NavList:

At the risk of repeating a post I sent Aug 25 and received not a single reply which seems oddly strange considering the subject covered included both maritime polar navigation (submerged) and aeronautical polar navigation – I repeat it almost exactly – it needs little editing as it is very interesting.

Hopefully, it will get more hits of interest this time.

This forum seems to carry very little content on aeronautical navigation.

Frank, it covers your subject query in depth – and has a push for us flyboys and aeronautical navigation.

My experience of the subject – whilst a bit dated now – we were taught and experienced grid and polar navigation as the New Zealand Maritime area for which we covered as Royal New Zealand Air Force maritime aircrew included the Antarctic region – and I was on duty as the P3B Orion duty navigator when the Air New Zealand crashed into Mt Erebus 28 Nov 1979 – we were launched from Auckland and were on our way to Christchurch – to refuel and kit up for the deep south patrol when a ground search party found the crash site – we, myself as navigator and the Tacco (tactical Navigator) geared up for grid navigation in which we were trained.

My experience to explain – I have 4000 hrs of RNZAF navigation – 3000 in a P3B Orion long range reconnaissance aircraft – we have operated close to the Arctic and Antarctic regions on patrol but never close enough our Litton ASN42 needed to go polar.

However, at navigation school we learnt Grid navigation – extensively used when navigating in the polar regions – and we did training flights where we had to draw our own Grid map and then navigate at night using this with our gyro compass set to free gyro and out of gyro-compass.

I fell across this story and found loose bit of wool hanging out and tugged it with some research and actual air experience and things as written in story book didn’t quite ring true.

An extract from the book I was reading at the time. They have just been tasked to transit the North pole to the Greenland sea.( quite topical I suspect with Trump making a bid for Greenland) This is a non-fiction book – an actual submarine and an officer’s is writing this.

However, it is fairly dumbed down I suspect to keep its contents clear of even a smiggen of classified content – however, sometimes this dumbing down is a bit too much. Whilst this chapter is about Navigation the other area that was also dumbed down a bit too much is the nuclear power plant – and if you read Colin Tucker’s ‘How to Drive a Nuclear Reactor’ before reading this book (which I did) – you will see what I mean. However, I will agree that to keep a book interesting the author needs to keep technical stuff to a minimum – however, not at the expense of the story line.

Read this chapter then read the link I have attached – I have split this long read up a bit an highlighted bits to get your attention – the SINS was your life line under the ice – without it you are directionless!! Read on

   [see attached PDF below]

A very interesting read and all that is written is my understanding of polar navigation.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1958/december/navigating-under-north-pole-icecap

For those not familiar with Grid Navigation here is a reasonably good overview of its workings
https://skybrary.aero/articles/grid-navigation

Whilst I suspect the story line was kept flowing by the author – I think (a personal view) it was a bit dumbed down. Please feel free to comment at will – am I too sensitive about the lost art of navigation or was the author keeping the story going at the expense of the detail.

Regards Howard G

PS if you have no experience at inertial navigation and the physics of it – that is actually another very interesting area of reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system.

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