Dan Kump
CE547, GIS in Water Resources Engineering
UNM Spring 2008
RE: Additional
Information About Amelia Earhart For HW#1
This write-up contains more information about the “Queen of the Air”, a nickname applied toindex_filesasgn1.htm Earhart by the United Press [The United Press was more grandiloquent; to them, Earhart was the reigning "Queen of the Air."[55] ] (1). The source of information was the www.wikipedia.org article about Amelia Earhart. This write-up contains excerpts from the 27 page Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Earhart) that I accessed on February 5, 2008, at ~ 5:00 A.M. To provide the attendant required source information that a student should include in all writings I have included the Wikipedia link as well as the approximate time I accessed the site, since it is a source that is constantly being updated.
The pictures that are included as part of the GIS HW#1
assignment were copied from the GIS software that was included with the course
text book: “Getting to know ArcGIS
desktop”, Second Edition Updated for ArcGIS 9, copyright 2004 by ESRI Press.
Amelia
Mary Earhart (24 July 1897 – missing 2 July 1937, declared deceased
5 January
1939) was a noted American
aviation
pioneer, author
and women's rights advocate.[1][2]
Earhart was the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross,[3]
which she was awarded as the first woman "aviatrix" to
fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.[4]
She set many other records,[5]
wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in
the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for women pilots.[6]
Earhart
disappeared
over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland
Island during an attempt to make a circumnavigational
flight of the globe in 1937. Fascination with her life, career and
disappearance continues to this day.[7]
Crash and sink theory
Many
researchers believe the Electra ran out of fuel and Earhart and Noonan ditched
at sea. Navigator and aeronautical engineer Elgen Long
and his wife Marie K. Long devoted 35 years of exhaustive research to the
"crash and sink" theory, which is the most widely accepted
explanation for the disappearance.[123]
Capt. Laurance F. Safford, USN (retired-deceased),
who was responsible for the interwar Mid Pacific Strategic Direction Finding
Net and decoding of the Japanese PURPLE cipher messages for the attack on Pearl Harbor, began a
lengthy analysis of the Earhart flight during the 1970s, including the
intricate radio transmission documentation and came to the conclusion,
"poor planning, worse execution."[124] Rear Admiral Richard R. Black, USN (retired-deceased)
who was in administrative charge of the Howland Island airstrip and was present
in the radio room on the Itasca asserted in 1982 that "the Electra
went into the sea about 10 am, 2 July 1937 not far from Howland".[124] British aviation historian Roy Nesbit interpreted
evidence in contemporary accounts and Putnam's correspondence and concluded
Earhart's Electra was not fully fueled at Lae.[125]
William L. Polhemous, the navigator on Ann Pellegreno's 1967 flight which
followed Earhart and Noonan's original flight path, studied navigational tables
for 2 July 1937 and thought Noonan
may have miscalculated the "single line approach" intended to
"hit" Howland.[126]
David
Jourdain, a former Navy submarine captain and ocean engineer specializing in
deep-sea recoveries, has claimed any transmissions attributed to
Gardner Island
Immediately
after Earhart and Noonan's disappearance, the United States Navy, Paul Mantz
and Earhart's mother (who convinced G.P. Putnam to undertake a search in the
Gardner Group)[128]
all expressed belief the flight had ended in the Phoenix
Islands (now part of Kiribati), some 350 miles southeast of Howland Island.
The
TIGHAR's
research has produced a range of documented archaeological and anecdotal evidence
supporting this hypothesis.[131][132]
For example, in 1940, Gerald Gallagher, a British
colonial officer (also a licensed pilot) radioed his superiors to inform them
that he had found a "skeleton... possibly that of a woman", along
with an old-fashioned sextant box, under a tree on the island's southeast
corner. He was ordered to send the remains to Fiji where in 1941,
British colonial authorities took detailed measurements of the bones and
concluded they were from a stocky male. However, in 1998 an analysis of the
measurement data by forensic anthropologists indicated the skeleton had
belonged to a "tall white female of northern European ancestry." The
bones themselves were misplaced in
Artifacts
discovered by TIGHAR on Nikumaroro have included improvised tools, an aluminum
panel (possibly from an Electra), an oddly cut piece of clear Plexiglas which
is the exact thickness and curvature of an Electra window and a size 9 Cat's
Paw heel dating from the 1930s which resembles Earhart's footwear in world
flight photos.[133]
The evidence remains circumstantial but Earhart's surviving stepson, George
Putnam Jr., has expressed enthusiasm for TIGHAR's research.[134]
A
15-member TIGHAR expedition visited Nikumaroro from 21 July to 2 August 2007, searching for
unambiguously identifiable aircraft artifacts and DNA. The group included
engineers, environmentalists, a land developer, archaeologists, a sailboat
designer, a team doctor and a videographer.[135]
They were reported to have found additional artifacts of as yet uncertain
origin on the weather-ravaged atoll, including bronze bearings which may have belonged
to her aircraft and a zipper pull which might have come from her flight suit.[136]
Myths, urban legends and unsupported
claims
The
unresolved circumstances of Amelia Earhart's disappearance, along with her
fame, attracted a great body of other claims relating to her last flight, all
of which have been generally dismissed for lack of verifiable evidence. Several
conspiracy theories have become well-known in popular culture.
pic
#1, graticule
Pic #2, cities visited, in ArcMap the cities visited by Earhart are shown as dots
Pic#3, disappearance
