
Finding Amelia Earhart’s Plane Seemed Impossible – Then Came a Startling Clue - tlb
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/science/amelia-earhart-search-robert-ballard.html
======
technothrasher
Tighar, the group mentioned in the article, has been pushing this photo for
many years, and about every 18 months or so they manage to get somebody new to
do a story about it. Considering nothing has ever come of it, I'm less than
convinced.

Here's a reasonably good skeptical summary of their efforts written a couple
years ago:

[https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4580](https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4580)

~~~
nigerian1981
Thanks for sharing this very well written article. I loved the part about the
picture of Hitler turning out to be Moe from the Three Stooges.

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WalterBright
I don't have a ready reference, but my recollection is:

1\. she wasn't a master of the airplane, having crashed it on takeoff before
due to overloading

2\. she had a history of overruling her navigator and being wrong

3\. she tried to find a tiny island at the limit of the airplane's range in a
time when navigation wasn't that accurate

4\. did not have proper training on the radio and direction finder equipment

5\. flew into a headwind and kept going

6\. proper technique at the time was to fly towards the centerline between
Howland and another island, doubling the likelihood of one being in visual
range. She did not do this.

This was at a time when such an attempt would be very, very unforgiving of
mistakes. I don't think there's much of a mystery. (WW2 saw a lot of airplanes
disappear over the Pacific with no trace.)

Lindbergh would have had a very hard time missing Europe. His biggest problems
were fatigue, icing, and headwinds. I think Lingbergh took a much more
calculated risk. His predecessors disappeared without a trace.

~~~
gamblor956
Citations needed for pretty much all of that. Especially the bit about Earhart
having a history of overruling Noonan, since by most accounts they had a very
open working relationship built on trusting and relying on each other's
respective capabilities.

Also, you followed up with a post about _trained Navy pilots_ going missing on
relatively simple flights between two giant landmasses where all you have to
do is literally fly east or west. Earhart and Noonan were able to handle the
navigation for much more difficult flights than crossing the Atlantic. So yes,
there's still very much of a mystery as to what happened to them.

~~~
WalterBright
> Citations needed

A fair question. Here's some detail:

> Especially the bit about Earhart having a history of overruling Noonan

My reference for that was a documentary on Earhart on TV, sorry don't recall
the title. When they crossed the Atlantic and hit Africa, Noonan said turning
right to find out where they were, Earhart overruled and turned left, and was
wrong. Fortunately, they had enough fuel to correct the mistake. The
documentary said their relationship was not as collegial as you characterized
it.

The headwind thing came from it, too.

B-17s were Army Air Force, not Navy. The WW2 planes going missing over the
Pacific were often B-29s flying great distances over water to attack Japan.
They didn't have trouble finding Japan, but finding Iwo Jima on the return
wasn't easy.

The bit about how to navigate to a tiny island came from my father. Him being
a trained navigator, I think that's fair. Besides, don't you think it makes
sense?

The radio issues you can find in the wikipedia article about Earhart. The
crash with the overloaded airplane you can find a brief mention of there, too.

> So yes, there's still very much of a mystery as to what happened to them.

Not to me, not to a trained navigator, either. For comparison, when JFK jr
disappeared, the first thing my dad said was spacial disorientation, a
perennial killer of inexperienced pilots flying into poor visibility
conditions. After weeks of investigations and conspiracy theories, the
investigators reluctantly made that conclusion, as well. Nobody wanted to
believe a mistake that simple could have taken down JFK jr.

~~~
gamblor956
I saw that "documentary" as well, as I recall most of it was speculation
unsupported by any third party sources.

Also, the Wikipedia article doesn't say what you claim it says. It in fact
states that the overloaded plabe was a test flight attempted to determine how
much weight the plane could hold, and that neither Earhart or Noonan were able
to use Morse code but could otherwise operate their radios.

~~~
WalterBright
Much of it should be documentable, like the headwinds, the overloaded plane
crash, and turning the wrong way at Africa which should be in the flight log.

It's well known that an overloaded airplane can handle very different, and for
a pilot inexperienced with it it can be very, very dangerous. Heck, I was
watching "Alaska Crash Investigations" just the other day, where the cause of
a crash shortly after takeoff was determined to be due to the airplane being
overloaded by 500 lbs. Crashing overloaded bombers at the end of the runway
was a popular way to die in WW2, as they were always deliberately overloading
them.

Linbergh famously overloaded the Spirit of St Louis and figured his biggest
risk of death came from getting the machine off the ground.

~~~
pravda
>overloaded the Spirit of St Louis

Can we use the word 'overloaded' here? Lucky Lindy's plane was custom-built,
basically a flying gas tank.

It is not like he took an off-the-shelf plane and loaded it beyond its design
specifications.

~~~
WalterBright
That's a good point.

Lindbergh wrote:

"No plane ever took off so heavily loaded; and my propeller is set for
cruising, not for take-off. Of course our test flights at San Diego indicate
that it will take off—theoretically at least. But since we didn't dare try a
full load from Camp Kearney's stony ground, the wings now have to lift a
thousand pounds more than they ever carried before—five thousand pounds to be
lifted by nothing more tangible than air."

He also indicated that the airplane was not stressed to land with such a heavy
load.

\-- The Spirit of St. Louis

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jamesdavid
In my opinion, the most fascinating corroborating evidence of the location of
Amelia's crash is the diary of a 15yo girl in Flordia that purportedly
received a reflected shortwave radio broadcast by Amelia after the crash and
wrote notes contemporaneously as she heard the transmission. On the last page,
she recorded that she heard something that sounded like New York. The visible
shipwreck on Nikumaroro is SS Norwich City.
[https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Noteb...](https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Documents/Notebook/notebook.html)

~~~
na85
Wow, that gave me chills to read the transcript. If true, that's an amazing
story. Do we know if Earhart had a shortwave radio onboard?

~~~
fapjacks
Long-range wireless communication necessarily limits you to shortwave bands,
exclusively if you don't have satellites. Earhart most certainly had a
shortwave transceiver onboard. It is totally plausible and unsurprising that
hams in the United States would have been able to hear Earhart's distress
calls. Additionally, this was in the age before vacuum tubes opened up
frequencies higher than HF for widespread commercial use -- for example UHF
(used for television broadcasts) was still largely experimental around the
time Earhart disappeared. So consumer wireless devices were still mostly
clustered in and around the shortwave bands.

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dwd
My first thought was they should have Dr. Ballard searching for MH370.

A quick search found this in an AMA he did.

"I offered immediately on hearing of its loss to help in any way possible
either advising them on how best to hunt for the airliner or to do it with my
own ship and technology but they turned me down. You can't help unless you are
invited to help and they clearly wanted to do it themselves. Recently, I met
the president of Malaysia Airlines who offered to send me the search data to
look at just in case they might have missed something. I am still waiting for
the data but don't expect to get it."

[https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/7eim7p/im_dr_bob_b...](https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/7eim7p/im_dr_bob_ballard_and_im_the_oceanographer_who/dq5c12d/)

~~~
trentlott
> or to do it with my own ship and technology but they turned me down. You
> can't help unless you are invited to help

Didn't the guy who found the initial wreckage do it on his own inspite of the
Malaysian gov't?

~~~
dwd
His tale adds yet another bizarre twist to the story

[https://www.news.com.au/national/mh370-private-
investigator-...](https://www.news.com.au/national/mh370-private-investigator-
getting-death-threats-warning-he-will-be-killed-if-he-keeps-probing-flight-
disappearance/news-story/90d61d16e1594c8ca467c3e5abb6a282)

There's a big difference between picking up wreckage on beaches and putting
your ship in the middle of a coordinated search pattern.

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krustyburger
The island he’s singled out was flown over within days of her disappearance
and the pilot did not see any signs of an airplane.

It would be wonderful to finally solve this mystery, but it’s not as though
this idea is some recent breakthrough. It was thought of at the time, which is
why the pilot was sent to look.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I was on a SAR mission a couple of years ago for a lost aircraft outside of
Truckee, CA. In that case, there was flight radar data available for most of
the flight path, Civil Air Patrol was out in force with multiple overhead
flyovers, CHP and Air National Guard were also out, we were receiving
intermittent ELT signals, there were hundreds of ground searchers and
UTVs/ATVs/snowmobiles, and all of our search activity was recorded and
coordinated through a well-organized incident command with specific search
assignments for each day.

We still failed to locate the aircraft. It was found a month or so later by
some random recreationalists.

Any number of circumstances may have prevented it from being spotted the first
time. It's far, far harder to locate missing aircraft than most people
realize.

~~~
chx
Just a thought exercise to show why this is so hard: let's say you know where
the aircraft was a minute before crashing but not the direction of it. If an
aircraft is flying at a modest 200 km/h (that's a Cessna 172 cruising) then in
a single minute it can fly more than 3km. The area of a circle with a radius
of that is close to 35km^2. That's half of Manhattan Island.

~~~
pacala
How difficult would be to fly one hd filming plane above, then scour the
imagery with a fine comb, possibly computer vision aided?

~~~
mopsi
Sometimes there are no traces left behind. In 1947, Avro Lancastrian airliner
flew into a mountain in the Andes and triggered an avalanche that buried the
wreck. Compressed snow slowly turned into ice and became a part of the
glacier. Over the next 50 years, the wreck moved down the mountain with ice
until it eventually melted and revealed parts of the aircraft. They were found
by two mountaineers in 1998.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_BSAA_Avro_Lancastrian_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_BSAA_Avro_Lancastrian_Star_Dust_accident)

If an aircraft goes missing, we're usually dealing with mountains, oceans or
remote areas with dense tree covers. Remote sensing is very limited in these
environments.

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nammi
> Mr. Campbell shared the photo with experts at the National Geospatial-
> Intelligence Agency, who used classified technology to enhance the picture.

I was curious about this since I hadn't heard of this agency before. I have no
experience with GEOINT but they seem to have a pretty impressive GH
organization

[https://github.com/ngageoint](https://github.com/ngageoint)

~~~
Rebelgecko
As the NSA and NRO have gotten more PR, I think the NGA has taken the mantle
of "biggest intelligence agency you've never heard of".

Probably the most famous thing about the NGA is the time when President Obama
was doing a meet-and-greet at a Five Guys in the DC area. He asked someone in
line where they worked, and when the answer was "National Geospatial-
intelligence Agency" it sounded like it was Obama's first time hearing about
it Edit: Link to video
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1TxMKaYHYA&t=5m55s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1TxMKaYHYA&t=5m55s)

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djmips
Archive of linked analysis of photos showing landing gear and 3D rendered /
lit landing gear. (Because original server might be overloaded I could not
reach it)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190812112844/https://tighar.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190812112844/https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bulletins/82_BevingtonAnalysis2/82_BevingtonObjectNewAnalysis.html)

~~~
mannykannot
That article seems rather tendentious. It claims that 'Jeff Glickman and the
State Dept. photo analysts looked at the image and asked, “What does the thing
on the reef look like?” They concluded, “It looks like Electra landing gear
wreckage.”' but, as told in the article, the only candidate they considered
for “what does the thing on the reef look like?” was, in fact, the wreckage of
an Electra landing gear, damaged, and adjusted until it was possible to say
that the image was "consistent with Lockheed Electra landing gear components"
(at least they did _not_ attempt to sharpen the image, on account of the risk
of "introducing information that isn’t really there.") (Update: after seeing
several other zooms of the object, I get the impression that the one chosen
for this article did undergo some form of processing.)

AFAIK, "consistent with" merely means that the hypothesis cannot be ruled out,
but that does not seem to be a high bar when the image is very small and
blurred.

So what else might they have considered as a candidate for the object? How
about anything that might of been swept off the nearby wreck by nearly eight
years of storms to start with, not to mention tree stumps, pieces of coral and
other natural detritus that storms regularly move around? There seems to be a
lot of confirmation bias here.

~~~
gamblor956
The island was in fact one of the original suspects when Earhart's plane
_first_ went missing but by the time the US Navy arrived several weeks later,
storms and natural wave action would have washed most of the plane away.

The point of the analysis was to see if there was photographic evidence to
suggest that it might have been the correct island all along.

Yes, it could be a tree trump or some other debris--but it also looks exactly
like the wreckage of a particular part of her plane, which is enough to
justify a more detailed search.

Like the Bismark's final resting spot, this island has a significant
underwater seamount. If the plane landed on the beach and sunk, if could have
slid thousands of feet into crevices in the seamount or even all the way down
to the abyssal plain surrounding the island.

~~~
mannykannot
I agree that there are _other_ factors that make Nikumaroro a candidate for
Earhart's final resting place.

Calling the image _exactly_ like an Electra undercarriage leg is quite a
stretch, IMHO - even that interpretation's proponents merely called it
"consistent".

~~~
gamblor956
It does look exactly like a blurry, distant photo of an Electra leg...

That's why they're launching another search. It could be other things, but it
could also be debris from the exact same type of plane she was flying.

~~~
mannykannot
> It does look exactly like a blurry, distant photo of an Electra leg.

At least for the sake of argument, I will grant that a blurry, distant photo
of an Electra leg might look exactly like this one, but in such a case, the
exactitude would be in the correspondence of two blurred, small images, and
that exactitude does not transfer to the identification of the imaged object
as an Electra leg. You have to ask what else could produce a matching
photograph, and if it is sufficiently distant and blurred, just about anything
of approximately the right reflectivity would work.

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atdrummond
[http://archive.li/BKq3S](http://archive.li/BKq3S)

~~~
deckar01
The text is still in the page.

    
    
        console.log(document.querySelector('#site-content').innerText.replace(/(.{80}\w*)\s*/g, '$1\n'))

~~~
atdrummond
Sure - but if that changes down the road, the archive.li link will still show
the proper content.

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rasz
Ballard you say, so what does US military need to cover up this time around?

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sanatgersappa
Funny, I just watched this last week - [https://memory-
alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_37%27s_(episode)](https://memory-
alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_37%27s_\(episode\))

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dpio
This is exciting news!

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blakespot
I subscribe to the Wash Post. Not the NYT. Wish I could read it, though.

~~~
jazzyjackson
The paywalls are implemented in javascript FYI, no javascript: no paywall.

~~~
dragonwriter
I thought NYT at least had switched to “the content loading beyond the teaser
is implemented in JS, so no JS => no article”.

