NavList:

Thank you for including that link to Roger Connor's article:
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/amelia-earhart-and-profession-air-navigation.
I wanted to get the link in here at the top, for anyone who missed it.

Just a couple of years after this essay, and around the time of the opening of the "Time and Navigation" exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, Roger Connor put together a fascinating presentation on air navigation in early 2016 at Mystic Seaport Museum (where I sometimes teach my navigation workshops), and I helped "host" him, took him out for dinner one night, and convinced him to join me and three other NavList regulars for beers another night. Roger, in the years since, has climbed the ladder at Smithsonian Air & Space and is now a relatively high-level curator.

Howard G., you wrote:
"Princess Earhart was an accident going somewhere to happen and there is just no mystery what-so-ever on the cause of their crash - none."

Really??! That strikes me an oddly "absolute" conclusion.

[btw, to everyone: enough with the "Princess" moniker... it's true that the media and American popular opinion treated her like a "princess" but that wasn't her choice, wasn't her fault, and it doesn't explain how Fred Noonan failed at Howland Island. Calling her "Princess" is a cheap shot...]

Howard, you continued:
"It was of my opinion [...]  that the Electra 10E was poorly equipment for navigation.
No astro dome
No periscopic sextant
[etc.]"

I would suggest that the problem you're having here is that you're not thinking like a historian must think [see Roger Connor's article for more on this issue]. You can't examine their tool kit or their methods based on your own knowledge from decades later. The year 1937 was not 1967... None of this chastising that some modern-trained navigators have been engaging in about the perceived flaws in the aircraft or the perceived deficiencies in Fred Noonan's navigation skills (or Earhart's) matters in the slightest if you complain that they did not meet the standards that were well-established decades later. How many aircraft available in 1937 had astrodomes?? If Earhart's Electra needed one, then why didn't Noonan insist on having one installed? Other significant modifications to the Electra were made for long-distance navigation. The simple explanation is that astrodomes were, as yet, a relatively unknown, relatively rare option. And periscopic sextants?? Sure, common in later decades... but in 1937?? Compare, for example, the Sikorsky S-42, an early "Pan Am Clipper", which was a trans-oceanic contemporary of Earhart's Electra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_S-42. Was it "wise" to fly the S-42 across the Atlantic and the Pacific in 1937? DId they use every skill of air navigation known in 1967 back in 1937 on those "clipper" flights? We can't just say "every competent navigator flying today knows this" [paraphrasing what some people say] and thus they were incompetent back in 1937. You have to "cut 'em a little slack" for being first in the game. We can't understand history by judging it with modern hindsight.

Regarding air accidents generally, you wrote:
"Before I close - to get a true understanding of air crash investigation - watch them on Netflix, SBS, or whatever feed you get - there are plenty of them - and truely fascinating to watch true detective work -  none - I repeat none are just 'the aircraft crash was the result of unpredicatable, unforseen and unfortunate circumstances' - i.e. they were all a collection of accumulated errors, that singly in the absence of accumulation would not have caused the crash - but together resulted in the crash."

During lockdown, my slightly morbid choice for end-of-the-world entertainment was a very long marathon of the 20+ seasons of "Mayday" (also sold as "Air Crash Investigation"). It's always fascinating, but of course, these are not "pure" documentaries. We have to remember that, as entertainment programming, there are story-telling choices and among those is this idea, that has become a mantra in accident investigation story-telling, that every accident has multiple low-probability contingencies which together all have to happen, and in the right order, to get us to a major loss-of-life or loss-of-vehicle accident. This is certainly true of almost all accidents in all settings in the modern world, but it's generally a result of the highly efficient and effective accident investigation culture itself. We have reached a point, thanks almost entirely to this mature systematic investigation culture, where single-point failures rarely lead to disaster, except where that culture is dangerously broken [insert "spring" sound here]. Everything is backed up. Every mission-critical system has some sort of redundancy. And so the principle is true... today... after decades of evolution and expense. The "drama" in programming like "Mayday" is dependent on this fundamental principle since it makes every accident a story of multiple mysterious threads rolled up into one big, bizarre ball of mystery. And once again, we're back to the difficulty of thinking like a historian. It wasn't always this way.

Once again, here's the link to Roger Connor's article:
https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/amelia-earhart-and-profession-air-navigation.

Connor makes some interesting points about the Electra, but he also points out that a few of them are anachronistic points. For example, are two engines better than one? It's an interesting question, and it's certainly not obvious to most people today --and wasn't even thought of in 1937-- that engine redundancy is illusory. It's not safer to have multiple engines. And yet multi-engine (typically four-engime) aircraft were the norm in trans-oceanic flight, both civilian and military for over five decades.

The most interesting element in Connor's article is the tale of the interaction between P.V.H. Weems and Earhart. Roger Connor explained to me that he and his team had been digging through the recently available collection of papers of Weems at the Smithsonian around the time that he wrote this essay. Weems had offered to instruct Earhart in the latest methods of celestial navigation. She declined, via her husband and manager, George Putnam --no time left before the great circum-navigation. But Noonan was the hired gun here. How well-versed was he in the new methodologies advocated by Weems? Yet again, thinking like historians, notice that the techniques developed and offered by Weems were not "standard" navigation. They were novel. They became standard, obligatory, even obvious, very quickly, and Weems is now recognized as a revolutionary in air navigation. But that revolution was in its early days in 1937...

Finally, what can go wrong in a revolution, like the development of new methods by Weems and others in the late 1930s? Consider that revolutions breed revolutionaries... Everybody wants a piece of the action. Everyone wants to get in on it and wave a flag on the ramparts, invent something clever that knocks down the old walls. And here is an opening for error. By all the descriptions I've read, Fred Noonan was not creative by nature, but if he thought he was a revolutionary, if he thought he had developed some slick method of managing celestial sights, it's conceivable that he might have come up with a technique that looked good in most cases, but could fail under other circumstances. Could he have screwed up at a fateful moment by playing revolutionary? I really doubt it, especially with his own life on the line, but it's a possibility worth considering. And since that possibility exists --during this on-going revolution in the 1930s-- it's worth looking at some of the more outlandish navigation-related theories. Strange things can happen during revolutions.

Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA