Search for Earhart Called Badly Botched Coast Guard accused of defaming flier in coverup Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer Saturday, July 1, 2000 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Sixty-three years after Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific on her round-the-world tour, new research suggests that the famed aviatrix and her navigator could have been rescued. An article in the June issue of the research journal Naval History reveals that the U.S. Coast Guard bungled its job so badly -- and then tried to cover it up -- that it was at least partly to blame for Earhart's disappearance. ``It's a classic cover-your-butt scenario,'' said Ric Gillespie, executive director of the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, the leading Earhart research group. ``I think this article raises a point that needed raising, which is that the Coast Guard's role in all this is not as pristine as it's always been presented,'' he said. ``There were definite problems with their conduct.'' Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, left Oakland on May 20, 1937, for a round-the-world trip. Then, 63 years ago today, the plane disappeared on the third-to-last leg of the journey, a 2,500-mile stretch from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, a flat, treeless strip of sand in the South Pacific. Earhart's Electra plane was about 200 miles from Howland Island when she started communicating with officers aboard the Coast Guard cutter Itasca, stationed at Howland to assist with her arrival. This, according to the article in Naval History, is when things started to go terribly wrong. Among the numerous gaffes detailed in the article: -- Earhart was using one radio frequency, and the Coast Guard was using another. The Coast Guard was listening when Earhart expected them to be transmitting, and vice versa. -- The Coast Guard had access to a high-frequency radio that could have reached Earhart but didn't use it. -- Howland Island was actually 5.8 nautical miles from where Earhart's chart said it was, and the Coast Guard neglected to tell her this. -- In the search-and-rescue operation, the Coast Guard only combed about a third of the area it should have, and at night, when it wasn't possible to see much. While trying to locate Howland Island, Earhart and Noonan's radio transmissions ended abruptly, and no one heard from them again. Their plane was never found, but the main theories are that they ran out of gas and crashed in the ocean or they landed on nearby Gardner's Island, possibly living as castaways for a while before dying. Most of the search and communication failings fall on the shoulders of Commander Warren K. Thompson. According to the article, Thompson must have suspected that he had botched the job, because in logs and reports to supervisors, he lied about many of the facts and, for good measure, threw in a few fabrications. In other correspondence, he blamed Earhart's piloting skills and implied that she was at least partly to responsible for her plane going down. The Coast Guard was apparently so embarrassed by the Itasca's performance that it sealed many of the relevant documents. The records were finally unopened in 1988 through the Freedom of Information Act. Thompson died of a heart attack in 1939, but since the Naval History article was published, the Coast Guard has begun looking into the allegations at its Washington, D.C., headquarters. ``Our historian's office is aware of the article, and we're reviewing our own documents to see if they support it,'' said Commander Jim McPherson of the public affairs office. ``It's too early to tell if there are any discrepancies.'' The author of the article, John P. Riley of Lake Mary, Fla., is retired from a career in radio propagation and antennas. He said he started looking into the radio details of Earhart's disappearance out of curiosity. The more he unearthed, he said, ``I began to realize that something was really wrong.'' ``Thompson had been commended highly. But I was absolutely shocked at some of the things he did, and bewildered as to why he did them,'' Riley said. The article took 3 1/2 years to research. In addition to poring over old radio logs and other material, Riley interviewed many of the radiomen who were on Howland Island and the Itasca at the time of the Earhart operation. Naval History magazine is published by the U.S. Naval Institute, an independent nonprofit on the campus of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., that serves as an open forum for military researchers. Riley's article was extensively fact- checked, said editor in chief Fred Schultz. Gillespie, the TIGHAR Earhart expert, disputed a few of Riley's technical details but concurred with the gist of the story. He said that Riley didn't go far enough and that Thompson messed up the job even more than his Naval History article indicates. Neither Riley nor Gillespie believe that Thompson's errors were malicious. They believe he probably made a series of bad decisions, panicked and tried to cover them up. ``Here's this guy, just doing his job, and he's assigned to meet Amelia Earhart in the middle of the Pacific,'' Gillespie said. ``Suddenly, America's sweetheart of the air disappears on his watch. A close reading of the logs show that those guys were really scrambling.'' Jerry Hamilton of Castro Valley, an expert on the navigator and former Piedmont resident Fred Noonan, said Riley's article ``is the first time I've seen anything that suggests the Coast Guard wasn't doing its job 110 percent, although I've always had my suspicions.'' No one was willing to say that Earhart and Noonan definitely could have been rescued if Thompson hadn't blown his assignment, but they did say that the article vindicates Earhart and Noonan's piloting skills. Due partly to the Coast Guard's coverup, many people had believed that the pair crashed because Earhart was a poor pilot and Noonan was an alcoholic. ``A lot of things happened that were beyond their control, and they had a lot of bad luck,'' Hamilton said. ``What this article means is that we can now say conclusively that Amelia Earhart was a pretty good pilot and Fred Noonan was one of the best air navigators of his day.'' <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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