Originally Posted by
Centaurus
As mentioned before, it is all too easy to imagine how a tired crew after 18 hours of hand flying, could miss Howland Island (only 1.5 miles long) among the plethora of low altitude Cu clouds that are a characteristic of that part of the Pacific after sunrise.
Yes, I agree, it is easy to imagine this - it is however much, much harder to imagine that after failing to locate Howland Island they mysteriously navigated to Gilbert Islands. Noonan was a very good navigator and such a miss by almost 1000 km makes no sense at all. Further it makes no sense since Amelia's voice was clearly heard in the vicinity (based on the radio technology at the time) of Howland island with minutes of aviation fuel to spare (her panicky voice at the time). She is even heard saying very loudly -
we must be on you but can not see you. So assuming, based on preponderance of evidence that at 7:42 they were within 100 nm from Howland Island and the fuel was supposed to last another ~30 minutes - how did they get to Gilbert Islands almost 4 hours flight time away? Makes absolutely no sense.