Video clip has "Oakland" on the hangar roof. Stumbled across this at
IFR by the Sun and Stars
From time to time, I reflect with empathy on the task that Fred Noonan had on his ill-fated flight with Amelia Earhart to Howland Island in 1937. Fred was well-experienced, having established most of the Pan Am's China Clipper seaplane routes across the Pacific. Noonan and Earhart left Lae, New Guinea, in late morning local time for the roughly 2200-mile, 20-hour flight, with a planned arrival at Howland after sunrise, about 8 a.m. local time. That gave Noonan all night for three-star navigation and a morning arrival to find the little island.
Based on Earhart's last few voice transmissions, "We are on the line 157 337 ...," Noonan was using a navigation technique called celestial landfall. Celestial landfall requires intentional off-setting the track to the left or right of the intended course, so that when the craft gets abeam the destination the navigator knows which way to turn.
The approach to Howland was quite literally the textbook reason for the landfall technique. With only a single celestial body to shoot—the Sun—Noonan had good information to determine his groundspeed but nothing for course guidance, because their true course was about 082° and the Sun's Zn was 067°. If that's not clear, think about it this way: They were flying toward the rising sun, so Noonan could calculate the distance toward the sun with good precision and know how fast they were moving along the course. Deviation north or south of the planned course, however, would be tough to calculate, as their LOP would run 157° to 337°.
I would guess that Noonan altered course to put them perhaps 60 miles north of their flight-planned true course. About an hour prior to his ETA, he would have taken a sun shot that gave him the 157°-337° LOP. Using his latest computed ground speed, he would have slid that LOP forward on the chart to where it would run through Howland.
Then he would have taken up a course that was perpendicular to the LOP, in this case 067°, and would have computed a dead reckoning position and time for intercepting the LOP. When they reached that time, they would have turned right to about 157° to fly down the LOP to Howland. That turning point, the dead-reckoning position, may have been on the order of 60 miles or about 30 minutes flying time from Howland.
During those 30 minutes there might have been a bit of conflict in crew imperatives. My experience with the South Pacific is that it is common to have wide stretches of scattered-to-broken, fair-weather cumulus clouds with bases as low as 1000 feet and tops somewhere around 3000 feet. Noonan would have wanted to stay on top to keep shooting the Sun to make sure the LOP continued to fall through Howland. Earhart would have wanted to drop down to see the island. Unfortunately, each of those little clouds has a shadow that looks just like a flat island.
Lae take off film clip here
www.tighar.org/amelia_video.zip
I read too that Howland was 5 miles in error on the charts.