For Want of a Nail (Part Three)

CCXXXVIII

A partial view of the Electra’s control panel

Fuel was another critical issue, and one around which there is much confusion. The Electra had a capacity of 1,050 gallons of aviation fuel and 80 gallons of oil, which gave the aircraft an optimum flying time of 24 hours.

The fuel controls on the Electra. Amelia had additional controls for the onboard tanks

It was known, however, that after the Luke Field accident that ended the first Worldflight attempt in March that Amelia routinely loaded the plane with only 950 gallons of fuel, which reduced the optimum flying time to about 20 hours. Although she had caused the Luke Field accident by overcorrecting for a ground loop she seemingly accepted George Putnam’s public explanation that the overweighted plane was unbalanced, and her method of avoiding imbalance was to load up with less fuel. For most legs of the Worldflight, some as short as 75 miles, the reduced fuel load made no difference.

If receipts exist for the amount of fuel Amelia loaded at Lae, they have proved exceedingly difficult to find, thus the debate. It is logical however, that Amelia Earhart would have loaded the plane to its brimming capacity in order to allow herself a comfortable safety margin on the difficult Lae-to-Howland leg. She may even have been carrying extra fuel in jerry cans. The plane, stripped of all excess weight, took an incredibly long time to get airborne using the entire length of the Lae runway, suggesting that Amelia may have replaced gear with extra gas (however, it needs to be remembered that weather conditions at Lae on July 2^nd were such that the laden plane had lessened lift). If she did carry extra fuel she may have extended her flying time to as much as 27 hours or more, supporting theories that she did not ditch but made landfall somewhere.  

Landfall?

Militating against any increased fuel capacity were two factors, the length of time it took her to reach normal cruising altitude with a fully-loaded ship in the hot, heavy air (this would have used up much of her 100 + octane military grade fuel reserve) and the constant headwinds she faced.  Although estimated at 25 miles per hour they seemed to be stronger since at an airspeed of 150 miles per hour (slower than the Electra’s usual 200 mph to begin with) her ground speed was only 108 miles per hour, a virtual crawl that would have devoured gas at an accelerated rate and extended appreciably the time it took to reach Howland. Something (this blogger posits lateral winds) was also pushing her far off her intended flight path. 

According to TIGHAR, Earhart was south, not north, of her intended flight path, and made landfall on Nikumaroro (Gardner) Island

Another anomaly was inherent in the charts Fred Noonan was using, which were relatively new but also very recently outdated. The U.S. Hydrographic Office had determined that Howland Island was mislocated on the charts by a distance of five miles. This determination was made after the second Worldflight began. The U.S. Government had issued a bulletin to this effect, but whether Noonan knew of it was questionable, and the error would not be corrected on the chart until a new edition was published. Five miles is not much --- unless you are in a cloudbank or flying at a very low level looking for a very low-lying island whose overall color matched the sea just beneath you. Fred and Amelia may well have reached the vicinity of Howland Island just to discover it wasn’t there --- We must be on you but cannot see you.

 

“We must be on you . . .”

Having reached Howland Island, or at least the spot where the charts told them Howland Island should be, what happened next?

The effects of wind on an aircraft

It’s possible they turned back on their course. It takes no great imagination to picture a frustrated Fred Noonan checking and re-checking his calculations for an error that didn’t exist. The radiomen on Itasca noticed a flutter in Earhart’s carrier wave that suggested she’d turned away from them instead of climbing to altitude for a good look around. Why?

In 2004, a plane wreck was found just off Buka Island in Papua-New Guinea. The Papua-New Guinea Post Courier speculated that it was the lost Electra, but most researchers do not believe that Earhart had the fuel to attempt a return to Lae --- never mind the stamina

If Earhart flew north of her planned track she may have put down at Mili Atoll

And having unknowingly turned away from their destination, what did they do? Earhart never announced a Mayday --- perhaps as The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) speculates, she had more fuel than the “half hour” she’d announced at 19:12 GMT (by 20:15 GMT she was all the way into a second half hour of fuel). She never stated that she was ditching in the open ocean. She never announced that she was headed for the Phoenix Islands or the Gilbert Islands. At that point Earhart and Noonan just ceased to exist as far as the outside world is concerned. 

If Earhart did turn back, she may have been trying to make for the Gilbert Islands which she had overflown in the night. The Phoenix Islands are another possibility

Maybe her engines quit suddenly, starved of fuel. That would have silenced her, as the radio worked only when the engines were running. But if her fuel tanks were running bone dry, the engines would have given a few gasps prepatory to quitting, allowing her to at least shout, “Mayday!” into the radio. Or maybe the gremlin sent her sending set to hell all at once.

No one knows who “invented” gremlins but they would have been familiar to aviators at least as early as the barnstorming era, perhaps before. Their name comes from an Old English verb, “gremian” meaning “to vex” and the idea of gremlins first appeared in the Royal Air Force.  During World War II the War Production Board seized on the idea of gremlins as saboteurs of the war effort in the skies