NavList:

Frank
Mike Sadler’s Obituary appeared in the British press over most of last week.  The Times of London hung onto it for three days, which is a long time for The Times where it was well reported without quite so much of the ‘Hollywood’ style embellishment.  With respect to New York Times article, firstly the term ‘Mr’ is rarely used in British obituaries, particularly military ones.  He could have been referred to as Sadler, Corporal Sadler, Sergeant Sadler, Lieutenant Sadler, Captain Sadler at various stages of his military career, or Major Sadler, the rank he retired with and retained thereafter.  His only chance of being referred to as Mr Sadler would have been if he had been a Warrant Officer and held the King’s Warrant, but he leap-frogged that rank. 

Anyway, back to navigation.  The article doesn’t really differentiate between use of celestial to obtain position lines and for direction.  Position lines would have required setting up a theodolite or use of an artificial horizon, so they would only have been obtained infrequently.  Use of celestial for direction on the other hand would have been in use continuously by use of a Sun compass.  The Times of London obituaries pay much more attention to Sadler’s dead reconning, which was based mainly upon direction from the Sun compass and distance from the vehicle odometer. However, I’m no expert in desert navigation.  Geoffery Kolby is the man, so I hope he’ll read this and weigh in. 

Turning to the art, hunch, and instinct bit.  If the aim of air, sea, and ground navigation on the move is to arrive at the correct place, at the correct time, safely, then that will require establishing a regular routine of checks, observations, recordings, and calculations and being able to achieve that is most definitely ‘an art’.   So would be the riding over the dunes to maintain the correct average course, a bit like helming a yacht at speed up, over, and down waves while allowing simultaneously for the shifting shadow of the Sun compass needle on the tilting surface of the azimuth plate.

What about ‘instinct’?  How can we work in an innate, typically fixed pattern of behaviour in animals in response to certain stimuli?  Can we count a change in the expected position of the sun, the direction of the breeze on the face, a darkening of cloud, a change in temperature, the smell of the sea, the smell of the land, the direction of the sound of aircraft engines being run up, which carries a long way at night.  I’m sure we can equate some of that instinct.  Does correctly judging the effect of wheel slip on odometer readings for each type of sand encountered count as instinctive?

That leaves ‘hunch’, a feeling or guess based on intuition rather than fact.  When all else appears to have failed we will be tempted to revert to hunch, but we must be careful, because reporting of hunch is biased.  Frequently, only successful hunch is reported and written about early.  Unsuccessful hunch is often only reported years afterwards when sand swept wreckage and dried bones are spotted glistening in the Sun.  DaveP