Old Time Navigation

Terry

Terry

Line Up and Wait
Joined
Apr 3, 2005
Messages
738
Location
LaCrosse
Display Name
Display name:
Terry
How did Trans World Airline navigate from say, New York to London before the days of modern navigational aides?

What about Los Angles to Hawaii?
 
The north star has been in the same place for how long now?
 
TLAR (Tee- lar) method. You hold your thumb up to the horizon, check the position of the sun, then say, "That looks about right", and go.

Actually with navigators plotting the course as they go. Map, compass and course line.
 
A sextant, a good clock, an aviation or nautical almanac, and H.O.249. You shoot a site at dawn and dusk and get a noon site, and DST/Ded Reckon between. Once you got close enough. DF gear. Then came Omega, and Omega was the first global radio nav system that I recall.
 
I can remember the navigator. Using a sextant on overseas flights,while in the service.
 
With this:

FnmaGzj.jpg


Also pressure pattern navigation, drift meters, and good old adf.
 
FastEddieB said:
Inertial navigation?
Click to expand...

That came after Omega, I'm not sure if aviation used Decca. Then Loran A, again not sure if t went to aviation; then came inertial systems then Loran C. Between those NAVSTAR came into play, but I don't know if that ever made the aviation market, the only receiver I know of is the old Magnavox 4102. After that we got GPS and once that got linked to a PC and chart plotter, the world of navigation was turned on its ear.

I think aviation went Celestial, Omega, Inertial (various technologies, some still in use), and GPS for long range Nav.
 
Last edited:
FastEddieB said:
Inertial navigation?
Click to expand...
Uses a highly sensitive set of accelerometers and gyroscopes to measure the instantaneous accelerations of the vehicle. Summed over time, that gives velocity, and summing velocity over time gives position in relation to the starting point. INS dates back at least to 1960, possibly before, although the technology has improved dramatically from the mechanical gyros and accelerometers of that era, producing greater reliability and better accuracy over longer periods of time. We had INS in all three aircraft I flew in the military (A-6, RF-4, F-111). The beauty of it in that application was that it was non-emitting and did not rely on external signals, so it couldn't be jammed and it didn't give away our location. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system for more details.

But the early transoceanic aviators used the same basic means as Christopher Columbus -- celestial navigation, just with improved equipment and better data.
 
Last edited:
I've always wanted to learn celestial navigation. The issue has been finding a good sextant that isn't going to cost me an arm and leg.

Pressure pattern navigation seems like an interesting concept.
 
Henning said:
The SR-71 had a serious celestial nav system built into them.
Click to expand...

I sat in on a SR-71 presentation at Oshkosh which talked about its celestial telescope and tracking system. It was quite fascinating.
 
ARFlyer said:
I've always wanted to learn celestial navigation. The issue has been finding a good sextant that isn't going to cost me an arm and leg.

Pressure pattern navigation seems like an interesting concept.
Click to expand...

Do not waste your money, buy the Davis Mk 25 plastic one, or whatever the better model Davis is (for learning the cheapest of them is fine really). I have shot sights and worked fixes side by side with a $1200 Wheems and Plath and a $900 Tamaya and couldn't get an appreciable difference in my 3-5 mile leg fix triangle.

If you want to ever pass the USCG Oceans test, learn celestial the H.O. 229 method, that is the one you test on. Learn to draw your sight reduction form from memory, you will have to, no commercial forms allowed. None of them are that good either. I section a piece of paper into quarters, top left goes my sight information and corrections, lower left is the Nautical Almanac work, top right is my H.O.229 sight reduction work, and the lower right is finalizing. On a noon sight you just work down the left and over in an L shape. Bring the finest mechanical pencil you can find (I used a 0.2mm) because the width of a normal pencil lead will cover 2 of 3 answers.
 
The military had Loran in WWII. My dad, a B-24 pilot, told me they used it to develop approaches to their home station as well as a few others and emergency stations in southeast England. It required a good navigator to operate and read the scope. I'm assuming it was relatively short ranged.


Jim R
Collierville, TN

N7155H--1946 Piper J-3 Cub
N3368K--1946 Globe GC-1B Swift
 
ChrisK said:
Celestial navigation?
Click to expand...

Just like ships.

If you look at all the old WWII and earlier transport airplanes, they all have clear domes that you can get a sun/star sight using a bubble sextant (sextant with a built in artificial horizon).

Just like ships, air navigation was done with combination of long range direction finding equipment, celestial navigation and dead reckoning when the first two were not available.

Ernie Gann's Fate is the Hunter gives some good descriptions of how they did it.
 
N3368K said:
The military had Loran in WWII. My dad, a B-24 pilot, told me they used it to develop approaches to their home station as well as a few others and emergency stations in southeast England. It required a good navigator to operate and read the scope. I'm assuming it was relatively short ranged.


Jim R
Collierville, TN

N7155H--1946 Piper J-3 Cub
N3368K--1946 Globe GC-1B Swift
Click to expand...

Loran was a terrestrial based system. Never worked out in the middle of the Atlantic.
 
N3368K said:
The military had Loran in WWII. My dad, a B-24 pilot, told me they used it to develop approaches to their home station as well as a few others and emergency stations in southeast England. It required a good navigator to operate and read the scope. I'm assuming it was relatively short ranged.


Jim R
Collierville, TN

N7155H--1946 Piper J-3 Cub
N3368K--1946 Globe GC-1B Swift
Click to expand...

That would be Loran A back then, and it, as well as Loran C, had ADF type range.
 
Henning said:
That came after Omega, I'm not sure if aviation used Decca. Then Loran A, again not sure if t went to aviation; then came inertial systems then Loran C.
Click to expand...

I don't know if it ever got fielded, but I had a DECCA/Omnitrac manual that was a supplement to some CAB filing so someone was thinking about it.
 
I remember reading a comment by a 1930's vintage record breaking flyer when asked how he always made his destination so accurately. He said that he flew the calculated heading without making any wind corrections on the assumption that these would cancel out as he flew through weather systems. Seemed to work for him, made it from England to Australia!
 
Low range Nondirectional beacons and open loop antennas.
 
Henning said:
Trans Ocean?
Click to expand...

Depends on atmospherics. Just like when we did it on ships. I don't recall exactly how far out I was, but I did some DF back in the Atlantic when I was sailing 3M. It worked fine....just pain in the butt to do all the calculations.
 
Henning said:
That would be Loran A back then, and it, as well as Loran C, had ADF type range.
Click to expand...

Hmmmm..

It has been 35 years, but I swear my King 8001 -01 Loran C could pick up the Great Lakes Loran C chain of transmitters from Orlando Fla.....:dunno:....:confused:
 
Fearless Tower said:
Depends on atmospherics. Just like when we did it on ships. I don't recall exactly how far out I was, but I did some DF back in the Atlantic when I was sailing 3M. It worked fine....just pain in the butt to do all the calculations.
Click to expand...

You know, having come up in the navigation dependent industries pre GPS, it makes me laugh when people dog on GPS and chart plotters. It's like sailors that rib me for not running boats without a wheelhouse house anymore. "I've done my hurricane in an old schooner with an aft cockpit, y'all can have it, I done paid my dues, now I like to sit inside with heat and AC, in my socks with a cup of hot coffee and watch the weather out window. 90kt rain and sea foam pummeling your head isn't my idea of a good time.":lol:
 
Air Force still had a trainer at Mather(?) Sacramento navigator school in the late 80s with clear domes at the top of the fuselage.
 
Once airlines started flying every single day and twice on Sunday they often had near real time wind data at altitude.

Plus, once they put a 50,000 watt radio station in Honolulu and San Francisco - you could fly the ADF needle. . . .
 
From WWII up at least through 1976 there was a long range navigation system called CONSOLAN. I know because we used in the T-29 (I was in the last class) in nav school.

CONSOLAN was based on technology first deployed by Germany in WWII.

It was a medium frequency system used for overwater navigation. All you needed to use it was a radio. You got your fix by listening to a series of tones from the transmitting station. It was very similar to the A-N range system but it provided 360 degree bearings from the station, much like VOR.
 
Graueradler said:
Air Force still had a trainer at Mather(?) Sacramento navigator school in the late 80s with clear domes at the top of the fuselage.
Click to expand...
Ummmm....no. In the 1980's, they had T-43's with a small hole in the rioof through which a periscopic sextant could be thrust. BTDT. The really ancient trainers with a dome were long gone when I went through USAF cel nav training in Spring 1980.
 
Ron Levy said:
Ummmm....no. In the 1980's, they had T-43's with a small hole in the rioof through which a periscopic sextant could be thrust. BTDT. The really ancient trainers with a dome were long gone when I went through USAF cel nav training in Spring 1980.
Click to expand...

I did mine at Mather in summer '83 with the T-43.
 
creweite said:
I remember reading a comment by a 1930's vintage record breaking flyer when asked how he always made his destination so accurately. He said that he flew the calculated heading without making any wind corrections on the assumption that these would cancel out as he flew through weather systems. Seemed to work for him, made it from England to Australia!
Click to expand...


Anecdotes like that are bad evidence. How many guys disappeared following similar procedures? Those guys weren't around to write memoirs.
 
Ron Levy said:
Ummmm....no. In the 1980's, they had T-43's with a small hole in the rioof through which a periscopic sextant could be thrust. BTDT. The really ancient trainers with a dome were long gone when I went through USAF cel nav training in Spring 1980.
Click to expand...

In my class I flew the T-29 on its very last training sortie, and completed the training in the still new-smelling T-43 (B737).

Both had periscopic sextants. An advantage to having sextant ports in a high altitude airplane is that you can connect a hose to them and have a great vacuum cleaner.

The sextant in my earlier post was used by my uncle in WWII, it's also periscopic.
 
Tom-D said:
Yes. Your probably to young to have used ocean ship November, Oscar, or zebra
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've never come across RF stations that I could DF across an ocean on, but maybe at 25,000' I could do better. Is any of the floating gear still out there? I haven't seen any in my career. I think the best I ever got a RF/DF LOP was 4-500 miles.
 
Graueradler said:
Air Force still had a trainer at Mather(?) Sacramento navigator school in the late 80s with clear domes at the top of the fuselage.
Click to expand...


I learned this week that these were called "astrodomes".

Not to be confused with Houston's twin obsessions with Astronauts and Football. ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top