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#11
August 29th 03, 01:57 AM
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From: Ed Rasimus
Four wide angle beams. Two quadrants broadcast A and two broadcast N--one is dot/dash, the other is dash/dot (don't remember which is A and which is N.) When introduced in WW2 the system was called Uncle Dog and used a D (dash dot dot) and a U (dot dot dash). Chris Mark 
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#12
August 29th 03, 01:57 AM
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In article , Mike Marron
writes In any event, other than NDB's, what type of instrument approaches were generally available back in WW2? NDBs (if available) would most likely be switched off over the UK to prevent them being of use to the LW. The Germans had quite a good radio system (Lorenz?) for giving the pilot a centreline. -- John
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#13
August 29th 03, 03:13 AM
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"Ed Rasimus" wrote
"Mortimer Schnerd, RN" wrote: Four wide angle beams. Two quadrants broadcast A and two broadcast N--one is dot/dash, the other is dash/dot (don't remember which is A and which is N.) When the beams overlapped, defining the published course you got a steady tone. Veer to one side you began to discriminate A, veer off course the other way and you got N. One course---hummmmmmmmmm. Trivial Pursuit: N = dah dit A = dit dah
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#14
August 29th 03, 07:01 AM
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Mike Marron wrote in message . ..
The link below shows just how dangerous flying into a thunderboomer can be. I understand that more aircraft were lost in Vietnam due to weather than enemy fire. How accurate is that statement and did weather also account for more losses than combat in previous wars (e.g: WW2, Korea, etc?) http://home.quicknet.nl/qn/prive/f.braaksma/ -Mike Marron Weather has been the direct cause and indirect contributor to several helo and UAV losses in OEF and OIF. Its hard to find direct info on this but wx could well be the leading causal factor in aircraft losses in those two conflicts
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#16
August 29th 03, 07:40 PM
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"Mike Marron" wrote in message ... "Mortimer Schnerd, RN" wrote: Mike Marron wrote: In any event, other than NDB's, what type of instrument approaches were generally available back in WW2? Radio ranges. Pilots flew along a beam listening to dots and dashes. The tone changed if you drifted off the beam. Some of the old timers here can explain this a lot better than me since I didn't start flying until the late 1970's. Since I qualify as one of the old timers, this is how it worked as best as this over the hill WWII airplane driver can remember it: Try to visualize two intersecting lines creating the form of a cross, which is the radio range with its station at the intersection. Each of the opposing quadrants broadcasts either an "a" or an "n" in Morse code, i.e.- ".-" or "-." Where the adjacent quadrants come together, the signals merge and become a solid tone, which becomes one of the legs of the range. The merger was never abrupt as I recall, so if you were flying at right angles to a leg, you heard a clear "n" as you approached a leg, and then slowly started to hear a solid tone in the background. The closer you got to the leg, the less you were able to hear the "n" until it completely disappeared as you flew over the leg. When you started to pick up the "a" over the solid tone of the leg, you were outbound from the leg. Let down procedures were published, just as they are now. So, whatever your heading happened to be, the first thing you did was to ID the station, which broadcast its unique identifier in Morse every minute or so (I don't recall how often). Then, you'd identify the quadrant you were in, as well as which leg of the range you were approaching (by the solid tone becoming louder or lower), each of which had its own published let down headings and altitudes. Work this out on a piece of scratch paper, and I think it'll make more sense to you than just trying to visualize it from words. Reverse turns were almost always initially done by flying outbound on a leg, then a 45 degree turn (all turns single needle width) either left or right and fly for a minute on that heading, then a 180 in either direction until the leg was again intercepted, followed by a 45 degree turn to the inbound heading. Somewhere along the line, somebody discovered that if you did a 90 degree turn to the left of the outbound leg heading and then a 270 to the right as soon as you hit the 90 heading, you'd end up at the same place inbound on the leg and didn't have to time your outbound leg after the 45 turn, which was useful when your clock was inop or at night when your cockpit lighting wasn't what it should have been. When RDBs became available, they simplified the process because you had a visual pointer to help you identify the station location, instead of having to rely on the clarity of audio radio reception which, when you were far enough from the station and in bad wx or over poor radio reception terrain, could be a challenge. At any rate, after a while, stations were lined up so that their legs were in what were the forerunners of airways, so that you could navigate over distances simply by flying from the legs of one station on to those of another ahead of you. I once ferried a gooneybird from the east coast to someplace near Riverside, Cal. for a major overhaul by flying radio ranges all the way. I hope that helped explain how the system worked. I hope I didn't have too much screwed up, but it's the best I can do with the memory available to me of details I used 60 years ago or so. Please feel free with the questions if I've left something muddy or otherwise unclear. I may or may not be able to clarify it, but I will try. George Z.
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#17
August 29th 03, 10:57 PM
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"Chris Mark" wrote in message ... Here's an anecdote from Capt Frank Dailey that gives a little bit of the flavor of weather on flight operations in the ww2 era: "Dick Korn was a PPC in squadron VP-H/L-7 who became the beneficiary of a good APS-15 radar operator in his crew. The circumstance began as a simple transit flight from NAS Kodiak to NAS Adak, with some off-airways patrolling along the way. Aleutian weather reared its head and as its first challenge provided headwinds much higher than those forecast. By the time the Korn-piloted PB4Y-2 got to the vicinity of Adak, it had exceeded its planned fuel consumption. Adak had closed in. I happened to be at Adak as a fill-in copilot for our Operations Officer, Lcdr. Wagoner. It was now snowing heavily at NAS Adak .The airfield was now below even GCA minimums. Dick Korn elected to try a GCA approach at Adak as he began to doubt that he had fuel enough to reach his alternate at Shemya. Wagoner went down to Adak's Operations room, right next to the tower. I stayed in our assigned Quonset hut on top of a hill just south of the runway. My next experience was to hear a plane with its engines in full roar making a pullup to the south and passing so close overhead that the Quonset huts all rattled. Then I went down to Operations and found Wagoner in communication with Dick Korn. Wagoner asked Korn to get a fuel report from his plane captain. It took longer than it should have and when Wagoner finally got it, he made some quick calculations and barked out instructions to Dick Korn. "Set your course direct for Shemya, using your radar operator to track you out there. Do not fly via the standard airways route. You do not have enough fuel. Do not try to land here. This field is almost zero-zero." Korn's crew grasped these instructions quickly and their plane gradually disappeared from the NAS Adak radarscope. Wagoner got into voice communication with Shemya Control and told them the story. He asked that Korn be given a straight-in approach and that the Bartow lights on the runway be set at Strength Five. It was raining slightly at Shemya but they had two miles visibility under a low overcast. The PB4Y-2 radar worked to perfection. Dick Korn and crew made a straight in approach and landed at Shemya. Number one engine quit on final approach and the # 2, 3, and 4 engine tanks when dipped, had twenty, twenty and thirty gallons left, respectively. (The wing tanks held about 2400 gallons when topped off.) The radar and the radar operator had scored again. Wagoner set another high mark for intelligent and timely decision making. And Dick Korn was smart enough to follow instructions." Chris Mark Chris...and others interested in the above anecdote... You would be interested in "The Thousand-Mile War" (World War Two in Alaska and the Aleutians") by Brian Garfield. There are a number of these 'weather' stories. In fact, the weather in the area impacted on most of the true tales in this remarkable book. IMHBUAO. Cheers.
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#18
August 30th 03, 02:04 AM
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"Peter Bjoern" wrote in message ... I have an original AAF Technical Order 30-100 "Instrument Flying Basic and Advanced" published on 15 January 1944. Btw. it looks like a kind of predecessor to the later AFM 51-37. /\/\/\/\/\/\/\ LOTSA GOODSTUF SNIPPED \/\/\/\/\/\/\/ The third part (T.O. 30-100F-1) covers the Army Air Forces Instrument Approach System. Dated 10 November 1943. This is nothing less than an ILS system, complete with localizer, glide path and marker beacons. The frequencies used are even the same as used today, though there were only six frequencies available for the localizer, named channels U,V,W,X,Y and Z in the area 108.3 to 110.3 MHz or megacycles as they used then. The glide path was using frequencies around 335 mc and the marker beacons 75 mc just as today. The airborne equipment is a receiver control box to tune the desired channel and the well known crossed-needle instrument with the blue/yellow zones. I don't know how widely available this system was, but at least it was known and developed as early as November 1943 and considered important enough to place in the instrument flying manual. Not very widely available, but others have commented as you did about the longevity of the system developed way back then. One of them is Roger Mola of Aviation International News who, incidentally, won the Northrop Grumman Award for the Best Breaking News Submission ( for 'Shutdown of National Airspace system was 'organized mayhem' ). And he comments on dates and such of the ILS family development, at the US Centennial of Flight Commision website: http://www.centennialofflight.gov/index.cfm (my notes in brackets below): (SIX LOCATIONS IN 1941) The instrument landing system (ILS) incorporated the best features of both approach lighting and radio beacons with higher frequency transmissions. The ILS painted an electronic picture of the glideslope onto a pilot's cockpit instruments. Tests of the system began in 1929, and the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) authorized installation of the system in 1941 at six locations. The first landing of a scheduled U.S. passenger airliner using ILS was on January 26, 1938, as a Pennsylvania-Central Airlines Boeing 247-D flew from Washington, D.C., to Pittsburgh and landed in a snowstorm using only the ILS system. (ILS REMAINS UNCHANGED) More than one type of ILS system was tried. The system eventually adopted consisted of a course indicator (called a localizer) that showed whether the plane was to the left or right of the runway centerline, a glide path or landing beam to show if the plane was above or below the glide slope, and two marker beacons for showing the progress of approach to the landing field. Equipment in the airplane allowed the pilot to receive the information that was sent so he could keep the craft on a perfect flight path to visual contact with the runway. Approach lighting and other visibility equipment are part of the ILS and also aid the pilot in landing. In 2001, the ILS remains basically unchanged. (NINE LOCATIONS BY 1945, TEN UNDERWAY) By 1945, nine CAA systems were operating and 10 additional locations were under construction. (ARMY INSTALLING 50) Another 50 were being installed for the army. On January 15, 1945, the U.S. Army introduced an ILS with a higher frequency transmitter to reduce static and create straighter courses, called the Army Air Forces Instrument Approach System Signal Set 51. In 1949, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) adopted this army standard for all member countries. In the 1960s, the first ILS equipment for fully blind landings became possible. Cheers.
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#19
August 30th 03, 02:41 AM
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You're quite welcome. I'll have to tell the missus, whatzername, that somebody
complimented me on my memory. (^-^))) Thanks for the nice words. George Z. PosterBoy wrote: "Gooneybird" wrote in message ... Since I qualify as one of the old timers, this is how it worked as best as this over the hill WWII airplane driver can remember it: Try to visualize two intersecting lines creating the form of a cross, which is the radio range with its station at the intersection. Each of the opposing quadrants broadcasts either an "a" or an "n" in Morse code, i.e.- ".-" or "-." Where the adjacent quadrants come together, the signals merge and become a solid tone, which becomes one of the legs of the range. The merger was never abrupt as I recall, so if you were flying at right angles to a leg, you heard a clear "n" as you approached a leg, and then slowly started to hear a solid tone in the background. The closer you got to the leg, the less you were able to hear the "n" until it completely disappeared as you flew over the leg. When you started to pick up the "a" over the solid tone of the leg, you were outbound from the leg. Let down procedures were published, just as they are now. So, whatever your heading happened to be, the first thing you did was to ID the station, which broadcast its unique identifier in Morse every minute or so (I don't recall how often). Then, you'd identify the quadrant you were in, as well as which leg of the range you were approaching (by the solid tone becoming louder or lower), each of which had its own published let down headings and altitudes. Work this out on a piece of scratch paper, and I think it'll make more sense to you than just trying to visualize it from words. Reverse turns were almost always initially done by flying outbound on a leg, then a 45 degree turn (all turns single needle width) either left or right and fly for a minute on that heading, then a 180 in either direction until the leg was again intercepted, followed by a 45 degree turn to the inbound heading. Somewhere along the line, somebody discovered that if you did a 90 degree turn to the left of the outbound leg heading and then a 270 to the right as soon as you hit the 90 heading, you'd end up at the same place inbound on the leg and didn't have to time your outbound leg after the 45 turn, which was useful when your clock was inop or at night when your cockpit lighting wasn't what it should have been. When RDBs became available, they simplified the process because you had a visual pointer to help you identify the station location, instead of having to rely on the clarity of audio radio reception which, when you were far enough from the station and in bad wx or over poor radio reception terrain, could be a challenge. At any rate, after a while, stations were lined up so that their legs were in what were the forerunners of airways, so that you could navigate over distances simply by flying from the legs of one station on to those of another ahead of you. I once ferried a gooneybird from the east coast to someplace near Riverside, Cal. for a major overhaul by flying radio ranges all the way. I hope that helped explain how the system worked. I hope I didn't have too much screwed up, but it's the best I can do with the memory available to me of details I used 60 years ago or so. Please feel free with the questions if I've left something muddy or otherwise unclear. I may or may not be able to clarify it, but I will try. George Z. Well, George.... With a nitpick here or there, I'd say your memory works pretty well !!! You may be interested to know that as late as the mid-50s, despite USAF's use of both VOR and ILS, we still had"ADF" and "GCA" stamped on the back of our Instrument Flight cards (together with VOR 'n ILS) because we gave (and had to pass, ourselves) the quadrant approach orientation as part of the annual IFR flight check. It was interesting, espy when you hit the null cone and wondered if it was station passage or problem with the radio!!. Thanks for the reminder. Cheers.
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#20
August 30th 03, 03:59 AM
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"ArtKramr" wrote in message ... Subject: Weather vs. Combat From: "PosterBoy" Date: 8/29/03 6:04 PM Pacific (ILS REMAINS UNCHANGED) More than one type of ILS system was tried. The system eventually adopted consisted of a course indicator (called a localizer) that showed whether the plane was to the left or right of the runway centerline, a glide path or landing beam to show if the plane was above or below the glide slope, and two marker beacons for showing the progress of approach to the landing field. Equipment in the airplane allowed the pilot to receive the information that was sent so he could keep the craft on a perfect flight path to visual contact with the runway. Approach lighting and other visibility equipment are part of the ILS and also aid the pilot in landing. In 2001, the ILS remains basically unchanged. (NINE LOCATIONS BY 1945, TEN UNDERWAY) By 1945, nine CAA systems were operating and 10 additional locations were under construction. (ARMY INSTALLING 50) Another 50 were being installed for the army. On January 15, 1945, the U.S. Army introduced an ILS with a higher frequency transmitter to reduce static and create straighter courses, called the Army Air Forces Instrument Approach System Signal Set 51. In 1949, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) adopted this army standard for all member countries. In the 1960s, the first ILS equipment for fully blind landings became possible. Cheers. Here's the way we did it when flying out of Stansted England before D-Day. .. You would taxi out to the head of the runway. If you could see the end of the runway you went. If you couldn't see the end of the runway you went anyway. Believe it, Art!! Same-same K-2 in Korea, 'cept it was mainly haze from the breakfast kimchi pots in the nearby village of Taegu! And, I'm sure that the air conditioning system...which could and did blow frost all around the '86 cockpit...made waiting for the haze to clear a bit more pleasant than in the Maurader. Cheers.
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