“Thanks” to our Navigation Pioneers
Today we can instantly navigate to any point on Earth before we crank the engine … just by setting the location identifier or coordinates in our GPS. Little thought is given to our navigation pioneers who preceded us by centuries on land, sea and in the air. They moved us from a travel by sun/moon/stars and sailing by compass to having Global Position Satellite navigation on all of our vehicles plus telephone, watch and pets.
The first real breakthrough in mapping our way by air through tough places was completing a chain of high intensity light beacons. The one pictured above is atop 4,000’ Mt. Diablo near San Francisco. Built by Standard Oil in 1928 and first activated by remote control from Denver by Charles Lindbergh who was championing the need for a national navigation system. Eventually 1,500 towers guided pilots at night and in marginal weather from city to city across America, shutting down in 1973 except for a few still maintained in Montana.
The next breakthrough was the low frequency radio range in 1929. Listening to the Morse code dots and dashes, pilots could tell when they were on course once the A’s and N’s superimposed sounding a steady “beam”. My first baptism in this system was as radio operator in a PB4Y four engine Navy Patrol Bomber, effectively a B24 with a single rudder. My main task was to reel out a 400’ trailing antenna (remembering to reel it in before landing) to pick up fringe stations. Below is an early map of the Green, Amber, Red and Blue Airways that expanded to over 48,000 miles. It was not until piloting B25’s that I experienced the exhilaration of building your own airway with the newer VHF Omni Range in the 50’s. RNAV was in due course the icing-on-the-cake! Fewer and fewer 45mph crosswind NDB approaches became reality!
Now I relish sitting relaxed in the backseat of your corporate or airline jet returning home from Europe, knowing that up front you’ll simply push a button for a hands-off Cat II/III approach in near zero/zero conditions. So, on this Thanksgiving weekend our “thanks” go out to everyone who has helped build, fly and pioneer our wonderful navigation system!
PS: The Mt. Diablo light above will be illuminated next month on the 7th in memory of its final service. It was shut down on Dec 7, 1941 following the attack on Pearl Harbor … reminding us that in time of national emergency the GPS can be turned off, too!
