NavList:

DaveP, you mentioned that you’ve wondered where the drift sight was in Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis.

I recall you’ve previously published the  lecture by Lindbergh given at the RAF College Cranwell, and you noted he said in the lecture he didn’t use the drift sight on the Paris flight due to the difficulty of measuring drift while flying alone.  I’ve noticed that the Smithsonian website shows a Pioneer Instrument Co. “U.S. Navy Drift Angle Meter” and their caption states that Lindbergh carried one like it on the flight to Paris, but adds that he didn’t use it as it was too difficult to operate it and fly the aircraft at the same time.  https://timeandnavigation.si.edu/multimedia-asset/pioneer-drift-meter

Lindbergh’s 1953 book titled “The Spirit of St Louis” also seems to have suggestions of a portable instrument.  On page 410 he wrote that the drift-indicator is lying in its rack in the fuselage behind him, and that “the movement of an arm could slip it into the brackets on my window”.  He then talks about the impossibility of being able to fly the aircraft straight while leaning out over the eyepiece of a drift indicator (page 401), and also mentions his state of fatigue.  He comments on that same page 401 that he “could have traded the instrument’s weight for another half-gallon of fuel”.  It seems the windows were removable; he describes on page 210 the windows as being stored in the cockpit and while over Nova Scotia he considered fitting them but decided against it.   I viewed the book at Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.547629/page/401/mode/2up

It will no doubt be obvious to you how the Pioneer drift meter works, but it is described briefly on pages 50/51 of a 1932 report at the link below, though looking a bit different visually to the example in the Smithsonian.

books.google.co.uk link

AdrianF