I see quite a few threads on aircraft here. Thought you’d find this piece of forgotten history interesting.
I’ve read about the early aviators and dead reckoning. Using a compass, natural landscape features, roads and buildings to find their way. I’d never heard about the arrows before. Almost seems like cheating. Makes it too easy, Follow the yellow arrows and beacons. Did Lindbergh follow the arrows too? He was a mail pilot for awhile.
I guess these were replaced by the radio beacons? Amelia Earhart famously refused to learn the new tech. She relied on her navigator when he was sober. What was that tech called? The radio beeps and how loud they were could be used to find the position on the map.
It would be pretty cool to restore a section of these arrows. Recreate at least part of the flights.
click the link, Arrow Locations to see the ones found so far.
Both of these were mostly faded from mainstream use when I started flying in the early 60s. Though you could still find a few of each in the US.
The LF range is long dead now, whereas NDB-defined routes are pretty much limited to the Third World and some high power stations along more advanced countries’ coasts which provide guidance well out over the water.
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I suspect they meant they hired Lindbergh to overfly the generally intended route and pick specific sites for installing the beacons and the arrows. Back then all maps of the US were pretty vague, so deciding exactly which rise to build on was something you had to decide by actually going out there and looking at the ground.
Flying arrow to arrow would not have been easy in the daytime. At low altitudes in the hazy Midwest you’re going to spend several minutes out of sight of both and only have a fairly brief opportunity to see the next one. Here’s hoping your compass is accurate and the wind’s not too much different than you think it is.
Over the blackness of 1920s America the beacons would be much easier to see at night than the arrows were during the day. But night flight in those primitive airplanes and challenging weather & craptacular airfields was a recipe for lots of wrecked aircraft and dead pilots.
Truly we stand today on the shoulders of giants. Or the shoulders of men (and a few women) with giant 'nads at least.
As a teenager, I remember my Dad had sectionals with radio ranges on them. Very few VOR’s back then if any. I remember them being a big deal for the pilots.
Mid 60’s instrument instruction included NDB navigation & approaches but the radio ranges were not used in the US anymore so I never got to play the A&N game in a real airplane. All the 30-40+ year old pilots had used them and there was much hanger flying about them.
I haven’t given this much thought in the past, but apparently Victor airways are so named because they are defined by VOR beacons. Given that, they would be drawn as close to great circle routes as they can but with some significant restrictions brought about by the practicality and cost involved in building and maintaining the VORs. As the Victor routes are low level routes they would require more deviations from the ideal path in order to stay in range of the VORs.
High level airways defined by VORs are preceded by the letter “J” and are known as jet routes, as they are flown by faster aircraft and the reception distances of the VORs is better at altitude, they can miss out a number of intermediate beacons and follow straighter lines. Low level RNAV (area navigation) routes are designated “T” and high level ones are “Q”.
RNAV is available to aircraft that can fly any desired course without having to proceed directly to and from ground based navigation aids. It is generally based on one or more methods of determining a current position including inertial navigation, GPS, and VOR/DME positioning. It generally requires some kind of flight management computer that can automatically receive position information from a variety of sources and derive a position of suitable accuracy.
RNAV routes are still not straight though. That is partly because a great circle route, while being the shortest line between two points on the Earth, does not appear to be straight when mapped on to a flat surface, and partly because of other considerations such as traffic separation in and out of the terminal areas. Long international routes have to take into consideration political concerns, proximity emergency diversion airports etc.
Cites:
Here in the backwater that is Australia aviation we still have a significant number of NDBs on the one hand, and on the other hand we are making progress toward de-commissioning the “old” VOR beacons. I fly to airports that are only served by an NDB, and I also fly to Sydney, the country’s biggest and busiest airport, that has only a DME and six ILS installations. If you don’t have some kind of RNAV system (GPS is fine) then you effectively can’t fly to Sydney IFR.
I had never heard of this before (but it seems to be mainly a western phenomenon, and I grew up in the east.)
Here’s something similar: arrows on the roofs of buildings of the American Optical plant in Southbridge MA guiding the company planes to Southbridge airport:
http://www.dickwhitney.net/DaveButlerAOAirlines.htm
Those buildings have been torn down, and AO is gone, but Southbridge Airport is still operating. In fact, one flight school has apparently just moved there from Worcester airport.
Didn’t Superman have a giant arrow (in Greenland?) pointing the way to his “Fortress of Solitude”? exactly how often did Superman use the place-it did look quite isolated.
A guy I know in Florida took me fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. There was a pole out in the middle of nowhere with one arrow that said “Mexico” and one that said “Florida”.
Actually the system was nationwide, and more dense in the more populated east.
The difference today is that these concrete slabs haven’t been maintained since the 1940s. So the survivors tend to be where there’s little water and no freeze-thaw cycles. And nobody has converted the 1920s farmer’s field into 1940s or 1960s or 1990s suburbia.
Which heavily biases the survivors to the desert southwest.
I’m not sure I really understand the purpose of the arrows. Wouldn’t it be easier for a pilot to just use a map to find the heading to his next destination and than use a compass to fly there?
Yea, but it doesn’t sound like the arrows are used to identify locations, but are strung out in lines to mark out a course. Am I reading incorrectly?
I can sort of see where following a compass might not work, since there’d be a changing angle between true and magnetic N as one flew, and E-W routes wouldn’t be on a great-circle. But for routes just within the Continenetal US, I wouldn’t think those would be large enough factors to justify the expense of building light beacons every ten miles.
It’s fine to fly by compass, but you really should have landmarks. At night, you have the beacons. During the day, you have the arrows. When I was learning to fly, I had to learn pilotage. That meant, in addition to using the compass and gyro, looking out the window and seeing if what’s on the ground corresponds to what’s on the sectional. I had dry lake beds, deviations in the roads, and rocky outcroppings to look for. I can imagine that there are places where there’s nothing for miles and miles but miles and miles, or mountains where someone unfamiliar with the region would think one peak looks like all of the others. Having a big yellow arrow would be a nice way to check your course.
Makes it too easy, Follow the yellow arrows and beacons. Did Lindbergh follow the arrows too? He was a mail pilot for awhile.