NavList:

Hi All

I read all your POSTs when I get up in the morning – AEST - = 11 hrs + GMT (East seaboard Australia) – my in box in generally filled with numerous posts from this forum.

And I think my reconditioned WW II A12A aeronautical sextant from Bob S – is sitting in the post office (there was a bulky parcel note in my PO Box in the weekend) – so really looking forward to finally getting my hands on a ‘REAL’ sextant ……  “ I chuckle”.

I have watched with a weather eye the comments about Amelia Earhart and her navigator Noonan – and have read very little about this history except that most of the “facts” are speculative – and we are unlikely to ever know the truth without true evidence – the wreckage or similar.

As an experienced front line senior aeronautical navigator – chugging across of NMs of ocean in a Bristol Freighter – below 10,000 ft as we were unpressurised – we used just a sextant and a drift sight and RDF (as we closed land) – to navigating 4 engined turboprop P3BOrions with radar, loran, celestial, RDF at 30,000 ft over 1000 of nms of ocean with nothing but sea – no islands or anything ……….. 15 hour submarine ocean patrols at night north of Hawaii with radar, radios, radar alts and everything off – the ONLY navigational aid permitted was the sextant – a periscopic Kollsman.

We dropped sonobuoy fields over huge areas of ocean using ONLY the sextant – and our accuracy for cocked hat fixes was about 10 nms! – that was superb accuracy – and nothing for an aircraft travelling at 6 NMS a minute."