is still in the page. console.log(document.querySelector('#site-content').innerText.replace(/(.{80}\w*)\s*/g, '$1\n'))
  - atdrummond 7y ago
    Sure - but if that changes down the road, the archive.li link will still show the proper content.
dpio 7y ago
This is exciting news!
nammi 7y ago
> Mr. Campbell shared the photo with experts at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, who used classified technology to enhance the picture. I was curious about this since I hadn't heard of this agency before. I have no experience with GEOINT but they seem to have a pretty impressive GH organization https://github.com/ngageoint https://github.com/ngageoint
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  As the NSA and NRO have gotten more PR, I think the NGA has taken the mantle of "biggest intelligence agency you've never heard of". Probably the most famous thing about the NGA is the time when President Obama was doing a meet-and-greet at a Five Guys in the DC area. He asked someone in line where they worked, and when the answer was "National Geospatial-intelligence Agency" it sounded like it was Obama's first time hearing about it Edit: Link to video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1TxMKaYHYA&t=5m55s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1TxMKaYHYA&t=5m55s
djmips 7y ago
Archive of linked analysis of photos showing landing gear and 3D rendered / lit landing gear. (Because original server might be overloaded I could not reach it) https://web.archive.org/web/20190812112844/https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bulletins/82_BevingtonAnalysis2/82_BevingtonObjectNewAnalysis.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190812112844/https://tighar.or...
- mannykannot 7y ago
  That article seems rather tendentious. It claims that 'Jeff Glickman and the State Dept. photo analysts looked at the image and asked, “What does the thing on the reef look like?” They concluded, “It looks like Electra landing gear wreckage.”' but, as told in the article, the only candidate they considered for “what does the thing on the reef look like?” was, in fact, the wreckage of an Electra landing gear, damaged, and adjusted until it was possible to say that the image was "consistent with Lockheed Electra landing gear components" (at least they did not attempt to sharpen the image, on account of the risk of "introducing information that isn’t really there.") (Update: after seeing several other zooms of the object, I get the impression that the one chosen for this article did undergo some form of processing.) AFAIK, "consistent with" merely means that the hypothesis cannot be ruled out, but that does not seem to be a high bar when the image is very small and blurred. So what else might they have considered as a candidate for the object? How about anything that might of been swept off the nearby wreck by nearly eight years of storms to start with, not to mention tree stumps, pieces of coral and other natural detritus that storms regularly move around? There seems to be a lot of confirmation bias here.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    The island was in fact one of the original suspects when Earhart's plane first went missing but by the time the US Navy arrived several weeks later, storms and natural wave action would have washed most of the plane away. The point of the analysis was to see if there was photographic evidence to suggest that it might have been the correct island all along. Yes, it could be a tree trump or some other debris--but it also looks exactly like the wreckage of a particular part of her plane, which is enough to justify a more detailed search. Like the Bismark's final resting spot, this island has a significant underwater seamount. If the plane landed on the beach and sunk, if could have slid thousands of feet into crevices in the seamount or even all the way down to the abyssal plain surrounding the island.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
WalterBright 7y ago
I don't have a ready reference, but my recollection is: 1. she wasn't a master of the airplane, having crashed it on takeoff before due to overloading 2. she had a history of overruling her navigator and being wrong 3. she tried to find a tiny island at the limit of the airplane's range in a time when navigation wasn't that accurate 4. did not have proper training on the radio and direction finder equipment 5. flew into a headwind and kept going 6. proper technique at the time was to fly towards the centerline between Howland and another island, doubling the likelihood of one being in visual range. She did not do this. This was at a time when such an attempt would be very, very unforgiving of mistakes. I don't think there's much of a mystery. (WW2 saw a lot of airplanes disappear over the Pacific with no trace.) Lindbergh would have had a very hard time missing Europe. His biggest problems were fatigue, icing, and headwinds. I think Lingbergh took a much more calculated risk. His predecessors disappeared without a trace.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  P.S. I talked with my father about this long ago, who was a B-17 lead navigator in the war over Europe. The crews flew their B-17s over the Atlantic to England. He navigated using a sextant and a chronometer, and they were 6 miles off when hitting the Irish coast. He said many B-17s were lost without a trace in the Atlantic crossings.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  Citations needed for pretty much all of that. Especially the bit about Earhart having a history of overruling Noonan, since by most accounts they had a very open working relationship built on trusting and relying on each other's respective capabilities. Also, you followed up with a post about trained Navy pilots going missing on relatively simple flights between two giant landmasses where all you have to do is literally fly east or west. Earhart and Noonan were able to handle the navigation for much more difficult flights than crossing the Atlantic. So yes, there's still very much of a mystery as to what happened to them.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    > Citations needed A fair question. Here's some detail: > Especially the bit about Earhart having a history of overruling Noonan My reference for that was a documentary on Earhart on TV, sorry don't recall the title. When they crossed the Atlantic and hit Africa, Noonan said turning right to find out where they were, Earhart overruled and turned left, and was wrong. Fortunately, they had enough fuel to correct the mistake. The documentary said their relationship was not as collegial as you characterized it. The headwind thing came from it, too. B-17s were Army Air Force, not Navy. The WW2 planes going missing over the Pacific were often B-29s flying great distances over water to attack Japan. They didn't have trouble finding Japan, but finding Iwo Jima on the return wasn't easy. The bit about how to navigate to a tiny island came from my father. Him being a trained navigator, I think that's fair. Besides, don't you think it makes sense? The radio issues you can find in the wikipedia article about Earhart. The crash with the overloaded airplane you can find a brief mention of there, too. > So yes, there's still very much of a mystery as to what happened to them. Not to me, not to a trained navigator, either. For comparison, when JFK jr disappeared, the first thing my dad said was spacial disorientation, a perennial killer of inexperienced pilots flying into poor visibility conditions. After weeks of investigations and conspiracy theories, the investigators reluctantly made that conclusion, as well. Nobody wanted to believe a mistake that simple could have taken down JFK jr.
technothrasher 7y ago
Tighar, the group mentioned in the article, has been pushing this photo for many years, and about every 18 months or so they manage to get somebody new to do a story about it. Considering nothing has ever come of it, I'm less than convinced. Here's a reasonably good skeptical summary of their efforts written a couple years ago: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4580 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4580
- nigerian1981 7y ago
  Thanks for sharing this very well written article. I loved the part about the picture of Hitler turning out to be Moe from the Three Stooges.
jamesdavid 7y ago
In my opinion, the most fascinating corroborating evidence of the location of Amelia's crash is the diary of a 15yo girl in Flordia that purportedly received a reflected shortwave radio broadcast by Amelia after the crash and wrote notes contemporaneously as she heard the transmission. On the last page, she recorded that she heard something that sounded like New York. The visible shipwreck on Nikumaroro is SS Norwich City. https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Notebook/notebook.html https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Noteb...
- na85 7y ago
  Wow, that gave me chills to read the transcript. If true, that's an amazing story. Do we know if Earhart had a shortwave radio onboard?
  - fapjacks 7y ago
    Long-range wireless communication necessarily limits you to shortwave bands, exclusively if you don't have satellites. Earhart most certainly had a shortwave transceiver onboard. It is totally plausible and unsurprising that hams in the United States would have been able to hear Earhart's distress calls. Additionally, this was in the age before vacuum tubes opened up frequencies higher than HF for widespread commercial use -- for example UHF (used for television broadcasts) was still largely experimental around the time Earhart disappeared. So consumer wireless devices were still mostly clustered in and around the shortwave bands.
- fouc 7y ago
  Any more analysis of this ? Do the numbers help?
dwd 7y ago
My first thought was they should have Dr. Ballard searching for MH370. A quick search found this in an AMA he did. "I offered immediately on hearing of its loss to help in any way possible either advising them on how best to hunt for the airliner or to do it with my own ship and technology but they turned me down. You can't help unless you are invited to help and they clearly wanted to do it themselves. Recently, I met the president of Malaysia Airlines who offered to send me the search data to look at just in case they might have missed something. I am still waiting for the data but don't expect to get it." https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/7eim7p/im_dr_bob_ballard_and_im_the_oceanographer_who/dq5c12d/ https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/7eim7p/im_dr_bob_b...
- trentlott 7y ago
  > or to do it with my own ship and technology but they turned me down. You can't help unless you are invited to help Didn't the guy who found the initial wreckage do it on his own inspite of the Malaysian gov't?
  - dwd 7y ago
    His tale adds yet another bizarre twist to the story https://www.news.com.au/national/mh370-private-investigator-getting-death-threats-warning-he-will-be-killed-if-he-keeps-probing-flight-disappearance/news-story/90d61d16e1594c8ca467c3e5abb6a282 https://www.news.com.au/national/mh370-private-investigator-... There's a big difference between picking up wreckage on beaches and putting your ship in the middle of a coordinated search pattern.
rasz 7y ago
Ballard you say, so what does US military need to cover up this time around?
sanatgersappa 7y ago
Funny, I just watched this last week - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_37%27s_(episode) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_37%27s_(episode)

119 points by tlb 7y ago

The island he’s singled out was flown over within days of her disappearance and the pilot did not see any signs of an airplane. It would be wonderful to finally solve this mystery, but it’s not as though this idea is some recent breakthrough. It was thought of at the time, which is why the pilot was sent to look.

secabeen 7y ago
The idea they're having, which is hidden in the article, is that she crashed in the shallow water around the island, and the wreckage slipped down the underwater slope, out of sight. At a later time, landing gear was pictured on the beach, broken loose from the rest of the debris, still underwater.
Etheryte 7y ago
The article addresses this point, in case you missed it. > According to the official report, a search pilot saw “signs of recent habitation” there. But because nobody waved them down, the search team left and the Navy dismissed the theory. What the sailors didn’t know was that the island had been uninhabited for 40 years. > Earhart landed on the very edge of the island, Dr. Ballard believes. As tides rose, her plane may have slipped down the underwater slope.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  > What the sailors didn’t know was that the island had been uninhabited for 40 years. It seems that it was occupied for several days by the 24 survivors of the shipwrecked SS Norwich City in November 1929, who were forced to abandon the wreck as it caught fire. I believe it is the ship in the photograph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikumaroro#SS_Norwich_City_wreck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikumaroro#SS_Norwich_City_wre...
thaumaturgy 7y ago
I was on a SAR mission a couple of years ago for a lost aircraft outside of Truckee, CA. In that case, there was flight radar data available for most of the flight path, Civil Air Patrol was out in force with multiple overhead flyovers, CHP and Air National Guard were also out, we were receiving intermittent ELT signals, there were hundreds of ground searchers and UTVs/ATVs/snowmobiles, and all of our search activity was recorded and coordinated through a well-organized incident command with specific search assignments for each day. We still failed to locate the aircraft. It was found a month or so later by some random recreationalists. Any number of circumstances may have prevented it from being spotted the first time. It's far, far harder to locate missing aircraft than most people realize.
- chx 7y ago
  Just a thought exercise to show why this is so hard: let's say you know where the aircraft was a minute before crashing but not the direction of it. If an aircraft is flying at a modest 200 km/h (that's a Cessna 172 cruising) then in a single minute it can fly more than 3km. The area of a circle with a radius of that is close to 35km^2. That's half of Manhattan Island.
  - pacala 7y ago
    How difficult would be to fly one hd filming plane above, then scour the imagery with a fine comb, possibly computer vision aided?
    - wil421 7y ago
      You would need different angles especially if there was tree cover or mountainous terrain.
    - thaumaturgy 7y ago
      Very. A similar tactic was used when Steve Fossett disappeared (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fossett#Disappearance_and_search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fossett#Disappearance_an...), and it was entirely unsuccessful. There are a few challenges: 1. There is a direct relationship between the time and effort required to take imagery, and the image resolution. Which is to say, if you want imagery that's detailed enough that you can find likely evidence without a lot of false positives, then you have to spend a ton of time in the air at low altitude, and if you want to effectively search a large area, then you have to spend time at higher altitude where you're too high up to get useful imagery. 2. Humans aren't good at sorting out natural features from unnatural ones. My favorite example of this is the face on Mars. Same deal when trying to search through imagery for debris. People have a preconception of what a plane crash looks like, and it's usually wrong. They'll confuse light-colored rocks, trees broken by snow loading, and all kinds of other things for evidence, while completely missing actual evidence. So the problem with these systems for search managers is that once someone flags something in a picture, you're kinda obligated to check on it, which takes resources away from more likely search areas. 3. The technology isn't there (yet). Computer vision may get better than humans at this soon, but not yet, and certainly not in the kind of technology that even well-funded search organizations or adventurers has access to. NSA? Maybe. Us? Nah, best we get is grainy photographs of features 1m across from high up. IR imagery currently has similar problems, there's just too much background noise in most cases. Some kind of multi-spectrum imagery fed into a big convolutional NN might be able to do a better job of telling the difference between a rock and some twisted metal and plastic composites at 1m resolution, but I don't know if anybody's actually invented that yet. I'm using 1m resolution here as a substitute value for whatever would be appropriate to cover a large area with reasonable resources. After the Camp Fire, Alameda County brought a really cool tech team out that covered large areas of the burn with imagery from drones. They got a 1cm aerial resolution that was good enough to satisfy insurance investigators. But, it required a lot of flight time and computing power to do that, and they covered a relatively small area compared to the search area for a missing aircraft.

blakespot 7y ago

I subscribe to the Wash Post. Not the NYT. Wish I could read it, though.

melling 7y ago
I ended up subscribing to both. Here's another version of the story: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/08/inside-search-for-amelia-earhart-airplane/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/08/inside-se...
jazzyjackson 7y ago
The paywalls are implemented in javascript FYI, no javascript: no paywall.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  I thought NYT at least had switched to “the content loading beyond the teaser is implemented in JS, so no JS => no article”.

atdrummond 7y ago

http://archive.li/BKq3S http://archive.li/BKq3S

deckar01 7y ago
The text is still in the page. console.log(document.querySelector('#site-content').innerText.replace(/(.{80}\w*)\s*/g, '$1\n'))
- atdrummond 7y ago
  Sure - but if that changes down the road, the archive.li link will still show the proper content.

dpio 7y ago

This is exciting news!

nammi 7y ago

> Mr. Campbell shared the photo with experts at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, who used classified technology to enhance the picture. I was curious about this since I hadn't heard of this agency before. I have no experience with GEOINT but they seem to have a pretty impressive GH organization https://github.com/ngageoint https://github.com/ngageoint

Rebelgecko 7y ago
As the NSA and NRO have gotten more PR, I think the NGA has taken the mantle of "biggest intelligence agency you've never heard of". Probably the most famous thing about the NGA is the time when President Obama was doing a meet-and-greet at a Five Guys in the DC area. He asked someone in line where they worked, and when the answer was "National Geospatial-intelligence Agency" it sounded like it was Obama's first time hearing about it Edit: Link to video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1TxMKaYHYA&t=5m55s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1TxMKaYHYA&t=5m55s

djmips 7y ago

Archive of linked analysis of photos showing landing gear and 3D rendered / lit landing gear. (Because original server might be overloaded I could not reach it) https://web.archive.org/web/20190812112844/https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bulletins/82_BevingtonAnalysis2/82_BevingtonObjectNewAnalysis.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190812112844/https://tighar.or...

mannykannot 7y ago
That article seems rather tendentious. It claims that 'Jeff Glickman and the State Dept. photo analysts looked at the image and asked, “What does the thing on the reef look like?” They concluded, “It looks like Electra landing gear wreckage.”' but, as told in the article, the only candidate they considered for “what does the thing on the reef look like?” was, in fact, the wreckage of an Electra landing gear, damaged, and adjusted until it was possible to say that the image was "consistent with Lockheed Electra landing gear components" (at least they did not attempt to sharpen the image, on account of the risk of "introducing information that isn’t really there.") (Update: after seeing several other zooms of the object, I get the impression that the one chosen for this article did undergo some form of processing.) AFAIK, "consistent with" merely means that the hypothesis cannot be ruled out, but that does not seem to be a high bar when the image is very small and blurred. So what else might they have considered as a candidate for the object? How about anything that might of been swept off the nearby wreck by nearly eight years of storms to start with, not to mention tree stumps, pieces of coral and other natural detritus that storms regularly move around? There seems to be a lot of confirmation bias here.
- gamblor956 7y ago
  The island was in fact one of the original suspects when Earhart's plane first went missing but by the time the US Navy arrived several weeks later, storms and natural wave action would have washed most of the plane away. The point of the analysis was to see if there was photographic evidence to suggest that it might have been the correct island all along. Yes, it could be a tree trump or some other debris--but it also looks exactly like the wreckage of a particular part of her plane, which is enough to justify a more detailed search. Like the Bismark's final resting spot, this island has a significant underwater seamount. If the plane landed on the beach and sunk, if could have slid thousands of feet into crevices in the seamount or even all the way down to the abyssal plain surrounding the island.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

WalterBright 7y ago

I don't have a ready reference, but my recollection is: 1. she wasn't a master of the airplane, having crashed it on takeoff before due to overloading 2. she had a history of overruling her navigator and being wrong 3. she tried to find a tiny island at the limit of the airplane's range in a time when navigation wasn't that accurate 4. did not have proper training on the radio and direction finder equipment 5. flew into a headwind and kept going 6. proper technique at the time was to fly towards the centerline between Howland and another island, doubling the likelihood of one being in visual range. She did not do this. This was at a time when such an attempt would be very, very unforgiving of mistakes. I don't think there's much of a mystery. (WW2 saw a lot of airplanes disappear over the Pacific with no trace.) Lindbergh would have had a very hard time missing Europe. His biggest problems were fatigue, icing, and headwinds. I think Lingbergh took a much more calculated risk. His predecessors disappeared without a trace.

WalterBright 7y ago
P.S. I talked with my father about this long ago, who was a B-17 lead navigator in the war over Europe. The crews flew their B-17s over the Atlantic to England. He navigated using a sextant and a chronometer, and they were 6 miles off when hitting the Irish coast. He said many B-17s were lost without a trace in the Atlantic crossings.
gamblor956 7y ago
Citations needed for pretty much all of that. Especially the bit about Earhart having a history of overruling Noonan, since by most accounts they had a very open working relationship built on trusting and relying on each other's respective capabilities. Also, you followed up with a post about trained Navy pilots going missing on relatively simple flights between two giant landmasses where all you have to do is literally fly east or west. Earhart and Noonan were able to handle the navigation for much more difficult flights than crossing the Atlantic. So yes, there's still very much of a mystery as to what happened to them.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > Citations needed A fair question. Here's some detail: > Especially the bit about Earhart having a history of overruling Noonan My reference for that was a documentary on Earhart on TV, sorry don't recall the title. When they crossed the Atlantic and hit Africa, Noonan said turning right to find out where they were, Earhart overruled and turned left, and was wrong. Fortunately, they had enough fuel to correct the mistake. The documentary said their relationship was not as collegial as you characterized it. The headwind thing came from it, too. B-17s were Army Air Force, not Navy. The WW2 planes going missing over the Pacific were often B-29s flying great distances over water to attack Japan. They didn't have trouble finding Japan, but finding Iwo Jima on the return wasn't easy. The bit about how to navigate to a tiny island came from my father. Him being a trained navigator, I think that's fair. Besides, don't you think it makes sense? The radio issues you can find in the wikipedia article about Earhart. The crash with the overloaded airplane you can find a brief mention of there, too. > So yes, there's still very much of a mystery as to what happened to them. Not to me, not to a trained navigator, either. For comparison, when JFK jr disappeared, the first thing my dad said was spacial disorientation, a perennial killer of inexperienced pilots flying into poor visibility conditions. After weeks of investigations and conspiracy theories, the investigators reluctantly made that conclusion, as well. Nobody wanted to believe a mistake that simple could have taken down JFK jr.

technothrasher 7y ago

Tighar, the group mentioned in the article, has been pushing this photo for many years, and about every 18 months or so they manage to get somebody new to do a story about it. Considering nothing has ever come of it, I'm less than convinced. Here's a reasonably good skeptical summary of their efforts written a couple years ago: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4580 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4580

nigerian1981 7y ago
Thanks for sharing this very well written article. I loved the part about the picture of Hitler turning out to be Moe from the Three Stooges.

jamesdavid 7y ago

In my opinion, the most fascinating corroborating evidence of the location of Amelia's crash is the diary of a 15yo girl in Flordia that purportedly received a reflected shortwave radio broadcast by Amelia after the crash and wrote notes contemporaneously as she heard the transmission. On the last page, she recorded that she heard something that sounded like New York. The visible shipwreck on Nikumaroro is SS Norwich City. https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Notebook/notebook.html https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Noteb...

na85 7y ago
Wow, that gave me chills to read the transcript. If true, that's an amazing story. Do we know if Earhart had a shortwave radio onboard?
- fapjacks 7y ago
  Long-range wireless communication necessarily limits you to shortwave bands, exclusively if you don't have satellites. Earhart most certainly had a shortwave transceiver onboard. It is totally plausible and unsurprising that hams in the United States would have been able to hear Earhart's distress calls. Additionally, this was in the age before vacuum tubes opened up frequencies higher than HF for widespread commercial use -- for example UHF (used for television broadcasts) was still largely experimental around the time Earhart disappeared. So consumer wireless devices were still mostly clustered in and around the shortwave bands.
fouc 7y ago
Any more analysis of this ? Do the numbers help?

dwd 7y ago

My first thought was they should have Dr. Ballard searching for MH370. A quick search found this in an AMA he did. "I offered immediately on hearing of its loss to help in any way possible either advising them on how best to hunt for the airliner or to do it with my own ship and technology but they turned me down. You can't help unless you are invited to help and they clearly wanted to do it themselves. Recently, I met the president of Malaysia Airlines who offered to send me the search data to look at just in case they might have missed something. I am still waiting for the data but don't expect to get it." https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/7eim7p/im_dr_bob_ballard_and_im_the_oceanographer_who/dq5c12d/ https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/7eim7p/im_dr_bob_b...

trentlott 7y ago
> or to do it with my own ship and technology but they turned me down. You can't help unless you are invited to help Didn't the guy who found the initial wreckage do it on his own inspite of the Malaysian gov't?
- dwd 7y ago
  His tale adds yet another bizarre twist to the story https://www.news.com.au/national/mh370-private-investigator-getting-death-threats-warning-he-will-be-killed-if-he-keeps-probing-flight-disappearance/news-story/90d61d16e1594c8ca467c3e5abb6a282 https://www.news.com.au/national/mh370-private-investigator-... There's a big difference between picking up wreckage on beaches and putting your ship in the middle of a coordinated search pattern.

rasz 7y ago

Ballard you say, so what does US military need to cover up this time around?

sanatgersappa 7y ago

Funny, I just watched this last week - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_37%27s_(episode) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_37%27s_(episode)