Many things I read about Noonan portrayed him as a drunk, but also a good navigator.

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
Many things I read about Noonan portrayed him as a drunk, but also a good navigator.

By the accounts I've seen, he was a drunk and they argued/bickered constantly.

She was not a very good pilot. Now, let me clarify that. Jimmy Doolittle was a GREAT pilot. He was incredibly skilled. Earhart was a mediocre pilot with a LOT of guts and great publicity (her husband owned a newspaper?). I admire the heck out of her, as she was a great aviator in regards to the records she set/broke and her other achievements. Now, even somebody with Doolittle's skill wouldn't do well if they got lost over the Pacific.


Also, I am confident that blurry yellow image is NOT Earhart's plane.

The way these things usually works is, they 'plow the field' over a search area with a towed sonar array (run parallel overlapping paths to get 100% coverage of the search area, like plowing a field). The sonar will locate promising targets such as this one. BUT, this is only the FIRST step. They then send down a camera sled and photograph/video the target. As an example, Ballard's expedition found some good sonar targets. They sent down the cameras, and soon the ghostly image of one of Titanic's boilers (they had a very distinct look) came into view. They THEN knew they were on the debris trail of the ship.

In this case, I would bet good money they already photographed the target. If it was legitimately a twin engine/twin tail aircraft, we would be seeing THOSE images, not the preliminary blurry crap. I speculate they already did so, and found it to be a B-25, or heck, a funky rock formation or deck cargo that fell off a ship within the past 100 years. I am convinced they already know this is NOT Earhart's plane, and are only playing this up for the publicity and/or to generate funding/donations.

I could be wrong, of course, (it happens more than I would like), but I bet this turns into a great big nothing. If we hear anything at all, they MIGHT admit it was another twin/twin aircraft (the Lockheed Hudson or Harpoon, North American B-25, a Twin Beech, or a dozen other twin engine twin tail aircraft).

Her plane went down 80 years ago. By now, the engines are probably the only recognizable pieces of the wreck still intact. Anybody looking for an intact complete aircraft on the ocean floor is dreaming. . .

The pic itself is not convincing. What might be more evidential is the ratios of the lengths of various gross artifacts of the object, wing span/fuselage, wing length/depth, etc. It these match up, then we might suspect something. This assumes that the various structures deteriorated at the same rate. I'm sure we will all know in a couple of months...unless it turns out to be something else, then crickets....

I say give it to PHPaul as a restoration project!