(AP) - "Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance"
By Ric Gillespie (Naval Institute Press)
"Finding Amelia: The True Story of the Earhart Disappearance" deserves both praise and criticism.
Its author, Ric Gillespie, is a widely recognized authority on the disappearance of Amelia Earhart who in 1937 vanished somewhere over the Pacific while attempting to fly around the world.
The book consists of nine chapters that introduce Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, and describe the flight preparations. Here, Gilespie gets credit for revealing Earhart's imperfect flight qualification and less-than-thorough preparation, subjects that previous accounts often ignored or skimmed over.
These chapters also briefly describe the flight up to the disappearance of Earhart's twin-engine Lockheed Electra as it headed for Howland Island on July 2, 1937.
The rest of the book is mostly a reconstruction and chronology of the surge of radio activity that followed the plane's failure to arrive at Howland.
This radio activity involved the coast guard and navy ships on watch for the plane's arrival, the traffic between these ships and their commands in Hawaii and the mainland United States, and the efforts made to establish communication with the missing Electra.
Also, the belated and unsuccessful efforts of the navy battleship Colorado and aircraft carrier Lexington to find the plane and its occupants.
Gillespie also tells about the many amateur radio operators in the U.S. who asserted they had picked up distress messages from Earhart during the first few days after her disappearance. Some of these claims were outright hoaxes, others were never verified.
Although Gillespie's narrative achieves a degree of drama, the reader is fed too much technical language that is hard to digest. Only radio-communications engineers and ham operators can appreciate the subtleties of frequencies, kilocycles, bandwidths, static, interference, voice and Morse codes, harmonics, wave lengths and the like.
This makes much of "Finding Amelia" an uphill effort for the average reader.
On the plus side, "Finding Amelia" exposes many instances of inadequate preparations for the flight, and Earhart's generally lackadaisical attitude toward flying. It also puts into focus the lack of co-ordination of the search-and-rescue efforts.
Stored in a pocket at the back of "Finding Amelia" is a DVD with all the official documents consulted to research the flight's radio communications.
