Frederick J. Hooven, famed for his engineering inventions, was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1905, met Orville Wright as a child and by age 15 was a regular visitor to the Wrights’ Dayton laboratory.  After graduating  from MIT in 1927, Hooven was hired by General Motors, and rose to vice president and chief engineer of the Radio Products Division of Bendix Aviation Corporation by 1935.  His Hooven Radio Compass, which he later sold to the Bendix Company, is now known as the Automatic Direction Finder, or ADF, was installed in Amelia Earhart’s Electra in 1936, but was later replaced by an earlier, lighter unit. 

When he died in 1985, Hooven held a total of 38 American patents, as well as many foreign patents in fields such as avionics, bomb sights, automotive ignition and suspension systems, photographic typesetting and medical technology.  His inventions include 17 radio and aviation navigation and landing instrument systems, bomb-release systems, six automotive ignition systems, three medical instruments, six photographic type compositions and seven other automotive inventions (axles, brakes, springs, suspensions, plus a complete engine, the 1966 Olds Toronado).

The late Fred Hooven, the noted engineer, inventor and creator of the Gardner Island (Nikumaroro) landing theory, was adamant that some of the post-loss transmissions originated from Amelia Earhart’s Electra 10E.  Faced with the undeniable reality that neither the fliers nor the Electra could have been on the island in 1937 without leaving a trace for the many future inhabitants to find, he later abandoned the theory, though others have not been as astute.

In his 1966 letter of introduction to Fred Goerner, below, the first of many from Hooven to his soon-to-be friend and Earhart research associate, he discusses his radio compass, his meeting with Amelia and what he believed was the fatal decision to remove his invention from the Electra.  Many more would follow through the years.  (Bold emphasis mine throughout.)

December 5, 1966

Mr. Frederick Goerner
Doubleday
277 Park Avenue
New York City, N.Y. 10017

Dear Mr. Goerner:

I just finished reading your book on Amelia Earhart.  I started the book with a good deal of skepticism, but now that I have finished it I find that I share your conviction that this whole matter must be clarified and honor rendered to those to whom it is due.  I can add a small and perhaps interesting sidelight to the Amelia Earhart story.  My contribution does nothing either to strengthen or weaken your conclusions, but I believe if my story had been different, Miss Earhart would not have been lost.

I installed on Miss Earhart’s Lockheed one of the first prototypes of the modern aircraft radio direction-finder.  Before she embarked on her flight, however, this was removed, and installed in its place was the old-fashioned null-type direction-finder that she [later] carried with her.  The modern instrument would have given her a heading on the transmitter of the cutter Itasca at Howland Island even under poor reception conditions and it would have shown her without ambiguity that her destination was still ahead.

The modern direction finder that I invented in 1935 had some important points of superiority over the old simple null-type that had been used ever since before 1920.  We called it a radio compass then. It is always called the ADF today.  It uses a conventional antenna in addition to the directional loop, the result being that it is possible to listen to the station at the same time a bearing is being taken.  It is so much more sensitive that it is possible to use a much smaller loop, contained in the familiar streamlined cigar-shaped housing that is still to be seen on all but the very latest models of commercial and military aircraft.

Most importantly, by using the signal from the non-directional antenna as a point of reference, the modern instrument is able to indicate the true direction of the transmitter from the receiver whereas the null-type indicator could do no more than tell that the transmitting station was somewhere along a line that passed through the center of the loop-antenna.  Obviously, to obtain a useable null with the old system the signal must be several times louder than the background noise.  With the radio compass, a useable bearing may be taken on a station that is not readable through the noise.  All of these things combine to convince me that Miss Earhart would have reached Howland Island if the radio compass had still been installed in her airplane.

Amelia with the Bendix Radio Direction Finder Loop Antenna, which replaced Fred Hooven’s radio compass for use during her world flight attempt in 1937.  Hooven was convinced that the change was responsible for Amelia’s failure to find Howland Island, and ultimately, for her tragic death on Saipan.

We built six of these prototypes.  I was at that time vice president and chief engineer of the Radio Products Division of Bendix Aviation, which was one of the small companies later combined into Bendix Radio.  Vincent Bendix had retained Harry Bruno as his personal public relations counsel and he distributed these prototypes where he thought they were most likely to get his name into the papers.  One of them went to Dick Merrill and Harry Richman, and we installed it on the Northrup Alpha they flew across the Atlantic and landed in Ireland.  They both told me they owed their lives to the radio compass.

Harry had broadcast to his public over their 50 watt transmitter until the airplane ‘s battery was flat, so when they reached England they were able to use only their receiving equipment.  It was foggy and they flew around for 24 hours before they found a hole they could get down through.  They said they surely would have been back over the ocean if they had not had the radio compass on board.  Just to bear out your contention about the transmitting range of the 50 watt transmitter I listened to Harry on my receiver in Dayton, Ohio on 3100 kilocycles until he was about halfway across the Atlantic.

Another prototype was turned over to the United States Army Air Corps at Wright Field.  We installed it in a B-10 and connected the output to the directional control of the automatic pilot.  I rode in this airplane on a nonstop flight from Dayton to Dallas, Texas and back.  During the entire flight the pilot never touched the controls of the airplane.  It was guided over the entire distance by the radio compass, which was tuned in to local broadcast stations and radio beacons along the way.

The pilot of that airplane was a very close friend of mine, George Holloman, who lost his life in the South Pacific during the war and who gave his name to Holloman Field.  Later on, the same radio compass was installed in an ancient Fokker C-151 which made the first completely automatic takeoff and landing at Wright Field in 1937.  Later the same year at Muroc Air­ Force Base, that airplane made the first completely automatic unmanned takeoff and landing.  Another of these prototypes went to the Department of Commerce and one I personally installed for American Airlines on the first DC-3 to go into commercial passenger service.

Miss Earhart brought her airplane to Wright Field in Dayton where I made the installation of our equipment.  I spent most of the day with her and I concur with your description of her.  She was attractive, charming, gracious — a real lady.  She had with her a pretty young girl straight from the sticks, named Jacqueline Cochrane.  We had lunch together in the cafeteria at the Field.  So far as I know Miss Cochrane is still living and should be able to verify this part of the story.

I don’t remember when I learned that the radio compass had been removed from Miss Earhart ‘s plane before she took off on her world flight.  The Radio Research Company of Washington, D.C. was another Bendix division.  Its vice president was Laurence A. Hyland, who is now, or was until very recently, vice president and general manager of Hughes Aircraft.  Hyland had been a Navy man and his company manufactured the standard Navy aircraft direction finder.  As I understood it, Hyland convinced Miss Earhart that she should not trust such a new­ fangled device as my radio compass and that she would be much safer with the good old reliable instead.  From what you say about the Navy’s involvement in the affair, it could well have been that the Navy persuaded her to take out this piece of equipment that had been developed in connection with the Army Air Corps.

A rare, heretofore unpublished photo of a very young Fred Goerner, circa mid-1940s, at an unidentified California beach. (Photo courtesy Lance Goerner.)

You can see why I read your book with more than casual interest and would like to see such a grand lady take her proper place in history.

                                                       Sincerely Yours,

                                                              Frederick J. Hooven

Hooven’s contention that if Amelia had used his radio compass she “would have reached Howland Island” was, of course, based on the assumption that she was actually trying to locate and land at Howland, and was not embarked on a far different and possibly covert flight plan.  Many factors that have been presented and discussed in earlier posts argue for that, but we simply don’t know for sure. 

After years of studying data from the Pan Am intercepts and other alleged radio receptions, Hooven presented his paper, Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight, which became known as The Hooven Report, at the Amelia Earhart Symposium at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum in June 1982. Citing the bearings on the signals reported by the three Pan Am radio stations and the Howland Island high-frequency direction finder supplied by the Navy, Hooven asserted it was “undeniable“ that the transmissions had originated from the downed fliers.

“Five bearings were taken on the weak, wavering signal reported on the frequency used by the Earhart plane,” Hooven wrote, “and four of them, plus the 157-337 position line of the last message all intersected in the general area of the Phoenix Group.  This constitutes positive evidence of the presence of a transmitter in that area which could only have been that of the downed plane.  No hypothesis purporting to explain the events of the last flight can be credited that does not offer a plausible explanation of these signals, and why they originated along the plane’s announced position line at the only location, except for Baker and Howland, where there was land.”

According to several knowledgeable researchers, Hooven later abandoned the Gardner Island idea after Goerner convinced him that regardless of the location of the source of questionable radio signals that inspired it, too many people had lived on Gardner for too many years without any trace of the Earhart Electra ever seen on the island.  I’ve tried without success to locate any documents that reflect Hooven’s alleged reversal, which I believe actually occurred.

Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight established Hooven as the creator of the Gardner Island (Nikumaroro) landing theory, not the executive director of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), Ric Gillespie, who has yet to credit Hooven publicly, at least to this writer’s knowledge.  If he has finally done so, I expect to be corrected quite loudly and quickly, and will report it here.  Lacking any other plausible alternative to the Marshalls-Saipan reality, our establishment media continues to deny the truth and force-feeds this rubbish, this long-debunked “Nikumaroro hypothesis,” to an incurious, gullible public, and to mislead all who remain willfully ignorant.