GROOOOANNNN... Tighar seems to be fixated on gardner island " chain" and seem to pile specific- ubique conditions on top of condition to make it sound plausible. Plane lands on beach OK- but then only engine that stays ABOVE water is the ONLY engine that has a generator capable of charging a battery etc ad naseaum ad naseaum. And to date no engines have been found there - they obviously disintegrated completely in salt water ? Riiiight . BTW- some may recognize me from earlier posts. re my suggesting and usibng excel solver to determine IF it was possible based on the few REAL pieces of HARD or reasonably /HARD data available. AS it turns out, I did NOT specifically read Daves excel spread sheeet in any detail until I finished my iteration- solver analysis based on GVW ( AUW) for the real pilots, and a few KNOWN times and locations. A few days ago, I sent Dave some basic solver ' teaching ' items, and then my current 60 line analyis based on a variety of takeoff ( AUW) weights, and about 4 ' gates ' re time and location.
And using solver analyze IAS and zero fuel gates/time and time location of NUK and ontario and " we should be overhead . along with a caefully crafter GPH ' multi curve" v GVW at half hour intervals, I came within a few percent of his overall data. WE did differ on how far fro holwland before they turned back - and different average wind - but with a rang of plausible AUW values at takeofff. I'm not yet ready to publish all the data - since I need to pretty up and make readable the protions of the LAC 487 data sheets I used to generate a close masch to PROBABLE performance.
ALL of which goes to say_ IMHO- and with minimum ' guesses ' as to how and why she PROBABLY elected to go for a PNG-new britan landing area and came up a bit short - she and fred did have enough range with reasonable head and tail winds to CFIT in the area described by Dave.
I have sent most of the data without a lot of neat graphs and analysis to back up my findings- analysis- best guess or whatever you want to call it -
I am now trying to cross check all my work and carefully explain how and why my relative simple method gives REASONABLE - PLAUSIBLE results that do NOT exclude the return to PNG-
Although retired, and a non pilot- I do have other things to do.- Besides which - my presentation obviously needs to be virtually bulletproof- and its l,ate tonight !!
It was only AFTER I sent my data to dave did I sit down and read carefully his paper at https://earhartsearchpng.com/earhart-lockheed-electra-search-project-6/
so my method has matched most of his data/analysis within a few percent but is much easier to let solver find a closer match- given that lac 487 does show an alternate range capability on pages 7 8 and 9 if one carefully reads . .