Electra Projects | AI Final Year Project Report

Complete Technical Paper Content — Electra Projects

1. Executive Abstract, Problem Formulation & Background

Amelia Mary Earhart ( AIR-hart; born July 24, 1897; disappeared July 2, 1937; declared dead January 5, 1939) was an American aviator who became one of the most celebrated aviation pioneers. In 1928, Earhart was the first woman to cross the Atlantic by airplane. In 1932, she became the first woman to make a nonstop solo transatlantic flight, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for her achievement. She was one of the first aviators to promote commercial air travel, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and helped found the Ninety-Nines, an organization for women pilots.

On July 2, 1937, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in a twin-engine Lockheed Model 10 Electra while attempting to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the world. Since her disappearance, Earhart has become a global cultural figure and numerous films, documentaries, and books have recounted her life.

Amelia Mary Earhart was born on July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas, the daughter of Samuel "Edwin" Stanton Earhart (1867–1930) and Amelia "Amy" Earhart (née Otis; 1869–1962). She was born in the home of her maternal grandfather Alfred Gideon Otis (1827–1912), who was a former judge in Kansas, the president of Atchison Savings Bank, and a leading resident of the town. Earhart was the second child of the marriage after a stillbirth in August 1896. She was of part German descent. Alfred had not initially favored the marriage and was not satisfied with Edwin's progress as a lawyer. Following family custom, Earhart was named after her two grandmothers, Amelia Josephine Harres and Mary Wells Patton. From an early age, she was the dominant sibling, while her sister Grace Muriel Earhart (1899–1998), two years her junior, acted as a dutiful follower. Earhart was nicknamed "Meeley" and sometimes "Millie", and Grace was nicknamed "Pidge." Both continued to answer to their childhood nicknames into adulthood. Their upbringing was unconventional; Amy did not believe in raising her children to be "nice little girls". Their maternal grandmother disapproved of the bloomers they wore, and although Earhart liked the freedom of movement they provided, she was aware that the neighborhood girls wore dresses.

The Earhart children had a spirit of adventure and explored their neighborhood daily. As a child, Earhart spent hours playing with Pidge, climbing trees, hunting rats with a rifle, and sledding downhill. Some biographers have characterized her as a tomboy. The girls kept worms, moths, katydids, and a tree toad in a growing collection. In 1904, with the help of her uncle, Earhart constructed a homemade ramp modeled after a roller coaster she had seen on a trip to St. Louis, Missouri, and secured it to the roof of the family tool shed. After her first documented "flight", she emerged from the broken wooden box that had served as a sled with a bruised lip, a torn dress, and a "sensation of exhilaration", saying, "Oh, Pidge, it's just like flying!" In 1907, Edwin's job as a claims officer for the Rock Island Railroad led to a transfer to Des Moines, Iowa. The following year, at the age of 10, Earhart saw her first aircraft at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines. Her father tried to interest his daughters in taking a flight, but after looking at the rickety "flivver", Earhart asked if they could return to the merry‑go‑round. She later described the biplane as "a thing of rusty wire and wood and not at all interesting".

2. Related Work, Literature Survey & Algorithmic Foundations

The Earhart family's finances appeared to improved with the acquisition of a new house and the hiring of two servants, but it soon became clear that Edwin was an alcoholic. In 1914, he was forced to retire. He attempted to rehabilitate himself through treatment, but the Rock Island Railroad never reinstated him. At about this time, Earhart's maternal grandmother died. She left a substantial estate and placed her daughter's share in a trust, fearing that Edwin's drinking would exhaust the funds. The Otis house was auctioned along with its contents, and Earhart later described these events as the end of her childhood. In 1915, after a long search, Edwin found work as a clerk at the Great Northern Railway in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Earhart entered Central High School as a junior. Edwin applied for a transfer to Springfield, Missouri, in 1915, but the current claims officer reconsidered his retirement and demanded his job back, leaving Edwin unemployed. Amy took her children to Chicago, where they lived with friends. Earhart canvassed nearby high schools in Chicago to find the best science program. She rejected the high school nearest her home, complaining that the chemistry lab was "just like a kitchen sink". She eventually enrolled in Hyde Park High School but spent a miserable semester, for which a yearbook caption noted: "A.E.—the girl in brown who walks alone". Earhart graduated from Hyde Park High School in 1916. Throughout her childhood, she had continued to aspire to a future career. She kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about successful women in male-dominated careers, including film direction and production, law, advertising, management, and mechanical engineering. She began junior college at Ogontz School in Rydal, Pennsylvania, but did not complete her program.

In the early 1920s, Earhart and a young woman friend visited an air fair held in conjunction with the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto; she said, "The interest, aroused in me, in Toronto, led me to all the air circuses in the vicinity." One of the highlights of the day was a flying exhibition put on by a World War I ace. The pilot saw Earhart and her friend, who were watching from an isolated clearing, and dived at them. "I am sure he said to himself, 'Watch me make them scamper,' " she said. Earhart stood her ground as the aircraft came close. "I did not understand it at the time," she said, "but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by." On December 28, 1920, Earhart and her father attended an "aerial meet" at Daugherty Field in Long Beach, California. She asked her father to inquire about passenger flights and flying lessons. Earhart was booked for a passenger flight the following day at Emory Roger's Field, at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. A 10-minute flight with Frank Hawks, who later gained fame as an air racer, cost $10 (equivalent to $160 in 2025). The ride with Hawks changed Earhart's life; she said, "By the time I had got two or three hundred feet [60–90 m] off the ground ... I knew I had to fly."

The next month, Earhart engaged Neta Snook to be her flying instructor. The initial contract was for 12 hours of instruction for $500 (equivalent to $9,000 in 2025). Working at a variety of jobs, including photographer, truck driver, and stenographer at the local telephone company, Earhart saved $1,000 (equivalent to $18,000 in 2025) for flying lessons; she had her first lesson on January 3, 1921, at Kinner Field on the west side of Long Beach Boulevard and Tweedy Road, now in the city of South Gate. Snook used a crash-salvaged Curtiss JN-4 "Canuck" airplane she had restored for training. To reach the airfield, Earhart had to take a bus then walk four miles (6.4 km). Earhart's mother provided part of the $1,000 "stake" against her "better judgement". Earhart cropped her hair short in the style of other female flyers. Six months later, in mid 1921 and against Snook's advice, Earhart purchased a secondhand, chromium yellow Kinner Airster biplane, which she nicknamed "The Canary". After her first successful solo landing, she bought a new leather flying coat. Because the coat looked new, she was teased, so she aged it by sleeping in it and staining it with aircraft oil. On October 22, 1922, Earhart flew the Airster to an altitude of 14,000 feet (4,300 m), setting a world record for female pilots. On May 16, 1923, she became the 16th woman in the United States to be issued a pilot's license (#6017) by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI).

Following her parents' divorce in 1924, Earhart drove her mother in "Yellow Peril" on a transcontinental trip from California with stops throughout the western United States and northward to Banff, Alberta, Canada. Their journey ended in Boston, Massachusetts, where Earhart underwent another, more successful sinus operation. After recuperation, she returned to Columbia University for several months but was forced to abandon her studies and any further plans for enrolling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), because her mother could no longer afford the tuition fees and associated costs. In 1925, Earhart found employment first as a teacher and then as a social worker at Denison House, a Boston settlement house. At this time, she lived in Medford, Massachusetts. While living in Medford, she maintained her interest in aviation, becoming a member of the American Aeronautical Society's Boston chapter and eventually being elected its vice president. She flew out of Dennison Airport in Quincy, helped finance the airport's operation by investing a small sum of money, and in 1927, she flew the first official flight out of Dennison Airport. Earhart worked as a sales representative for Kinner Aircraft in the Boston area and wrote local-newspaper columns promoting flying; as her local celebrity grew, she made plans to launch an organization for female flyers.

3. Dataset Ingestion, Preprocessing & Stochastic Augmentations

20 Hrs. 40 Min. (1928) is a journal of her experiences as the first woman passenger on a transatlantic flight. The Fun of It (1932) is a memoir of her flying experiences and an essay on women in aviation. Last Flight (1937) features the periodic journal entries she sent to the United States during her round-the-world flight attempt, and was published in newspapers in the weeks prior to her departure from New Guinea. The journal was compiled by Earhart's husband GP Putnam after her disappearance over the Pacific. Many historians consider this book to be only partially Earhart's original work.

Earhart accepted a position as associate editor at Cosmopolitan and used it to campaign for greater public acceptance of aviation, especially focusing on the role of women entering the field. In 1929, Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT) appointed Earhart and Margaret Bartlett Thornton to promote air travel, particularly for women, and Earhart helped set up the Ludington Airline, the first regional shuttle service between New York and Washington, D.C. Earhart was appointed Vice President of National Airways, which operated Boston-Maine Airways and several other airlines in the northeastern US, and by 1940 had become Northeast Airlines. In 1934, Earhart interceded on behalf of Isabel Ebel (who had helped Earhart in 1932) to be accepted as the first woman student of aeronautical engineering at New York University (NYU).

Earhart married her public relations manager George P. Putnam on February 7, 1931, in Putnam's mother's house in Noank, Connecticut, in what has been described as a marriage of convenience. Earhart gained a tireless promoter and Putnam—heir to a publishing company—gained an opportunity for cultural dominance.

Earhart had been engaged to Samuel Chapman, a chemical engineer from Boston, but she broke off the engagement on November 23, 1928. She reportedly spent the summer of 1928 writing her first book at the home of Putnam and his first wife while having an affair with Putnam. Putnam, known as GP, was divorced in 1929 and sought out Earhart, proposing to her six times before she agreed to marry him. Earhart referred to her marriage as a "partnership" with "dual control"; in a letter to Putnam, and hand-delivered on the day of the wedding, she wrote: I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any midaevil [sic] code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly ... I may have to keep some place where I can go to be by myself, now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinement of even an attractive cage. Earhart's ideas on marriage were liberal for the time; she believed in equal responsibilities for both partners and kept her own name rather than being referred to as "Mrs. Putnam". When The New York Times referred to her as "Mrs. Putnam", she laughed it off. Putnam also learned he would be called "Mr. Earhart". There was no honeymoon because Earhart was involved in a nine-day, cross-country tour promoting autogyros and the tour's sponsor, Beech-Nut chewing gum. Earhart and Putnam never had children, but Putnam had two sons—the explorer and writer David Binney Putnam (1913–1992), and George Palmer Putnam Jr. (1921–2013)—from his previous marriage to Dorothy Binney (1888–1982), an heir to her father's chemical company Binney & Smith.

4. Neural Network Backbone, Layer Specifications & Loss Formulations

In late November 1934, while Earhart was away on a speaking tour, a fire broke out at the Putnam residence in Rye, destroying many family treasures and Earhart's personal mementos. Putnam had already sold his interest in the New York-based publishing company to his cousin Palmer Putnam. Following the fire, the couple decided to move to the west coast, where Putnam took up his new position as head of the editorial board of Paramount Pictures in North Hollywood. At Earhart's urging, in June 1935, Putnam purchased a small house in Toluca Lake, a San Fernando Valley celebrity enclave community between the Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures studio complexes, where they had earlier rented a temporary residence. In September 1935, Earhart and Paul Mantz established a business partnership they had been considering since late 1934, and established the short-lived Earhart-Mantz Flying School, which Mantz controlled and operated through his aviation company United Air Services, which was based at Burbank Airport. Putnam handled publicity for the school, which primarily taught instrument flying using Link Trainers. Also in 1935, Earhart joined Purdue University as a visiting faculty member to counsel women on careers and as a technical advisor to its Department of Aeronautics. Earhart lived in Women's Residence Hall South, now Duhme Hall, part of Windsor Halls on Purdue University's campus.

On May 20, 1932, 34-year-old Earhart set off from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, with a copy of the Telegraph-Journal, given to her by journalist Stuart Trueman to confirm the date of the flight. She intended to fly to Paris in her single engine Lockheed Vega 5B to emulate Charles Lindbergh's solo flight five years earlier. Her technical advisor for the flight was the Norwegian-American aviator Bernt Balchen, who helped prepare her aircraft and played the role of "decoy" for the press because he was ostensibly preparing Earhart's Vega for his own Arctic flight. After a flight lasting 14 hours, 56 minutes, during which she contended with strong northerly winds, icy conditions and mechanical problems, Earhart landed in a pasture near Culmore, north of Derry, Northern Ireland. The landing was witnessed by Cecil King and T. Sawyer. When a farm hand asked, "Have you flown far?" Earhart replied, "From America." As the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic, Earhart received the Distinguished Flying Cross from Congress, the Cross of Knight of the Legion of Honor from the French government, and the Gold Medal of the National Geographic Society from President Herbert Hoover. As her fame grew, Earhart developed friendships with many people in high office, most notably First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who shared many of Earhart's interests, especially women's causes. After flying with Earhart, Roosevelt obtained a student permit but did not further pursue her plans to learn to fly. Earhart and Roosevelt frequently communicated with each other. Another flyer, Jacqueline Cochran, who was said to be Earhart's rival, also became her confidante during this period.

On January 11, 1935, Earhart became the first aviator to fly solo from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California. This time, Earhart used a Lockheed 5C Vega. Although many aviators had attempted this flight, including the participants in the 1927 Dole Air Race, which flew the opposite direction, and resulted in three deaths, Earhart's flight was mainly routine with no mechanical breakdowns. In her final hours, she relaxed and listened to "the broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera from New York". On April 19, 1935, using her Lockheed Vega aircraft that she had named "old Bessie, the fire horse", Earhart flew solo from Los Angeles to Mexico City. Earhart's next record attempt was a nonstop flight from Mexico City to New York. After she set off on May 8, her flight was uneventful, although large crowds that greeted her in Newark, New Jersey, were a concern, because she had to be careful not to taxi into them. Earhart again participated in the 1935 Bendix Trophy long-distance air race, finishing fifth, the best result she could manage because her stock Lockheed Vega, whose maximum speed was 195 mph (314 km/h), was outclassed by purpose-built aircraft that reached more than 300 mph (480 km/h). The race had been difficult because a competitor, Cecil Allen, died in a fire at takeoff, and Jacqueline Cochran was forced to pull out due to mechanical problems. In addition, "blinding fog" and violent thunderstorms plagued the race. Between 1930 and 1935, Earhart set seven women's speed-and-distance aviation records in a variety of aircraft, including the Kinner Airster, Lockheed Vega, and Pitcairn Autogiro. By 1935, recognizing the limitations of her "lovely red Vega" in long, transoceanic flights, Earhart contemplated a new "prize ... one flight which I most wanted to attempt—a circumnavigation of the globe as near its waistline as could be." For the new venture, she would need a new aircraft.

The original plan was a two-person crew: Earhart would fly and Manning would navigate. During a flight across the US that included Earhart, Manning, and Putnam, Earhart flew using landmarks; she and Putnam knew where they were. Manning did a navigation fix that alarmed Putnam, because Manning made a minor navigational error that put them in the wrong state; they were flying close to the state line, but Putnam was still concerned. Sometime later, Putnam and Mantz arranged a night flight to test Manning's navigational skill. Under poor navigational conditions, Manning's position was off by 20 miles (32 km). Elgen M. and Marie K. Long considered Manning's performance reasonable, because it was within an acceptable error of 30 miles (48 km), but Mantz and Putnam wanted a better navigator. Through contacts in the Los Angeles aviation community, Fred Noonan was chosen as a second navigator, because there were significant additional factors that had to be dealt with while using celestial navigation for aircraft. Noonan, a licensed ship's captain, was experienced in both marine and flight navigation; he had recently left Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), where he established most of the company's China Clipper seaplane routes across the Pacific. Noonan had also been responsible for training Pan American's navigators to fly the route between San Francisco and Manila. Under the original plans, Noonan would navigate from Hawaii to Howland Island—a difficult portion of the flight—then Manning would continue with Earhart to Australia, and she would proceed on her own for the remainder of the project.

5. Training Protocol, Convergence Behavior & Experimental Evaluation

While the Electra was being repaired, Earhart and Putnam secured additional funds and prepared for a second attempt, in which they would fly west to east. The second attempt began with an unpublicized flight from Oakland to Miami, Florida, and after arriving there, Earhart announced her plans to circumnavigate the globe. The flight's opposite direction was partly the result of changes in global wind-and-weather patterns along the planned route since the earlier attempt. Putnam pressed for the removal of important navigational, communication, and safety equipment to lighten the aircraft. Manning, the only skilled radio operator, had left the crew, which now consisted of Noonan and Earhart. The pair departed Miami on June 1 and after numerous stops in South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia, arrived in Lae, New Guinea, on June 29, 1937. At this stage, about 22,000 miles (35,000 km) of the journey had been completed. The remaining 7,000 miles (11,000 km) would be over the Pacific.

On July 2, 1937, at 10:00 am local time (12:00 am GMT), Earhart and Noonan took off from Lae Airfield in the heavily loaded Electra. Their destination was Howland Island, a flat sliver of land 6,500 ft (2,000 m) long and 1,600 ft (500 m) wide, 10 ft (3 m) high and 2,556 miles (2,221 nmi; 4,113 km) away. The expected flying time was about 20 hours; accounting for the two-hour time-zone difference between Lae and Howland, and the crossing of the International Date Line, the aircraft was expected to arrive at Howland the morning of the next day, 2 July. The aircraft departed Lae with about 1,100 U.S. gallons (4,200 liters) of gasoline. In preparation for the trip to Howland Island, the U.S. Coast Guard had sent the cutter USCGC Itasca (1929) to the island to offer communication and navigation support for the flight. The cutter was to communicate with Earhart's aircraft via radio, transmit a homing signal to help the aviators locate Howland Island, use radio direction-finding (RDF), and use the cutter's boilers to create a dark column of smoke that could be seen over the horizon. All of the navigation methods failed to guide Earhart to Howland Island. Around 3 pm Lae time, Earhart reported her altitude as 10,000 ft (3,000 m), but that they would reduce altitude due to thick clouds. Around 5 pm, Earhart reported her altitude as 7,000 ft (2,100 m) and speed as 150 kn (280 km/h; 170 mph). During Earhart's and Noonan's approach to Howland Island, Itasca received strong, clear voice transmissions from Earhart identifying as KHAQQ, but she was unable to hear voice transmissions from the ship. The first calls received from Earhart were routine reports stating the weather was cloudy and overcast at 2:45 am and just before 5 am on July 2. These calls were broken up by static, but at this point, the aircraft was a long distance from Howland. At 6:14 am, another call was received stating that the aircraft was within 200 miles (320 km) and requesting that the ship use its direction finder to provide a bearing for the aircraft. Earhart began whistling into the microphone to provide a continuous signal for the ship's crew to use. At this point, the radio operators on Itasca realized their RDF system could not tune into the aircraft's signal on 3105 kHz; radioman Leo Bellarts later commented he "was sitting there sweating blood because I couldn't do a darn thing about it". A similar call asking for a bearing was received at 6:45 am, when Earhart estimated they were 100 miles (160 km) away. An Itasca radio log at 7:30–7:40 am states the aircraft had only a half hour of fuel remaining. A further radio log states they thought they were near Itasca but could not locate it and were flying at 1,000 ft (300 m). In her transmission at 7:58 am, Earhart said she could not hear Itasca and asked them to send voice signals so she could try to take a radio bearing. Itasca reported this signal as the loudest possible signal, indicating Earhart and Noonan were in the immediate area. The ship could not send voice at the frequency she asked for so they sent Morse code signals instead. Earhart acknowledged receiving these but said she was unable to determine their direction.

The last voice transmission received on Howland Island from Earhart indicated she and Noonan were flying along a line of position running north-to-south on 157–337 degrees, which Noonan would have calculated and drawn on a chart as passing through Howland. After all contact with Howland Island was lost, attempts to reach the flyers with voice and Morse code transmissions were made. Operators across the Pacific and in the United States may have heard signals from the Electra but these were weak or unintelligible. A series of misunderstandings, errors or mechanical failures are likely to have occurred on the final approach to Howland Island. Noonan had earlier written about problems affecting the accuracy of RDF in navigation. Another cited cause of possible confusion was that Itasca and Earhart planned their communication schedule using time systems set a half-hour apart; Earhart was using Greenwich Civil Time (GCT) and Itasca was using an American Naval time-zone designation system. Sources have noted Earhart's apparent lack of familiarity with her direction-finding system, which had been fitted to the aircraft just prior to the flight. The system was equipped with a new receiver from Bendix Corporation. Earhart's only training on the system was a brief introduction by Joe Gurr at the Lockheed factory. A card displaying the antenna's band settings was mounted so it was not visible. The Electra expected Itasca to transmit signals the Electra could use as an RDF beacon to find the ship. In theory, the plane could listen for the signal while rotating its loop antenna; a sharp minimum indicates the direction of the RDF beacon. The Electra's RDF equipment had failed due to a blown fuse during an earlier leg flying to Darwin; the fuse was replaced. Near Howland, Earhart could hear the transmission from Itasca on 7500 kHz, but she was unable to determine a minimum so she could not determine a direction to the ship. Earhart was also unable to determine a minimum during an RDF test at Lae.

The U.S. government investigated the aircraft's disappearance and, in its report, concluded Earhart's plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. During the 1970s, retired United States Navy (USN) captain Laurance Safford began a lengthy analysis of the flight. His research included the intricate radio-transmission documentation. Safford concluded the flight had suffered from poor planning and worse execution. Many researchers believe Earhart and Noonan died during or shortly after the crash. In 1982, retired USN rear admiral Richard R. Black, who was in administrative charge of the Howland Island airstrip and was present in the radio room on Itasca, said: "the Electra went into the sea about 10 am, July 2, 1937, not far from Howland." Earhart's stepson George Palmer Putnam Jr. has said he believes "the plane just ran out of gas". According to Earhart biographer Susan Butler, the aircraft went into the ocean out of sight of Howland Island and rests on the seafloor at a depth of 17,000 ft (5 km). Tom D. Crouch, senior curator of the National Air and Space Museum, has said the Electra is "18,000 ft. down" and compared its archaeological significance to that of RMS Titanic. British aviation historian Roy Nesbit interpreted evidence in contemporary accounts and Putnam's correspondence and concluded Earhart's Electra was not fully fueled at Lae. William L. Polhemous, the navigator on Ann Pellegreno's 1967 flight that followed Earhart and Noonan's original flight path, studied navigational tables for July 2, 1937, and thought Noonan may have miscalculated the "single line approach" to Howland.