NavList:

David, I'm still wondering if that leg looked like a critically dangerous gamble to any navigators back in 1937. It would help to answer the question: just how relevant or irrelevant is our hindight ...from almost a century later? Maybe the points we're making would have seemed obvious in 1937. Or maybe this was the "disaster" that opened the eyes of navigators to the problem of locating a tiny featureless island from the air. The war soon after immediately added a super-abundance of case evidence for navigation, as well as far greater concerns. 

Did P.V.H. Weems have anything to say about the navigation of the doomed Earhart expedition? Or navigators in the Pan Am Clipper service? I'm aware that Weems wrote Earhart shortly before the flight offering more training, but that was too litttle and too late. 

Supposedly Jacqueline Cochrane suggested (source?) that Earhart may have rejected the west-bound flight because it would have required a fully-loaded take-off from Howland's primitive runway. That seems like a genuine risk. Flying east toward Hawaii from Howland implied a substantially lower take-off weight, right?

Frank Reed