Robots To Search for Amelia Earhart's Lost Plane 98
raque writes "Following up on an earlier story, a group of aviation archaeologists will use underwater robots along with submersibles and sonar to search for Amelia Earhart's plane. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery will search this July for the aircraft, which went down 75 years ago. 'If there's wreckage there that can be recovered, we need to know what it is, how big it is, what it looks like, and what it's made of so we can prepare a recovery expedition that has equipment to raise whatever's there,' said Richard Gillespie, the group's executive director."
Re:Why Did Amelia Earhart's Plane Crash? (Score:2, Informative)
The science purely says that it is cheaper, not that it is less likely.
Science is great and all, but it's useless if you're incapable of interpreting the data.
Not that what's less likely? The science shows that women are much less likely to be involved in serious accidents, and much less likely to die in those accidents. In short, their driving is less likely to result in serious and costly accidents. By any reasonable measure, a good driver is one who gets safely from A to B. The science tells us that women do this better than men by a significant margin. And since we're talking about a serious accident, I think the science is very applicable in this case.
:)
In other news, men certainly have bigger egos than women when it comes to driving.
Re:really? (Score:5, Informative)
If its in anaerobic mud or water there will be steel. If in aerobic aerated water there will be little more than rust. Also the effect of galvanic corrosion in general is well known, but in this specific example its not too clear exactly what will be down there.
Anecdote time is I've removed stuff like anchors and gas tanks from freshwater lakes (this is actually pretty exciting salvage ops for a teenager) and its unpredictable how much above vs below the mudline corrosion will be found. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out how anchors end up on the bottom of a lake, often with a short broken length of chain, but I could never figure out why I found gas cans down there. Those things are not cheap so its not simple littering. They just fall off occasionally and sink, or whats the deal with that, maybe junkyards won't accept them so they get sunk? I believe I found one propeller. Oh and I found sailboat rope cleats too, lots of them, apparently they rip right out of the hull. I never salvaged anything really interesting, unfortunately. As a hobby its very much like being a poor fisherman in that it takes a lot of time on the lake to find anything at all.
Before anyone gets all excited about WWII sunken battleship anecdotes from roughly the same era, corrosion is sorta linear not a percentage, so 6 inch thick battleship armor that has had a 1/16th of an inch corroded away looks untouched from far away, but something like 20 gauge sheet steel might look a bit different after the same 1/16th of an inch of corrosion.
Re:Why Did Amelia Earhart's Plane Crash? (Score:4, Informative)
The! Science! Says!