Missing planes, missing events

Amelia Earhart and her Lockheed.

One of the things that has always puzzled me is why some historical incidents generate massive, sustained popular interest, while others, often greater, generate scarcely any interest at all.

Take the bombing campaigns of World War Two and its antecedents.  During the Spanish Civil war the bombing of Guernica is still remembered as a seminal moment in history, although it caused few casualties and other, more severe bombings during that war are utterly forgotten.  And perhaps even more puzzling, the Japanese terror bombing of Chinese cities in the 1930s garners no interest at all.  

I say "terror" with purpose: the Japanese intended to maximize civilian deaths.  Their spies in Chinese cities reported that the bomb shelters were poorly ventilated and people rushed to get out of them as soon as the all-clear was sounded. So the Japanese bombers would only release half their bomb load and then depart, the all-clear would sound, people would scramble out of the shelters gasping for air -- and the Japanese bombers would swing around and race back, dropping the rest of their bombs on the frightened, exhausted civilians, slaughtering them en masse.

Then we have the bombing of Dresden remembered forever, but not that of Hamburg -- Operation Gomorrah as the RAF called it, clearly defining what the British intended to do to the civilian population.  And Hiroshima but not Tokyo, the bombing of which killed maybe more than any other bombing raid in history.

I could go on listing such large events, but even some small, even insignificant events, live on and on, never forgotten though the generations pass.  Take the loss of Amelia Earhart in July of 1937, almost 90 years ago.  Why is it still getting headlines today?  What was so important about her death?  A few years earlier, in a race between California and Hawaii, six airplanes and 10 airmen were lost, yet nobody remembers that episode. 

Well, of course, you may say, the difference was that Earhart was a woman, a woman back in the day doing something only men were expected to do.  But that's not really true. There were many women involved in those early days of aviation -- Louise Thaden, Elinor "The Flying Flapper" Smith, Florence Klingensmith, Ruth Elder, Frances Grayson,  Ruth Nichols, Blanche Noyes, Laura Ingles, Jackie Cochran, and Noel Gourselle among many others, making distance, endurance and altitude records, winning air races.  Some were even killed.  But no one remembers them today.  You could wonder why, but that seems to be the way of the world. Not everybody who excels gets recognized, whatever the field of endeavor. 

Earhart at the controls of her Lockheed.

It was Earhart who caught the public's imagination, perhaps because she was so friendly and outgoing, just the opposite of self-contained, publicity-shunning Charles Lindbergh, who typified the ideal of the manly hero of few words.  Earhart was also an ordinary Midwestern girl all Americans could identify with.  She had a then-typical country tomboy childhood, riding horses and motorbikes, going down to the town dump with her sister to shoot rats with a .22. She became a nurse during the Great War, tending to war wounded. On one of her days off she went to a fair and on a dare took a ride in one of those newfangled things called an aeroplane and got hooked on flying. She took lessons and bought her own airplane, a little 60 horsepower job in which in 1922 she set the woman's altitude record -- 14,000 feet -- and suddenly found herself famous. And found being famous allowed her to do lots of things she liked
doing, especially flying airplanes, expensive ones she could never afford but that others would willingly pay for if she did newsworthy things in them.  So she kept flying, which she loved doing, but now on other people's dime.  She flew the Atlantic.  She flew the Pacific between California and Hawaii. She flew nonstop across the United States. And she attempted to fly around the world.  Wiley Post had done it, but then died in a crash in Alaska, along with Will Rogers. Who remembers that, or who Wiley Post was, or even Will Rogers?

Last photo of Earhart & Noonan at Lae, New Guinea.

In any case, by 1937, when she attempted her around-the-world flight, Earhart had been a newsmaker for 15 years, a well-known figure in the rotogravures. So her loss was naturally big news.  But it was not something unforeseen.  Part of the interest in Earhart's flying exploits, I imagine, was due to the expectation that one day she would be killed, and what a thrill it would be to read all the gruesome details.  I think of that because last year when I was flying the Atlantic and across the country with my father, a father-daughter duo were killed in the crash of their Beechcraft and my mother got plenty of concerned inquiries wondering if it was me and dad or saying that they thought it had been us when they first heard the news, and I got a sense that some of those people were hoping it was, not out of malice but prurient interest -- someone they knew got killed in an out of the ordinary way.  And celebrities such as Earhart then and now are, in a way, people we know.

Of course, there were legitimate mysteries and curiosities, if I can call them that, about Earhart's final flight, especially the route she took, and her disappearance. But they dissolve away when you examine them.  Wiley Post on his around-the-world flights had avoided long over-water legs across the Pacific by traveling through Russia, even taking the shortest way across the Atlantic by following a northern route via Newfoundland.  But Earhart chose to fly around the world as close to the equator as possible, meaning long distances over water making a 29,000-mile flight, the longest ever attempted. Post's circumnavigation took only 15,000 miles.

Earhart's original plan was to fly east to west, completing the trans-Pacific legs first, getting the hardest part over with while all her plane's equipment was in tip-top shape, but Earhart ground-looped on take-off from Luke Field in Hawaii, wrecking her plane, and so the first attempt was cancelled.  

One of the stories about Earhart's last flight was that she bungled the take-off because she was a poor pilot, or even deliberately crashed her plane because she really didn't want to make the flight.  Eye-witnesses said a tire blew, but I'm not convinced that was the reason for the crash.  I tend to doubt that because I fly a plane with very similar ground-handing characteristics to the Lockheed 10E, a Beechcraft BE18. Both are tail-wheel planes from the same era, and taxiing them is an acquired skill and always challenging. They also both have similar flight characteristics so it is not hard for me to imagine what Earhart had to deal with handling her airplane. 

Earhart's Lockheed was heavily loaded, probably at maximum gross weight with specially installed long-range tanks loaded with 5,400 pounds of fuel and herself plus three crew members, including two navigators -- Fred Noonan, who had established Pan American's seaplane routes across the Pacific and trained the airline's trans-Pacific navigators, and Harry Manning, captain of the USS President Roosevelt and a pilot himself -- and Paul Mantz, Hollywood stunt pilot and Earhart's business partner. Mantz was killed many years later while performing a stunt flight for the movie Flight of the Phoenix. Manning would crash his own plane the next year and be so severely injured that he quit flying.

It is not at all hard for me to believe that Earhart had difficulty  keeping the Lockheed under control during take-off, especially if she was having trouble with the plane's variable-pitch propellers.  They had begun malfunctioning during the flight from the mainland and Mantz ferried the plane from Wheeler where they had landed to Luke where the props were repaired at the Navy facility there, but perhaps one failed on take-off, suddenly changing pitch.  That's important because you control taxiing and take-off in a multi-engine tail-wheel plane by

Wiley Post's bent Lockheed Vega.

applying differential throttle, more so than braking, which, especially in those old planes, was not very good.  My BE18 has had much more powerful modern disc brakes installed, replacing the originals, but I still rely on differential throttle to keep the plane center-lined on the runway during take-off.  If one of her props slipped out of pitch or otherwise malfunctioned, it might have been impossible for Earhart to control the plane. 

On his around-the-world solo flight Wiley Post ground-looped his Lockheed Vega 5C while landing at Flat, Alaska, the crash almost putting an end to his attempt. Tail-wheel planes are unforgiving on the ground. And the bigger they are the more challenging they are to manage. Post had left Khabarovsk, Russia heading for Nome. He had a radio direction finder, but it didn't help him.  He missed Nome and wandered around interior Alaska, completely lost, for seven hours before sighting the airfield at Flat after 22 hours in the air. Completely exhausted, he lost control on the roll-out.

Earhart's Lockheed in Karachi after its record flight.

Anyway, once Earhart's 10E was shipped back to the States and repaired, weather and wind conditions had changed so much that an east-west flight was no longer possible so the plan was changed to west to east with the 7,000-mile over-water legs the last ones.  And navigator Harry Manning had to bow out of the trip because of other obligations.

As planned, her flight would take her through Omani  airspace, which the British, who then controlled Oman, had closed to all non-British air traffic. The American ambassador to Britain requested foreign secretary Anthony Eden grant an exception for Earhart but he refused, so Earhart was forced to skirt the British protectorate, flying nonstop from Assab in Eritrea to Karachi in India (as it was then). She followed the line of the south Arabian coast, but stayed over the sea in the record-breaking 13 hour and 10 minute flight.

Earhart after landing at Lae.

Thence she flew across the subcontinent and southeast Asia to Australia and then New Guinea, landing at Lae. Five years later, Lae would be the hub of serious fighting in the war between Japan and America and there are many tales that can be told about all that happened. The USS Yorktown  attacked Japanese shipping in the Huon Gulf off Lae in March, 1942, while the USS Lexington attacked the Japanese  naval base at nearby Salamaua. The Lex's  dive bombers and torpedo planes virtually annihilated Japan's Fourth Fleet, some 15 ships, which had spear-headed the invasions of Guam and Wake, sinking five cargo vessels and four warships plus setting afire and stopping dead in the water four more warships.  Two other warships were damaged.   

 TBDs about to attack Japanese shipping at Lae on 3-10-42..

Vice Admiral Shigeyoshi Inoue, commander of the fleet, had to order the postponement (later abandonment) of the planned invasion of Port Moresby as a result of these losses. He also called for Japanese carrier back-up to counter the US Navy carrier force, thus setting the stage for the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway. Just three months after Pearl Harbor, the US Navy was kicking the snot out of the Tojos. I'm proud to say my grandfather flew on this mission, flying air cover in his F4F-3.

The next leg of Earhart's flight was the long stretch over open water to Howland Island. That flight skirted the Japanese-controlled Marshall Islands, which the Japanese, contrary to treaty, had secretly fortified. Japan based long-range bombers on the islands, which were planned to be launching points for attacks on Australia and British and American possessions. In 1939 and 1940, the Japanese navy built airfields on Kwajalein, Maloelap and Wotie and a seaplane base on Jaluit.  When Japan attacked in 1941, the planes that bombed Wake Island flew from these bases.

Howland Island, where Earhart was to land, was uninhabited until 1935, when the United States took possession.  And it wasn't until 1936 that facilities began being built there by the Air Commerce and Interior Departments, the airfield completed only weeks before Earhart's flight in 1937.  Because personnel, supplies and equipment were transported by the Navy to Howland, some have speculated that Earhart's was a spy mission sponsored by the Navy, the plan to have Earhart accidentally-on-purpose fly over the Marshalls and photograph Japanese installations.  But Earhart's plane carried no recon cameras and most of the countries and colonies she flew over did not permit foreign planes to carry cameras, even hand-held tourist types, and there is no evidence the Lockheed was so equipped.  The plane was sponsored by Purdue University and was called a flying laboratory because it carried instruments to measure atmospheric conditions and that sort of thing.  But no spy gear.

So why was an airstrip built on Howland just before Earhart was to need it?  It seems the Air Commerce Department had planned to build one from the beginning but had no funds to do so. However, when Earhart announced her trip itinerary, mentioning Howland as a refueling point (based on old news items, she thought there already was an airfield there), the Interior Department borrowed a bulldozer and grader and the Navy agreed to transport them to the island on their next quarterly resupply run to the island, which would be in  January,1937. And so a rough-and-ready landing strip was scratched out. But there were no facilities for servicing her plane or repairing it, as had been necessary at several stops along the way, including at Darwin, Australia, where her radio was repaired. Her direction finder was also not working.  A blown fuse was replaced but no examination was made into why the fuse had blown. 

Gasoline at Howland was delivered by the Navy in 55-gallon drums that had to be hand pumped into the plane's fuel tanks, 350 turns of the pump crank to empty the drum.  There were only four people stationed on the island, Hawaiian university students, replaced at three-months intervals. They studied the flora and fauna of the island, the weather, etc., as part of their school curriculum.  

The Coast Guard agreed to station a plane guard ship, the Itasca, at Howland and another plane guard ship, the Ontario, halfway between Lae and Howland, at approximately 3° South Latitude, 165° East Longitude, to assist with the flight.  That was all the military involvement in Earhart's flight.

 

The loop worked by manually turning the 
crank on the controller  until a “null” 
or point of low-signal strength was found.

A high-frequency loop radio direction finder borrowed from a Navy patrol plane at Pearl Harbor, in which it was being tested, was set up in a jury rig on Howland Island.  It was the same as the experimental battery-powered Bendix, one of three ever made (see additional explanation farther down), in Earhart's plane. It was capable of receiving on 3105 kilohertz, or kilocycles as the term then was, the frequency Earhart would transmit on, but it could not obtain bearings on an airplane transmitting on that frequency unless it was nearby.  It could only fix on long-range transmissions being broadcast below 1800 kilocycles due to the nature of radio waves. On higher frequencies, the signal can be heard but the receiver can't pick up the steady hum, or null, that indicates direction. It seems that was not understood by Noonan or Earhart, or those who obtained and installed the Bendix. But it was intended only as a back up anyway, in case the direction finder on the Itasca, receiving on 500 kilocycles, which the ship expected Earhart to transmit on, failed, something it often did, and, hopefully, by then Earhart would be near enough that the Bendix could obtain her direction.

WW2-era drift meter similar to Earhart's.  Center is eyepiece.

So what happened to Earhart?  From studying her flight path and reading her radio transmission transcripts, it seems Earhart deviated north of her flight plan.  The clearest evidence of this is a radio message Earhart sent at 2030 Sydney, Australia, time (1930 Lae time), that she had sighted a ship that she thought was the Ontario.  This message was heard by the radio operator at Nauru Island (2130 Nauru time), who heard transmissions from Earhart over a five-hour period.  The ship she sighted was actually the British steamer  Myrtlebank, which reported hearing a plane fly over at that time.  The Myrtlebank's approximate position at the time the plane was heard was 1° 40' South Latitude, 166° 45' East Longitude, 1° 20' north of the Ontario. (Nauru lies at 0° 31′ 41″ South Latitude, 166° 56′ 13″ East Longitude.  Howland Island lies at 0° 48′ 25.84″ North Latitude, 176° 36′ 59″ West Longitude.)

If Earhart thought she had sighted the Ontario when in fact she had sighted the Myrtlebank, then she didn't know that she was already about 90-100 miles off course to the north and some 50 miles farther east. If she didn't correct her course, she would be well north of Howland at her planned arrival time, and, if her ground speed held, well past it.  But if she thought she was right on course, and flying over what she thought was the Ontario seemed to prove that, she would not have changed course. Incidentally, the Ontario never heard any messages from Earhart although the Itasca did. It seems that for some reason the Ontario was not listening on any of the frequencies Earhart transmitted on.

Those blaming Earhart never consider the weather she dealt with.

 At 1700 Lae time, the radio station at Lae received a message from Earhart saying that they were at 10,000 feet but were going to reduce altitude because of thick banks of cumulus clouds. The next and last message Lae received, at 1720, was that they were at 7,000 feet and making 150 knots.The message also said that they were having trouble receiving transmissions so were changing frequencies.  Lae had been hearing them loud and clear but after the frequency change heard nothing more.

My guess is that the clouds were so thick they couldn't use sunsights or celestial navigation and were by that point relying solely on dead reckoning and were being blown off course by strong south-southwesterly winds pushing them north-northeast. Being in the tropics, there probably were thunderstorms in the area, their lightning discharges interfering with their radio direction finder, if it was working, and may have been the cause of its failure. From what I understand, the most likely reason for the direction finder antenna system to fail would be malfunctioning of the send-receive relay, located inside the transmitter unit, which would leave the receiver effectively without an antenna.  The relay probably malfunctioned because of damage by lightning or heavy static discharge.   Flying into the growing night as they were and traveling over trackless ocean, their drift meter would have been of no use.  And it seems their radio was also going on the fritz: they could transmit, at least on one frequency, but couldn't receive.  

So there they were, far out over the ocean with no way to determine where they were or what direction they needed to fly to reach safety, unaware they were off course.  And you can bet, with all that cloud cover and strong winds, thunderstorms building, lightning flashes flaring through the clouds and blasting static into their earphones, a gale brewing, that they were encountering some pretty rough turbulence.  I can imagine exactly what it was like in that cockpit, believe me, and would definitely not have wanted to be aboard that plane. 

That big loop antenna is the Bendix MN-20.

Why didn't they use radio navigation aids?  When the Lockheed was being repaired after the Hawaii crash, the radio Earhart had trained on, the Western Electric Model 20B, was replaced with a Bendix aircraft radio receiver with an experimental (only three ever built) Bendix Type MN-20 rotatable shielded loop antenna.  A 250-foot flexible-wire trailing antenna on an electrically operated, remote-controlled reel at the rear of the plane was also added. Neither Earhart nor Noonan were trained to operate these, just given a brief rundown.  The trailing antenna would have allowed them to receive and send radio transmissions for over a thousand miles but neither navigator Noonan nor Earhart saw the necessity for this capability.

Earhart Light after the Jap attack.

While flying the plane from Burbank to Miami, Earhart noticed that the plane's flight characteristics had degraded.  When she tried extending the trailing antenna it became even worse.  The Lockheed was also burning more fuel and flying slower than it should given the throttle and prop settings.  She attributed these problems to the drag caused by the trailing antenna when extended and, located at the very rear of the plane as it was, its weight and that of its associated equipment pushing the center of gravity aft, requiring her to trim strongly nose down, so she had it removed.  Had she kept it, she and Noonan should have had no communication problems, assuming the radio kept working; 1930s-era electronics needed constant maintenance and repair.  But, burning more fuel than normal, range would have been reduced, and flying a plane with squirrelly flight characteristics is exhausting.

In any case, the Earhart mission, extremely risky had everything been perfect, was, it seems to me, doomed at the start.  Maybe Earhart should have taken the crash at Hawaii as a word to the wise from the Fates and called the whole thing off.

As a postscript, no airplane ever used the landing strip at Howland.  The Japanese, flying from the Marshalls, bombed the island the day after Pearl Harbor and a Japanese submarine shelled it, destroying the only two buildings, killing two of the university students studying there and severely damaging the "Earhart Light," originally built as a beacon to help Earhart spot the island, but converted to a memorial tower to the vanished pilot after her loss by the university students studying on the island. After the attack, the students were evacuated and the island was left to the seabirds.

 Now, why did I title this post missing "planes" in the plural as well as missing things?  Lemme tell ya. And answer the question I asked. But in another post. This one is already pretty long.

 

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace,
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
From little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.
How can Life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull grey ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul’s dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold resistless day,
And count it fair.
~ Amelia Earhart

 

 

Photo by Allison Meier.

A lock of Amelia's hair, preserved at  the Museum of Women Pilots in Oklahoma City.  The museum also has Amelia's lucky bracelet that she always wore when flying, but left behind, along with her lucky scarf, on her last flight.  Her scarf was taken aboard the space shuttle Atlantis for one last flight.

 

A portion of the radio transmissions to and from Earhart's plane on the Howland leg of the flight.  Note these were in Morse Code, although there were some voice broadcasts. Noonan, not Earhart, who was busy flying the plane, made the transmissions.  He was not all that familiar with Morse code, keyed slowly and made several mistakes, including, I believe, the infamous "We are on the line 157 337," which people have interpreted it to mean all sorts of things. Note also all the "Unanswd"s and frequency changes.  Something certainly seems to have been wrong with their radio.

 

Morse code numbers.
Did Noonan mix up
his dits and dahs?

  

Howland Island runway distances
between markers: N/S 4200’
NE/SW 2600’ E/W 2250’
Soft coral recently graded.
Prevailing easterlies 20mph.
Days average 100°F, 85% humidity.

At Lae, the runway was 3,000 feet of packed dirt with a 25-foot drop-off to the sea at the end. Earhart's plane got airborne at 2,900 feet, began dropping and disappeared off the end of the runway descending, skimmed over the water, the props leaving spray trails, before gradually beginning to climb. Could Earhart, if she had landed at Howland, been able to take off safely? She might have crashed due to mechanical problems, unable to gain flying speed, or perhaps a bird strike; the island is home to thousands of sea birds.  I think a crosswind of 20mph would make the North/South runway inadvisable and both of the others are probably too short. (The yellow word on the photo is "Itascatown," the name of the buildings pictured farther up post.)

Earhart Light in 2008. Note bomb damage repair.

 

  

 To Be Continued