Aerial Navigation

good morning gentlemen my name is Frank Hearn I've been around this ship for getting on clothes - clothes yours now I guess and you can see from the heading on the briefing paper that I passed out to you all that I wrote this thing back in 2000 so when I said 56 years ago on the first paragraph it's 56 + 9 it's getting longer and longer and harder and harder to remember the purpose of this class is is to give dosent some background to respond to visitors often asked questions about oh how did pilots navigate over the open seas in the old days without GPS everybody everybody knows what GPS is but very few people know what dead reckoning is and dead reckoning is the term that applied to the system of navigation that we use back then the briefing is not intended as a course of navigation I couldn't possibly teach you this in an hour but I can give you enough of a background maybe the way your appetite to look into it a little bit more the the operational and tech not technological constraints of now 65 years ago were considerably different than they are today today we're airplane cockpits are full of magic black boxes and all kinds of things that enable the pilot to to navigate generally with by push button rather than having to sit down and plot courses and calculate Brown speeds and take into account wind velocities and altitude and so on those black boxes are generally go by names that you're probably all familiar with GPS a Global Positioning System TACAN with its distance measuring capability and various other devices that we just simply didn't have access to more importantly perhaps what we didn't have back then was an adequate radio communication system we had one but we couldn't use it we were deathly afraid of the enemy fire using the direction finder on our signals locating either us or our track which would give them an indication or where the ship was that we came from and so therefore the the the transmissions that we were limited to as pilots was were twofold one was a significant enemy sighting and perhaps the most classic of all of those was he was the PBY pilot just off of Oahu shortly after Pearl Harbor who sent back the signal sighted sub sank the same latitude so-and-so longitude zone so and that was the end of it and you didn't expect to reply because this ship or the short was not gonna give it to you you just sent the message in the blind the second one was that if you were on an attack mission instead of a search mission you were to give a signal of the but it was called a strike signal letting anybody who was listening to know that you were you were going in on the target hey there were frequently some unexpected things that occurred along the way and you had to be prepared to adjust your flight plan for that the flight plan itself was something that was developed in the ready room prior to the prior to the mission the squadron leader or the or the air group commander depending upon how big the assembly was would would spell out the parameters of the mission and the pilots would use that information in preparing their their rather detailed flight plans before about July of 1944 the standard attack carrier was a at that time called a fast carrier carried an air group consisting usually typically of three squadrons fighter squadron o bombing squadron and a torpedo squadron and after July 44 this complement was sometimes increased to four squadrons by adding aircraft especially outfitted for a particular task including night night flying which we did not do ordinarily prior to that time at first each squadron was nominally a nominally consisted of twelve aircraft but sometimes increased for a specific mission early in 1942 there was an apparent objective to maintain a one to one with the ratio replacement aircraft aboard each carrier so when you as you have red and some of the other material about well how many airplanes did you carry on this thing when you talk about somewhere maybe five to a hundred remember that half of those were generally replacement aircraft and most of them were suspended from the overhead down in the hangar bay and had to be sometimes even had to be assembled before they could be used the Air Group commander or the tag usually held the rank of commander squadron leaders are typically lieutenant commanders and the squadron pilots range from instance to senior grade lieutenants was sometimes a naval naval flight officer or enable naval pilot officer NPOs who were actually petty officers the loading place bombers and torpedo bombers carried air crews of one or more radio mannered gunners as well as the pilot missions were usually classed as attack missions or scouting / search missions in order to extend the range of the scouting missions the planes ordinarily carried only defensive ordnance instead of the heavier load of attack hardware and the days before night searches most scouting missions were carried out by fighters and scout or dive bombers missions were generally ordered by the battle group or Task Force Commander a flag officer who with the support of his tactical staff developed and transmitted an outline for the missions to the carrier skippers the captain convened a meeting at a tag the air officer the air bosses would call them CIC officer the navigator the iographer and other essential specialties to detail the mission the CAG then met with the squadron leaders to assign appropriate elements to the mission and its parameters such as launch into parts of time boundaries of the flights mission objectives radio frequencies to be used and coordination of the different types of aircraft the more the squadron leaders issued briefing orders to their pilots who had assembled in their respective ready rooms to receive detailed flight assignments and each squadron leader was assisted in these briefings by appropriate specialist and weather intelligence ship's navigation during the mission and communications communications were pretty limited as I said the search missions for from the carrier's were generally two types the broad sector sets in which a large area of ocean was to be searched for signs of the enemy shipping or searches that were confined to an area and which enemy shipping had been specifically reported these had the same navigational considerations as the broader searches meaning those that were what in later years called Search and Destroy missions because the carrier was not likely to be in the same place on the pilots return leg that it was when he departed attack missions were usually launched toward a specific set of geographic coordinates were enemies shipping or Shore installations had been positively identified another type of search called a geographic search was used on planes were deported or and/or returning to a fixed base on land that didn't happen very often than navy but one once some of the bare bases were established down in the southwest Pacific it did and the pilots and were able to return to a base that thing they knew where it was that type of mission of course usually eliminated the navigational problem of a calculator calculating relative motion relative motion being the the relationship between the movement of the airplane and the movement is the ship at the same time in Sector searches the adjacent segments of the circle radiating out from the carrier were assigned to each flight the number of segments to be searched was dependent on the number of aircraft available these are wedge-shaped areas usually which usually became trapezoidal in shape due to the movement of the carrier during the several hours of the search the carrier is moving all the time and so the pilot goes out and what would ordinarily be a high wedge the return leg is adjusted to be able to intercept the carrier at the time that the plane was and the carrier are going to arrive in the same spot thank you what's its partner in watch the carrier always endeavored to follow a fixed course so that it would be at a known position well they tried to but as you can imagine that was know as possible and frequently and lots of times in the in the briefing the zig zag plan would be announced so that they would have some idea however the zig zag usually didn't have much of an effect on on trying to find a carry yeah pretty pretty much yeah they were supposed to arrive at the same point at a time specific Oh because it may contain virtually all the navigational problems encountered the plotting solution used in this briefing are mainly for the sector search and I've put up here these each one of these is in your is in your briefing paper so you don't have to worry about copying but the initial flight planning is done honor what was called a small area plotting sheet and this is a scaled-down version of it although not scaled down very far their seats were all about a square and you just tore them off of a patent took them with you when you when you when do you left the ready room some of the calculations that were done are represented in this second one and they basically what they are is they're wind triangle solutions based upon information furnished by the iographer as to winds aloft at the at the altitude that the mission was going to fly or the nominal altitude didn't always stay the same because sometimes the the weather at the at the altitude the proposed altitude was not good enough yeah the difficult admission would be complicated by the length of the flight how long did the white slash generally four hours yeah that's that's a nominal figure well it's not two out and two back because you've got a base leg after you get out there that you go across the flights out we're about let's say on average maybe 300 miles the cross leg was probably a hundred miles and the return leg was the 325 miles something like that debate about what the course of the ship was and I mean in the meantime if the if the course of the ship was divergent and it was a blow the final leg was longer if it was tending toward the sector that was being flown then it was a little bit shorter none of that made an awful lot of difference and I'll explain that to you in a little bit but in in planning for the for these missions important to understand the following constraints imposed on the pilots as I said before radio silence and wartime of that day was of paramount importance in order to protect the position of the carrier and to some extent the track of the flight low power transmitters such as today's similar to today's walkie-talkies allowed for some close-range communication between planes of the flight so long as they were within two or three miles of each other and that was voice anything else that I previously described a various the the tooth the two signals the enemy sighting signals or the strike signals were done in Morse code and most pilots whether or not they had a radio man in the back seat had a telegraph key staff to their leg and you had they had to be able to send and receive Morse code and ten words a minute what's part of the criteria and so when you tap that stuff out you had to do it generally a couple of times could be sure that it was understood by the people on the other hand some of the aircraft carried simple radio direction finders but the enemy was similarly observing radio silence of they were often of little to use except to obtain sometimes unreliable bear from the shore station radio transmitters now almost every island that was occupied either by us or by or by the enemy had some form of a radio transmitting the transmitter on it oftentimes there were there were nothing warrants standard broadcast stations that broadcast news and other information to occupants the inhabitants of the island but nonetheless they were charted their frequencies were known and they could be used to obtain radio bearings however there were of such low frequency that the bearings would the signals would often Bend give me a false indication of of their direction at night it was pretty good but in the daytime they were they were often often unreliable unless you were pretty close in the most of the shipboard aircraft of the day had a range corresponding to about six hours of fuel that lean crews are approximately 65% of power for the scout bombers this equated to about 900 knowwhen miles plus 45-minute fuel reserve 600 I mean six hours of fuel is probably stretching it a little bit if you didn't have any distractions or any significant changes of wind at altitude and if you didn't run into any severe weather which caused you to deviate from a fright flight plan well you didn't run into anybody any enemy fighters or other things that would cause you to deviate from the flight plan yeah you probably could get six hours out of it but you wouldn't want to make a life on each squadron leader divided his part of the mission into as many fighters as we required to accomplish the objective but no less than two aircraft per flight fighters were sometimes requested to escort a scouting mission at least partway if enemy aircraft were likely to be encountered they would usually fly high coverin or to enable them to spot potential attackers and get in position to attack out of the Sun it means that if you attack out of the Sun anybody who is trying to draw a bead on them with a gun would have trouble because they're looking into the Sun to do it not so bad an anti-aircraft fire from the ground but from pilots and other aircraft it was difficult okay with that all in mind Squadron Leader with the assistant of other specialists proceeded to brief his pilots on the mission and each pilot was given his assignment that included the coordinates latitude and longitude or radials of a search area the current barometric pressure updated as a time of launch scheduled time of launch and form up that is air marshaling as we call it today instructions preferred altitudes to be flown weather forecast including winds aloft winds aloft information more about that in a minute intelligence reports on activity within the search area both enemy and friendly communications frequencies to be used for the mission coordination with other elements of the air group anticipated course speed and coordinates of the carrier at the time of launch during the mission and at the expected time of return and a bingo or possible alternate landing appeals such as a friendly Island or other carrier now winds aloft if you don't fly these missions on the deck why I'm well up into the end of the sky and the winds aloft that are furnished to you by the by the araga fir are largely based upon a weather balloon that he launches from the deck of the carrier okay that tells you what it is right where you are but 150 miles away it could be significantly different so the get to what you do about that in a minute these pilot then phoned applauded all the coordinates or the radius of the carrot and encompassed research area on a small area plotting sheet and I pointed that out to you here he's one of those represents a leg of the flight carry they started the launch point of the carrier was here the return point of the plane was where the carrier was expected to be that many hours later as I said he said he then saw the the relative motion and speed problems for all three legs of the flight with a with a what was called a mark free plotting board and that's a device that looks like this I have to tell you this is probably older than most of you it has a moveable disk here which the graphics of which will allow you to transfer course or a heading from one bearing to another the concentric circles in here called speed circles are used for measuring both speed and distance little calculators glued onto the thing to be able to solve some of the time distance problems and they're nothing more than a simple slide rule but they're graduated and increments that are usable for nautical miles on statute miles nautical miles for some correction for altitude and temperature and so on they're pretty handy gadget and sometimes you had a saw two problems at the same time so you right glute another one on here on the top of the board okay now you obviously can understand the use of this in me and the planning of the flight but every one of the aircraft of the large leads to larger arc of the bombing planes and I don't recall whether there were any and the fighters are not there may have been but the yes a panel was slit the slit occurred just over the top of the joystick so that tray was inserted between the upper and lower after the of the instrument panel you pull the tray out and in the trave what lies one of these things moved through the bottom of the tray so you didn't have to carry your own with you you left it the left it in the ready room but this is what was often used when you had to make an alteration to the flight plan for one of the reasons that I described a couple of minutes ago sometimes when things that got occurred so fast that you couldn't you didn't have time to pull this out and and start plotting changes in heading and changes in the course and so on but with an e board you simply made a note of those things in about how long they lasted you take a look a look at the clock and said okay I've been off course now for seven minutes and the speeded I've been traveling it give me some indication of where I ought to be based upon based upon that time lapse and so then you'd get this out and recalculate the heading that you had to fly in order to reach one of the preordained coordinates that's one of the one of the turning points either here or there then the calculation of the relative motion which was the final way which is the important one for everybody in order to be able to get home was simple geometry and anything you did prior to the time you made that final turn for the carrier that had to be accumulated and plotted on the board so that the return leg which would be altered consistent with the the amount of the deviation that had occurred up to that point it could be could be forecast and plotted you can see the importance of the calculation of that final way now it's if you want to pass this around you take a look very carefully that's kind of brittle the after having gone through these two exercises these calculations are transferred to the plotting chart then I have some other things in this third graphic up here the the upper the upper diagram is the standard winch what's called a wind triangle and it's used for solving the problems of the difference between airs indicated airspeed and ground speed the heading at fly to make good a certain course and then the lower portion of it is the part of the triangle that's used for calculating the relative motion between the carrier and the aircraft itself the pilot proceeded to develop the geometry of the flight on a small area plotting sheet transferring all unnecessary information that came from the plotter to his flight lug and his flight lug is this this final graphic over here on the side this is all done before he even before he leaves there any room the time of launch he knew what the top of settings were to fly on each leg and the number of minutes to fly on each heading for a given indicated airspeed now again this is all done beforehand and it's based upon the information that's furnished to him if any part of that information is wrong or it turns out to be wrong then he's got to make an adjustment after everything that's in the air yeah you mentioned that the flight might encompass two four six aircraft would one be the lead navigator for it or did you have six independent I realize you couldn't lose some there was nothing it seldom was formal if it was old if it was a large strike yeah somebody would do be designated as a lead navigator but as you'll see later on in this briefing that most of those searchlights were too plain two element groups two aircraft at a time one one one lead and one wingman the thing that we usually did was that we during the development of the flight plan we coordinated with each other to avoid making fatal mistakes in the inner navigation and by checking with each other usually there weren't any any real some mistakes that were made so there are a couple of compensating things here one and this is in the briefing but the you have to remember that let's say it's 6,000 feet of altitude you can see for over 80 miles to the horizon now you can't identify a ship at that distance of course but but what you can't see is you get a little bit closer you can see weights and as if you and it makes it possible even to start counting the weights weeks after you get a little bit closer the difficulty with that is that you frequently have some sort of cloud cover during the mission and in order to be able to see the distances that you would like to be able to see simply because of your altitude you often had to get lower you had to get down below the below the cloud deck and when you did that then your sight distances our horizon became shorter the upside is that the carrier task groups battle groups that call today consisted of as many as a dozen 14 ships with the carrier at the center the out rigging ships that were used for submarine protection and for anti-aircraft protection by throwing up a you know a wall of fire we're off on as much as 50 miles away from the carrier itself so you you often could see some of the ships out on the outer ring of the task group a long time before you saw the carrier itself and because of the way that they formed up the steaming plant is evicted kind of like a concentric circles and you knew that once you saw some of the outlying ships you could begin to figure out your you know in your mind where where that carriers like to be likely to be and in relation to those are arrays yeah if I'm before you got into an extended time bad situation say 20 30 minutes worth of fighting at that point you know you no longer know where you are because you've been yeah I was well yours when you say 20 or 30 minutes that's several lifetimes so you wouldn't be that far off where you thought you were when you're done no but you're likely to be you're likely to be some distance away enough to and enough to that that if you didn't correct for it the compounded area error that it had occurred up to the point of making the last the final turn that could have been enough to throw you way off well that's my question is since you're no longer operating from a known position at the end of the combat right stop think about it and in plane geometry it doesn't take much of an angle of difference between the intended course and the hitting that you're actually flying to wind up way apart when you get down or 250 miles down the road I guess my question is since you don't actually know where you are now you know what do you use for a basic calculation for the return life you you you make the correction based upon the notes that you've made it a deviation from the flight plan and it's yeah it's a wild ass yes frequent 80 but but because of the because of the advantages that you have for being at altitude and so on it generally didn't make all that much it it's not nearly as critical as it is a surface navigation we're in combat and you're making all these turns your princely either evading or doing you are noting I went 324 two minutes and I went 180 for six minutes you brought in that sphere at the beginning to return don't you yeah but you got to understand that when you get involved in that kind of in that kind of a combat situation the area in which all of this this Arum and these aerobatic are being performed is really quite small it's not large at all so you could wind up about where you work yeah you'd be often you could do you sell your three or four miles off you looking for a fix on how white rain yeah yeah okay when the order comes pilots man your planes that's not just a movie term not actually that was exactly used pilots in the air crews grabbed her gear including the flight plans blotting sheets and Sun navigation equipment as they needed and raced up the ladders to the flight deck some aircraft with slightly larger cockpits I described all this before the carried their own plotting board I was going to bring today a bubble octant which is used for celestial having air aerial celestial navigation but the strap on the damn thing broke as I was lifting it out of the closet because it was rotted and but the point that I want to make was those things were only used in the larger aircraft mostly patrol bombers we couldn't handle him in the cockpits of these smaller planes and because of the fact that you had to hold the things so steady in order to get a decent shot at at the Sun usually you frequently would be so far off just from the bouncing around that they weren't they were at work trying to try to use but they were they were a useful tool in the long-range aerial navigation used by some of these patrol bombers that flew long long distances PB wives PPM's PB 2 wise flying flying flying flying boats no they were not land-based necessarily they they generally they could land on the water take off from the water it would be handy to have them based someplace where they could add a ramp they could pull them up out of the water in order to do maintenance on them but they were they were pretty much there duck called an optin different yeah the difference being that is sextant if you know what a sector looks like you know it's got a curved arc at the bottom of it that's graduated degrees sextant that arc is 1/6 of a circle an octant it's an eighth of a circle but it performs the same function now the OP tent has on it also something that the sextant doesn't have that a device called a timer the one that I have the timer has long since been lost but it gives you a way to avert out the Sun shots if you get you've got a you know so many degrees that the X hour and minutes suited again and it varies a little bit and you shoot at the third time and it varies a little bit more well this timer actually averages out the averages out those shots it's all enclosed it's a I've never taken one apart so I don't know what it looks like inside but it's it's just a black box there's a fasten to the right to the device yeah yeah but it's mechanical okay as I said fine departures from the carrier all navigation was performed by dead reckoning which consists of deducing the position of the aircraft at any given time by keeping account of the direction and distance run over the surface of the earth from the point of departure any fix of a dr position he's accomplished by taking bearings on positively identified earth landmarks or radio signals anything else is no longer a fix that's a that's a yes the pilot carefully recorded his time of launch time of departure from the former point and time of arrival at cruising altitude and the reason for that is that your burn rates that fuel are different up to that point in time they're higher once you get to cruising altitude your burn rate becomes what whatever is on the card for the power seconds it will tell you how many gallons per hour you're here using and you knew that before you left so you that was all in the calculation the flight plan the the greatest potential for error and dead reckoning navigation over water is in the use of a soon wind that had the altitudes to be flown accurate winds aloft information was frequently unavailable for the outer reaches of the flight significant changes to the assumed wind that out at flight altitude would affect not only the planes ground speed but also the track made that over the water that the planes heading was left uncorrect it for these wind changes each leg of the flight might magnify the air until on the final leg if the error became sufficiently great the pilot would not likely be where the Plant City the carrier should be the potential result was of course very high risk to the pilot aircrew and aircraft and i'm laura we've already been through them if you if you get to the end of that third leg and the carrier is not there or the task group is not there somebody's made a god-awful mistake and so what do you do then before my time in the fleet you instituted what was called a square search and that was you got over that point that you were supposed to be you didn't you didn't find your ships and so you began a ever-expanding square search like this and how did you do that well you remember I told you that you calculated that flight clerk 45-minute fuel reserve and you could you could cover a lot of ground in 45 minutes put that square search technique however those guys who crunch numbers and kept track of the statistics of pilots that were lost and so on finally came up with a recommendation that that squares search be stopped and that if you got over the point of where you were supposed to be and you didn't see the ship you simply orbited that position and if you had to ditch you disk while you still had control the airplane had time to get the raft out and and sit down wait for somebody to pick you up and they generally they'd find you because they knew where you likely were on board the ship so they knew where to look you know there's all kinds of stories about the guys that spent 80 days in a raft Eddie Rickenbacker some of those folks but not very few stories of it about the guys that only spent a couple of days in a raft before somebody found them how often do you know what percentage were lost or was a very high rate I have no idea and in absolute numbers I don't I don't know there were there were enough to be notable but not not enough to be critical sometimes it was deliberate and it was done deliberately too because maybe a jump by by enemy fighters and the last thing the world you want to do is lead those fighters back to your ship so you just fly off into the sunset couple guys did that and for what it's worth got the Medal of Honor for it but but takes a lot of guts to do that okay getting back to the the variation and winds aloft it's known that wind velocity increases and changes direction with increasing altitude with some degree of predictability the pilot can apply certain rules of thumb to estimate the wind that has flight altitude based on the surface wind direction and velocity and a method often used to determine wind drift was the execution of a maneuver called a wind star after flying 100 to 150 miles the pilot would check his wind drift by executing a sixty degree turn to the right from his existing heading then flying for three minutes while observing the directions of the ocean swells or Whitecaps through a drift site installed in the floor of the airplane and the decklid just a glass window but it had engravings on it four radials and same kind of things that you would use for calculating winter Afghan Indies 6b computer.this this part of the this part of the computer the the NIF site had grid lights and bearings line engraved on it so the line of swells or Whitecaps could be measured as an angle to the planes heading the pilot noticed it noted this drift angled and turned left 120 degrees for another 3 minutes and repeated the observation he then returned to his original heading and read the drift angle and plotting the three observations they son here in the lower part of this diagram you end up with the actual correction of - that we made in terms of wind direction of velocity and you can when you go through your your briefing paper I think you probably see how that works if if that wind velocity direction plotted from the wind scar was different than the one shown in the flight plan then you had to adjust a company your compass heading to compensate for it and when you continued and the pilot repeated this maneuver whenever by observation or instinct he felt that his drift was more or less than that necessary to achieve the plan track over the water now first of all you can't good at 6000 feet because you can't see well enough down to the surface and so you generally have to get down pretty fairly close to the deck to get a good reading from the drift sight and they in the floor of the airplane that meant that you had to use the the rule of thumb for every thousand feet of altitude the wind direction changes about 30 degrees and the velocity goes up by some number that I'm now long since forgotten as I said this was 65 years ago and flying a wind star I didn't do in later years you know you're fighting in cover settings with world war ii with biggest magnetic compasses or do they have general compasses that we had we had gyro compasses there were three classes the magnetic compass which was probably the most unreliable thing not only would it bounce around any you know when you were flying but but also there are a significant number of or bodies in the floor of the ocean in the Pacific that frequently will will will alter the reliability of the compass now you know you've looked at charge and you see that there's those variation lines magnetic variation lines ago - that's nominal you could be flying over one of those or bodies for a short distance and have it absolutely go crazy the compass go nuts and so the gyro compass became your Savior after a while but the gyro compass was not without its frailties I mean it you had to you had to reset the thing every opportunity that you got and that meant when you could get a positive bearing on something then you go ahead and reset reset it well that's what we were talking about the magnetic compass system is the wet compass and that's the probably the most unreliable of the of everything that he had in the airplane even when they're working right they're hard to fly yeah it's alright for general direction but yeah it's like required yeah did you say there was a this is well radio compass but that didn't come along until later and the pilot would sometimes repeat this maneuver whenever by observation or by instinct and there was more often by instinct he felt that adrift was more or less than that was necessary to achieve the plan track over the water didn't happen too often because he burned a lot of fuel going down looking at and climbing back up and under to a acceptable flight altitude when he reached the limit of his outbound leg which is here the pilot recorded the time of the turn and recalculated is heading for the second leg if his previous wind star has indicated another wind velocity and direction then that used for the flight plan it should be noted that in the vicinity of occupied Islands it was frequently possible to take bearings on radio transmissions us providing a dead reckoning fix from which the pilots position could be confirmed and is heading adjusted if necessary to return to the planned course and I described that to you later and there so I'm sure that you run across documents that would give you the call letters for most of these islands stations and the frequency that they that they normally transmit or none if the pilot ran into trouble because of the enemy aircraft or some weather phenomenon such as a thunderstorm and was forced to significantly deviate from his flight plan the recorded as much of the deviation as possible in terms of course speed and altitude changes and delay and in time and route this information was utilized later in making adjustments to his headings and courses to recover his original flight plan of the final final leg of the other search so that he could return to the carrier before or his remaining fuel became a problem it should be noted that visual additional I explained all that to the visual distance of the horizon increases with without a tune after July of 44 the coming of airborne radar installations and the larger shipboard aircraft may later the TBS TBMs enabled missions to be flown at night and provided additional navigation capability to other aircraft that formed up on these pathfinders other radio navigation aids we're waiting in the wings at the close of World War two and were placed into service as soon as radio side of the radio silence from rule could be suspended further developments over the years are furnished today's carrier pilots with many magic black boxes but accurate navigation and it's constant monitoring during the overwater flights remains as imperative for all pilots who face the problems associated with a landing field that is a moving platform and who is to keep their feet dry on the next page I've kind of laid out for you a sample mission gives you some idea of how their mission was developed what the pilot briefings are consists of with actual numbers and I think I've used those in the flight plan itself that's where I got the numbers that are in there whose law intelligence communications yeah okay that in general is the this of course any other questions you mentioned radio silence on your return within the proximity of five or ten miles was radio silence then broken as you've coordinated your rivals not by the pilot but ships off and had homing signals that sometimes we're not very good you know some similar to an outer marker as you're approaching an airfield but you have to remember that a lot of this stuff is a little frequency and a little frequency is as well is a very powerful signal it's it's encumbered by interference there's a lot of communal form cloud activity in the South Pacific and frequently those can be reformed clouds contain electrostatic charges and lots of times you can't distinguish between an A and an N for instance I meant more so you calling up the ship is you fly back no no you don't you better make a left break it everybody you know and so on yeah yeah yeah so it's what kind of a gaggle then come in you know it's kind of kind of a gaggle but remember that everybody if you're flying to place search units not everybody gets back at the same time because the navigation for everybody is a little bit different I can't I can't recall any more than four or six aircraft in the pattern at one time on a return journey and you got in the outer sphere will you ever fired on by your own ears I wasn't but I'm sure they're people who were that usually did not occur in the fleet it frequently would have to occur with Shore batteries and if you were flying over your own territory and there were gun in place unless you I'll be oftentimes would get trigger-happy and shoot at I remember one time Okinawa yeah I knew about yeah so the the principle of the wind star is predicated that winds at the surface are constant indicated by the way that well I wouldn't say they're constant they're there they're indicated by the action of the swells and of course if there aren't any swells and there aren't any Whitecaps and you don't have a problem cause you don't have any wind generally there's a there's a pattern to it that you can that's discernible you can't it's usually it's enough to you can get get enough of a feel for it when you look at it that as to what direction of wind is blowing it's yeah there are breaks here and there where you'll get one cross across well or another one over here or something but in the main that Whitecaps the swell lines will all be in the same thing in the same direction wings along we start that gives you the wind cruising at 5 or 10,000 feet out of you correlate that when you climb back well I think I mentioned that that there the rule of thumb really was at the direction in the northern hemisphere of the direction of the wind changes about 30 degrees for each thousand feet of altitude up to some level and I don't remember the velocity increases as well by some you know that it isn't if I remember the exact amounts I'd tell you but I don't but I do I do remember that the the for every thousand feet it was about a 30-degree shift in direction that's kind of clockwise that's hemisphere into ya the velocity is what I don't remember the velocity changed what do you go off would you be flying missions I take in forgive me fairly nasty weather I mean like moderate rain or light rain or every rain what tried to avoid it loose but simply because of simply because of the nature of tropical weather it wasn't possible to avoid at all time you did you didn't know enough to avoid thunderstorms but and and oftentimes that was a that was an impediment to your planned navigation because in order to circumvent some of those things you had to deviate considerably from from what's your point plan whoa and those are the kinds of things you keep track of what a referee you play I flew an SPD dive-bomber but it it really wasn't as complicated as it might have sounded because a lot of it was approximation and just based on your judgement Channel but that kind of thing with the patrol missions that went out would they utilize SPD's for that or well yeah yeah so if the patrols could be formed by the different aircraft but what was available that day so you might send the fighters out and get one time you might send SPD's out you might send torpedo right well yeah they seldom use the fighters for that because the fighters had a shorter range the larger aircraft of the Bombers the torpedo bombers and again des and the dive bombers had had a pretty good range stones well you didn't blow the balloon up with bombs that extra weight made quite a bit of difference in fuel consumption so if you could find the Task Force on your way back you know did you have any what was the position of the carrier in that test book sooner they'd always be in the would they be within sight of each well occasionally there'll be more than one carrier and a task group not often but occasionally there would be especially when there was a large attack mission going on but they still and they would the two carriers would have one ring of protective ships around the two carriers find something to land on yeah turned those carriers wouldn't always stay in the same relative position to some of the ships on the perimeter there was respecting the ones on me outside of the turn had to go like hell to try to maintain Oh they'll follow you know what it's still at stake enough the pattern would remain for you to be able to recognize where their numbers painted on the flight deck so how would you recognize two ships at the same class profile silhouettes or if they were both a essex-class carriers how would you differentiate at a distance necessarily frequently landed on the wrong with some frequency yeah was the carrier with all these flights going on was always in a state of readiness during the daytime could she receive airplanes oh yeah yeah so there was always an Ellis over there and they were always ready oh it was always ready that was clear yeah if you got into a into a fairly concentrated combat zone you did not leave airplanes parked on the deck you got the hell out of there until everybody was back and then sometimes they started loading the flight deck in advance of the next day's mission remember I said up until mid 1944 at any rate well they they most everything was done at daylight the most flying no no they would they would they would turn into the wind once the returning aircraft were sighted and they'd stay in the wind until all of them were back thank you got a large number returning aircraft was there any way to differentiate well some crews were low on fuel others weren't was there any way for the guy for the people on the carrier to know that clarity yeah there was the aircraft frequently the pilots treat when they carried a device called an all-too slight yeah yeah and I just flashed red or green and there were signals that you you know but my recollection was it frequently was first-come first-served you see some of these movies of aircraft coming back that are shot up and when they come back they disabled the carrier at that point for a little while did they hold those off so they could get the other ones back because if somebody came in and they couldn't get their gear down or they'd only get one gear down they're gonna tie up that deck for a while yeah to some extent there was and but it largely depended upon the the first thing you knew you knew which aircraft it was because it's got big numbers and letters painted on the side of it you know from the records in the well it wasn't any such thing as primary flight control those days except a couple of guys with a megaphone down a catwalk but just somebody kept a record of when those planes departed to the hour and minute so and they knew how much fuel they had on board so they could roughly estimate how much fuel they had left if a plane was shot up badly enough frequently they would the pilot know enough to try to ditch the aircraft alongside of the carrier that was all his decision yeah I wasn't commanded by radio digital would pick you up - no you just did he just did it you know he knew they'd pick him up I figured if he could get out of the cockpit I know that would be the screening ships to pick him up not care yeah all right we actually you know we lost surprisingly few the numbers sound bad but but compared to the number of possibilities it wasn't able to you wasn't all that bad let's just come work pretty well okay anybody else yeah were you gonna say something about Okinawa oh that's in response to a question about did you did you suffer much from friendly fire I do it for one time at Okinawa and there was a there was a Marine airfield on the top of a bluff overlooking not Buckner Bay but over on the other side Green Beach or whatever it was and it was an Army anti-aircraft battery stationed on the beach just below it and these guys took off every morning and every morning they got shot at by this I flew off the old enterprise old cv6 in the spring summer in 1944 I was at Okinawa I was assigned to another ship with a with another Duty non-flying to and so I made the Okinawa and vision mission ship it will my dad she said that she was so glad I was out of their airplanes anomalous yeah what's the success rate pretty good I'm a dive bombing of hitting targets getting well I don't know what you mean by pretty good there were a lot of attacks that were near Oh near misses who didn't didn't hit the target but mmm distracted it enough that they deviated from whatever their current mission was sometimes the the the hits were not totally disabling but did a lot of damage I'd say we did actually we did if we had enough airplanes on the attack yeah we did pretty well but sometimes if you only had two guys that had spotted wanted decided to go down and then dump on it well sometimes you were looking and sometimes you weren't because the arcade delivery system no it largely had to do with it with anti-aircraft fire you know two airplanes for several ships to concentrate on is a lot different than a dozen airplanes fall in the shoe tent all things being equal is more likely to get a hit coming from this burner coming from in a broadside you always came out of the Sun when you could okay so just so they the Gunners couldn't see it where their Gunners pretty good somewhere yeah yeah I came home with holes in the air playing on more than one occasion yeah I was excellent in the early days there were before my time and in training I would say in 42 the training was short and probably not extensive enough but as as the as the program began to wind up yeah we had more schools that lasted longer we had more time and operational training and I guess more importantly we had an opportunity to to work with some of the combat experienced pilots yeah and that made a big difference it's one thing you know to go by the handbook but it's another thing to to be talked about the guys that actually experienced it and I would say that that probably was more important than any other part of than any other part of the training I mean there was a level that you had to reach being able to fly an airplane you had to reach the point where you and the airplane became a single entity but then what you did with it in order to stay out of trouble and to be successful with it largely dependent upon tactics that they didn't teach in high school if you came back and landed on the wrong a different carrier would you just overnight it with a gash up and you fur you over to the other one not upon what time of the day was was it and I mean it happened all the time and and lots of times it was it was not because you mistook the car it's because you were low on fuel and it needed a place to put down what we considered acceptable it wasn't oh absolutely yeah yeah yeah what was not acceptable is landing in the wrong direction yeah once or twice they couldn't see the way yeah yeah there were strange things that happened under under you know extreme circumstances see though I guess the worst one was the night after the turkey shoot when all of us had been out three times that day and we'd run through the three tank full of gas and we were coming home after dark and none of us had any night carrier life experience or training and the guys were at the limit of their their fuel and everybody looking for a place to sit down and they mistook losers for carriers and they guys I remember is that most of us for about 20 years old in those days and and while we were pretty good at what we did we were we were not ready for that kind of stuff we have lighted paddles or something yeah and there was no other there was no other visual aid for night landing well that particular night there was one visual aid that nobody ever expected Marc Mitscher said turn on the lights and he lit up the entire fleet find their way back the fleet and did they light have a center line on the carrier for you to come in on I don't remember that I and I remember seeing I remember side lights going down but I don't remember a center line you tried to yeah yeah you try if the swells were they had enough of a small frequency low frequency yeah you tried to look you tried to plan between them you're trying to land next to the carrier and the carrier was into the wind the swells would be perpendicular to the carrier's course so it would be difficult wouldn't it the land parallel you might understand it because I'd never had to try it Tom but what my understanding was that they that the screen that the ship itself provided to the weather made it a little easier for you to sit down in other words the sea was really a little smoother right right alongside of the carrier I think the big thing was when you had to ditch the airplane he had to be aware in your head of everything you had to do bang bang bang bang bang because what you needed to be able to do is you need to be able to get out of that cockpit get out of the shoulder harness undone note the shoot get over the cockpit combing the out of the way get the raft out and make sure that if you had a gunner in the back seat he wasn't on the other side pulling a wrap the other way so that you then that happened occasionally because there was and there was a hatch back of his compartment back there when they scored that stuff was stored and if one of you grab one side and the other one grab the other will he had a tug of war over trying to get it out what the objective of course was to get out of there before the damn thing sank where could they spin you when you select at the Marianas turkey shoot when you came back and then you go out again 45 minutes thereabouts bombing at you yeah yeah we armed and refueled on the flight deck that's why that's why the center section was always kept clear and the barriers barricades were were after the island and the launch didn't start until you get to the forward end of the island you really asking the wrong guy we had in those days we still had pretty low on some of the older carriers the ones that weren't new we had pretty little powered hydraulic caps the one on the the one that we had on the enterprise was a retro and it frequently didn't develop full power so most of us have voided the dam didn't like to play we could get off under our own power safer than you even though you'd you seen the movies up they disappear but what about well you knew you were gonna hit that cushion of air struggle along till you get a little more speed and start to climb but it was a lot safer than being dribbled off the end of the flight deck any good books that you can think of on the subject I mean any any books that you've read and he said hey I was like what I was doing no I I'm not sure I know what you mean books any any good additional reading word oh oh like boys the fibroids was more of more if you can get that top here the biggie by Stafford which is kind of the key still work for that ship and that was another one about the Yorktown name which I don't remember now but some of those were I eyewitness stories work you care there's another one that I have and it's similar to that Jesus I can't remember the title of it now it's a fairly recent publication but it's it's a compendium of other stuff you know that's just been written about actually then if you've ever been wanting to know about submarines and especially reconnaissance of submarines I hear that the guy who's had them to their family and said you ever want to know what I did read this book okay why all right gentlemen thank you very much for coming

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Length: 78min 9sec (4689 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2013