Finding Amelia Earhart’s Plane Seemed Impossible – Then Came a Startling Clue

It's well known that an overloaded airplane can handle very different, and for a pilot inexperienced with it it can be very, very dangerous. Heck, I was watching "Alaska Crash Investigations" just the other day, where the cause of a crash shortly after takeoff was determined to be due to the airplane being overloaded by 500 lbs. Crashing overloaded bombers at the end of the runway was a popular way to die in WW2, as they were always deliberately overloading them.

Linbergh famously overloaded the Spirit of St Louis and figured his biggest risk of death came from getting the machine off the ground.

None of the issues mentioned below should have happened if Earhart had properly learned how to use the equipment, prepared for the flight with with best practices, and coordinated with the ship & ground radio operators beforehand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Earhart#Radio_equipment

"Neither Earhart nor Noonan were capable of using Morse code."

"At least twice during the world flight, Earhart failed to determine radio bearings at 7500 kHz."

"Through a series of misunderstandings or errors (the details of which are still controversial), the final approach to Howland Island using radio navigation was not successful."

"The Electra had been equipped to transmit a 500 kHz signal that Itasca could use for radio direction finding, but some of that equipment had been removed."

"The antenna was bulky and heavy, so the trailing wire antenna was removed to save weight."

"Earhart's only training on the system was a brief introduction by Joe Gurr at the Lockheed factory, and the topic had not come up. A card displaying the band settings of the antenna was mounted so it was not visible."

"the aviators had cut off their long-wire antenna, due to the annoyance of having to crank it back into the aircraft after each use."

"It was at this point that the radio operators on the Itasca realized that their RDF system could not tune in the aircraft's 3105 kHz frequency"

"If transmissions were received from the Electra, most if not all were weak and hopelessly garbled. Earhart's voice transmissions to Howland were on 3105 kHz, a frequency restricted in the United States by the FCC to aviation use.[Note 35] This frequency was thought to be not fit for broadcasts over great distances. When Earhart was at cruising altitude and midway between Lae and Howland (over 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from each) neither station heard her scheduled transmission at 0815 GCT.[166] Moreover, the 50-watt transmitter used by Earhart was attached to a less-than-optimum-length V-type antenna."

A similar tactic was used when Steve Fossett disappeared (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fossett#Disappearance_an...), and it was entirely unsuccessful.

There are a few challenges:

1. There is a direct relationship between the time and effort required to take imagery, and the image resolution. Which is to say, if you want imagery that's detailed enough that you can find likely evidence without a lot of false positives, then you have to spend a ton of time in the air at low altitude, and if you want to effectively search a large area, then you have to spend time at higher altitude where you're too high up to get useful imagery.

2. Humans aren't good at sorting out natural features from unnatural ones. My favorite example of this is the face on Mars. Same deal when trying to search through imagery for debris. People have a preconception of what a plane crash looks like, and it's usually wrong. They'll confuse light-colored rocks, trees broken by snow loading, and all kinds of other things for evidence, while completely missing actual evidence. So the problem with these systems for search managers is that once someone flags something in a picture, you're kinda obligated to check on it, which takes resources away from more likely search areas.

3. The technology isn't there (yet). Computer vision may get better than humans at this soon, but not yet, and certainly not in the kind of technology that even well-funded search organizations or adventurers has access to. NSA? Maybe. Us? Nah, best we get is grainy photographs of features 1m across from high up.

IR imagery currently has similar problems, there's just too much background noise in most cases.

Some kind of multi-spectrum imagery fed into a big convolutional NN might be able to do a better job of telling the difference between a rock and some twisted metal and plastic composites at 1m resolution, but I don't know if anybody's actually invented that yet.

I'm using 1m resolution here as a substitute value for whatever would be appropriate to cover a large area with reasonable resources. After the Camp Fire, Alameda County brought a really cool tech team out that covered large areas of the burn with imagery from drones. They got a 1cm aerial resolution that was good enough to satisfy insurance investigators. But, it required a lot of flight time and computing power to do that, and they covered a relatively small area compared to the search area for a missing aircraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_BSAA_Avro_Lancastrian_Sta...

If an aircraft goes missing, we're usually dealing with mountains, oceans or remote areas with dense tree covers. Remote sensing is very limited in these environments.

That's why they're launching another search. It could be other things, but it could also be debris from the exact same type of plane she was flying.