According to Discovery News and other sources, a piece of metal recovered in 1991 on an uninhabited Pacific atoll has now been identified (with high probability) as having been part of Amelia Earhart’s plane when she and her copilot went missing during their around-the-world flight in 1937. Back in mid 2012, I gave some evidence that this atoll was indeed the duo’s final resting place.
New research strongly suggests that a piece of aluminum aircraft debris recovered in 1991 from Nikumaroro, an uninhabited atoll in the southwestern Pacific republic of Kiribati, does belong to Earhart’s twin-engined Lockheed Electra.
According to researchers at The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which has long been investigating the last, fateful flight taken by Earhart 77 years ago, the aluminum sheet is a patch of metal installed on the Electra during the aviator’s eight-day stay in Miami, which was the fourth stop on her attempt to circumnavigate the globe.
Here’s the piece of metal:
The patch replaced a navigational window: A Miami Herald photo shows the Electra departing for San Juan, Puerto Rico on the morning of Tuesday, June 1, 1937 with a shiny patch of metal where the window had been.
And here’s the photo showing the repair patch:
TIGHAR researchers went to Wichita Air Services in Newton, Kans., and compared the dimensions and features of the Artifact 2-2-V-1, as the metal sheet found on Nikumaroro was called, with the structural components of a Lockheed Electra being restored to airworthy condition.
The rivet pattern and other features on the 19-inch-wide by 23-inch-long Nikumaroro artifact matched the patch and lined up with the structural components of the Lockheed Electra. TIGHAR detailed the finding in a report on its website.
This supports the idea, which has been around for a while (and has other evidence behind it; see the article and my earlier post), that Earhart and Fred Noonan, her navigator, made an emergency landing on the atoll. The plane is then supposed to have eventually washed into the sea (where it’s now supposed to rest 600 feet down), while the pair died on the island. Presumably any remains would also have been washed into the sea or eaten by crabs.
Researchers think they know where the plane is, and will go back to the island in July of next year to try to find it. Perhaps the mystery will be solved at last.
And here’s an image of Nikumaroro:
I always feel nervous flying over the pacific ocean. It’s so vast & you’re totally screwed if you are lost there.
When in the U.S. Navy, took a ship across, flew back and forth a few times, and when I left the Navy took a 50-day non-stop trip Guam-CA. (Only sailboat trip I’ve ever taken – what was I thinking? I can only say that the Window of Opportunity opened, and I didn’t want to stand immobile and watch it close.) On the latter got seasick again – mandarin oranges is a good way to go – big difference between a 500-ft. ship and a 45-ft. sloop. (For once I’d like to take a sea voyage where I didn’t have to do a lick of work if I didn’t want to.) At least on the Clipper flights had the nectar of the gods to ameliorate any nervousness.
My dad has a friend who sailed a little yacht he built from Australia to Canada. He only had a sextant to navigate and he had some bad times — encounters with pirates, boat laying on its side for days because of a storm, sea sickness. I think I’d probably go nuts but kudos to you for doing that! Very adventurous!
When I was 7 and my dad was US Consul in Martinique, I got a horrible case of ringworm all over my body from – guess what – my kitty. I needed to get to Puerto Rico to get decent treatment and Henry Luce’s yacht (sans Henry Luce) came into Fort-de-France harbor (by chance)and offered my mother and me a ride to PR. I think the trip took about 2 days and I think the yacht was pretty much horizontal the whole way. My mother always said that she got blisters on the tops of her toes from hanging on so tight. Not my idea of a fun time…
I’ve put offers on 4 sailboats in an attempt to buy one so I can do some long distance sailing to warmer climes. I’ve never heard of mandarin oranges for seasickness. That’s the one major concern I have, being debilitated while on the sailboat. I’ve been on plenty of boats before, but all of them in the protected waters of the Straight of Georgia and the Gulf Islands, never out on the Pacific Ocean.
Ginger’s supposed to be good, too. Candied or fresh.
My Dad was a captain in the Merchant Marines. At a regular meeting of the supper club my folks belonged to, the subject of cruises arose, and one couple was boasting about their voyage to Europe. Another woman mentioned how much she’d love to sail like that, but that her husband always insisted on taking planes instead, “because he can’t swim.”
My Dad replied, “Can he fly?”
Last night the kids were watching the movie The Addams Family, which they had not seen before. Don’t know if you’ve seen it, but there is a scene where the two Addams kids try a lemonade stand to raise some money. A snooty girl scout comes along and snootily asks if the lemonade is made with real lemons. They say sure. The girl scout snootily asks if they are sure because she only drinks lemonade made from real lemons. They assure her it is. The girl scout then snootily offers to buy a cup of their lemonade if they agree to buy a box of her girl scout girls.
Wednesday (the Addams girl) responds, inevitably, with, “Are they made with real girl scouts?”
The kids thought that was hilarious, especially my daughter. It was so fun seeing them react to that, that I laughed too.
Ha, ha! It’s a good line by itself, and I do know how much fun it is to see children get a joke like that.
One example comes to mind. My middle-school-aged (at the time) daughter, who has a memory like a hard drive that can’t be overwritten, was listening to the news one night and suddenly burst into laughter. The local-interest story was about one of those contests where people place bets on where a cow in a grid-marked field is going to defecate, and the announcers used the term “cow pie.” My daughter blurted out, “now I get that Calvin and Hobbes strip!” Something she’d read years earlier.
I remember as a kid, consciously remembering things I didn’t understand for when I would. It took me years sometimes but then I’d be “A-ha! That’s what the adults meant!”
Very cute! I’ve always wondered how much patience it would take to sit around for hours waiting for cows to poop, though;-)
Ha ha! I always tell myself that I’d probably be dead before I’d die from drowning or being eaten by sharks anyway. Somehow, I find this not much more comforting.
On flights to Rarotonga I used to be bemused by the navigational display which showed the plane’s track across a blue screen with, hundreds of km to one side or the other, a little dot with a long Polynesian name I had never heard of**. I concluded that if an engine blew up that’s how far we would have to fly on one engine in order to crash on the beach. Not very reassuring.
** And I’m a geography nut.
Yeah and when you’re flying from LA to NZ, I look for hours at blue ocean. Then finally, I’m happy to start seeing Rarotonga because it means we are close!
We once landed in Rarotonga to refuel & I thought we were going to fall off the runway! 🙂
Well the runway isn’t *that* short, though one end does end right at the ‘lagoon’ (actually the narrow fringing reef) so you can see the palm trees beside you as you land.
We lived for 5 months in a flat just by the end of the runway, first night there I jerked awake at 4a.m. thinking there was an earthquake, everything was vibrating, I eventually realised it was a DC-10 taking off. Soon got used to it, to the point that if the regular 3-times-a-week plane got rescheduled, I’d wake up at 4a.m. with a feeling there was something missing…
Yeah, I think we banked before we landed and I remember looking at the runway ending at the lagoon, thinking our plane was really bit (I think a 767) & wondering if it would stop before we reached the water.
I also remember getting out on the tarmac & thinking how the sun was extra strong on my head.
So far (and so far as I know) nobody’s actually ended up in the lagoon.
And they’ve had DC-10’s and (I think) 747s in there. In fact I’m fairly sure about the 747’s as Air NZ got rid of its DC-10’s a couple of years after Mt Erebus, say about 1983, and replaced them with 747’s, which used Raro as a stopover on the way to LA.
Sub
Meflg. Check box.
I’ve been to Kiribati (Christmas Island). It’s not a good place to be marooned. They would have died of thirst in short order.
Excellent flats fishing, though, and plenty of large land crabs and hermit crabs.
By the way, Christmas Island is right on the International Dateline and was visited by media crews at the turn of the millenium to catch the first moment of 2000.
Depends on what kind of stuff you have. It’s pretty easy to improvise a solar still from almost anything that doesn’t leak, and there’s a limitless supply of seawater to feed it.
Basically, all you need is a container to hold contaminated water, a lid to suspend low over it for water to condense on, and another container slightly downhill of the first to collect the condensation that runs down the (tilted) lid.
You can get sophisticated with it with black-bottomed containers and clear covers and careful geometry and what-not, but the basic idea works well enough without much sophistication, and you’ll have plenty of time to improve on your first design.
Airplane wreckage would have more than enough materials. A couple sheets of metal sufficiently bowl-shaped (whether originally or after re-working) plus some window glass for the lid…something like that would be plenty.
That’s the water. Food should be readily available, especially if there’re the crabs Jerry mentioned. The plane would provide shelter. Fire will be a challenge, but you might be able to do without, depending on weather and your tolerance for sushi.
Your biggest problem is going to be lasting without medical attention until help arrives, especially if you were injured in the crash. And, of course, this assumes that the plane wreckage is on land, not underwater….
Cheers,
b&
… and Ben has just described how to build a Mk-I still, for production of “hooch”, “poteen”, “dew of the mountainside”, …
It is important to get your immediate needs dealt with. And on a ha-ha-but-serious-basis, it’s worth remembering that the process of brewing to a beer or light wine is effective at cleaning water (it’s the boiling) and keeping it clean enough to drink even after prolonged storage.
Boiling water and/or brewing alcohol would seem to be among the most basic bits of culinary technology separating Homo sapiens from the beasts, but some recent hunter-gatherer societies lacked both. It’s amazing they survived at all.
A society without brewing I can easily imagine (though fermentation is a critical process in many other food processing technologies such as cheese making, pickling …), but without boiling water? Citation required, I think.
I recently sampled a bottle of Chateau Jiahu, the recipe for which is reputedly nine thousand years old. Jiahu was a stone age settlement; apparently most nascent civilizations developed beer or beer-like beverages very early on, as grain is an excellent source of calories and wild yeast are near-ubiquitous.
Hmmm, faint bells – wasn’t that a spin-off from the world’s oldest “Pot Noodle” find of a few years ago?
Hmmm, maybe not. Sounds interesting enough though.
I am in no way responsible for any non-essential recreational usage of such a device, especially should the tax people come knocking. I may, though, accept royalties in suitable liquid form for use of the idea….
(And, in seriousness, it’s my understanding that many life rafts have inflatable stills packaged with the rest of the emergency supplies. Last time I looked, you could buy that sort of thing for a few hundred dollars.)
b&
Never heard that mentioned in any listing of the contents of a SOLAS-standard life raft or TEMPSC. The plan is very much to get into the emergency vessel, then deploy the sea anchor to stay at the location of the original vessel’s loss. Any rational search pattern will start from the last recorded location for the lost vessel (that in itself can be an issue : MH370) and then search out from there. If you’ve a long duration of uncertainty of location, then you might need to be searching swathes parallel to the planned route, but your cone of possibilities expands really rapidly.
A SOLAS TEMPSC is only equipped with fuel for 24 hours of engine running. That’s intended for station keeping in heavy weather (nose into the weather is far less likely to make people vomit, which is a serious loss of fluids), and manoeuvring during the pick-up phase. The TEMPSC is likely to be much more manoeuvrable than any collecting vessel.
Food and water stores … I think it’s about enough for the rated complement for a week, with water at 1 or 2 litres per day. Food is hard tack. Like it or lump it.
Hmmm, I see that the US Navy regs require “solar stills” or reverse osmosis desalinators. Yeah, well that may be an issue for people in a warfare situation, when you’re likely to be left behind by your convoy and to have weeks to wait before rescue (Grandad was on the Murmansk runs ; they had no illusions). Different scenario on civvy street.
I’ve seen some small recreational craft life raft equipment lists with solar stills. They run around $3000 to $8000, or the ones I was looking at were. I think SOLAS might be for life rafts on big boats? Like cruise ships, perhaps cargo or container ships?
Those life rafts are as big as many recreational sailboats, and probably cost as much, if not more. Amazing little ships in their own right.
Recreational craft … hmmm probably come under different regulations to vessels which routinely cross national boundaries, and universally (I think ; I don’t recall any exceptions) have ownership in a different country to that of registration.
$3-$8k$ would be about the annual service charge for one of our liferafts. My current boat has 24 or 32 such rafts at forward port & starboard and aft port and starboard. All on hydrostatic releases, so they’ll start popping to surface before the radome and helideck are awash. TEMPSCs are 4-fold at 90 personnel each at two stations forward port and starboard, plus a FRC (Fast Rescue Craft amidships port just aft of the moonpool and hose station. That’s for searching for man overboard and has cabin for 5 crew (cox’n and four crew to manhandle any casualties inboard) with a sheltered cabin for all apart from the cox’n. All self-righting and intrinsically buoyant, of course.
I’ve not asked about the sums … but I don’t think you’d get change out of a megabuck for that lot.
The general logic is that you’re going to lose half of your lifeboat capacity in any incident – whether to weather (windward side boats unusable), listing (upward side boats can’t launch, or just the inevitable Mr Murphy.
I remember one horrible night listening to the radio traffic as one rescue boat reported seeing a lifeboat (TEMPSC) land in the water a bit over a mile from the rig, burning. No body inside it, but someone had opened the doors and thrown two singed lifejackets in there. Probably seconds before the gas feed from the Tartan platform ruptured and all hell broke loose.
If you’re operating in tropical waters, a solar still may be sensible ; in the North Atlantic, it’s less sensible. But the liferafts are designed so you can use the roof to collect rain water, which is likely to be less salty than seawater ; good for wound washing maybe, to preserve potable water supplies.
I’ll ask one of the Mates next time I’m on the rig. It’s possible that we have this variation in our kit out, but I’ve never heard it mentioned in my instruction courses. Or possibly, they’re in the North Atlantic area kits, but not mentioned because they’re likely to be useless to us.
…and, it’s again worth mentioning that they’re something everybody on land should at least know about. It’s not hard to imagine some sort of disaster that takes out power for an extended period of time and either takes out municipal water with it or renders said water unsafe to drink — big storms do that all the time, and a big earthquake could do the same. In addition to whatever other plans you might have (remember: your water heater is an hundred gallons or so, and household bleach at 1/4 teaspoon per gallon of water or 1 ml per liter will kill anything in clear water after half an hour) for water, it’s good to know that it’s easy to improvise a solar still that might be low production but is also ultra-low tech and guaranteed to produce absolutely pure water.
If you’re smart, you’ll have at least a few different ways to make fire (lighter, matches, steel and flint, Boy Scouts to rub together, magnifying glass, etc.), and a similar number of ways to get safe water. Hot water tank or other large storage, bleach, disinfectant tablets, maybe a LifeStraw or similar filter, and the awareness of how to make a still.
b&
“Defence in depth,” is the key to resilience.
The USN regs may well be what I’m thinking of. I’d also imagine they’re popular for yachts that spend a lot of time out in the middle of nowhere. Might not care about it if you’re just popping back and forth between New York and Miami when the weather’s forecast to be pleasant for the weekend…but might be one of the first things you think of when sailing a twenty footer from Auckland to Vancouver.
…or so I would guess. I’m certainly no sailor!
b&
Yachts don’t normally spend a lot of time sitting in the middle of the ocean – they’re machines for going from A to B, usually pretty expeditiously. Then they hang around in harbour, or potter around inshore. At least, that’s how my yachting friends use theirs. (I joke with one of them that she can provide her own transport to work ; ha-ha, but serious).
Our tub is designed to to touch shore every 3 years. So we carry dry store foods for about 15 days at full complement (~2700 man-days food), but really expect to get a 10-tonne food container every couple of days with fresher foods. The watermaker (reverse osmosis) plant should be able to supply all potable water and washing water requirements. Sewage plant likewise can handle full complement essentially indefinitely. I’d have to check the fuel figures … 2000 cubes should be good for about 20 days with 7 engines running.
We actually end up having to go into harbour for customs clearance, which is a tremendous PITA, and costs millions of dollars each time in non-productive time.
Yes, of course…but…well, New York to London is ~5500 km, no? And even if we grant 50 km/h (which I would think is extremely fast, though, again, I’m no expert), that’s still 110 hours, or over four days. And four days is a long time for something to break, especially running non-stop at high speed, and the middle of the Atlantic is no place to be waiting for roadside assistance. And up to double that for the Pacific, such as Sydney to San Francisco? Regardless, as much as I’d love to make such trips, I’d also want to make sure that I had plenty to get by with if and / or when the shit hit the fan.
That’s some serious operation!
…I’m guessing there’s some sort of protocol that says how many such shipments y’all can miss before all sorts of contingency plans kick in? I’m sure at least somebody amongst a couple hundred guys can do math and figure out that there’s only n days of food left for everybody, and other people who don’t ever want said guys to start doing such math….
Are you “just” doing exploration, or is this an actual mining rig? If the latter…well, were I designing such a vehicle, I’d power it primarily from the natural gas that I would expect to be coming from the well, or otherwise have some contingency for running the generators from whatever you’re pumping. Yes, crude normally has to go through all kinds of refinement…but if you’re just running a boiler and a turbine, you’ve got incredible flexibility in what you burn to heat the water to steam (even if some fuels are more efficient / cheaper than others).
Hasn’t it occurred to somebody that a suitcase stuffed with cash might be a cheaper alternative? You could buy some pretty high-up port officials for that kind of money — not to mention legislators themselves!
b&
Pretty normal for a deepwater MODU (Mobile Offshore Drilling Unit).
This was figured out in remote mining camps all over the world during the 19th century. The guy with that job is the “camp boss”. And when the camp boss messes up ordering supplies, everyone suffers. Which is, of course, part of the reason for weeks worth of “dry goods” Being unable to load supplies for two weeks at a time is nothing unusual – and running out of food is no reason to stop working.
Pure exploration. We’re not expecting to produce anything more flammable than data. And rock samples. Hmmmm, without saying exactly what sort of samples, numbers or frequencies … the costs are in the order of 300-400 dollars per gramme of sample. The total programme, if it worked out at 100% discovery rate (which is infeasible), is budgeted on the order of 10^12 dollars. Burning the samples is not an effective use of them.
I made a joke to that effect. Once. I almost got the sack. People at my level do not make jokes about that sort of thing twice. If the management to whom I answer say “our worldwide policy is that we do not do bribery and corruption” than I am not going to disagree with them.
Heavens to Murgatroyd, Batman! The oilfield has never in it’s entire existence ever contemplated such an ethically dubious stance. The next thing you’ll be suggesting is that we understand “sarcasm”.
My first thought was wildly off the mark; uranium oxide is only about $35 / pound, and one could reasonably use the vernacular term, “burn,” to describe what one does with it.
So, “rock samples,” makes me think gemstones…though it’s also my understanding that most of those, especially diamonds, are actually almost as common as dirt and it’s the DeBeers cartel that uses top-notch marketing and very shady business practices to keep prices permanently inflated.
Most things with that sort of value density are manufactured goods, especially computer chips….
You sure you’re not in the next hallway down from me…? Either that, or your management has been cloned from the same vat as ours….
b&
If we’re doing our job properly (which we endeavour to do), our samples are sufficiently representative of dozens to hundreds of feet vertically, in formations that extend for kilometres or tens of kilometres horizontally.
Once we’ve found it – and got an evaluation of the drilling hazards between surface and reservoir, as well as how to produce it, what surface equipment will be needed, processes to control wax deposition and gas-hydrate formation … some other tub comes along to actually drill the development and production holes. Meanwhile, we’re off to the next exploration prospect.
So you guys get all the glory and excitement while the others get all the drudgery. Certainly the way to do it!
b&
Oh, I’ve done my fair share of appraisal, development and production wells. Had a steady bout of specialising in horizontal (re-)production wells through existing fields to improve production rates from about 1995 to 2005 before I started to get more work in rank exploration work.
That would presumably be because they don’t want rank amateurs doing rank exploration….
b&
I would hesitate to describe many of my colleagues as “rank amateurs”. But … experience counts. You tend to have made your mistakes already ; you tend to have fallen for the more obvious pitfalls ; you tend to know that you can be mistaken again and to be able to entertain multiple working hypotheses. All of which are bad things if you’re in marketing or business, but more acceptable things if you’re in science.
✈️
Playing with the unicode again?
Lessee …
All these funny ⚗ symbols are going to drive 🚚 me to an early grave ⚰. The devil with them ⛧ ! I’m going to slide off ⛷and have a cuppa ☕ in the 🛀. Or maybe something stronger 🍺 ?
(Most of which rather depends on what fonts you’ve got supported locally.)
the cuppa in the bath sounds divine;-) Can’t do emoticons on WP on my Mac.
“funny & # 9879 ;” (alembic, and why not?)
“to drive & # 128666 ;” UN soldier’s black van)
“early grave & # 9904 ;” (coffin, for genealogy tables ; my machine doesn’t have a glyph)
“The devil with them & # 9959 ;” (inverted pentegram ; and why not? Or perhaps & # 128127 ; 👿 x1F47F IMP)
“slide off & # 9975 ;” (skier)
“a cuppa & # 9749 ;”
“in the & # 128704 ; (bathtub)
“something stronger & # 127866 ;” should be a whisky glass, but my fonts differ from the Unicode reference formulation.
And look at what else I found : 🐯 & # 128047 ; 1F42F 🐯 TIGER FACE !!
or & # 128005 ; 🐅 x1F405 🐅 TIGER – third of the signs of the Asian zodiac ?
Hey — how’d Baihu get his own emoji!?
🐅, indeed!
b&
There is a story floating around that they were sending out radio calls for help, but that it was ignored for some reason. Is that a hoax, or possibly true?
Poor blighters. It would not have been a nice way to go.
I haven’t followed the story, but it was mid-1930s, wasn’t it (?), and they acknowledged navigational difficulties. That’s well before the civilian availability of any form of radar, and signal-strength radio direction finding was never a simple task. Without investigating thoroughly, I wouldn’t go casting aspersions on the radio reception people. If you don’t have a pretty good indication where a signal is coming from, then dispatching SAR assets can literally be a waste of time.
What a wonderful lagoon!! If anyone hasn’t ever been to one of that type of island, and still has the time and inclination, do not miss it. I only with I’d started earlier and had the gumption of Robert Frisbee (although without the cyclones requiring the family to tie themselves to palm trees as waves washed over the whole island). Try Aitutaki, in the Cook Islands for starters.
The formation of atolls was originally explained by one Charles Darwin, so right On Topic for this website 🙂
Back in the days of flying boats, Aitutaki used to be a stopover on the Coral Route to Tahiti – from Auckland, to Lauthala Bay in Fiji, to Aitutaki, to Tahiti. A roundabout route dictated by the limited range. The stop in the Cook Islands was Aitutaki rather than the main island of Rarotonga because Raro is a ‘high island’ with no lagoon to speak of.
In Aitutaki, the overnight stop was on one of the ‘motus’, small unihabited islets on the outer reef, rather than the main island, I think because the Aitutaki lagoon is shallow and full of coral heads and the only safe landing area was near the outer edges of the lagoon and a long way from the ‘mainland’.
Robert Dean Frisbie, who you mention, settled on Pukapuka in the Northern Group, an atoll that makes Aitutaki look like Manhattan by comparison 😉 The first time I was there, by slow boat from Raro, it was the first ‘official’ boat for 5 months, though the island was managing quite nicely thank you on diesel and rice donated by Taiwanese fishing boats that landed illegally for rest and recreation.
Incidentally, re water, atolls have a shallow ‘lens’ of fresh rainwater that soaks into the ground, so shallow wells work, if of course Earhart and Noonan had the knowledge, tools and strength to dig one.
To clarify, Frisbee’s tying-themelves-to-palm-trees episode was, I think, on Suwarrow, an uninhabited island (for good reason!) where they stayed for a while, not on Pukapuka which is bigger – the main island is almost a mile across.
That freshwater lens “floating” on the saline pore waters is also a control on cave formation. It’s a peculiarity of water chemistry that if you mix fresh water which is saturated with respect to calcium hydrogen carbonate into seawater which is also saturated, the resultant mix is actually undersaturated. This leads to the development of extensive phreatic networks over time, which are a source of “interesting” diving. For certain values of “interesting”. Also highly lethal to the overconfident. Oddly, the term we used in the 1980s for such karst systems, “enchyaline”, seems to have fallen out of use.
Am I wrong to think of Gilligan’s Island when I see that image?
Yes, you are very wrong. This is an atoll, with a perhaps wade-able lagoon, with very warm water, low land mass around the lagoon, and it looks like a nice barrier coral reef (providing an other lagoon). But the interior lagoons of this type are amazing places. Gilligan and that krew would be an insult to an island like this.
There would be no fresh water except for very occasional rain.
The rain soaks into the ground and makes a ‘lens’ of fresh water, so shallow wells work.
I hope they’re right and I hope they find the wreck next year. In the meanwhile, this is my favorite image of her and the Electra. (The Cord was an Indiana product, and she was adjunct at Purdue at the time).
The scenario brings up Stephen King’s gruesome short story: Survivor Type.
Is that the one where the surgeon has to eat himself to survive, and can do it because of all the heroin that he was smuggling?
Exactly!
Oroborous.
🙂
I suppose I could say “suck on that” before handing you your tail on a plate.
Color me unconvinced.
This was a forensic investigation (as in air crashes), where they didn’t state a testable hypothesis from the beginning (such as fit with existing rivet handiwork on a similar plane) and afterwards looked at the evidence.
The best they can get out of that is that an individual plate can be a fit to a part of the plane. That will also many trash other plates do, such as some found around ocean shores.
They have also decided that a very conspicuous custom feature of the missing plane is the best fit. The only constraint in doing so seems to be that it would both be easier to find a fit (could be any plate thickness and size; could be dissimilar rivet patterns) and be closer to constraining the case. That is a non-neutral constraint.
Would this be convincing evidence in a plane crash or some other forensic investigation? I very much doubt that, presumably investigators would want to find the crash site and the plane before they decide if the piece is related to that.
In my opinion: Case non-closed.
Yes, this is basically correct (though that island may yet be the final resting place of AE.)
I worked for many years on designing and maintaining airplane structures (including fuselages).
This looks to be clearly a piece of airplane fuselage skin. However, that’s a long way from making it from AE’s plane or even more, that specific modification part noted in the story.
I see skin tears on at least 2 sides. The edges don’t really look the edges of a repair/mod plate to me. However, without closer inspection it’s very hard to say.
Just matching the structural pattern doesn’t get one very far: The airplane (and every one like it) would have large areas with the same pattern (this looks like basic field skin). That would make it very hard to pin down.
I don’t know the Lockheed Electra; but many airplanes share very similar structural arrangements.
Even if the Electra has a unique arrangement, this could come from any instance of the airplane. According to the Oracle of Wikiness, only 143 Electras (1930s models) were produced, this would narrow it down quite a lot, even if it isn’t “proof”. I think it unlikely that the Electra had a really unique pattern.
Based on the dimensions given, you’ve got a stringer pitch of about 5 inches.
Some off the things they should do:
– Metallurgy to see if this is a material used on the Electra
– Detailed inspections of the part
– See if there are any fasteners on it to compare to known examples
– Check the surface treatment of the part
I’m going to look at the website and see the details.
Finding a part number on the piece would really help too!
… and I should have said that only 143 were fielded, not produced.
Sharon Hill of “Doubtful News” is also very unconvinced. She notes that: “TIGHAR has had this aluminum scrap since 1991. In 1992, the piece was examined by mechanics and metallurgists and determined NOT to be a piece of the Earhart plane.” You can read her post (written the 30th) here:
http://web.randi.org/swift/-group-obsessed-with-finding-amelia-earharts-plane
George
Well, looking at their site, it seems pretty shaky.
I would be asking:
What happened to the fasteners where they weren’t torn out?
What happened to the (presumed) stiffeners that were (presumably) riveted to those rows of holes?
They have cut out pieces of the part. What did they do with those? What is the metallurgy? They don’t say. (Is that because they don;t support the hypothesis? They don’t say.)
They said they have fatigue failures along the bottom row of rivets. This doesn’t seem probable for an unpressurized airplane with the patch installed so recently and a heavy window frame in place underneath it (the window frame would take the loads, that’s what it was designed to do. Load always follows stiffness.)
Anyway, case not closed as far as I can see.
And they lived happily ever after, in peace and quiet but for the roaring of the see.
Such a sad scenario, especially if the current hypothesis is true: after landing, or crash-landing, the Electra in the lagoon (which may have resulted in injury), Fred and Amelia may have had only a short time to salvage anything from the plane before it was dragged back out by the surf and destroyed (several artifacts have been found that appear to date to the time period: some bottles, cans, and I think a cosmetic-type container). I doubt if either one of them was a knowledgeable “survivalist”, and I doubt that the know-how for making a solar still was common knowledge at the time. Salvaging the materials for one would have been problematic and just making protection from the sun on that barren atoll would have been difficult enough; exposure may have contributed to their demise. It will always remain a mystery as to why they were unable to send any more radio transmissions.
Errm, if they crash-landed in the lagoon, there would have been no surf, there are no big waves in an enclosed lagoon. If they crash-landed on the outer beach or reef then it still seems an unlikely scenario, those reefs are usually level* and the waves break on the outer edge so if they landed on it the plane would just sit there. It’s quite unlike landing on a normal sloping ocean beach.
If they did land in the lagoon its likely the plane would still be there, or what’s left by corrosion and not covered in sand or coral.
*Level but not smooth, the flat top is usually broken up by frequent channels or holes that wheels would drop into.
There’s an aerial tour of Nikumaroro here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL9FGsvB3E8
That link I gave is a low-level helicopter flight around the island. It’s by TIGHAR so may be biassed, but it’s still a fascinating watch.
Re sun protection and exposure, the island is covered in dense bush and trees – no lack of shade.
Count me among those that find this rather unconvincing.
I’ve been looking into the details of the flight for a short while, out of casual interest, and have now gotten to the point of wanting to investigate it more thoroughly – as yet, I haven’t done more than a cursory start, but even that has been enough to call most of TIGHAR’s ‘evidence’ into question.
There is a plethora of evidence that the Electra was close to Howland during the last confirmed transmissions, and running low on fuel at that point. Earhart herself maintained that they were flying a north-south pattern on the line that they interpreted as intersecting their destination. Nikumaroro is a long ways off of this line, or any reasonable flight path, and well outside of the expected fuel range of the aircraft. In order to even make sense, the plane would have had to have been quite a few degrees off bearing for the entire flight to find Nikumaroro with such a pattern, and then the radio operators on the Coast Guard cutter, in the vicinity of Howland to guide them in, would not have had the strength of signal that they did, nor the rough bearing (someplace northwest of Howland.)
Search planes, several days after the disappearance, did indeed overfly Nikumaroro, and buzzed what appeared to be a old settlement/camp on the island multiple times to try and provoke a response from anyone who might still be around, producing nothing. No plane was seen at this time, no wreckage, no indication of a landing, forced or otherwise. There was, however, a wrecked tramp steamer from years earlier sitting offshore, a potential source of all the little bits that TIGHAR claims show Earhart’s presence. Most people assume that Nikumaroro was a completely untouched island, so anything found thereon was remarkable, but this simply is not the case – trash abounds on many such Pacific Islands, and a shipwreck can deposit a lot as well.
It is notable that everything that has ever been produced that strengthens the idea of Earhart reaching Nikumaroro has been attested to solely by TIGHAR, with no independent verification. TIGHAR has not, to my knowledge, provided any rebuttal to the investigations of various people, including military radio specialists, that analyzed the transmissions, equipment, and flight planning, that determined that the Electra went down off Howland. Curiously, this piece of aluminum plugging a window opening, obviously riveted through the center to crossmembers (in a window?), is somehow matched with a high degree of certainty to a single photograph – I’ve even seen one article where TIGHAR says that the piece showed no signs of having been removed by crash forces, a remarkable statement given that none of the edges look intact.
Sorry, all I’m seeing is confirmation bias, with no visible efforts to examine or explain the myriad weaknesses in the theory. Best of luck to TIGHAR, as long as they’re proceeding on their own money…
Further. This is from the article “Researching Amelia: A detailed summary for the serious researcher into the disappearance of Amelia Earhart” by Richard G. Strippel, published in the November 1995 issue of Air Classics magazine, and referenced in the Wikipedia entry on Earhart. In it, Strippel is listing the “evidence” (his own quotes) that TIGHAR has presented in support of their theory:
(The ground loop referred to therein is an accident suffered during the first attempt, on the takeoff run, which required extensive repairs to the Electra – it does not equate with “loop” in the typical sense, but in this case largely means the collapse of the landing gear.)
However, judging from this entry, it would appear that TIGHAR has made a contradictory claim for the providence of that aluminum plate once before, without even performing rudimentary confirmation. Not a good sign (and I’m being nice.)
*provenance
(It was late)