NavList:

   

Reply

Recent article at the Avweb site:

"When I was a callow lad, private pilot ground school was interactive.
It was interactive not in the sense of the Pavlovian clicking of choices
on a webpage, but of having a human instructor who actually talked and
answered questions. Chalk was a thing then.

"One of the instructors must have been an old school oceanic navigator
because during the section on basic navigation, he produced and
demonstrated a sextant of the sort used by World War II-era crews to
find their way across the Pacific. I remember two things about this
instrument. It had a bubble and my first attempt at reducing position
with it put us in Indiana, 600 miles away from where in fact we were in
North Carolina."


https://www.avweb.com/blogs/insider/Modern-Navigators-Are-Unerring-But-Also-Numb-to-the-Universe-230845-1.html

I have never heard of the book he mentions.

When I worked in B-52 maintenance in the early 80s, the little tubes in
the terrain computer had been replaced by transistors on circuit cards.
It was still an analog computer in the same case, now mostly empty space
since the volume of circuitry had been reduced about eightfold.

   

Reply