NavList:

Hi Gary. Thanks for that update. Great to see you "on-stage". It's sad for the science of celestial navigation, and it must be very frustrating for you, to see the so-called "dateline theory" treated as if it's valuable or even remotely plausible.

Of course navigators had been crossing the (formally defined) dateline for decades prior to Earhart's flight. I can show you examples in a logbook from 1897 that I have been using in one of my celestial navigation workshops for almost fifteen years. There was no doubt, not even a debate about it, because navigators, of course collected their almanac data based on Greenwich date and time and would never have done anything else. Among hundreds of "dateline crossings" every year, the dateline was never a concern. It wasn't an issue. In the absence of some actual documentation of "dateline confusion" from Noonan and Earhart, during their preparations for the flight perhaps, specifically stating that they have somehow, against everything that was known and standard, logical and accepted, in celestial navigation become convinced that they had to change the date for celestial calculations, this theory has to be tossed in the junk pile of ignorant chatter. In short, Liz Bell's "dateline theory" is an incompetent, hand-waving speculation. Might as well say space aliens did it...

Frank Reed