NavList:

Hi Frank

These Amelia Earhart conspiracists seemed to pop out of the ether spoutting wild theories of "what really happened to Amelia's aircraft on its fateful flight from Lae to Howlett" without considering the huge amount of known facts about that fateful trip.

In my opinion ( and this is based on a lot of experience of celestial navigation as an RNZAF Navigator on Bristol Freighters and P3 Orions  -with nothing but the sun gun to navigate by - and further - I have flown in the weather and area that Amelia's flight was in - in the tropics, the convergence zone weather, at night and during the day - in a bristol freighter - and have 4000 hrs of such experience)  - to continue - and having read numerous books to collect objective facts about what is known about that fateful flight.

It is my opinion based on all the facts (Occam's razor principle says that if you have two competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one) which is

Gary LaPook is absolutely correct!!!

They were well north of track ( I believe up to 100 nms) and they just ran out of fuel! - simple!

And when you analyse all the data despite the 2 position line fixes reported by him - ( we in the military NEVER EVER call a 2 line fix a FIX - the minimum is a cocked hat 3 line at about 120 deg each - and then we add a circle of error of uncertainty to this. Also the Electra was Not a stable celestial platform for this to happen - the Bristol Freighter wasn't below 10,000 ft in the tropics the air was not smoothe enough. Take a P3 Orion at 30,000 - very stable!

Anyways - they took off from Lae with less fuel than was needed - it was hotter than desired so the fuel was hotter hence took more volume than refueling in the cool morning - and they flew into an increasing head wind. And they took off late because they needed the sea breeze to give them some wind over the wings for the downhill take off - because the evening in Lae brings orographic winds off the mountains in the early cool morning - an uphill direction.

There were other factors that I believe contributed to an error to put them further north - I have never seen it mentioned - but when you crash an aircraft and rebuild it and replace the engines you MUST swing the compass on board - they didn't - Noonan did a quick check before he left mainland USA heading down the coast to South America. I believe the compass most likely had an error in it. 

And the biggest error was flying East vs flying West - you are always flying into a headwind at that time of the year - which is what they got - greater than forecast - lethal in their case - !!!

They suffered they classic malady of flyers - "pushonitis" - which often kills - it did in their case.

Anyways - I think they should have turned back before the PNR on the Lae - Howlett track but they didn't. 

And the 'dateline theory' is simply twaddle, and just not possible if you have ever navigated in the air - you set your navigation watch to GMT - which the celestial tables are based on - wear 2 watches - that was really common before modern watches allowed both to be entered - but NO air navigator used local time to navigate by - no one - that theory is piffle!!

Regards Howard