Navigation

"Colin W Kingsbury" writes:
"vincent p. norris" wrote

About five years ago, a friend and several of his friends who have
much more money than I have, sailed a catamaran around the world. A
big one, both hulls 40 feet long. He carried three GPS units, but he
also learned celestial nav before he set out, just in case.

I also sail and have always said that if (when) I go way offshore (eg
Newport-Bermuda) I would learn celestial. Why? practically speaking I always
said I don't want to rely on batteries and satellites.

As a fail-safe, if you turn west won't you get to North America
in some reasonable amount of time?

But to be honest, what's more likely to fail? A couple of ruggedized
solid-state electronic devices in a waterproof bag, or a piece of machinery
built to jewelry precision and a stack of paper tables?

And don't tell me about the satellites- if the GPS network goes down for an
extended time (at sailboat speeds, being without GPS for a few days
shouldn't be a big deal) then I suspect I won't want to be finding
civilization anytime soon.

Thanks Bill.

I knew there had to be an easier way.

I am not usually a big Acrobat fan. For such a big program it is not very
full functional. Maybe I just have not spent enough effort to learn all of
it.

Blue skies to all

"Lakeview Bill" wrote in message
. com...
Handy hint...

For .PDF's, right click the link, then select "Save target as..."

This will allow you to save it directly to your disk with no timeout
problems. And if you find it's something you don't want to keep, you can
always delete it.



"private" wrote in message
news:fFOUd.529485$8l.443020@pd7tw1no...

"C J Campbell" wrote in message
...
The Air Force manual "Air Navigation" is on line he

http://www.e-publishing.af.mil/pubfi...fpam11-216.pdf

--
Christopher J. Campbell
World Famous Flight Instructor
Port Orchard, WA


Ne Obliviscaris

Thanks for the link.

It is a 70,928kb .pdf It downloaded ok but would repeatedly time out
when
I
tried to save it to disk. I had to slowly page down through all 427
pages
to force the graphics to load, then it saved ok.

Blue skies to all

"Everett M. Greene" wrote in message
...
"Colin W Kingsbury" writes:
"vincent p. norris" wrote

About five years ago, a friend and several of his friends who have
much more money than I have, sailed a catamaran around the world. A
big one, both hulls 40 feet long. He carried three GPS units, but he
also learned celestial nav before he set out, just in case.

I also sail and have always said that if (when) I go way offshore (eg
Newport-Bermuda) I would learn celestial. Why? practically speaking I
always
said I don't want to rely on batteries and satellites.

As a fail-safe, if you turn west won't you get to North America
in some reasonable amount of time?


True, but at sailboat speeds (often 5-6kts groundspeed) the penalty for such
shenanigans is often measured in weeks. If someone on the boat gets
appendicitis, or injured, well... Yes there is an EPIRB to activate and
anyone crossing blue water these days is carrying a nice GPS-squawking
406Mhz unit, but you're still in a small boat in a very large ocean and if
you can't help yourself there is simply no guarantee anyone else can help
you either. And if you're crossing an ocean, the difference between a good
course and a "turn west and we'll hit it" course might exceed the capacity
of your fresh-water tanks.

-cwk.

-cwk.

Y'All,
I fought the celestial vs electronics battle through most of WWII.
I was with the B-29s initially in India as radar bombardment mechanic. I
had learned LORAN at Boca Raton, FL and it
became my duty to try to keep the APN-4 in my group (468th)
operational. The set was in two units each the size of a 19" TV.
40 vacumn tubes made it operate until higher altitudes caused electrical
malfunctions. Only good for 600 miles at night in the
best of conditions. Reliability always in doubt due to tube failure,
vibration of connections, corrosion and operator skills..

By ship to Tinian in the Pacific. Assigned to 58th Wing Training center to
teach LORAN. New B-29s coming over with APN-9
which was only the size of one 19' TV. New planes were taken over by senior
officers and older planes assigned to new arrivals.
Result was that I was given the job of training old navigators on
the -9 and the new on the -4. As a Corporal instructor I ranked
my students none of whom wanted to learn about something they had previously
learned not to trust. Tough teaching assignment but
made me want to become a teacher.

Skilled operator could get fix in less than 3 minutes. This involved
matching the counting of signal time differences in microseconds from the
master/slave pair and finding the line on a LORAN chart.
Do the same thing with another pair and you had your fix with built in
travel-time error..

Much of the 2800 mile flight to Japan was at lower levels with stations on
islands like Ulithi. Good LORAN range and accuracy. Flights required
passage through weather fronts that reduced use of
celestial navigation and increased reliance on electronic. We even
had first inertial systems which read out longitude and latitude as
an odometer in the newer planes.. My plane has a hard-wired LORAN the size
of cigar box. Last military LORANs were in the APN-30s.

Still celestial ruled with electronics a step-child category. The rule of
primacy still reigned and LORAN was just a back-up. Experience in India had
made navigators unwilling to trust both RADAR and LORAN navigation when
celestial was possible..

At the end of the war I was seeing the birth of DME as the slant range to a
bomb release point. RNAV as used to put bearing and distance to radar
visible target to hit non-radar target. Even the first German radio
controlled bomb was instrumental in sending me to India as a replacement. At
war's end I was operator/mechanic of a
supersonic bombardment simulator that had the Nagasaki chart installed for
practice bombing runs in the immediate vicinity of Nagasaki. Device used
tank of water with underwater maps made
of sand and beads to give radar-scope pictures of Japan by using a vibrating
underwater crystal to send to scale transmissions and echos back to the
scope.

Greatest change in all of this WWII technollogy has been in reduction of
size, speed of presentation and availability
Gene Whitt

("Gene Whitt" wrote)
Y'All,
I fought the celestial vs electronics battle through most of WWII.
I was with the B-29s initially in India as radar bombardment mechanic. I
had learned LORAN at Boca Raton, FL and it
became my duty to try to keep the APN-4 in my group (468th)
operational. The set was in two units each the size of a 19" TV.
40 vacumn tubes made it operate until higher altitudes caused electrical
malfunctions. Only good for 600 miles at night in the
best of conditions. Reliability always in doubt due to tube failure,
vibration of connections, corrosion and operator skills..
snip...


Thank you for the interesting write-up Gene.


Montblack

Thank You for You Service Gene!

Patrick

Gene Whitt wrote:

I fought the celestial vs electronics battle through most of WWII.

Very interesting. Thanks.

George Patterson
I prefer Heaven for climate but Hell for company.

"Gene Whitt" wrote in message ink.net...
Y'All,
I fought the celestial vs electronics battle through most of WWII.
...
Greatest change in all of this WWII technollogy has been in reduction of size, speed of presentation and availability
Gene Whitt


Wow, very interesting...

Y'All,
Thanks for the kind words, friends.. A more complete posting about how I
won WWII without knowing it is on my website at the very end of the IFR
section Page 7.91 and some others along with a WWII Chart with practice
bomb runs. Nagasaki in the lower
right. Blow up chart to see better.
www.whittsflying.com

gene

"Gene Whitt" wrote in message
ink.net...
[...]
Greatest change in all of this WWII technollogy has been in reduction of
size, speed of presentation and availability

Boy, I'll say. And I thought my Northstar M1 was primitive. At least it
actually displays the numbers in their final calculated form.

Thanks for sharing...