NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Earhart's Plane - Search For?
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2011 Apr 25, 18:29 -0700
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2011 Apr 25, 18:29 -0700
| If you read from a book: "First place a metal container filled with a liquid heat-transfer-medium onto a source of heat energy. Add energy to the system until the liquid heat-transfer-medium reaches a temperature of 373 degrees Kelvin. Next breach the outer surface of an avian ovum and carefully pour the contents of it into the liquid heat transfer medium..." You might be able to figure out that this is a recipe for poaching an egg, but one thing you will know for sure is that the guy who wrote these words is not a cook! You know this because cooks use a standard terminology for their instructions while this guy was searching for words to describe the process, words that a cook would never use. The same is true for navigators who also use standard terminology. We discussed the Waitt research on another forum and I have some criticisms of it. I went to this website and read the whole hundred page report and ran into lots of non standard words used to describe the navigation which tells me that it was not written or reviewed by a person who has knowledge about navigation. I ran into this same thing with TIGHAR's supposed navigation "experts." One example that sticks in my mind was when one of TIGHAR's "experts" was analyzing Noonan's navigation of the leg to Hawaii. He described the direction that Noonan was pointing his sextant to take observations of the stars as the "look angle!" Anybody who knows anything about navigation knows the standard word for this is "azimuth." It is the universal word for this and is the same word in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Greek, Spanish, and probably every other language since this word was of Arabic origin and was translated into all of these languages. Yet, TIGHAR's navigation "expert" had never heard of it. There are the same kind of problems with Waitts research. Here is an example. The report states the coordinates for three possible "end of navigation" (EON) points, a term you will not find in any navigation text. It gives the coordinates for EON C as N00° 40' 51.7 W177° 16' 41.1 which is also not a standard format for latitude and longitude. The proper format would be 0° 40' 51.7" N, 177° 16' 41.1" W. ( 0 degrees, 40 minutes, 51.7 seconds North, 177 degrees, 16 minutes 41.1 seconds West.) Notice the Waitt report left off the double quote marks which denote seconds of latitude and longitude. But even more funny is that a navigator would never use seconds but would use only minutes to give the location since seconds are a very small unit. And to make it even more ridiculous it gives the position to a precision of one-tenth of a second. A degree of latitude is 60 nautical miles. (A nautical mile is 6076 feet, 1852 meters, approximately 6000 feet.) Since there are 60 minutes in a degree one minute is one nautical mile, approximately 6000 feet. Since there are also 60 seconds in a minute this means that one second is 100 feet and a tenth of a second is only 10 feet! so Waitt is claiming to know the location to a precision of 10 feet, ridiculous! Also, since the plane was flying at about 150 mph (130 knots) so it was covering about 200 feet per second of time meaning that Waitt must also be claiming to know the time of arrival to one-twentieth of a second of time! As you can see, I have some problems with their methodology. I will examine it more fully in a future post. Ian wrote that we can eliminate the "crash and sank" theory because Waitt had searched the ocean bottom and found no plane, well not so fast. The bottom line is they did not search the most likely area. gl --- On Mon, 4/25/11, Gary LaPook <glapook@pacbell.net> wrote:
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