NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Latitude AND Longitude by Noon Sun
From: Stacy Hanna
Date: 2004 Jan 25, 14:21 -0500
From: Stacy Hanna
Date: 2004 Jan 25, 14:21 -0500
The USS LaMoure County while engaged in a pre-dawn training amphibious assault in a low visibility situation off the coast of Chile during a UNITAS deployment. While approaching the anchorage, they navigated with GPS only on Chilean charts that used a local datum without taking into account the datum shift. As a result the ship ran aground on the rocky coast with damage that caused the decommissioning of the ship. The datum shift was later determined to be 1500m. -----Original Message----- From: Navigation Mailing List [mailto:NAVIGATION-L@LISTSERV.WEBKAHUNA.COM] On Behalf Of Jared Sherman Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2004 13:51 To: NAVIGATION-L@LISTSERV.WEBKAHUNA.COM Subject: Re: Latitude AND Longitude by Noon Sun Joel?I found nothing on Google but must believe that is a gross oversimplification. First, there are no reefs in GPS, so they must have also been relying on charting of some kind. And then, the odds are they were using the one or the other or both improperly. One must also rely on the navigator/operator as much as the tools, and I'd bet the problem was operator error--not GPS itself. Error that would have been repeated with any other tool: LORAN, sextant, rod and chain, whatever. But I'd certainly be interested if you could turn up details.