NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
"backseat driver in a bomber" (1943 article)
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2017 Oct 15, 23:56 -0700
From: Paul Hirose
Date: 2017 Oct 15, 23:56 -0700
This 1943 Popular Mechanics article is about air navigation training during the war. The first photo shows someone taking a sun shot. The sextant appears to be an A-12, which is a little awkward in an astrodome since you look down into an A-12 to shoot the Sun. "Under average flying conditions, the navigator on an ocean flight of thousands of miles can determine the position of his plane within five or 10 miles. With his sextant, which the navigator considers almost as a third hand, he takes his position from a star directly along the line of flight or directly to the right or left of the plane. He makes at least nine shots and takes the average. His guideposts are 52 trustworthy stars that don't choke off their 'beams' when the air raid sirens sound." (A few years ago I posted a link to a similar article, but that was a different magazine.) https://books.google.com/books?id=WNYDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA40&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2 The site loads the whole magazine. If you don't have the bandwidth to support that, it's a good idea to disable Javascript. You can still view the pages one at a time.