Those magnificent men (and women) and their flying machines

In My Humble Opinion
1

This post:

Reminded me of something I’ve wondered about. To wit, how important was flying skill to accomplishing the great feats of long distant flying in the past?

Like John Alcock and Arthur Brown’s first transatlantic flight or Charles Lindbergh’s first nonstop flight from New York to Paris. Even Amelia Earhart’s attempt to circumnavigate the globe and, of course, many others.

Now don’t get me wrong, I get that at the time these were heroic ventures and I’m not trying to diminish these accomplishments at all, but was it a matter mainly of courage, or did these flights take extraordinary aviation skills?

ETA: Meaning skills beyond what the average pilot of the day possessed.

2

Sorry if this is a threadshit right off the bat, but what qualifies as “extraordinary aviation skills”?

I remember reading about Yeager breaking the sound barrier in the Bell X1. Folk had no idea what really would happen when the barrier was passed, but the event itself was pretty uneventful.

Was Lindbergh’s accomplishment in coordinating what he felt was needed to complete this novel accomplishment? If nothing else, the light too - IIRC - something like 30 hours. So there was some degree of endurance involved.

Given instrumentation of the day, I have no idea how challenging it was to find any precise destination after a prolonged flight.

3

Lacking any external navigation aids, a pilot or navigator had to use ‘dead reckoning’, as in “If you don’t reckon correctly, you are dead.” This meant keeping track of speed and direction, estimating winds, flying around big weather patterns and turbulence while keeping track of your deviations, and watching fuel consumption and engine temperatures. None of this is genius work but it requires an almost singleminded focus and discipline that requires experience and temperament to manage as well as endurance, patience, and coolness under emergency conditions that occurred frequently in the early era of flight.

Stranger

4

I would think it should be fairly obvious - could the average pilot of the day do it with the skills they possessed or were these pilots of a much higher technically inclined caliber?

For instance, in rock climbing the average recreational climber can’t climb a route rated a 5.13 (even if it’s only 100 feet high). It takes an extraordinary climber. Conversely, most anyone with enough money and reasonable degree of fitness can hire a guide to lead them to the top of most tall mountains, including Everest.

5

If you could read a map and knew how to use a compass, long-range navigation should have been easy enough for any pilot back then (unless your name was Corrigan, and you flew the wrong way :wink: ). Even today, small, simple aircraft don’t have much of a range (compared to passenger planes). In training, I would note waypoints on a sectional chart and mark my progress with a pencil. Yes, it takes training and discipline; but it’s not a superhuman feat.

I think the larger worry back then would have been the reliability of the aircraft and powerplants.

6

Was this Noonan’s job for Earhart? Or was it a combined effort?

7

Jimmy Doolittle’s 1929 instrument-only flight had to count as something above the physical courage and a good inner ear that was the average pilot

8

Even land nav isn’t as easy in practice as it is in the classroom, and navigating over long distances while flying with the equipment available of the day (manually compensating for changes in magnetic declination, local magnetic anomalies, and windspeed and cross wind effects) was non-trivial.

Noonan was doing the navigation on the attempted circumnavigation but Earhart would be providing estimates of cross and head/tail winds (such as can be done over water without fixed references) and deviations from planned heading. I assume they would be using a sextant at noon and if flying at night to get more accurate fixes between waypoints but the history of aviation prior to nav beacons and now GPS is rife with planes heading way off course.

Stranger

9

I don’t think I’ve ever done land navigation, but flying with a compass and sectional was easy. Of course, I had a sectional.

10

Were you flying over ocean, in strong cross winds, in cloudy or nighttime conditions, without fixed visual references with charts primarily intended for marine navigation?

A Smithsonian A&S article on the state of the art and challenges to long distance navigation circa 1937:

Stranger

11

Interesting article, Stranger, thanks for that link.

12

Bolding mine. Hadn’t thought about that.

Crosswinds though… there weren’t any navigation aids to help you determine them, where there? Would that be ‘seat of the pants’ stuff?

Wouldn’t cross winds sort of be like being in an ocean current with no land references to show that you where moving?

13

Great question and some great answers so far.

The flying part was not necessarily that hard in terms of technical airplane-steering skill versus the norms of pilots of the day.

Airplanes of the day were underpowered and not very stable. And for a long range flight, tended to be grossly overloaded with as much fuel as could be crammed into nooks and crannies. With the result that the engines and wings were just barely able to keep the thing in the air for the first couple / few hours. Better fly precisely; every wander you permit increases drag. Do too much of that and soon you’re skimming the wavetops.

Creature comforts were non-existent, and flights long, so personal mental and physical endurance was huge. Like a climber getting halfway up a tall cliff, now you’re going to have to push yourself hard to succeed or die trying. And both outcomes were common in early aviation.

Lindbergh briefly fell asleep a couple times on his journey and awoke out of control. But not so out of control that he could not recover before impacting the ocean. One more, or slightly longer, sleep episode and he might have been another case of “intrepid flier vanishes into the sea”.


As suggested upthread, the truly hard job was navigating. Not easy over mostly uninhabited land where there were no good maps, and even harder over water.

The precision of your own compass(es) and airspeed indicators was not great. At least by then good chronometers were available. Your ability to assess wind direction and speed was near zero.

If you, like Earhart, have a dedicated navigator on board who has time to use a sextant, and the sky above you is clear enough, you can get fairly accurate position fixes, albeit after a few minutes of math. But with less than great maps, knowing that 15 minutes ago you were at 23.456N 160.678W may not be as informative as you wish it was.

Successive fixes can give your actual direction and speed of progress over the surface. Comparing that to the compass course and speed you’ve held gives insight into the wind. But the error bars on all this stuff are large. Two fixes 30 minutes apart should show you having covered 45 to 60 miles at the speed of early airplanes. Slight errors in sextant work means each position is really a circle a couple / few miles in diameter.

You can draw a lot of different straight lines between points picked inside two e.g. 5" diameter circles 50" apart. One of those lines is real, and all of the other dozens of possibilities are mistakes. What you deduce about the winds depends critically on picking a line close to the real one. Plus you need to have flown consistently as to airspeed and course the whole time. If you’re wandering around on either parameter, that just increases the error bars on your wind calculation.

So finally your navigator maths up a wind number you can believe. Which was the average wind you experienced from ~15 to ~45 minutes ago. How predictive is that of the next half hour?

Weather science was still in its infancy. Sure, ships had been plying the seas for centuries, but their low speed meant all weather was local. Even at 100 knots, a plane was 10x faster than a ship. We now know that traversing a large body of water like the Atlantic, the winds will be very different at various spots on your journey. So you might reasonably extrapolate a couple hundred miles = ~90 minutes into your future, but not farther.

If your preflight planning weather predictions turned out to be pretty close to what really happened out there, you’ll probably find your target. If not, either you land in Ireland instead of Paris, or you get to swim for a few minutes before drowning.