NavList:

Pushing my point of the difficulty in simply spotting Howland Island from the air, even if you were relatively close, I googled ‘Howland Island distant view’ and amongst the views offered were views of a different Howland Island.  This was a tree covered atoll with a lagoon, not the barren scrub and sand covered smudge which I’ve always imagined.  See: https://www.janeresture.com/howland/ .  This is clearly wrong and is the result of poor picture editing.  However, the same photograph re-appears several times showing the dangers of ‘copying and pasting’ straight from the www by the general public without the least amount of checking.  One wonders what will happen when AI gets hold of this image.  On the plus side, the same link shows a YouTube video of what looks like the real Howland Island viewed from an approaching helicopter.  It shows exactly the difficulty of spotting a tiny island with only ten feet vertical extent under broken cloud.  You really wouldn’t need to be more than a few miles off to miss the place all together.  You don’t need to make a mistake with your navigation, it’s just how things are.  (I agree the close presence of USCGC Itasca, also not seen, would have made Howland Is easier to spot as with the support vessel in the video.) DaveP