(2 of 3)
Several facts made it clear that much more than simple bad luck was involved. Before the hop-off, when capable Navigator Noonan inspected what he supposed was an ultra-modern "flying laboratory," he was dismayed to discover that there was nothing with which to take celestial bearings except an ordinary ship sextant. He remedied that by borrowing a modern bubble octant designed especially for airplane navigation. For estimating wind drift over the sea, he obtained two dozen aluminum powder bombs. For some reason these bombs were left behind in a storehouse. The Coast Guard cutter Itasca, which had been dispatched from San Diego to Howland Island solely as a help to the flyers, would have been able to take directional bearings on the Earhart plane if the latter could have tuned its signals to a 500-kilacycle frequency. The plane's transmitter would have been able to send such signals if it had had a trailing antenna. Miss Earhart considered all this too much bother, no trailing antenna was taken along. Finally, the Itasca's, commander would have had a better idea where to look if the plane had radioed its position at regular intervals. But not one position report was received after the plane left New Guinea. In fact only seven position reports are known to have been radioed by the flyers during their entire trip.
When word that the Earhart plane was lost reached the U. S., Husband Putnam wired an appeal for a Navy search to President Roosevelt. But even before the message reached Washington, Secretary of the Navy Swanson had ordered the Navy to start hunting. By last week the search was costing $250,000 a day. The battleship Colorado hove to off the Phoenix Islands, catapulted three planes from its deck. The flyers skimmed over Gardner and McKean Islands and Carondelet Reef, saw nothing but ruined guano works and the wreck of a tramp freighter. Thousands of startled seabirds fluttered up, menacing the propellers and forcing the flyers to climb. Some days equatorial squalls and vanishing visibility crippled the hunt, but on others the weather was perfect, visibility unlimited. By week's end the Colorado's planes had scanned more than 100,000 square miles. The Itasca, which inaugurated the search last fortnight, continued its futile patrol until fuel ran short. The minesweeper Swan put ashore a searching party at Canton Island, where last month a party of scientists viewed the | solar eclipse (TIME, June 21). Meanwhile the aircraft carrier Lexington, with 62 planes aboard (instead of 72 as first announced) and an escort of four destroyers, sped out of San Diego at forced draft, stopped in Hawaii to refuel, arrived in the search area early this week. If the Lexington's great fleet of planes could not find the lost flyers. Rear Admiral Orin G. Murfin, coordinator of the search, planned to abandon it. Meanwhile the chance of finding the flyers alive, according to the consensus of searchers, was already down to one in a million.