Good morning snopercod. There are some additional theories at the website I've linked below. Lots of pages and had I included them the thread would have been too long. This site is listed for further reading on my list, but it does seem to be a lot of conspiracy stuff including the writer's theory on the last crewmember yet to be found, so I avoided using the information but it is good reading.
Link
Here is an excerpt:
Blame it on the navigator?
From the outset, blame for the loss of the Lady Be Good has been aimed at Lt. Dp Hays.
It has been said that his Log was poorly filled out. This is only partly true—it was only incomplete after 8.52 p.m.
It has been said he was inexperienced. This is true.
It has been said that some of his instruments were unopened and never used. This is also true.
It has been said that the locations he noted in his ship flying up the Ionian Sea are wrong.
It is, however, most likely that the Lady Be Good was over the Ionian Sea. If Hays had been so at odds with events, why did the Lady Be Good fly over or very near Benghazi and Soluch around midnight?
This ill-considered criticism of Hays implies that he was incompetent, that he had no idea where his ship was and that he had no sense of direction. This certainly was not the case.
Hays and crew knew that they were off course to the East, that 360 degrees was towards the North, that 140 degrees was towards the South, and that the latter led back to Soluch.
Evidence of this is that at 8.52 p.m., Hays wrote in his log: "Depart. 140 degrees."
Hays, like any navigator on his first mission, may have had his faults, but he was not a fool.
(The log with Hays' position reports is on view at the Lady Be Good museum in Dayton, Ohio.)
snopercod, I also recall they thought that the men believed they were over water because the life vests were not on the plane. As far as survival equipment, food, water, etc. I hope someone here will be able to comment.
Thanks for the good dialogue, we love it when we can get a good conversation going about a topic we cover. :)
Direction finding is very confusing, even for experienced pilots.
You have bearings to, and bearings from a station, which are reciprocals of each other. Neither is related to the direction the aircraft is pointed, but are related to the position of the aircraft over the earth.
But the direction finding equipment on the aircraft is oriented whichever way the aircraft is pointing. It only gives you the Relative Bearing between the nose of the aircraft and the remote station. So if you are lost and want to fly TO a station, you have to use the formula:
Relative Bearing + Magnetic Heading = Magnetic Bearing To Station
Their loop antenna would give the navigator the Relative Bearing (the angle between the nose of the aircraft and the station), and adding that to the Magnetic Heading (taken from the compass), would give the compass heading the pilot would have to follow to reach the station. Further complicating matters is the fact that these numbers add up to more than 360 degrees, you have to subtract 360 to find your BEARING TO. If you do the math incorrectly, you will be going the wrong way for sure.
And all this assumes there is no wind up there. If there is a crosswind (there almost always is), the pilot has to adjust his magnetic heading left or right to compensate for that. It can all be very confusing and requires a lot of SA (situational awareness) to keep it all straight in one's head.
I was wondering if the navigator ever looked at the stars to determine which way they were going. Maybe it was cloudy above as well as below...
Having done extensive off shore navigation on sailboats(Most of the time lost) with basically the same equipment as these people had, it is very easy to make mistakes. It is also very easy to believe what you want to believe as to where you are at.