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A 1993 article from the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings on how her lack of radio savvy was a major factor in the tragedy:
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/1993/d...
An example: she or somebody had a retractable antenna optimized for long-range high-frequency/shortwave radio removed prior to the flight—crazy!
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39239964
They probably ditched the transceiver because it weighed 40-60lbs, which is a lot of extra weight for something that you don't need, based upon "success oriented" planning.
(The linked article says Earhart didn't know enough about radio, either to convert from wavelength to frequency, or to match an antenna to the transmitter. Such knowledge was probably rare in 1937.)
Earhart had a practice run at navigating over the ocean to a radio source on land prior to the start of her trip. She flew from somewhere around San Francisco out over the ocean, then turned around and tried to fly toward the source of a radio signal using the technique that would guide her to Howland Island. She got lost, and that exercise was never repeated by her.
Radio had been around for the best part of 40 years by that point.
Sounds like she would have been friends with Stockton Rush if she were alive today.
Earhart seems to be a story of someone pushed beyond their capabilities by a runaway media narrative.
She was a good stick and rudder pilot in an era where most of them were male military veterans. This made her famous but her fame coincided with an era in which aviation headlines were being made by breaking long distance records. She couldn't remain in the limelight just doing loops and barrel rolls.
But long distance navigation required skill with technology she didn't have much familarity like radios and sextants. No doubt she had pressure to run up those firsts before some other female pilot did so she had no time to go back to school. Then you have the whole organization built around her and their expectations.
Her story isn't that much different than Donald Crowhurst.
The retractable antenna could only be used for Morse code. Only Harry Manning was well-versed in Morse, so after he quit, neither Earhard nor Fred Noonan effectively couldn't use it anyway [1].
That retractable antenna was for low frequencies. If you are referring to the underside "V" antenna (which was not retractable), that one was likely just damanged, not intentionally removed. [1, 2]
[1] https://youtu.be/zTDFhWWPZ4Q?t=1629 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39262061
There is a good Veritasium episode on her last flight going deep into technical details of what went wrong:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTDFhWWPZ4Q
Yes, the Veritasium episode is great.
In short: there's plenty of evidence Amelia Earhart was reckless. I'm sad that she paid with her life, but that is sometimes what happens when you're reckless while using dangerous machines.
Captain A. G. Lamplugh, a British pilot from the early days of aviation once famously said “Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.”
Yeah this was a great video, so many errors.
The experienced navigator refusing to fly with her was correct, but I do wonder if he had been there if he would have been smart enough to save them.
Probably . . . from what I have read in the past, a better understanding of radio direction finding probably would have been enough to get them to Howland Island.
My dad was a B-17 navigator and later a career pilot. He told me that Earhart was a reckless pilot, and had little respect for her. Lest you think he was sexist, he professed admiration for Jacqueline Cochran.
An unmentioned aspect is airplanes of that era did not have hydraulically boosted controls. They were designed according to the strength of men. This means under emergency conditions, women were simply not strong enough.
My dad flew B-17s, and with 3 engines out and just an outboard engine running, it took all of a man's strength to keep it straight. Usually, the pilot and copilot would trade off each 10 minutes.
When planes got larger, like the B-29, boost had to be added.
To accommodate female pilots, Boeing reduced the flight control forces in the 757.
Is there a ceiling to the amount of force exerted on a plane’s control surfaces or does every human have a limited range of what situations they could wrestle a plane out of?
I’ve got to imagine that put into a fast enough dive, nobody’s pulling up?
Reminds me of driving a car with manual steering. If you have never tried it, it is a whole different experience and a massive workout.
> He told me that Earhart was a reckless pilot
I was surprised to learn the same once I started diving into her history. She definitely was a media phenomenon, with her public image largely manufactured by her publicist husband.
Her story actually feels very similar to the fake YouTube personalities of today. What's funny is that, for all the complaints about people today being too gullible about modern influencers, the ones from history often succeed in fooling far more people.
> Lest you think he was sexist, he professed admiration for Jacqueline Cochran.
It's understandable why this needs to be said - unfortunately, these accusations accusations are the default reaction many people have to this criticism (I've seen them before in discussions about Earhart and others). Once someone is given a status of an icon for a particularly identity, people have an unpleasant habit of believing criticism of the icon is criticism of the identity. It would be nice if we were able to judge people as individuals.
To your last point, I really enjoy trapped in the closet, both the video and the audio; but mentioning that got me a lot of grief, "don't you have kids? Don't you know about him?"
Yeah a large portion of humans have flaws, do bad things (3 felonies a day!), etc. But I think art (as it were) transcends the artist, especially in audiovisual stuff where it's much more likely there are other people involved that actually make the art memorable; however even a self-published asshole can produce something great.
I guess I could just suffer the weird al trapped in the drive-through, to placate such people, or can ignore them. R Kelly got no money from me, anyhow, I bought it all secondhand. My conscience is clear enough, I think.
It's dumb that a man should be automatically assumed as sexist because he happened to elaborate a criticism of something a woman did in some context. I've even seen some women use this implicit assumption as a weapon, labeling as sexist a completely valid complaint.
Happens a lot across a variety of protected classes. For example Israel calls anyone who criticises them "antisemitic". Whereas I like to call the IDF, who indiscriminately kill Gazans, state sponsored terrorists; just as Hamas killing Israeli civilians are also terrorists.
Perhaps if someone calls me antisemitic for that, I'll call them homophobic for disagreeing with the opinion of a gay man.
You're making it very black-and-white when there's a lot of nuance to these kinds of discussions. A woman in a leadership role making difficult choices or shutting people down may be abrasive, but a man doing it might be admired for their vision. A woman taking risks might be careless, or a dilettante, while a man taking the same risks is bold and courageous. Even if the outcome is the same, men can fail while women have to be successful (and even then they're still criticized for _how_ they succeeded).
It's very dumb. It's also the default assumption today in government, media, academia, and most of the corporate world, especially HR. If you like your job, or just like being able to post your thoughts on social media, you ignore it at your peril.
When JFKjr's crash was in the news, I phoned him up and asked what he thought the cause was.
He didn't hesitate: "Spacial disorientation"
Aka pilot incompetence. Airplanes don't care if you're a celebrity or not.
That's a little too dismissive. Flying in those conditions is deeply disorienting, and you have to have instrument training (and discipline) to safely accomplish it. My dad (also air force pilot, F-104, and later, bush pilot) was flying near Block Island at the same time, and despite his training and experience said it was difficult and disorienting. You need to be rated for instruments and have developed trust in them, despite your senses.
> When JFKjr's crash was in the news, I phoned him up and asked what he thought the cause was.
Um, what?!? .... ohhhh, you phoned your dad.
Cochran was simply insane. I credit her success to a pathological lack of fear, and an amazing teacher in Chuck Yeager.
Was Neil Armstrong insane, too? He later remarked that he figured his odds of surviving were 50-50. I think he was being optimistic.
I do notice that people all across the comments are treating this as a touchy topic, what, because she was a woman? She had as much capacity for skill, responsibility and agency as anybody else and her missteps led to her death in the same way that those of Stockton Rush led to his (and others') death.
History books are written by reckless people- especially in aviation.
also, I imaging operational and safety planning/operations research basically didn't exist back then, or maybe was at a fledgeling state?
The publicity machine is pretty amazing. There are hundreds of books about Amelia Erhart and probably hundreds of thousands of girls and women named Amelia, but who even knows the name of the first woman to fly around the world?
Your question was rhetorical, but for anyone that doesn’t know: it was Jerrie Mock
Almost all flight during this stage of development was reckless. It took a long time for us to collectively learn the lessons as pilots, mechanics, engineers, logistics, etc, to make it safe. A great source of reckless piloting stories are from the Alaska bush in the 1920's. People like Eielson and Wilkins managed to land on drift ice and fly from Alaska across the Arctic Ocean to Europe in 1928. A great book to read about this is The Flying North by Jean Potter (1946), which chronicles the Alaska bush pilots from the 1900s to 1940s, when she was stationed in Alaska during WWII.
There's reckless and there's reckless.
One is doing something that nobody knows if it's going to work, and probably won't - Lindberg, perhaps.
Another is doing something you should KNOW isn't going to work, but you don't bother or care.
I like stories like this. They remind me of two things: 1) you have to be a little crazy to make history (and become an inspiration), 2) there's no need to whitewash, ignore, or silence the tellings of imperfections of "heroes"; their [often inaccurate] legend will live on anyway.
WTF is with the "coördinated" umlaut... Seriously the New Yorker works hard to earn their monocled caricature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)
Indicates that the two o's are separate syllables.
They have used an umlaut on the second repeated vowel in a word for as long as I've been reading. I can't find a link but I believe that's part of their style guide
You’re supposed to do that for any word where two consecutive vowels have a syllable break between them instead of forming a dipthong. Of course, most of the time it’s redundant because there’s only one cromulent word anyway and the reader can figure it out quickly enough without the umlaut.
the monocle gives them permission
The New Yorker does it because it needs to project an air of sophistication, even though it's basically The Atlantic with cartoons and a NYC-local bias. It's no New York Review of Books.
It's a similar kind of conservative affectation as The New York Times referring to people as "Mr. Putin" or "Mrs. Clinton". I find it hilarious that the NYT will never refer to someone by their first name, even when it's contextually more apt to do so, and will often use a stiffly formal version of their full name ("Vladimir V. Putin") that nobody else in the world bothers with outside encyclopedias.
"Earhart planned to have human navigators on board with her, but she’d be the first female pilot to accomplish the feat." - What an odd statement. Could "male" have been replaced by "human"?
The strangest TIL for me this year is that Fred Noonan was indeed on board for the doomed flight, and he was just as lost/dead as Earhart was.
I've surely conflated Earhart with Lindbergh, who was known for his solo marathon flights, and somehow absorbed decades' worth of pop-culture "Amelia Earhart" legends that left Captain Noonan as a remarkably obscure footnote in history.
And even more interesting still were the accounts that a disastrous landing in Hawaii carried a crew of four, and her penultimate attempt had a crew of three, with an aborted takeoff that severely damaged her Electra, and the third man had refused/declined to continue as the odds were increasingly not in their favor.