"etagg" wrote in message
...
with a sextant and a compass they know ware the ship was and it's heading
so
it was not hard to comput the heading to intersect ths ships heading......


Well if the ship steered a constant heading and there
were no cross winds or currents and the pilot kept a
running plot that might be true.

However ships that steer straight lines at constant speed
in wartime tend to collect torpedoes, winds doth
blow and pilots tend to have other things on their
mind from time to time so it wasnt quite that
simple.

I believe the normal procedure was to have a pre-arranged
rendezvous point but it could be a little dicey. I recall
one of the FAA pilots at Okinawa who found the
BPF by climbing to max height and spotting smoke on
the horizon. That wouldnt have worked so well in the
Atlantic in winter

Keith