2018 Jan 17 - Where is Amelia Earhart (HD Upload)

Okay, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome. First, let me introduce myself. I'm the new program director, Chandra Merchandani. And for our first talk this year, we have George Anderson and Gondar Azawal giving us a talk on where is Amelia Earhart? It's five years of hard work. Give them a big hand. Before we continue, let me tell you, I'm gonna stop them for 45 minutes into the talk after they finish the talk. So you can have time to ask questions, okay? Thank you. Hello. George and I have been working, we did about five years ago, we put together a 100-page report that we're going to raffle off today on Amelia Earhart. And so that was in 2012. So for the last five years, we've been tracking all the crazies and the non-crazies about all the stories about Amelia Earhart. So we're gonna look at those today. We're gonna look at the Navy search, Dave Jordan, Elgin Long, Nautico, they did some searching. Fred Gore, Mike Campbell, Marshall Islands, they thought that she might be up near where the Japanese are. And then the Tiger is looking down in the other island where they found aluminum pieces and bottles and shoes and things like that. And then our idea, or where we think she might end up to be. Now we have a couple of other areas. We're talking about the fuel performance production and the burden of, and we came up with an idea of burden of proof. You know, it's like in a court case, you gotta prove to say that it really happens. And we think a lot of these ideas that people throw back and forth, they have no proof or have very little proof. So we wanna show that as a, at least for you guys to compare that and to think about it from that point of view. Also, we're looking at the plane that crashed and they haven't found it yet, the 370. And it's a big ocean out there. And they've been looking for that for three years and they haven't found it. So we wanna compare it to the size of where we think the Amelia Earhart is. So that'll be, and I'll give you also an idea of the cost involved in searching for something like this. Now, one thing, she enjoyed flying and going to different places and making records. She said, please know that I'm quite aware of the hazards. I wanna do it because I wanna do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be put a challenge to other. So she's been, she's done a lot of things in terms of being the first lady to go across Atlantic Ocean. She went to Honolulu, Oakland to Honolulu and she started her trip around the world. But what was her goal? Her goal was to be the first to fly around the world near the equator. There've been other people that flew and didn't go that far, but she wanted to prove it, prove the hardest, toughest flight. Now, she said, this is going to be her last record flight. She's gonna retire after this and just enjoy life. But I think that she might've had a get-home-itis syndrome because she had to be home in Oakland for July the 4th because they had a big parade there. And she owed about $850,000 in today's cost for repairing the airplane when they crashed the first time she tried doing the flight. And so that's a lot of money. So she tried, she was selling these stamp things and she had a lot of those on the airplane. Now, the interesting thing is she got rid of the parachute, she got rid of the boat, but she didn't get rid of these because this was money. Now, she did do a test ride with Paul Mance and we have one of his books that we're gonna give out today. And they had a 16-hour flight and he felt that she really didn't have the stamina. In fact, when it was getting ready to land, she asked him to land the plane. And so the issue is that this flight was over 20 hours plus she got up like at four in the morning to check the fuel and everything. So we think of what, 24 to 28-hour day. At the end of the day, things can go bad. In fact, in our chart, we have some ideas that George will talk about how the airplane's noise, the fumes, the lack of sleep, you know, all those criteria can cause you to make bad decisions. So basically, we're looking at an estimated flight time of 21 hours and we have enough fuel to last for about 22 and a half hours. So we're looking at an hour or two of extra fuel and you'll see some of these theories are that she's gonna have four to six hours left. Well, she said that she only had a half an hour left when she got there near the island. So we think that that's probably more likely. Who would say that I have a half an hour left when you have four hours left? You know, I don't think that that's reasonable. So one of the problems was she had no direct communications with the head of Ontario ship in the middle and she transmitted out to them, but she never got anything back. And to me, why didn't she turn back? Why didn't she turn back? Because she had to get there to pay for the bills. You know, so she said, well, if I turn back, I won't get there July the fourth. And then, you know, we don't wanna have the parade. The other thing she did was every time, every place she stopped, she wrote an article for the newspaper and had it sent back. And in fact, we have a book of all of her articles. So she, they were making money left and right. Well, you know, they had to make money because it was an expensive, expensive flight. So you can see like New York Times. The interesting thing in here is they say plane was equipped to float. Well, we've seen a lot of actually simulations and actually results where one of those Lockheeds went down. The airplane, the engines are so heavy that it goes straight down into the ground. It doesn't float. Even if she's got all those tanks of gasoline. So there was a lot of speculation right about the time and from her husband, he said, well, she's got the lifeboat. Well, the trouble with the lifeboat, how are you gonna get it out into the sea? Because there's a hatch above her head. And I think there's a door on the side, but I think they locked that so that that's not accessible. So how's she gonna get the life raft out there? It doesn't make any sense. I think they're a little optimistic. And in fact, they were saying, well, she could be floating there for hours. Well, that's not true. So the Titanic was found after 73 years. And so we think that she might be at 18 to 20,000 feet. But we got to remember the ocean is huge. I mean, it's just, you know, I'll show you some numbers here in a while. It's really crazy. So the Navy was looking for, the problem was with that was that there was no debris was found. But when they had a similar flight between, you know, Hawaii, Oakland and Hawaii, the Dole Company sponsored this contest. A couple of planes went down. They never found a loss like nothing. So it's not, and you know, that plane is not as big as a plane today. And it didn't have as much stuff in it, like seats and things like that, that would be floating on the surface. So the Navy cost $4 million per day, $60 million. There was a lot of, they shut it off because one of the things is they were saying, these are crazy, crazy events that people are doing. And then the Navy has got to search for them. You know, it's something like today, where you've got to climb up a mountain and you fall down and you've got to helicopter rescue you. And it costs you $50,000 to do that. They were sort of complaining, this is a lot of money for people to do, you know, crazy stuff, in other words. Now, the first area that we're going to cover, the first scenario is David Jordan. And they were searching, they were searching using this underwater vehicle and that they just put it down under there and it goes, it searches back and forth, it searches back and forth. And so they did that. And they searched 2,000 square nautical miles at one meter resolution. Now remember the 2,000 number when we talked later on about the vastness of the area that we think she might be in. He would like to search 6,000 miles. And Elgin Long was, he wrote a book and he's been using, Elgin Long thinks that she got near the island and crashed in the sea. And sort of George and I have the same idea. You know, it's not really, because you know, the radio transmissions, the one thing is, one thing we have in Elgin Long's and our scenarios is there is actual data of her transmissions of where she was, where her speed was and so on. But the other scenarios don't have that data. So here's the other one, the Marshall Islands. Somehow she ended up in there, you know, going towards Japan. Japan held Marshall Islands. And she's supposed to be, somebody had seen her in a light boat. But you know, the thing is, they have a depiction of an airplane crashing, you know, on a stamp. But what is the, how did she get the raft out? How did she pump it up? You know, it's not really a plausible scenario to be able to get a life raft out of an airplane. And so the thing would be is, they claim that when she got to Baker Island, she had close to four to six hours of fuel left. And you can see in our calculations, that doesn't seem plausible. And so she would, now she might've gone a little bit, did a shortcut, but you gotta remember, the signal was pretty strong. So they feel that she was at least within a couple of hundred miles of the island. So she might've gone this way and then gone up there, but she still needed four hours of fuel. So it doesn't seem plausible that she didn't make it to that island. Of course, if she can't make it to the island, the eyewitness people seeing her doesn't matter. She didn't make it. You know, they got a 300 page book with a thousand people seeing her there, but those are just speculative. And especially a lot of them were many years later, they're interviewed like 40 or 50 years later. What do you remember about anything that you saw 40 years earlier? Now, the other one we're talking about is, History Channel found a photograph showing Amelia and Fred, but they're not enough pixels there to really say that that's who they are. But then they found another, the Japanese found another version of it that was published two years before. Now, the History Channel is saying they're looking at it, but they haven't come back to say that they were wrong. But, you know, that's the thing that there's a lot of information out there. And since they didn't really publish it before, nobody could, nobody really verified it until they ran their movie. Now, the Gillespie Island, the Gillespie is Tiger, and they said that, well, if she went up here, it took, it was 350 miles, so she needed two to three hours of fuel. Now, certainly if she came up this way, and she was 150 miles from there, it's possible that she could make it down there. But then the question would be is, if you're lost, how can you find an island if you're lost? You know, if they can't find the island that they were trying to find, how are they gonna find another island that they were trying to find? You know, it's just a question that, now, of course, what they found on there is they found all sorts of artifacts, but they're not really linked to Earhart. They're linked to maybe the era. You know, they're 1937, and they had some bottles and some shoes. And of course, they had the shoe, so, but it was the wrong size. It wasn't her size. And they also had other things, like they found an airplane, some aluminum there. And at first, they thought it was a perfect match, then they said, well, maybe it's a perfect match, maybe not. But they really can't test it because they don't have anything to test it. You know, they tested against other Lockheeds, but it's sort of, you know, the eye of the beholder whether it's really a match or not. So we can say that, really, there's things that seem to be reasonable, and we'll show you later on in the chart that that doesn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt. And of course, the other thing is they found a picture where they thought it was a piece of a landing gear. And we've looked at that. They had a person evaluate it. And, you know, it's like, if you want to see something, maybe you can, if you believe, maybe you can see it. It's a little hard to say that it was actually a landing gear because there weren't enough pixels there again. So George can talk about our scenario. Thank you. Good evening. I have two things to cover. One is the scenario that we made, a drive between us after reading what seems like an endless number of sources. And I always like to brag, I mean, the time has gone by since 2012, but we actually obtained original manuscripts that weren't in general publication. So that's all in our paper, which is available to you. It's not a, it's an academic read. We did not write a sensational, we did not set out to write a sensational book or to make claims that our scenario was anything other than the derivation of all what we read and what we felt made sense. So that's what we present to you tonight. We're not attempting to compete. There are any number of reasonable scenarios. That is how you go about forming a Bayesian search pattern. And that was the end purpose of our paper was to show the methodology for where you prioritize your search and everything. And to do that, you have to come up with expert, Bayesian statistics is based on expert input. So we serve the role of the experts in assigning a recommended search pattern. So in going there, though, we had a very interesting journey. And the first thing I want to point out is the product, one of the products of our journey, and this is a concept map over to your left. And we have copies of it. You can take home. It's addictive when you actually, you know, get in to look at it, if you're at all interested in the middle of your heart, because we think there's a lot of original ideas in the C-map. And for those of you that have kids in school and the children in about fourth grade, fifth grade that have brought home a C-map that they've worked on, you realize that the procedure is not rocket science to develop one. But the knowledge that you put into it can be quite valuable if you know what you're talking about. So we would assert that after we got this together, we sought things that could not be seen without putting all these ideas together. And I'm just going to come over for a minute because my assignment is to talk about this over here. But I'll just say this. These are actors. This, for some of you architectural engineers, this is closely related. This is the pilot's duties here. We put down everything that we had read and understood. This is the radio operator's responsibilities. Now, those of you that somewhat are familiar with the details of her flight, there was no radio operator aboard. So Amelia was performing both these duties. I think that tells you right away, as we're all systems engineers or we like to hang around with system engineers, that's why you're here tonight. That tells you a lot. That tells you, yeah, they were up for a long time. Yeah, there were a lot of circumstances working against them. But the fact their duty were so complicated and so extensive that it was beyond, in my opinion, this chart, you could make a case that there was more to do there than she could possibly get done. So back now to a scenario. The scenario is our summary of how we would describe the end event, which is the approach to Howland Island. And it's all based on the courses that were flown and made what we have chosen. I think we're original in saying that people use the term splash and run out of fuel. We call it EOF, end of flight. I think that's the fairest way to describe what happened because we don't know how the flight ended. And we're not trying to suggest it could never have landed in Jalliute in the Marshalls or in Nicamaroro, which by the way, on the chart, if anybody's confused, that was Gardner Island in 1937. Sorry for the oversight in preparing the slides. So how does this work here? I'm like, okay. So we have Howland Island, we have Baker Island. We have a planned course. We have an estimated time en route of 21 hours. Now we know that because Amelia Earhart transmitted that to the Coast Guard Cutter Atasca, which was standing just off the island and was supposed to be her homing beacon. And we could talk forever about what went wrong with the homing and so on, but we don't have time to do that tonight, but we're always glad to talk about it. Any part of this thing we're glad to talk about. So we think that the scenario goes something like this, that the course in red and the turning point and her position at 19 hours and 12 minutes GMT is what was on the navigator's table. This is where he thought they were. Now it's very important where the navigator thinks he is is not necessarily actually where he is. Without getting into any technical details, that's the bottom line. So I'll talk a little bit about that vertical line that is there because that's very important and immediately a lure. Okay, this is a, in those days, if you couldn't find your island, you throttled back and you went to best fuel endurance, not best cruise, but best endurance so your fuel would last long. And you flew very slow and you did a methodical search. There are three types of searches in manuals, aeronautical manuals of that era. We've looked at them all and just for convenience, we did the easiest one to depict on the slide, but we're not saying that's what she was doing. She may not have been doing any of them if she was getting overly anxious and wasn't listening to her navigator. I don't think Amiya knew about search patterns. I think that the navigator was the only person on board that could have known. Okay, okay, so let's take it right to the end. If they had flown this course down to the search pattern, they've flown over Holland Island and they are now in a search pattern and the navigator assumes he's gonna eventually home in on the island and see it visually and they're making smoke with the ship so there should be a range of 40 to 50 miles that's in the daylight early in the morning. That's what he thought he was. Now this is what we think. Okay, we think that two errors, which are very typical in aviation. I've had some experience investigating accidents with the NTSB and I can defend that. One thing is pilots are always getting confused, especially when they're tired. They think they've arrived at a turning point and they turn early. Well, Gundars has already talked about jettomitis so that could play a role. But wouldn't be the only pilot that turned early and slammed into a mountain or did something. There's plenty of them. So we assume that there was an early turn. We assume that she was closer to the course than perhaps the navigator showed. And then lastly, you see the vertical line that the airplane is pointing to and you notice it's mirrored in the navigator course. Those vertical lines in this chart are called sun lines. What's happening there is that the navigator does not have a clue where he is left or right. But he does have the ability to know how far along he is to a destination. And the way he does that is he used the sextant during the day to shoot the sun. The sun happened to be rising right on the nose of the airplane. So as soon as the sun got above the horizon far enough to get an accurate reading on his sextant, he would know within the error of his sight where he was. They call it the speed line, but along the course. He wouldn't know left or right, but he'd know how far along he was. So many have speculated, we kind of agree, that certainly Fred Noonan knew how to do that and would have done it. What we don't know is how accurate he was because anybody, after they've been up that long and other factors, refraction, the atmosphere was not necessarily the same as it was on the day before and so on. Those errors can put you off. Well, you don't have to be very far off. And so we're just displacing that vertical sun line, okay, a reasonable amount to just show that that error plus the early turn can put you in a place that you don't know, you know, it's not where you expect to be. So to make a long story short, we think that they ended up southwest. And this is not the scale, of course, it can't be in this kind of depiction. And then did their search, I think, there we go. Okay, so we think that their actual track mirrored just what the navigator was showing on his chart, but because of their early turn, which he did not record on his chart, right? He recorded it later. Okay, so here we go. The radio call is the same and then the X indicates the local search to end of flight. So that's, you know, our contribution to the literally myriad number of scenarios that have been presented. We don't wanna be in the business of defending it against the other scenarios, because we welcome new scenarios. We think the more scenarios there are, the better chance that a Bayesian search would zero in on that area of the search grid that would be most productive. The last search took $10 million, that was this spring. This is not chicken feed looking for Amelia's aircraft. So we would like, of course, like any researchers to contribute to the knowledge here, but we certainly don't wanna debate it. There's many number of blogs that have been going on for the last few years that get into heated discussions over how much fuel was aboard and on and on and on. And occasionally we're aware of it, but so far we've been lucky and avoided becoming involved in that, because our role is to, you know, a successful conclusion to the search. Not an argument. Go to the next slide. What's that? Go to the next slide. Yeah, okay. There we go. Okay. You wanna? Okay. So I don't have much to say about this island or this slide except to give you a feel for where the Gilbert Islands are and the island that she supposedly went down on. Well, wait a minute. Amelia Toll is clear. Let me have that and I'll find it quicker. Amelia Toll is where the first scenario put places her crash landing. And then from there she was taken to prisoner and then taken to Saipan. And then many people saw her there. And as an aircraft investigator for five years, I can assure you, nobody believes eyewitnesses because you won't have very long career as an investigator because there's just terrible, terrible difficulty with witness reports. Fact. It's not my idea. So anyway, Nica Mororo is down here, okay? And there've been 10 expeditions at least to Nica Mororo to find evidence that she landed there and actually was able to transmit distress signals for two or three days. Three days. Yeah. And again, I'm saying that with an even voice. I just find it very difficult as a pilot to imagine that that airplane survived any kind of landing at or near Nica Mororo Island. It would've been wonderful if she'd been able to do that, but I just don't think it was in the cards and I don't think she had the fuel to get there. But either way, it's not anything. Now the one possibility is if they're off course down here and they come across and inadvertently fly upon Nica Mororo, we can't rule that out except for one thing, the radio signals. The last transmission that she made was the maximum signal strength that the meter on the ATAS could measure. So I've talked to several of the radio operators 20 years ago. We had a something similar discussion and Chief Bellerts was there. He wasn't a chief at the time. He was a very young radio operator. But he talked to us. He said, we all were looking out and we were sure she would come in sight at any moment. Now that story has persisted to this day. But I actually heard the man say it. He's deceased now, but he is about as close to an eyewitness of what went on in the radio room of the ATAS as we'll ever have. Okay, let's see. Anything else here, Bruges? Okay, this is just, and I apologize, this is not, this was just put here to kind of for perspective. It would not have been that far north, that course line. But you can see the orientation with the islands. Now, this is our product. This is our product here. This is the result of a Bayesian search pattern. And what you've done is you've divided what you think the search area is into search grids and presumably ones that you can complete on one expedition. And then you prioritize them using expert knowledge. And so the expert knowledge, we're showing our expert knowledge and then we assign lesser probabilities along this grid. And so you can see the hotspot, the temperature chart for those of you that are used to a temperature chart and so on, a heat chart. So no big deal there. But if you're spending $10 million on an expedition, it's a very big deal. And that's what we're trying to help with. Okay, and Dundaris can talk more about the search areas. Yes, they're very large. Okay, and I've already said the center of that is where we feel is most probable. The first search should be in there. Okay, you want me to talk about the- Yeah, go ahead and talk about it. Okay. There are so many experts in the world. I had no idea. I've been a career pilot. I've flown many airplanes, some of which date back to this era of the C-47. 2,000 hours flying in the Pacific. I can identify with a million many ways that the other folks can't identify. That doesn't make me any smarter, but I can identify. And I do know a little bit about fuel consumption. I'm a power plant engineer. I'm an expert on both reciprocating and jet aircraft engines. So I did bring something to this party. And some of this stuff makes me very uncomfortable because it just doesn't have any documentation. Kelly Miller was, who many of you know, is a very famous. He's, I'm an aerodynamics engineer as well. He's the holy grail of engineers. Started with, before Amelia's airplane and ended up with the SR-71. I believe he had a role in all of those, all the Lockheed airplanes through that era. The Super Connie or the Conniff Constellation. What else? There was some, oh, P-38 Lightning. I could go on, but the point is, they attribute these fuel figures to Kelly Johnson. Well, I've been in the aircraft industry. I've helped build airplanes. Kelly Johnson doesn't know anything about engines. He's an aeronautical engineer. So he got this delivered to him by the tech rep from Pratt & Whitney. Okay, that's my opinion, okay? I may be all wrong. Maybe Kelly Johnson as a hobby went home at night and ran these engines and recorded consumption, but I doubt it. So a lot of this stuff has to be taken with a grain of salt and most of it is optimistic. And the reason I submit to you that it's optimistic is everybody wants that extra fuel so the scenario works for them, okay? And that's why we on the opposite end are taking a very sharp eye with the fuel consumption, okay? And so I'm the reason that we have made sure that these fuel consumptions are not overly optimistic. So what do I have to say here, Gunther? Okay, estimated flight time, 21 or 2130. Here's the problem. She arrived by her own radio call at 1915 or 19- Pardon, 20? 1920, yeah. Okay, so she was ahead of flight plan. So you pilots out here realize only two variables, the distance hasn't changed. So what has changed? Either the headwinds or her power setting, okay? You can fly the airplane faster. You just burn fuel faster. So that remains the issue. Heated arguments all over that. My personal view is that she ran faster because of the get-home-itis and she hadn't had to pay a penalty for increased fuel consumption before. And the fact was that there are calculations that probably didn't exist in those days but we are an analysis know that the certain values of headwinds given the cruising speed of the airplane, it's more economical to fly faster, okay? Nobody that I know of has taken that position but I would entertain it. It's just that I don't think in 1937, this airplane was a year old when it was lost or a year and a few months. I don't think anybody had those performance charts for that airplane. I could be wrong. Now, the other thing that you read about and I'll shut up, Cambridge Air Fuel Analyzer. Today we have the emission monitoring thing on our exhaust pipes. And in those days, they were just learning about getting the most miles per gallon of fuel. And so they were measuring the temperature of the gases and the fuel and the exhaust, excuse me. And by doing that, they were able to lean the engine out, the air fuel ratio to the best performance they could get as far as fuel consumption. But the technology was not as good as we would expect it today. And so the danger is if you're wrong, if you lean out too far, guess what? Your engine overheats. So she was aware of that. She was a good pilot. She had been, I think, trained with it. And so if anything, she would not lean to the maximum fuel mileage, if you will. She would keep it on the reset. I've flown these engines. I never dared get anywhere near the air fuel ideal. Stoichiometric, for those of you that are chemists, no way, you don't want those engines damaged. If you need them for 20 hours. So, and then she'd need them for another 20 hours the next day. So I don't believe any optimistic fuel consumption figures. I think common sense tells you that she came in in a more reasonable area. Okay, so I've already covered this. She arrived early and if you take the slides home, you can see that you can figure this all out. One thing to be careful of, and Gundars and I stumble over it all the time. A lot of the manuscripts talk in miles per hour. The airspeed indicator was in miles per hour, but when you're a navigator over the big ocean, you always talk in nautical miles per hour and nautical miles. Anything else gets you confused, okay? Because it just doesn't work out. Okay, so, okay. So at 2013, I'm just jumping ahead here. The last message from Earhart ran out of fuel, okay? And that's, we believe, is all real. We don't believe that there was anything hidden. We don't believe there was a secret mission. We don't believe that she was contriving. And I think that's all I have to say. So what we wanted to look at was a little bit from the law books, you know. We want to look at some credible evidence. When you say some of the fact that, you know, there was a shoe heel on an island, that's credible, but it's only somewhat credible. It's, you know, it's the same era. It could have been hers. It might've not been hers. Then we've got a substantial evidence. And then we have a preponderance of evidence and beyond reasonable doubt. Now, interesting thing is everybody agrees beyond reasonable doubt is the serial number off the engine. You know, yeah, we found her, you know. And this is a eye chart. But what we're looking at is we're looking at the fact that if we look at the, I'll read it here. The one with the Mike Campbell going to Marshall Islands. Did she have enough fuel to arrive in Marshall Islands? I think we already said that. We probably didn't think so. People saw her land in a rubber raft. We'd think they didn't even have a rubber raft on the plane. And photographs were shown to be her island, which we saw there had been debunked by already. So we really think that there's not much chance of that scenario. The other one is Tiger. Now, Tiger's been up there for 20 years, probably looking for her. The question is, did she have enough fuel to arrive? We don't really have, we have some evidence that she may, some evidence that she may not. Artifacts are found from the airplane. Her personal effects are inconsistent, but that's about all we can say. We can't say any of those belong to her. And radio transmissions in the plane after landing may have come from her, but there's a lot of hoaxes. Even on the New York Times, July the 3rd, you know, newspaper, they're saying, well, they heard her, they heard Amelia and all this stuff. But they also prove, you know, that was just like today on the internet, the hoaxes back then too. Now, the aluminum from the skin from the airplane, you know, that's some credible evidence. You know, the only problem with that is it seems like the marking on the skin of the aluminum is not consistent with a manufacturing person, company at the time. And of course, we have the landing gear. It sort of looks similar. It may look similar if you really, really think about it, but it's just like you've got to believe to make it real. So it's some credible evidence. They probably had enough fuel for an alternative. They're really way off course. And, you know, we do have a issue with the RF skip. So she could have been 200 miles away and they could have still had an S-5. And we found that and we researched that. So the other two scenarios, the important thing about these is that the radio signal was heard. And none of these other scenarios have or that they rely on the radio signal because it's, you know, the radio signal was heard when she was near the island, but then past it if she went to the other two sites, there was no radio communications from her anyway. And the radio, and the fact is that the radio messages were documented by the Navy by third party persons. Wasn't anybody that is researching it today. So that, you know, you just come to your own conclusion if you look at that. And then when you see these reports that they found this and they found that, you got to look and say, how credible is that? You know, and that sort of, you know, just one item doesn't mean it's done deal. It's like a murder situation. So here where we're looking at is comparing the cost of the search areas and the cost. So the search area that they did for the 370 was, you see that line down there, that line down there, that's 64,000 nautical square miles. Now our search area, and so that took them three years to search, cost them $157 million. Now the search area that we pointed out, and so that's only what I'll say, that's only one search area. You know, this could be over here, this could be over here, this could be over here. So, you know, if we're looking at the 100, this whole area is 100 nautical miles, well, this was only 64 and that was $157,000. So it's going to be luck that you're going to find it. And so, you know, the credibility that it may, maybe she's near the island, that's true, but it's going to be luck to find it. And so they searched only 2,000 nautical miles. So they're way, way, way, got to go a long way to do the whole thing. So now we're ready for some questions. Yeah, get the microphone so we can get it on the video. Hey, it's a really good talk, you guys. My question is because of the syntax that says ran out of fuel, is there any agreement on whether or not that message was during flight or after flight? She had a message at, I think there was actually, let me go back. There's actually a message right here. At 1912, low on gas, only a half an hour left. And they've had a couple of people verify that in the radio room. So that was at 1912. So less than an hour later, she had another message. It said, you know, she's searching. So we assume that, you know, because of the calculations here that you ran out of fuel, but I mean, I don't think a pilot would say, I'm low on gas, you know. I mean, unless it's somebody that, you know, some of the scenarios said, well, she said she's low on gas, but she still had four hours left. Well, I don't think a pilot, George, do you think a pilot would say she's low on gas if she had four hours left? No need to belabor that. Okay. Next. So thanks, guys, for being so interesting stuff. So what do you guys, in plain English, you know, what do you guys think happened the last minute or two? I mean, crashed in the ocean, crashed in land. I mean, you know, based on all the evidence that you've seen, what do you think is the story of the last minute from your guys' perspective? Well, I think that the fact that she didn't land on that island, Howland Island, there isn't anything near, I think the other island south of it is about 50 miles. 250. Well, there was one, there was one that you could- Baker Island. Baker Island, you couldn't really land on it, but there was an island 50 miles. Other than that, it was 200 or 300 miles, the nearest piece of land. So the odds are 99, in our case, she was in the water. Now, the fact that the Navy didn't find any debris is not surprising. They said there's evidence of that and similar airplanes crashing in that era, too. And, you know, even today, sometimes you get a crash in an airplane, you don't know where it is, like the 370. So was there any possibility, you said there was a transmission out of fuel, you could do some, you know, so do some, you know, directional finding. If two people heard it, they could pinpoint where it was when they said it. Well, they had the- Did they have anything like that? Well, they had one ship there at the Howard Island, but they didn't have two ships, you know? And of course, then the other thing is, she's happened, she didn't be on a radio for more than about eight seconds at a time. I think she was worried, she had really a fuse that had gone out on her when she went from Darwin, from Australia to Leia. And so she was worried about the fuse going out on her, because the transmitter had taken a motor, there was a motor- Dynamotor. Dynamotor to, the battery had not enough power to do the transmitter, so the dynamotor turned on. Of course, the dynamotor surged to cut a bone, a fuse. And so she was, she only had about eight seconds at a time when she was transmitting, and so they really couldn't get a bearing on that either. And I think the other issue is, she did not report her position as she, as the rules would say, you know, she didn't say where she was every time she transmitted the message. So we don't really know, the last transmission that we know where she was, it was near one of the islands where she said she saw an island, and so we could correlate that, that that's really where she was. But of course, you don't know whether the navigator had the right numbers either. So we only have her maybe 500 or 600 miles from the final point is our last, really, really, really, we know where she is. So the area of unknown is huge. I just wanted to add one more thing for the DF. There's a rich literature in that. There's a lot of discussion on the DF aspect because it all failed. That's the factual part. All the discussions and the arrangements and the type of equipment, whether it was working or not working, it's very rich in the literature. You can look up all kinds of articles on that. And it's very interesting reading. I would recommend it. George and Gundars, thank you very much. Have you had a reaction from people who spent years trying to make this determination as to how they react to your information? Has it helped them? I think everybody's reaction was whatever they were thinking. So if they're going to Gilbert Island, they're like, well, they took all the facts that seemed to correspond to their end solution, and they would ignore all the other facts. And the same thing with the Marshall Islands. So I think that unless they already agreed ahead of time, they wouldn't agree because they would pick the numbers out just for their solution. There's only one group of people we hope to communicate with, and those are the people that have the money to do another search. The rest of the people are researchers like we are, and we can't expect to give them anything that they don't already think they know, right? And we're not gonna in the business of converting them to our way of thinking. Well, right. And the search that David Jordan did, his search was funded by this guy, E-U-S-T-A-C-E, you said? Used to, I believe. Yeah, he's a Google, ex-Google person that has a lot of money, and he did a parachute drop at 200,000 feet or some crazy thing like that. So he's got a lot of money, and that's what he funded. He funded the Jordan trip. So I think that that search, using that autonomous underwater vehicle, it probably has more chances of succeeding than anybody. Okay, I got a quick question. Now, they said that it was about a half hour left on fuel? In one of the transmissions, they heard that she said that she had a half an hour left. I think it was at 1912. Okay, what was the typical cruise speed at that point? Was it, I don't know, 250 knots or? No, she was going, George, you can probably answer that. 130 knots. Okay, so basically 50, 60 miles range with the half hour fuel. Two miles a minute, basically. And she was going about 1,000 feet. She was at 1,000 feet, she had reported it to us. Oh, okay, so at 1,000 feet, you probably couldn't spot much of the window. Well, it's worse than that. One of the things is they actually did a helicopter tour of that island. It was a cloudy situation. The clouds look like an island, or the island doesn't sort of merge into the clouds. So if you're 15, 20 miles out, and you're looking straight out, you sort of don't really see the island. It's only about 15 feet from the ocean. So it can get very, very difficult to find. Any other questions? If not, thank you very much, George. Be sure and tell him that we're gonna have the swearing in of the officers. Yes, and I want her to wait a couple of minutes. Thank you.