by RitterKreuz » Sat Mar 31, 2007 9:32 pm
i have been reading that article with some interest.
i have always felt her and Noonan would have done what any pilot would have done and attempted to land on or very near an island. ANY ISLAND!
the part about the two women hearing her broadcasts are absolutely believable, radio can do some strange things.
the searchers were hunting several hundred miles in the wrong direction! I'm confident that with the proper funding, not only will the researchers find her plane in a few feet of water sitting neatly on a reef near the island in question, but they will also find evidence that her and her navigator were on that island.
The area of the Pacific where she went down is almost surely in the phoenix islands - ask yourself this aviators "If i were out of gas and going down in the ocean, where would i ditch?" open sea? or near one of those islands?
your best bet at survival is going to be on dry ground.
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My theory is that they landed on the reef at low tide, they broadcast radio distress calls as long as they had battery power.
Fred Noonan received a head injury in the crash landing - hence the young ladies in Florida and Wyoming picking up weak radio transmissions with him muttering on incoherently in the background while a woman identifying herself as Earhart made distress calls. these distress calls were triangulated by the Pan American Pacific stations placing the origin of the radio waves dead center in the vicinity of the phoenix islands!
As battery power faded, and the high tide approached the two had no choice but to abandon the aircraft and head for shore in the knee / waist deep water.
Earhart made Fred Noonan as comfortable as possible in the shade of nearby trees, she looked back down the shallow water at the task that lay ahead of her - returning to the airplane to find anything of use.
tearing away a bit of damaged plexi glass and some shards of aluminum plating then grabbing the sextant and placing it in its box and returning to shore exhausted she prepared a shelter for her and noonan. certain that rescue was only days away. using up the better portion of daylight, she decided that she would return to the aircraft again in the morning.
But
The high tide eventually swallowed the Lockheed Electra and dragged it perhaps as much as a mile out to sea - water deep enough to hide it from viewing but shallow enough that it is reasonable to expect that it would be found.
Earhart and Noonan were now hopelessly stranded on Gardner Island.
The two eventually died of exposure, perhaps after spending as long as 4 weeks on the island.
Searching continued - but it focused on a chain of islands about 400 miles west of her destination. While the two aviators were in reality - stranded about 400 miles south of the destination.
