An Air Force officer who spent $11M searching Earhart's plane may have found it | Hacker News Reader

An Air Force officer who spent $11M searching Earhart's plane may have found it

businessinsider.com

212 pointsrntn166 comments

The interesting thing about this is that it doesn't appear to involve TIGHAR at all.

TIGHAR, for those unfamiliar, are the people who pop up every few years with tantalizing new evidence that certainly will prove once and for all some novel theory about Earhart's disappearance and raises a couple of million dollars to mount an expedition which of course reveals nothing but some tantalizing new evidence that requires a new expensive expedition to investigate.

So, there might be something to this.

I seem to recall these guys. Last time I read an article about them, it read like they were in cahoots with the government of Kiribati to promote tourism. Fun read though!

For others curious about the acronym:

The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIGHAR

> The theory, which Romeo relied on partly to guide his search, suggests that when Earhart crossed over the international dateline during her 20-hour flight, her navigation system became inaccurate and misdirected her by about 60 miles, potentially leading to a tragic end.

How would this happen? It's not like her plane would have contained a misprogrammed computer.

An electrical issue could cause a gauge to misreport. E.g. vibrations cause a bad ground.

An electrical issue wouldn't be caused by crossing the international date line.

Maybe the Bermuda Triangle is on walkabout?

Crossing the equator causes the sun to flip around and go the other way in the sky.

Source: When I went to Australia, the sun went the wrong way. It was curiously unsettling.

Google brings me here - http://www.datelinetheory.com/p/time-and-celestial-navigatio...

Probably a polite way of saying she screwed up.

She had a reputation as an indifferent navigator and aviator which is consistently downplayed.

Fred Noonan was hired as the navigator specifically for this leg of the flight because of his navigation skills, which he proved by establishing Pan Am's transpacific routes, so it's not obvious to me why a navigational error would rest on Earhart's lack of skills in that area.

Journalistic misinterpretation of what an expert told them leading them to write something dumb.

Earhart’s “navigation system” was Fred Noonan, an almanac, and a chronometer.

Fred looking on the wrong page of the Almanack because he forgot which side of the dateline they were going to be on is what’s implied here.

'Navigation system' could be paper, maps, compass, etc. It's modern bias to assume that means 'computer' or 'electronic'.

Exactly. Just like I have an organization system for my clothes. That doesn't mean I have a computer controlled robot organizing my clothes. It just means socks go in the top left drawer.

Right, but if a reporter is trying to write a story why all your t-shirts turned pink, and after you explain that system to them, they write:

"When the clocks went back at the end of daylight savings, pests' organization system became inaccurate and misdirected a red sock into the whites wash,"

... they might have misunderstood what you were trying to say. They certainly aren't doing a good job of explaining to their reader how your clothing organization system works.

What evidence is there for your accusation against the journalist? I don't see any at all but your personal interpretation of 'system' (which many disagree with) and your personal imagination of how it got into the article.

Call it ‘Gell Mann Lucidity’ - the experience of having seen reporters make mistakes before and remembering to apply that knowledge to critical reading of news stories. The opposite of Gell Mann Amnesia.

Notice that's just fabrication, and for the same reasons people have always fabricated things - their preconceived notions, their prejudices, etc.

There's a reason that rationality depends on evidence, and that is applied so strictly in science, law, and reporting. What would you say about a reporter who made claims like yours?

Allow me to carry you back to the top of this thread, to a post made by a presumably reasonably well educated member of the Hacker News community, in reaction to this article on the professionally written and edited, reputable website, businessinsider.com.

That user wrote:

> > The theory, which Romeo relied on partly to guide his search, suggests that when Earhart crossed over the international dateline during her 20-hour flight, her navigation system became inaccurate and misdirected her by about 60 miles, potentially leading to a tragic end.

> How would this happen? It's not like her plane would have contained a misprogrammed computer.

So you see, what we have here is a sentence written by a journalist and published by their editor, which says “her navigation system became inaccurate and misdirected her”; juxtaposed with evidence of a reader being confused and trying to work out what the writer was talking about, because the implied technical failure mode seemed anachronistic for Amelia Earhart’s era of flight. Because the way that sentence is phrased certainly sounds like the kind of sentence one would write to describe an automatic system failing when taken outside its design limits, like a millennium bug type of error.

You seem to be suggesting that the only fault here lies with the reader, who should have understood that by ‘navigation system became inaccurate’ the writer expected them to understand that to mean the processes and procedures followed by the crew suddenly stopping working when crossing the dateline - since obviously that would be the sort of ‘navigation system’ used.

That’s a wonderfully generous position to take but I’m sorry it doesn’t pass the sniff test for me. The ‘navigation system’ Earhart was using couldn’t ’become inaccurate’ when crossing the dateline. It could be misapplied; human error could lead to it producing inaccurate results; but the system (looking up celestial ephemera in a book then doing math) was valid and worked.

Writing that the system ‘became inaccurate’ when crossing the dateline communicates to me that the writer misunderstood the system being used as being one which could systematically fail under those circumstances. Such misunderstandings are common! It’s understandable! Writers are reliant on interpreting expert quotes and rephrasing them, dumbing them down, or occasionally adding their own interpolation! It is one of the most common error types you will see in journalism about topics you understand well to see a journalist extrapolate from what they were told and say something completely wrong.

If the writer had understood the dateline theory more thoroughly they would likely have written that Earhart’s navigator made an error in accounting for crossing the dateline, rather than attributing the error to ‘the system’. There was a human being in the plane! You don’t need to ascribe the fault to the weakly passive ‘system became inaccurate’ source. Someone who understood that would not write this sentence in that way.

My attribution of the error here to the reporter is an application of Occam’s razor. The expert sources who found the sonar echo of a plane in the pacific definitely know how Earhart navigated. The reader who was confused on HN when reading something that implied a ‘systemic’ navigation failure at the dateline had a reasonable instinct that such a failure seemed unlikely for the time period. So the issue is with the reporter, who misinterpreted what the expert told them, didn’t realize before the filing deadline that what they were saying made no sense, and so wrote a sentence that caused confusion.

It's a modern article though

No computer (device), but definitely a computer (person who computes) the location of the plane and destination in a formula that relies on the correct date for accurate long distance navigation.

Navigators used tables to determine the longitude that depend on the day. The theory[0] is that because their flight involved multiple day changes, Noonan might've done some on the fly calculation that plugged star positions into the wrong day's table, putting them off by 1 degree of longitude.

[0]: http://www.datelinetheory.com/, no idea how plausible this is

I have no idea how to interpret that sonar image. Am I supposed to see what looks like an airplane when viewed from above? Because the Lockheed Electra didn't have swept-back wings. I don't think any airplane had swept-back wings until the 1950s.

Could it be either sonar distortion or that the wings were damaged in the crash?

Speaking of which, it looks pretty intact, which means (armchair air crash specialist here) it wouldn't have crashed but done an emergency landing on the water.

That would match with the leading mis-navigation theory. She and her navigator were fine and healthy, as was the plane. They were looking for the island to land on, but had messed up the navigation and were sufficiently off-course. There were US Navy boats in the area of the island that heard their radio calls. There was no emergency -- they just reported to be searching for the land that they should've found. Presumably they flew until they ran out of fuel and likely set it down in the water as gently as possible.

There’s literally a side by side diagram showing you how to look at. Not that your wings comment is wrong.

Ha, I clearly didn't scroll far enough. Thanks :)

Still, seeing as how I don't look at these kinds of images all day it's really hard for me to gauge if the sea floor is littered with false positive images that may seem to be a good match. I could also imagine a true match to also have some other confounding blob attached to it. It'd be nice to have some kind of score to summarize that aspect.

Post crash many planes have swept-back wings

Swept wings wasn't a thing until after WW2. The Me262 had swept wings because the engines came in heavier than expected, and sweeping the wings back was the easiest fix.

Read their comment again with a bit more irony :)

I meant to reply to the parent of that.

> Roughly a month into the trip, the team captured a sonar image of the plane-shaped object about 100 miles from Howland Island — but didn't discover the image in the submersible's data until the 90th day of the voyage, making it impractical to turn back to get a closer look.

To be a skeptic, this sounds like confirmation bias.

Or maybe the computer they had analyzing the data takes a while to search and it had nothing to do with people at all.

Relevant search: this presumed plane is at 16,500 feet of depth, and the record for deep sea salvage is, according to a quick search, about 19,000 feet. I had wondered whether it was feasible on the face of it to try salvaging this plane, and it may be. No comment on the advisability.

How would/could you distinguish this from any of the hundreds or maybe thousands of planes that went down during WW2 in the Pacific? Assuming it's even a plane.

I think the author is excited because he found the plane in roughly the area he expected to find it if she was thrown off course by an instrumentation fault that occurs when crossing the international date line. Also, it was about the right shape.

Also, it wasn't near the fighting in WWII, and the shape doesn't match that of WWII carrier aircraft.

I'll be more excited when they get out there with a deep sea probe and take some photographs.

From the source linked in another comment: (edit, ugh, I hate HN formatting, can never get it right even after all these years)

----

One piece of good news for Romeo’s search is that there are probably very few other planes anywhere near Howland. An airstrip was built on Howland in the 1930s in anticipation of commercial trans-Pacific flights, but Earhart was going to be the first to actually use it. During the war it was bombed by the Japanese to prevent its use, and that’s the extent of its aviation history. None of the WWII air-sea battles were fought in the vicinity, and it’s much too remote for general aviation planes to ever go near.

----

https://briandunning.substack.com/p/i-remain-very-guarded-ab...

Who is Brian Dunning and what do they know about the subject?

He's wrong because that is an area that the USN actively did carrier training in from 1945 to today, and lots of planes ended up in the ocean after missing a landing, a take-off failure, or just because the pilot had to bail for whatever reason.

Heck, during the evacuation of Hanoi they were pushing perfectly good jets into the ocean just to clear enough room for helicopters and the odd cessna, but that would have been further west.

https://theaviationgeekclub.com/that-time-a-south-vietnamese...

Not sure why you're bringing up the evacuation of Hanoi. Further west is a hell of an understatement. Howland Island is closer to San Francisco than Vietnam. It's thousands of miles from that anecdote.

To quote Brian Dunning of Skeptoid:

> The biggest secret of the Amelia Earhart mystery is that there is no mystery, and never has been. The USCG Itasca was on station at Howland and in partial radio contact with Earhart when she and Fred Noonan ran out of fuel and ditched after having slightly overshot the island in the dawn lighting conditions. The USN and USCG analyzed their data and identified this area as where the plane went down...

> So the best news about Tony Romeo’s find is that he’s looking in the right place, unlike the TV networks and the random crackpots whose claims they promote. Romeo hasn’t divulged the exact location, for obvious reasons; but his location has the endorsement of Dorothy Cochrane, a curator in the aeronautics department of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. She knows where the USN and USCG have said where the plane is, so that tells me Romeo is probably right.

https://briandunning.substack.com/p/i-remain-very-guarded-ab...

I was curious, but the link doesn't elaborate on how much is known about the "ran out of fuel and ditched after having slightly overshot the island" -- whether that's all fact, or partially fact, or all speculation.

Here's the US Navy's full report: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305240

Which references the radio logs from the day of the disappearance: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/6210268

tl;dr we know they overshot the island and were running a search pattern for it while running out of fuel because they told the radio operator on the other end as much. The only question is what specifically happened (did they manage to get life rafts out, etc.

So like the fate of the Roanoke colony, the cause of the Tunguska explosion, the Dyatlov Pass incident, the explanation is what's right in front of everyone?

> the fate of the Roanoke colony

What is the prosaic explanation for the Roanoke colony?

The colonists, lacking food and supplies to get by on their own, went over and joined the local Native American tribe, the Croatoan. Their descendants are likely now part of the Lumbee tribe.

So weird that they all disappeared! And carved “Croatoan” into a tree before that happened! I cannot imagine where they might have gone.

Yeah, regardless of what might have happened to them there, it's pretty obvious that it was the destination of the colonists.

Great Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roanoke_Colony

Being a west coaster, I don't recall ever hearing about it.

  Colonial era Europeans observed that many people removed from European society by Native Americans for substantial periods of time – even if captured or enslaved – were reluctant to return; the reverse was seldom true. Therefore, it is reasonable to postulate that, if the colonists were assimilated, they or their descendants would not seek reintegration with subsequent English settlers.

Integration.

the exact location is a big part of the mystery

And to quote his article with the bit that matches my first impressions:

> I am not super gung-ho about the image. Yes, it is vaguely airplane-shaped (though not a great match for the Lockheed Electra). It’s also vaguely anchor-shaped, or the shape of most any random pile of rocks on the ocean floor — you can see at the bottom left of the image there’s another object right next to it, which would be improbable if this was indeed a lone aircraft sitting on the ocean floor. It could be anything.

What? That image looks just like Bigfoot!

> Romeo hasn’t divulged the exact location, for obvious reasons

The most obvious reason being he doesn't know the exact location.

Doesn't the mention of titanium here seem wrong?

    If the Electra had been built of other metals, say aluminum and titanium, there
    wouldn’t be anything left but free atoms floating around.

Titanium is supposed to be resistant to corrosion in seawater due to the oxide layer that forms: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.5301/jabfm.5000387

    Titanium is reported to be highly resistant to general corrosion in seawater.

    ...

    These properties make titanium suitable for a variety of applications involving
    seawater, starting from thin-walled heat exchanger tubing, with consequent good heat
    transfer properties, up to submarine hulls, ships, platforms, desalination plants,
    salt production evaporators and water jet propulsion systems.

Can we do the same with MH370? I've got a classmate inside that plane. His family has been deprived of any form of closure or peace regarding his fate.

Around $150 million was spent searching including with high resolution sonar[1]. But obviously nothing was found. The area they're searching is far larger unfortunately.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_Malaysia_Airlines_F...

A company, Ocean Infinity, is continuig searching with robots.

iirc when it was missing there was a lot of wild speculation and then someone (maybe it was on twitter) discretely said it was on the bottom of the ocean at some location i can't remember and nothing else. The conclusion was this person was from some three letter agency and knew exactly where it was because of all the listening devices in the various oceans hunting for submarines. They(agency) will never say where it is because it exposes their capability. I think a similar thing happened when that submarine imploded on the way to the titanic.

Is there a screenshot of this Twitter post?

> The conclusion

Whose conclusion? On what basis?

They readily shared the implosion detection data with search and rescue teams.

I remember for the first few days no one was saying anything certain. But once the official reports started flowing after those first few days, they were very certain about the fact that the sub had imploded.

The public wasn't certain, but the search and rescue teams were made aware of the implosion that was detected, that wasn't going to stop an attempt to verify the wreckage.

The precise location of the wreckage nonwithstanding, the fate is pretty clear. Several pieces of MH370 have been discovered washed up along the coast of Africa and Madagascar over the past few years.

The fate is clear, the how and why is not. Of course that's important for families.

And $150M is less than the plane itself would have cost to buy.

So around 400 miles* from where (likely) her bones and shoes were found?

https://www.npr.org/1998/12/02/1032135/bones-shoes-may-have-...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/08/591950171...

* Eyeballing it on Google Maps, distance from Howland island to Nikumaroro island

In a surprise twist, when they explore it in detail, it turns out to be MH 370.

That's what I was thinking. Someday I or my kids will read about finding MH370. Will they put that in a museum?

No because it's not mysterious anymore. Also not many museums in the world that can fit one.

I - Howland Island (near which they seemingly found this wreckage) is in the Central Pacific Ocean. Vs. MH370 seems sure to have gone down in the Central-ish Indian Ocean.

II - If they have even the vaguest sense of scale from their image - MH370 was a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777-200ER. Vs. Earhart was flying a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_10E. There is a ~10X difference in wing area, and ~50X difference in weight.

This is likely Earhart's plane, as it has a fuselage and two wings.

Also, I am likely the Pope, because like the Pope I have two arms and two legs.

here you go, you earned it!

https://discordia.fandom.com/wiki/Pope_cards

Nice background story on Earhart from my alma mater, Purdue University. [0] Boilerup!

[0] https://stories.purdue.edu/amelia-earhart-aviator-legend-boi...

> the object, which rests more than 16,500 feet beneath the surface

So 4000 feet deeper than the Titanic.

Since the journalist doesn’t seem to know about metric units: The plane was found at 16,500 feet = 5.029 km beneath the surface of the sea.

If he's "searching Earhart's plane", doesn't that imply that he's found it? Or is he searching a plane he _thinks_ was Earhart's, trying to find confirmation from the contents of it?

On the other hand, if he's "searching FOR Earhart's plane", this contradiction resolves itself.

Like dozens or hundreds of others before him, this guy thinks he has found her plane. Good luck to him, but I doubt he really found it.

Title reaction: How much does an 'Air Force Officer' make?!

Answer:

> But Romeo, a former real-estate investor who sold commercial properties to raise the $11 million needed to begin funding the search, returned in December from a roughly 100-day voyage at sea with a sonar image that he believes shows the lost plane in the ocean's depths.

(Also, article title uses 'former air force officer')

20 years in + take retirement + also work for a government contractor at 3x+ your former pay rate (while collecting retirement!), can equal a lot of money in a hurry at a relatively young age (say, money to fund a real estate investment venture without risking being penniless in old age).

> government contractor at 3x+ your former pay rate

And then some. Friend of mine rode backseat in F-15s. After retirement, he spent two-three years as a contractor for Boeing training allied military in the Middle East and paid off his mortgage, and much much more (I want to say at least 1, maybe 2 investment properties owned effectively outright).

Yeah, the "+" is doing some heavy lifting there :-) 3x is what you can basically just fall into after military retirement without trying very hard, with a bad network, and with poor luck.

Another factor is that your expenses can be quite low while you're in, even with a family. Put an officer's salary on top of that—which isn't amazing, but isn't terrible either—and you can save a fair bit of cash even before you even start the contractor + retirement double-dipping.

Though there are real costs—the schools are generally very good, but you may have to move every couple years. The bureaucracy is hellish (though, for all their dysfunction, they've got a lot of shit figured out way better than your average bigco). You'll probably serve under and with some real assholes at some point. And there's ever the temptation to get out early and start taking those sweet contractor dollars before you secure the government retirement check. Plus, you know, you may have to go kill people or get killed or what have you.

[EDIT] Oh, another downside: it can be really hard for your spouse to have a career, due to all the moving and often living in places without much economic opportunity.

Thanks for adding that last one - it's really important to remember. (It's even a movie trope.)

> [EDIT] Oh, another downside: it can be really hard for your spouse to have a career, due to all the moving and often living in places without much economic opportunity.

And it may be really hard to get an actual spouse instead of gold diggers of either gender.

As an active duty officer approaching 20 years of service myself, I think this is a good comment except for your first couple of statements. I'm very skeptical.

I think that an enlisted service member who's good enough, and lucky enough, to learn and do some technical things can easily 3x their pay by working as a contractor after their initial enlistment. But their starting point is low as an E-3, E-4. They can go from making $40k to $120k, sure, especially if they're willing to work in a combat zone.

I don't know a single O-4, O-5, O-6 (and I'm talking aviators and IT/cyber officers) who has "fallen into" making 3x as a civilian. Their pay in uniform is $160-240k. Many of them seem to opt for civil service jobs as a GS-14, GS-15, which will match their previous pay at best (but be in addition to the $50-90k pension).

I hope you're right, but I'm certainly not counting on a $600k job offer when my time comes.

I could have this figured as more of an exponential curve when it’s really as S-curve with your E-8s and your mid-scale officers on roughly the same flattish (but fairly high!) part. Could be I’ve got that bit wrong.

I do think the really high paid ones usually require living in one of a few areas (NOVA, say) and some travel, which isn’t in a lot of folks’ life plan for their 40s and 50s. But yeah, I may just have the “graph” wrong.

[edit] my more narrow point was just that an ex-officer with enough money to safely invest in a real estate business that might plausibly grow to $11m value under even moderate success, isn’t that weird a notion.

To your last point, I agree. I think that most people (including most people in uniform) don't realize how well it actually pays to be an officer. The corollary is that it's not easy to make much more by transitioning to the civilian world. But yes, one can leave active duty in their early 40s in a really good position - a couple million in savings, the pension, the retiree healthcare, the GI Bill for the kids - and keep making similar money in a new job or launch a new venture (having plenty to fall back on if it fails). Ending up with $11M later in life is not out of the question.

I'm still thinking about the exponential curve vs. S-curve. I do think there are a lot of jobs, regardless of someone's final military rank like you said, that will pay low six-figures just for the security clearance and knowledge of certain systems. The few jobs that pay much more - getting into the world of corporate executives, board members, consultants, lobbyists, media personalities, guest speaking - might be accessible to some retired flag officers, but there aren't a lot of retired flag officers to begin with.

Could you give a range if possible? I've always been curious as to what those salaries are like.

Are we talking 300-600k / yr? More?

Thank you

My rough guess would be around $400,000. He mentioned "A thousand dollars a day, including weekends". Atop this, effectively zero living expenses (family still at home, to be sure), plus a whole host of stipends and per diems.

Here's a page that gives the range for each rank [1] to give an idea what they can make before they leave and start contracting. Click on a particular rank and you'll get a page with a slider for years to see how pay progresses within that range over time.

A general makes the most, $221 900 per year.

That site also has pay for non-military jobs. Lots of interesting stuff there.

For example here's their page for computer science [2]. Average government computer scientists makes $142k. There's a graph showing the distribution and it is very uneven--looks like you can make pretty good pay or pretty terrible pay. 5 times as many computer scientists at the FAA (250) than at the IRS (53). 180 at the FBI. Nearly 1500 computer scientists total.

Some surprised me. The government has a little over 1000 archeologists [3]. I guess that explains where all those other thing came from in the warehouse they stored the Ark in!

[1] https://www.federalpay.org/military/air-force/ranks

[2] https://www.federalpay.org/employees/occupations/computer-sc...

[3] https://www.federalpay.org/employees/occupations/archeology

Very useful, thank you very much for sharing.

That chart for pay levels at different military ranks is not a good reference. It's only showing "basic pay." I recommend instead playing with this: https://militarypay.defense.gov/calculators/rmc-calculator/

You also have to understand how career progression works. Like it's nonsense to look at the basic pay for an O-5 with less than two years of service, even though there's a number on the chart for that. Outside of exceptionally rare circumstances, an O-5 will have at least 15 years of service.

I'd say $200k is about the floor, including enlisted, not just officers. Assuming they did 20 years in, they should be able to land at least that much for a boring office job in the US and if they didn't have something notable working for them (good network, what kinds of work they did, that sort of thing). That'll mean an NCO rank of some sort, for enlisted, and probably at least a bachelor's degree (it's strongly encouraged past a certain point) plus the all-important clearance. It goes up from there—way up, at the higher officer's ranks (O-6 and up, say), where whole new tiers of job open up, like high-level lobbying jobs, think tanks, C-suite positions, and even media.

Details of your service, who you know, what you're willing to do (travel, say) can start adding fives and even sixes of figures to your comp in a hurry (each!), from there.

[EDIT] This is for post-"retirement" former military folks in general, not that specific case. You're probably not getting one at all for under $200k/yr unless they just don't want to do one of the kinds of jobs that pay a premium for retired military. And that's, again, way on the low end.

[EDIT EDIT] Also if you account for all benefits, the multiplier on military comp may not be as large. These places tend to offer good bennies, too, but not... you know, housing and such.

This comment has a lot more qualifiers than your previous comment, but I still think you're wildly overestimating things. Maybe everybody I know "just [doesn't] want to do one of the kinds of jobs that pay a premium for retired military" but it seems like someone I know would at least try the $500k+ job for a while if that were an immediately available option for them. I don't think they're ending up in GS-14 or GS-15 supervisory positions in a big headquarters because the office politics, meetings, and emails are so much fun.

Air Force pays goooood[0].

But seriously:

>> but then we're thinking: 'How do we lift the plane? How do we salvage it?'"

Don't. Just leave it. Be happy it was found, but just be respectful and leave it.

[0] Yes, I RTFA.

It can be raised respectfully.

Probably can. Should it though?

Like the Titanic, maybe we just let it rest in peace? Send a sub down to confirm what it is. Then maybe update a few of the monuments to her to indicate her final resting place has been found…

My only concern would be looters. If it is quite feasible to access “easily” then yeah maybe we should recover it just to protect against looters and pillagers.

The titanic is massssive, making raising it a much more difficult challenge compared to raising a single aircraft.

There was a rather silly 1976 thriller “Raise the Titanic!” predating it’s actual discovery by about 10 years. They made a movie from it too in 1980. Based on a premise that there was something valuable the government wanted on board)

Then Arthur Clarke wrote "The Ghost from the Grand Banks" in 1990 (after Ballard discovered it was in pieces) with a slightly more plausible approach to raising the bow. The wreck has deteriorated now to the point where raising it would probably destroy more than what would be recovered.

It appears that there would be significant questions about ownership and whether maritime salvage laws apply [1]. Remember that Earhart was a faculty member at Purdue University, the aircraft was owned by the university, and it was filled with student experiments. They're going to claim that it still belongs to them. You're going to spend millions to recover it and then immediately get hit with a lawsuit demanding you turn it over to them. By an entity that will have no problem collecting enough donations to fund the best lawyers for as long as it takes.

[1] https://www.perthilj.com/blog/2019/2/19/aircraft-salvage-in-...

Seems like a situation where it would be best to get all parties with any claim that wouldn’t be summarily dismissed to agree on details of what should happen with the salvage before committing to recovering it.

Yes absolutely, there’s no reason for the plane to rest at the bottom of an ocean forever. The bottom of the ocean is the opposite of rest, it’s hell.

To you, there's no reason. To others, there is. That by itself shows the need for discussion (where either side ought to listen to the other).

With respect to the argument of putting the plane rests in a museum: I do not see how that would be better than being able to visit the actual place where the crash occurred, with the plane still somewhere below the waves.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

What are the needs of the many here? And are they really needs, or just nice to haves?

> Should it though?

Yes, it's a plane not a person. We can learn from it, and Earhart won't care.

What could we learn from taking it out of the water vs leaving it in its grave?

There will be no FAA safety notices (or whatever they are called) based on the findings.

If it were a feasible to raise the Titanic as a small aircraft, it would have been done.

Aside from the practicality of the two, the Earheart wreck seems much more like something our society would want to honor. An explorer and adventurer who's legacy and life pushed equality forward for women across the west vs a failed engineering project which was mostly a status symbol for rich people.

Looters are exactly why we should raise it. Protect it from unscrupulous people.

Yeah, but then amateur submariners can't offer expensive tours in their homebuilt craft.

Salvaging the plane could give interesting clues about what led to the crash.

That's just morbid curiosity...

I find it odd to see geeks, on a site essentially devoted to idle curiosity, speaking out against idle curiosity.

There is value in showing respect for the dead, mostly for the benefit of those near death and the grieving families, but the arguments made here seem weird to me. Do we seal homes and turn them into tombs when a person dies inside? Do we leave car wrecks on the side of the road?

Curiosity is great but that doesn't mean it should always take priority. Would it be nice to know how that plane crashed? Sure, but we also figured out how the Titanic sank without lifting it out of the water.

> Do we leave car wrecks on the side of the road?

No, but we also don't need 80 years to find car wrecks on the side of the road, and there are various reasons to remove them. This comparison is ridiculous.

I think the "risks" of disturbing a grave site are greater than any "rewards" for doing it.

A home in which someone died can be used again by another person after proper cleaning and what not. Wrecks on the side of the road are usually removed because they are a danger to other motorists.

In the case of Earhart's plane the air frame and navigation systems are 75ish years out of date so it's not like there is a pressing need to solve a potential safety issue. IMO there is nothing of value to be gained besides "solving the mystery" and perhaps gathering a few personal artifacts that could be displayed in a museum or returned to the families.

And nothing of practical consequence is learned from exploring the tombs in Egypt. We might be able to decipher some tidbits about everyday life thousands of years ago, but one would be hard-pressed to explain what tangible benefits it offers, beyond "well, it's a part of our heritage / it's cool to know". Just like many other human activities, it's glorified idle curiosity.

> Do we leave car wrecks on the side of the road?

If they get lost for 80+ years, yeah, we do. There's a state park not far from me that has a trail that uses an old highway's right of way for a bit. The highway is long long gone, but if you look down from the trail into the gully nearby, you can still make out a few rusting hulks of cars from the 1920's and 1930's that went off the road and were just left there.

Every time Earhart is mentioned here, someone pops up with authoritative info that she and Noonan were not well prepared / equipment was faulty / more Hollywood salesmanship than navigation skills / that island was always going to be a stretch on gas... point being that while in the collective memory they are heroes, my lay understanding is that scholarship on the subject has already determined there were major problems with their flight plan

It's been several decades in saltwater at unbelievable pressure - I somehow doubt that.

If we raise it, it will almost certainly end up in a museum where many many people will see it and connect with Earhart and her story. Earhart would near deification, I’d guess. Plus the inspiration of many young boys and girls to adventure. I don’t quite see where the lack of respect would come from. Or, if it is disrespectful to raise the crash, that disrespect would be repaid many times over with honour in a museum, no?

> Earhart would near deification, I’d guess.

Let's not get hyperbolic. She's already well known. Agreed though that displaying her plane in a museum would seem respectful to me.

I can't imagine what would be recovered of a crash of a light aluminium aircraft after a century at the bottom of the ocean would bear much resemblance to an aircraft.

I think it's a great thing to locate and document the discovery but I don't see much to be gained from raising it.

Plus, it would be a violation of the Benthic Treaty with the Deep Ones.

Frankly I think her story is a bit less inspiring without the mystery

>Don't. Just leave it. Be happy it was found, but just be respectful and leave it.

I don't see anything inherently disrespectful about rasing the plane from the seabed. I recall people telling James Cameron that he should leave the Titanic alone but he made a great movie and brought the ship back in to the public imagination and didn't disrespect the fact many souls were lost tragically. The ship was deemed not economically viable to salvage but this plane is much much smaller and it may be worth putting in a museum.

I'm presuming you are offended on behalf of other people but if not can you elaborate why you find the idea so offensive or disrespectful?

Because there's little to be gained save morbid curiosity. She did amazing things alive, celebrate that. Putting a wreck in a museum will emphasize her death.

Enjoy disagreeing...

That’s such an odd opinion. Her death is already emphasized whenever the disappearance is mentioned because it’s super interesting. Being concerned that someone who died doing something interesting will have their death emphasized is just super weird imo. Everyone in history is dead.

Her disappearance is emphasized. Her death is not. There is a difference.

But like, who cares? It kinda just doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. I really don’t get it.

The big problem with Titanic is how deep it is. Very, even by ocean standards.

Titanic (12,500ft) is pretty close to average ocean depth (12,080ft).

The Pacific is several thousand feet deeper on average than the Atlantic, though. Especially the parts of the Atlantic near the US mainland are quite shallow, with the continental shelf extending outwards well offshore. I guess it would have been more accurate to say that for a ship in the major Atlantic shipping lanes, Titanic is quite deep.

Even looking for Titanic was a cover story in the first place. They were actually looking for a sunken Russian sub that was sorta in the area. It was only when they had a bit of left over time at the end of the mission that they ACTUALLY found Titanic, almost accidentally.

> I recall people telling James Cameron that he should leave the Titanic alone

I think HumblyTossed is suggesting this group do exactly what Cameron did: investigate and document but not remove. If this is Earhart's plane, it's probably also her grave. We generally frown on disturbing the resting places of the dead for commercial purposes.

What "worth" do you see in placing it in a museum?

So people can know about it

Example: https://www.facebook.com/RoyalAviationMuseumofWesternCanada/...

We don’t frown on that at all, nor do we apply any sacred virtue to graves comprised of accidental wrecks.

While I agree with you, there's sarcophagi in museums all over the world.

And on the tour these days, you are more likely to year "Yeah, maybe we shouldn't have moved it".

> If this is Earhart's plane, it's probably also her grave.

Only because no one knew where she was to bury her properly.

I assume you don't say that we shouldn't recover bodies from ANY plane crash; most people would expect bodies to be moved from a plane crash to be buried properly.

Why is this one different? The length of time it took to find the crash, I assume. So how long before we can't move the body because it is a grave? 3 months? A year? 10 years?

I don't think I would consider this a grave, and recovering the body and burying it properly is not grave robbing.

That's super fair - I think recovery and reburial is probably a respectful option. My impression is that our decisions about what to do with human remains often relies on finding a living member of the family to speak about preferences. To go back to the titanic example - I don't know of any families who agitated to have the remains in the ship reburied. One of the ways this situation is different is that there would be no ambiguity about remain identification.

> I don't think I would consider this a grave

If by not a "grave" you mean not an "intentional burial site" I agree. But it would be a final resting place and, to the question I was answering ("why would people object") that's a thing that people care about being handled with the proper care and consideration.

Yeah, this one is always a tricky topic for me because I have literally zero emotional response to human remains and really don't care at all what is done with my remains or the remains of my loved ones. Once a person is dead, the body is just random matter to me.

Trying to guess how other people would feel about things is a complete academic exercise in this case for me.

There are no bodies to recover. The crabs ate them long ago

> What "worth" do you see in placing it in a museum?

The same value as anything else in a museum? It's historically important, and also really cool, the kind of thing that inspires kids and even adults.

(I saw Halifax W1048 at an impressionable age and am very glad I did)

Good use case for Apple Vision Pro, etc. Capture the plane in situ and then have it available to view as an AR model (at home, or in a 'museum' space). Let users 'walk' or 'swim' around the wreck.

It looks like there's something similar for the Titanic already, so, not a weird suggestion to make.

No so sure. Titanic is essentially unique, her two sisters not lasting much longer, the last going to the scrappers in 1935.

There were quite a few model 10 Electras built. Over a dozen survive, with several still flying. The Earhart museum already has a 10E, even.

> just be respectful

IDK if littering wrecks is more respectful than putting them in a museum.

Indeed. Just leave it.

Document it, photograph it, leave it.

There's no reason to lift it, to "restore it", etc.

It's a wreck. Leave it alone.

Go find a "modern" Electra, and make that as "close to Earharts" plane for your display. But there's no reason to drag this thing up.

If this plane were shot down, it would be considered a war grave and left untouched. No reason to not treat this the same.

Rejoice if she has, indeed, been found. Peace for the families, finally.

Surely to search a plane have to have already found it?

Nonsense. For instance, I do a search every morning for "tomorrow's winning lottery numbers" on several search engines and haven't found them yet.

for

Tangent - wouldn't it be absolutely fantastical (and perhaps scary) if we could break the deterministic universe?

Time travel movies about sending people and things never made sense to me. To receive information from the future alone would be all you needed. Not only could you get stock prices or a lead on innovation, but you could also perhaps perform instantaneous, constant time computation of any function. And you'd have perfect foresight of anyone trying to disrupt you and take away your advantage.

But then maybe the future sends instructions for a machine that destroys you. Or it could be even simpler - it knows where to send you to die. So maybe you can't trust what it tells you at all. It has all the time to plan around your choices, and if you're still listening in any capacity it can coerce you to do its bidding.

Wild science fiction ideas searching for novelization, I suppose.

Bruce Willis starred in one such movie, "Looper".

Arguably in two - 12 Monkeys, too...

The 2004 indie film Primer is a very good take on this.

Reminds me of DirecTv’s Black Sunday[0]: the future machine gives you all the pieces you need to build the machine that, as the final puzzle piece is put into place, explodes and kills you.

[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/revisiting-the-black-sunday-ha...

Not quite the same thing, but https://qntm.org/causal is related.

The reason time travel movies don't make sense, while absolutely lots of fun to watch, is because the Sun is travelling through space. If you were to hypothetically build a time machine and set it for any given year, you would materialize in a hard vacuum. So, you need more than a time machine, you also need a spacecraft to be able to fly to where the Earth's previous position is. Chemical propulsion won't do it, you need something with significant velocity and energy.

Unless of course, you are able to enter specific astronomical coordinates to appear in and match velocities. Would suck if you got the coordinates right, but were off on the velocity by 1000 km/hr.

> you could also perhaps perform instantaneous, constant time computation of any function

See the first section of HPMOR chapter 17: https://hpmor.com/chapter/17

The article title currently says "for"

There would be hundreds of WWII planes in that area that would be indifferentiable from what Mr. Tony Romeo says he's looking for. More likey he's just looking to fund his retirement hobby.

That's what I thought, not even WW2 specifically, but (and I'm no expert) the image supposedly showing 'the distinctive shape of the fuselage, tail, and wings' is not that compelling? To paraphrase Jaws: it certainly looks like an aircraft, but not the aircraft.

It could be! Wings broken off/up a bit. But is it that likely? It could also be some other aircraft. Seems a bit sensationalist until they go back for a better look.

Maybe. Looks to be a bit (... by Pacific standards, so, hundreds of miles) off the Easternmost part of the Pacific that would have seen lots of air traffic in the war, which should leave it relatively clear, but I may be wrong.

[EDIT] I still doubt it's the plane, but this area may be far less-cluttered with 1930s-40s aircraft wreckage than others, is all I mean.

Howland island was pretty far from the fighting in WW2. The Phoenix Islands were not used by the military. All the fighting was to the west or the north (Hawaii).

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