[CW] another earhart blurb

[rb]

Should have stated up front the below comments are not mine (wish I was that
knowledgeable):
_____________________________________

HSHK writes:

}}}Though I am not in on this discussion, I have been following it
with increasing interest.

You points below make valid arguements and are well thought
out.  {{{

This is the text he's talking about:

}}}  Think we should give a bit more credit to American aircraft radio
engineers
of the mid to late 1930s.
The ARC-5 transmitters are of that era, and there is no way they could be
tuned up on second and third harmonics without extensive electrical and
mechanical modifications.
The crystal controlled transmitters of the day used in civil aircraft were
channelised and fixed tuned with usually only antenna loading adjustable
within the aircraft.
They were set up before flight and operated by the pilot via a control box.
As you say, one can visualise scenarios whereby the radio was damaged in a
forced landing and somehow came to put out signals on a harmonic but this is
stretching the bounds of plausibility.
I am puzzled by hypotheses about running an engine to charge the batteries
after a forced or crash landing.
One would assume that the aircraft came down with the batteries fully
charged.
Assuming the batteries survived the landing, then there would have been
capacity to run the radios for some time with full power from the tx.
There were plenty of ships and aircraft around listening on known channels
and it seems very unlikely that Earhart would not have been heard loud and
clear if the equipment was intact.
As I recall the note in Old Timer's Bulletin suggested that Earhart may have
been confused by procedural directions from the US Navy that used both
frequencies and wavelengths with the consequence that she neither
transmitted or listened on the correct frequencies.
Earhart had learned to fly during the barnstorming era when flight training
was sloppy by modern standards.
She never had experience as a pilot under discipline in either the services
or in scheduled airline operation.
In these areas pilots learn that standardised procedures and drills are
everything.
Taking into account the accumulated fatigue, questions about Earhart's state
of health, (amongst other things, it has been suggested she might have been
pregnant at the time) and the lack of drills and rehearsals of radio
procedure before she left Lae it is likely that pilot error was a factor.
If Noonan had been allocated the radio operating tasks things might have
gone better, but this was impossible due to the layout of the Electra as
modified. The actual navigation tasks were routine, no problem for Noonan,
but pushing the limits of precision on a long flight.
If the radio procedures had worked as planned then there would have been no
problems: the US Navy ships would have got a fix on them and they would have
been able to RDF on the homing beacon set up for them or on MF transmissions
from ships. With good RT communications they would have been talked into
their destination with the greatest of ease.
Sad.  {{{