Charles Lindbergh's flight--how did he navigate?

His own explanation was “Alcock and Brown showed me the way!”.

Done.

Alcohol and what?

So, you’re an American, huh.

So was Lindbergh. :slight_smile:

He was bound to hit land sooner or later. Dead reckoning would work. He aimed in the general direction of Ireland, follow a compass heading, and based on air/land speed, it was what he reached. If he’d been deflected further south he would not have made landfall so soon. The western coastlines of Ireland, Land’s End England, and Brittany are pretty easy to tell apart. Once you have a rough Idea where you are, follow the coast.

Between the compass and the shape of the coastline, and then the towns you encounter, you can follow where you are. I imagine once you establish, for example, that you are following the south coast of Ireland, finding Paris is a trivial exercise with maps and compass and rough speed guide. (If it’s not too cloudy). You time your traversal of a known distance on the map, and that gives you airspeed vs. land speed, and direction you travel on the map vs. compass heading tells you what angle the crosswind is deflecting you (and therefore what angle to compensate).

Worst case, he’d be blown too far north and after a while realize he should turn south hoping he’s not actually too far south, in which case he’d make landfall at Bordeaux instead of Cork or Galway. But stellar navigation would give a rough latitude, and north of Ireland to Basque country is about 12 degrees difference in latitude. “If I’m at 52 degrees and travelled at least the distance to Ireland, I should hit land any time or the headwind is seriously stronger than I thought.”

Were there radios then? I know during the Pearl Harbor attack, the Luftwaffe pilots homed in on commercial radio broadcasts from Hawaii.

Over? Did you say “Over”? Nothing is “over” until WE decide it is!

And don’t forget Twinkletoes and Lucky Jim. The first cats to cross the atlantic by air.

The “Spirit of St Louis” did not have a radio as Lindbergh wanted to save weight so he could carry more fuel.

No wonder they couldn’t hit anything with precision in London, then, if they were using Hawaii radio.

Luftwaffe pilots just loved the steel guitar.

I’m not a WWII expert, but I’m willing to go out on a limb here and say the Luftwaffe was kinda rare over Pearl Harbor. Imperial Japanese Naval Aviation, not so much.

A Wright Whirlwind, even throttled down, sounds more like a hardware store being shaken by Godzilla than a whoosh, so the sailors probably couldn’t hear or understand Lindbergh.

Forget it. He’s rolling.

The British or the Germans had two radio beams for their aircraft to navigate. The other side attempted to jam or fake them.

British planes had RADAR quite early in the war although it was successfully kept secret. Much development was done in the US from the original work which was passed to them on Churchill’s orders.

Pilots on a slow aeroplane could easily use celestial navigation to fix their position so long as they could fly above any cloud cover.

WWII bombers had small windows for the navigator to view stars.

I had something like that happen to me once. A large boat was going by and someone on the boat had a bullhorn. The boat was too big to get close to shore, so the pilot yelled thru the bullhorn, “Ahoy on shore! Anybody! Which way is the canal?”

I ran down to the shore, and realized he would never hear me, so I just pointed south. I guess it worked, as he took off in that direction.

Obviously that was before GPS.

Did you search the paper the next day for shipwrecks? :slight_smile:
That is a pretty cool story.

It’s cool that Charles Lindbergh posts here.