Amelia Didn't Know Radio (1993) | Hacker News Reader

Amelia Didn't Know Radio (1993)

usni.org

70 pointscenazoic43 comments

Summary:

“Amelia Earhart went missing in 1937 during her attempted circumnavigation of the globe when she failed to find Howland Island, as intended radio navigation assistance from the Itasca ship was compromised by issues with her plane's radio equipment. Specifically, Earhart had mistakenly designated 7.5 megacycles as the Itasca's beacon frequency, which was too high for her plane's direction finder to get a bearing from. This prevented her from coordinating with the Itasca. Intriguingly, radio signals later intercepted by stations in the Pacific showed Earhart's plane was still operational for hours after she went missing, suggesting she survived the initial landing but could not be reached due to radio problems. Unfortunately, no definitive evidence of her final fate has ever been discovered.”

The article makes no mention of a receive-only antenna mounted on the underside of the aircraft. One source [1] says "...there was a second “V” antenna mounted on the underside of the fuselage and connected in parallel with the top “V” antenna. If so, it was removed or disconnected before the plane left Miami." Note TFA does say the 250-foot antenna was removed in Miami, but does not mention the second V-antenna

More recently there was a lot of speculation the underside antenna broke during takeoff from LAE New Guinea, this being the explanation of the puff of smoke seen in the film [2] of the takeoff. The TIGHAR folk [3] are convinced the underside antenna was present on the aircraft and broke off during the takeoff.

[1]. https://earharttruth.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/pan-am-radio-p...

[2]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntkOyDanuRw

[3]. https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bullet...

Just shows you that you have to know everything. At least, about the death bucket you've decided to fly over a vast merciless ocean.

We know enough about Amelia Earhart at this point that we really should spend more time on other woman flight pioneers, and there are many that deserve to be remembered.

- Earhart was a bad pilot and was considered dangerously incompetent by some who worked with her

- She didn't understand how her equipment worked, and would fail to learn how to operate the equipment even after incidents that should have made her take the time to learn

- In many of her 'firsts' she was little more than an observer, with her mechanic or others flying the plane while she rode along

- She had a super wealthy husband who owned media companies, and he would greatly amplify her supposed achievements. This, more than any other fact about her, is why she is so well remembered.

we really should spend more time on other woman flight pioneers

Starting with Jackie Cochran. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Cochran

* Encouraged by then-Major Chuck Yeager, with whom Cochran shared a lifelong friendship, on May 18, 1953, at Rogers Dry Lake, California, Cochran flew the Sabre 3 at an average speed of 652.337 mph. During the course of this run the Sabre went supersonic, and Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier.*

Per her wikipedia page: "During her supersonic run, Yeager flew right on her wing."

Analogs of each other. Yeager said as much in his autobiography.

She was an amazingly competent firecracker, two traits that rarely go together and produce greatness when they do.

Jackie is the first person I thought of too.

Also notable: Bessie Coleman, who received her pilot's license a year before Earhart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessie_Coleman

And Coleman had to leave the US and go to France to get her license, because she was an African-American woman and no US school would teach her. She took French classes to send applications to the flight schools.

Our country's most famous aviator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Batten

Jackie Cochran and the Night Witches should be placed higher than her, in my personal opinion.

Amelia was quite the daredevil though! Fame is not always for the noble reasons.

The Night Witches were fascinating to read about, thanks!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches

http://dupuisww2.weebly.com/wasp-and-night-witches.html

The Sabaton song about them is absolutely excellent, too.

Pancho Barnes has entered the chat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancho_Barnes

The videos (!!) of Gladys Ingle changing tires on flying planes are incredible [1, 2]. It's almost hard to believe these are real.

She was the fourth woman to earn a pilot's license.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Ingle (see videos)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qW98Ji6hHmY (colorized, restored)

My palms are sweaty

> One of her most daring stunts was to stand on the wing of an aircraft while it "looped the loop".

Uff!

I hope this picture opens:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi...

"Lillian Boyer hanging from right wing boom using right hand, circa 1920s"

Reminds me of the influencer skyscraper climbing videos on YT. I guess it makes sense that people always loved outlandish thrills?

That video has my heartrate up to something very unhealthy. That is absolutely incredible.

Damn! What women have had to do over the years to prove their manhood. Would you look at the balls on that gal!

Would love to read some sources for what you say, most info I have read about her don't say anything about her supposed incompetence.

On the flight from Brazil to Senegal, Eahart ignored navigator Fred Noonan's course correction and they landed in Saint Louis instead of Dakar, which is 150 miles off. Well, Africa is a big continent but 150 miles is a big deal when you're island hopping in the pacific.

I highly recommend West with the night[0] by Beryl Markham about a bush pilot in africa, super entertaining and the book is beyond well written.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_with_the_Night

It's probably generally accepted that she almost certainly had a lot of help writing the book but it's still almost certainly the best of the growing up in the highlands on Kenya memoirs.

Sources?

> She had a super wealthy husband who owned media companies, and he would greatly amplify her supposed achievements. This, more than any other fact about her, is why she is so well remembered

This applies to many historical figures whose names are widely known. Such stories are often carefully planned beforehand and then widely circulated, usually with political activism as the motivating force.

> This applies to many historical figures whose names are widely known.

... such as?

Did any of the others go missing without a trace for multiple decades? I'm pretty sure that's the reason she is so remembered. It's the only thing I know about her at all.

She crashed into the middle of the pacific. The whole 'missing' thing is just more media attention, she is just dead.

> Earhart was a bad pilot and was considered dangerously incompetent by some who worked with her

Do you have sources for that and your other claims about her flying ability? I'd like to read more.

Sounds very similar to Sally Ride. Many people who worked with her had complaints about her level of professionalism and behavior. Many believe she was chosen to be the first because her name went well with PR. And this was not a sexism thing - many of the people with legitimate complaints spoke highly of other female astronauts, like Judy Resnik (and history does not cover the other 5 like it does Sally Ride).

I think the framing here is somewhat important. Your post can make it seem as if Earhart was someone who over-exaggerated her own achievements, however from what I remember, she was generally quite honest and up-front about the limits and weaknesses of her piloting skills.

She frequently described her landings as poor, and also said that learning to fly was a long, drawn-out process for her.

The image she cultivated was one of a gutsy risk-taker who doesn't take no for an answer, not as a master pilot. She is remembered for her attitude and how it relates to gender norms in the broader context, and I would still say, rightfully so.

> In many of her 'firsts' she was little more than an observer, with her mechanic or others flying the plane while she rode along

I can't quite comment on the "many" part, but again, it's something she was pretty honest about when it happened, to my knowledge. E.g. on the (initial) transatlantic flight, her words: "Stultz did all the flying—had to. I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes."

So you're saying we should give ber credit and pay attention to her because she admitted she doesn't deserve credit or attention? What?

My point is that there are many legitimate woman flight pioneers wbo weren't gifted an oversized (and basically bogus) reputation by virtue of being part of the gilded social class.

I'm suggesting that it's fine to pay attention to Earhart for other reasons, including the particulars of her media phenomenon, the audience appetite for it, and so on. And I don't think it's OK to incept a sort of unqualified counter-meme of "look here, a woman with fake achievements".

HN being curious about the particulars of her - factually - famous disappearance makes just as much sense as the once-a-year HN discussion of the Dyatlov Pass incident.

I do agree there's many other aviators worth talking about.

> And I don't think it's OK to incept a sort of unqualified counter-meme of "look here, a woman with fake achievements".

To her credit, she was very open about how little she had done and the fact that she was little more than an observer who was present (at least in some of her most noted stunts). She does have significant achievements as well, but these are greatly overstated. She was poor and ungifted pilot (by her own account) that happened to have the fortune to allow her to be idle and spend a lot of money to keep trying to become an adequate pilot (she required far more training than others by her own account), and who ended up getting herself and others killed in a stunt designed entirely to produce media attention.

You seem to want to frame this as an attempt to attack women. It is not. This is about class. The women who were great pilots, and who demonstrated that women can achieve and even out achieve top men are passed over again and again to pay even more attention to Earhart.

The counter meme is: Look, a person from the top social class with some real and some dubious achievements who completely eclipses contemporaries who were far more impressive (but less rich).

I do agree with you but I find it odd we are 20 paragraphs into this conversation and not a single mention of any other woman pilot besides Earhart. Who are the woman and shouldn't we be talking about them instead of spilling even more ink for Earhart?

I can't reply to pests directly due to thread depth limit, but:

Bessica Raiche built her own airplane out of piano strings and silk when she read about the Wright Brother's flight. She was the first American woman to fly solo. She is worth remembering for many reasons, the flying just makes her relevant to this discussion.

I think Bessica Raiche is a worthy person for young women to hear about. Frankly she is a worthy person for young men to hear about too, she inspires me. If you are ever in a position where you need to be to keep at something, I think remembering that a person built an airplane out of wire and bamboo poles and then flew it solo, crashed, and kept at it is hard to beat. If she did it today it would be remarkable, but she did it in 1910 when it was completely unreasonable to try. She was competent in multiple fields and a renaissance woman. She was able to achieve remarkable things, and more mundane things that were still remarkable given the time she lived.

"On October 13, 1910, Raiche was awarded a diamond-studded gold medal inscribed "First Woman Aviator in America" by Hudson Maxim of the Aeronautical Society of America".

"Bessica was a physician, one of the first women specialists in obstetrics and gynecology in the United States"

"Bessica served as president of the Orange County Medical Association"

Have you ever heard of her before? Her Wikipedia page is less than 1 page long and only has one section. Earhart's Wikipedia page is 64 pages long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessie_Raiche

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

If you want to be remembered, it's better to be rich and connected than a remarkable and competent person.

I'm sick of Amelia Earhart, the rich poser who got herself killed through what is credibly believed to be willful negligence and incompetence with her own equipment (the negligence and incompetence with her equipment is well documented, we just don't know if that is what killed her because she was so far off course that she was never found). It's ironic that if she had been a better navigator it's likely that she would have a worse reputation, because she might have wrecked closer to where she was supposed to have been and they could have figured out what happened.

> we really should spend more time on other woman flight pioneers

Like Beate Uhse (actually: Beate Uhse-Rotermund), who is much more well-known for the sex shop empire that she built than for her acrobatic flight skills:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beate_Uhse-Rotermund

> Earhart did not understand the relationship between wavelength and frequency nor how to convert from one to the other.

Is this true? Even the most incompetent pilot should know at least these basics.

Some of these comments are funny. I am sure there are plenty of mistakes made by plenty of competent people as I read the next article about Boeing. Good to analyze root cause ….to a point. Some of you hate brave women, who probably would all be classed as reckless and less trained in much but cooking/laundry in that era, and it shows.

Now clean up the mud from the reckless 4 wheeling you did before lunch.

Wut.

You don’t care about incompetent but good people such as Earhart being essentially murdered by a society pushing them to take on a task they’re not properly equipped to do because of PR wins and advertising.

Didn’t the US Navy kill a woman who wasn’t ready to solo jet flying back in the 80s by pushing her to take on the task before she had passed the simulations so they could beat the US Air Force to have the first solo woman jet pilot.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Hultgreen#:~:text=Death...

Look at a picture of her face and think of her family she was killed by people like you who don’t think logically and only care for how things make them feel

I am defined as a logical processor in an assessment somewhere. Your activism towards me hasn’t been working since launched by a disinformation actor precisely December 2019. Would be great if someone can tell me where the forum is.

Interesting info about root cause, culture and errors though. Also I might care.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com