I was musing about Lindy’s famed non-stop flight from Long Island to Paris, and although Wikipedia says he navigated by the stars and dead reckoning, I can’t understand how he could even find France, let alone Paris and the airport.
I know in those days the mail pilots and others often used the “iron compass” (following the railroad tracks), and can see them doing that and by roads, they could get from city to city. I am mystified, however, how Lindbergh navigated.
Many many years ago when I was taking lessons, not too long after I soloed, I had to make a cross-country flight.It was scary, but had good maps, etc. The idea of flying over huge bodies of water back in those days is amazing.
I can only speak to the final leg. The Seine Estuaire near Le Harve is pretty hard to miss from the air and following the river to Paris would be a simple matter from there.
Maybe if you were in a normal plane but the Spirit of St. Louis was a bad plane to fly at all let alone very long distances. Navigation was especially hard because it didn’t have a front windshield because it was built to be a flying gas tank and that space was used for fuel. Visibility was restricted to the rather small side windows. It was a fairly unstable plane so keeping it in stable flight was a chore. I am pretty amazed that he was able to get anywhere at all safely and land in one piece.
ISTR reading somewhere (sorry, no cite) that, on approaching the coast of Ireland, Lindbergh descended to treetop level, cut the engines, and asked the Irish fishermen down below to point him in the general direction of Paris.
Nope, according to Lindbergh’s memoir of the same name, on which the moive was based, that part was true.
Unfortunately for Lindy, the fishermen were too stupefied to see a plane in mid-ocean to respond. Fortunately he just headed east and struck Ireland right about where he expected, anyway.
There was also a “London - Paris” airway at the time made up of ground beacons. Since his final approach was at night, those would have been easy to follow all the way from the channel directly to the airport.
Once over the British Isles, large enough to find by dead reckoning, he had landmarks to follow. He couldn’t really see out the front of the plane, but he could look down from the sides.
Yes, but I don’t think he could effectively look down to ground level from flight altitude with the periscope. To use IFR (I follow roads), he would probably have opened the door and stuck his head out.
I don’t understand your not understanding. As you will see from other posts, there were only small side windows in the Ryan, much of the time he was flying in fog or clouds, and the Atlantic is one big sucker of an ocean with no landmarks.
As to dead reckoning , in your link is the following statement:
“A disadvantage of dead reckoning is that since new positions are calculated solely from previous positions, the errors of the process are cumulative, so the error in the position fix grows with time.”
Lindbergh did not have a sextant, he was flying a plane that was extremely difficult to handle, so he had little ability to do celestial navigation. Just flying eastward, with strong side winds and no points of reference, he might well have ended up in Norway, or missed Ireland and England totally and ended up who knows? He was one lucky guy.
Elmer J fudd, thanks, that is one good bit of information about the beacons. Still, hitting a relatively small Islands of Great Britain after crossing the who ocean was amazing.
I don’t think there was one at Le Bourget at the time. Typical landing fields literally were fields. That worked fine for planes of the time that only needed 2000 feet or less to land, and which were absolute pigs in a crosswind.
Lindbergh had a much bigger problem with the darkness - the Parisians at the field had enough sense to illuminate the field with car headlights, but there was still the risk of hitting someone, and judging his height off the ground was still tough.