Amelia Earhart

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 15:48:05 GMT, Larry Dighera
wrote:

Thanks for the link to interesting Earhart information.

You're welcome.

There is considerable speculation that the US government secretly
asked her to do reconnaissance over Japanese held Pacific islands on
her last flight. This was the conclusion reached by author Fred
Goerner in his The Search for Amelia Earhart.
http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?ac...1661_2:113:280

Yes. Fred Goerner and Fred Hooven were great friends.

Those of you who are full-scale pilots can do this exercise
better than I can. We know what time AE took off from Lae,
New Guinea (10 AM local; 00:00 Zulu).

1.At what time would she arrive over islands in the Pacific
held by the Japanese in 1937?

2. How much could she
see at that time?

3. How much help would she receive
from the Japanese in homing in on their allegedly
secret military installations?

4. How many passes would she need to get
herself oriented?

5. What kind of equipment could she have
carried with her to aid her spy mission?

6. How much
fuel would she need to make such a flight and still
reach Howland Island?

These are my answers:

1. She would arrive in the middle of the night.

2. She couldn't make any observations at that time that
would be worth the danger involved.

3. The Japanese would give her much less help than
she got from the Coast Guard at Howland (which,
in the event, turned out to be not much different
from zero).

4. Flying in the dark would require extraordinary
efforts to get oriented and to find the right places
to make observations.

5. Infrared cameras, x-ray equipment, microwave
equipment, high-altitude aerial cameras, magnetometers,
gravitometers and the like were not available in
1937. What could she have seen with the old Mark I
eyeball that would be of any use? If the government
knew where to have her look, that would mean that
they already knew what the enemy-to-be had there,
and they wouldn't need a nighttime spy flight. If they
just wanted her to visually survey the islands, what could
she see at that time of night?

6. My totally amateur guess (TAG) is that she would need
much more than the 1100 gallons her plane was designed
to carry for such a mission. See the Chater Report
for details on the fuel she received in Lae:
http://www.tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Documents/Chater_Report.html

The theory that AE was flying a secret spy mission dates from
the 1943 war propaganda movie, Flight for Freedom, starring Rosalind
Russell and Fred MacMurray. It's so much more romantic to
think that AE and FN died serving their country than because
they willfully neglected to prepare for a very dangerous flight
undertaken to make them rich and famous.

Marty