Still, according to a story appearing this morning via the Associated Press, the seventy-year-old mystery surrounding Amelia Earhart’s disappearance may soon be put to rest thanks to “new perspectives” provided by a recently discovered diary. The article reports that The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), which for years has been leading efforts to confirm Earhart’s crash site on an uninhabited atoll, recently acquired the diary once belonging to James W. Carey. Carey was an AP reporter who had been dispatched to the south Pacific in 1937 to cover the flight of Earhart and co-pilot Fred J. Noonan from New Guinea to Howland Island — one of the last and most dangerous legs of their around the world flight. Of course, Earhart and Noonan never arrived on Howland. Instead, they disappeared somewhere over the ocean.

It turns out that Carey was aboard the US Coast Guard cutter Itasca anchored off Howland. From there he was able to listen in on the radio reports dispatched from Earhart’s Lockheed Electra. The contents of the radio messages and Carey’s radiograms to the AP have long been available to investigators. The personal diary that Carey kept while on board the cutter was previously unknown.

Although TIGHAR executive director Ron Gillespie acknowledges that the diary doesn’t provide any new information about the content of Earhart’s radio messages, he notes that

[it] is the first document that puts a real person aboard Itasca and tells us something from a firsthand witness about what went on during those desperate hours and days.”

TIGHAR members are convinced that Earhart and Noonan crash-landed on a flat reef 350 miles south of Howland where they survived for some time on scant food and rainwater. If they can raise sufficient funds, the group hopes this summer to dispatch its ninth expedition to the south Pacific to locate Earhart’s crash. Previous trips have turned up a number of tantalizing clues, including shoe heels, Plexiglass pieces, and an aluminum panel that may have come from an Electra aircraft. However, definitive evidence has yet eluded the organization.

So how did Carey’s diary surface? A TIGHAR volunteer who trolls the Internet for Earhart memorabilia spotted it for sale on E-Bay.

Cost of the diary? $26.

Sailing along with this summer’s TIGHAR expedition? $50,000

Viewing the following video of The Handsome Family’s “Amelia Earhart versus the Dancing Bear?” Priceless…

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According to the IAC the crash of SibirAir flight 778 was caused by “pilot error.”

The Russian news daily Kommersant has a slightly different take on the matter. In an article published on 23 November, the paper reported that:

IAC experts knew from the beginning of their investigation that Flight 778 made its last flight with a reversing system failure of the left engine. Valves located in the rear part of the turbine that control the direction of the flow of gases stopped closing and thus only forward thrust could be created. That malfunction caused an inconvenience for pilots of the A310, but was not grounds for stopping a flight. The main braking on an airplane is performed by the flaps and wheel brakes, and reverse throttle is only used supplementally, as backup. In the complex situation, just one reversing system, the right one, which was functional, would have helped the A310 pilots brake.

The landing at Irkutsk really was complex for [Pilot 1st Class Sergei] Shibanov and his crew. After the long flight from Moscow, they landed on a short and inconvenient runway at the Irkutsk airport. Shibanov was counting on only the usual application of flaps and wheel brakes, since a dispatcher in Irkutsk, according to S7, told him that the runway was dry and wheel cohesion should be good. As soon as he saw that there was rain at the airport and then felt that the wheel brakes were not holding the craft and it was skidding on the runway, the pilot turned on the reversing system as an unplanned emergency measure because immediate additional braking was needed.

When he pressed the switch for the reversing system, located between the pilots’ seats, with one finger of his right hand, Shibanov most likely bumped the handle that controlled the left, deactivated engine, located only centimeters away, with his other fingers. As a result, he simultaneously turned on the right reversing system and left takeoff system and the plane picked up speed, turning to the right, hitting garages and bursting into flames.

Lawyers representing the families of passengers killed in the crash have denounced the IAC report as bogus. Citing faults in the design of the A310 reversing system as the principal cause of the disaster, they have announced that they will file suit against American and British companies that make components for the A310.

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On February 12, 1935, the USS Macon, was lost in a storm off the coast of California. Miraculously, only two of the 83 crew members who were on board perished with the craft. Still, the loss of the dirigible effectively marked the end of the American military’s ill-fated and accident prone experiment with lighter-than-air technology. (Just two years earlier, Macon’s sister ship, the USS Akron, had gone down over the Atlantic, killing 76 crew members.)

On Monday, researchers from the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, the National Marine Sanctuary Program, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Stanford University, and the University of New Hampshire are planning to revisit the “age of the airship.” They will send a submersible robotic probe to film the wreckage of the USS Macon which now rests nearly 1,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

For more information about the USS Macon and next week’s expedition, head over to the web site of the Monteray Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The web site will have live streaming video of the underwater expedition beginning around 10:00 AM CST on Monday and continuing throughout the week.

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Given the frequency with which Iran’s aging and poorly maintained planes inadvertently return to earth, Friday’s aerial disaster hardly comes as a shock.

Still, the crash of the Tupolev is unwelcome news for Russia’s beleaguered aviation program. On the same day that the Iran Airtour plane went down, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that he is charging Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov with the task of improving Russian civilian and military aviation safety. Vladimir Vladimirovich’s (TM) actions come in direct response to a spate of accidents since May that have claimed the lives of 410 people in the airspace over the former Soviet Union (FSU).

Putin’s choice of Defense Minister Ivanov is telling. It is another signal that the Russian President is intent on drawing the country’s aviation programs under still firmer state control.

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Arguably, the low-point for Russian civilian aviation came on 23 March 1994 when an Aeroflot-operated Airbus A-310 en route from Moscow to Hong Kong crashed near the town of Mezhduretshensk. The post-crash investigation revealed that the disaster had occurred as a result of “pilot error” when the flight captain’s fifteen-year old son (who had been allowed to man the plane’s controls) inadvertently disconnected the autopilot. The crash killed all 75 people aboard the plane.

Since then, Aeroflot and many of Russia’s regional carriers (like Pulkovo, Sibir, and TransAero) have worked hard to improve service, upgrade their air fleets, and strengthen safety standards. By and large their efforts have paid dividends. And yet…

Tuesday’s news that a Tupolev-154 operated by Pulkovo Air crashed near Donetsk, Ukraine en route from the Black Sea resort town Anapa to St. Petersburg, killing all 170 passengers aboard the plane, cannot help but raise questions about the current status of civilian aviation in Russia and the regions of the former Soviet Union. Initial reports suggest that inclement weather may have played a role in bringing the plane down. Still, this is the third major aviation disaster to occur in the airspace over the former Soviet Union since the spring of this year.

Last month, a Sibir Air A310 slid off a wet runway while landing in Irkutsk. The plane struck a concrete barrier before bursting into flames. 122 people were killed in the crash. Only two months earlier, on May 3rd, an A320 operated by the Armenian airline Armavia went down in the Black Sea during its final approach to the Russian resort city Sochi. Pilot error appears to have been the cause of that crash, which claimed the lives of all 113 people on board.

2006 has not been a good year for Russian aviation. And there are still four months left.

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