A few months later, the newly famous pilot would meet a young Naval officer, and their collaboration would change the world of flying. His nearly tragic Caribbean trip, however, turned out to be a critical moment in time, not only for Lindbergh’s understanding of navigation, but also for the advancement of the practice for all aviators. Had this occurred nine months earlier, over the Atlantic, the name “Lindbergh” might today be no more than a forgotten bit of aviation trivia. I had flown at almost a right angle to my proper heading and it…put me close to three hundred miles off route! Nothing on my map of Florida corresponded with the earth’s features I had seen…where could I be? I unfolded my hydrographic chart …. But haze thickened as my altitude increased…. If I could see Polaris, that northern point of light, I could navigate by it with reasonable accuracy. I started climbing toward the clear sky that had to exist somewhere above me. A few stars directly overhead were dimly visible through haze, but they formed no constellation I could recognize. I had no notion whether I was flying north, south, east, or west.
Over the Straits of Florida my magnetic compass rotated without stopping…. It happened in the middle of the night, and it alarmed Lindbergh enough that years later he recalled the incident in his memoir The Autobiography of Values: Louis, lost his way somewhere between Havana, Cuba, and the southwest coast of Florida. In the year following his historic transatlantic flight to Paris, Charles Lindbergh, flying again in the Spirit of St. Let’s talk about that…… Even Lindbergh Got Lost OK, this was a good start but what about over water navigation and across land masses where there were no arrows. The towers and foundations were painted with bright colors (yellow and black or orange and white) so pilots could see them easily. The arrows pointed towards the next beacon along the airway, so pilots could use them to stay on course during daylight hours. They were only 10 miles apart so that when a pilot arrived at one beacon, he could see the flashes of the next.ĭid the arrows all point the same direction? No.
They ran on electricity and rotated so that a pilot would see flashes. The beacons were two, very bright lights (1,250,000 candlepower). The beacons or lights sat on top of tall steel towers, between 20 and 87 feet high. How far apart were the arrows? They placed the beacons about every ten miles along an airway. These people were a lot like lighthouse keepers. The postal service hired people to turn on the beacons every night to guide airmail pilots flying airways in the dark. These giant arrows were the foundations for electrical beacons. They built the towers in the middle of the concrete arrows. So they came up with the idea of building arrows and beacons. They called the routes “airways.” The Postal Service decided that pilots needed to be able to fly during both day and night to deliver the mail quickly. The Postal Service established routes along which to fly airmail. Why did they make the arrows? In the early 1920s, airplanes hadn’t been around for very long and the Postal Service was experimenting with using airplanes to deliver mail. The United States Postal Service first made the arrows in 1924. Today I want to talk about navigation and how this system evolved and who the person was that made “Avigation” a reality however, before we move ahead let’s talk about giant concrete arrows in the desert. Hopefully everyone had a good week and are ready for the weekend and some down time away from the office or airport. Robert Novells’ Third Dimension Blog June 9, 2017
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