![]() ![]() Radio navigation, the method that sent John Rodgers sailing to Hawaii, was clearly unreliable and the equipment was heavy. Even if he’d had a clear view, it would have been too big of a challenge trying to take sextant measurements with one hand while controlling the unstable Spirit with the other, then scribbling calculations that took a trained mariner 15 minutes, all done by a single pilot forgoing sleep on a 33-hour flight. The Spirit’s high wing obstructed his view of the sky, making star sightings nearly impossible. The crew spent a valiant 10 days sailing their flying boat to the Hawaiian island of Kauai, in what was perhaps the greatest feat of seamanship ever accomplished by airmen.īy the end of World War I, some pilots were using bubble sextants, which in flight substituted an artificial horizon for the actual horizon on which mariners depended, as well as radio navigation, but Lindbergh decided that for his Paris flight, the devices were both cumbersome and ineffective. Out of fuel, the airplane was forced to land in the ocean hundreds of miles short of Hawaii. ![]() But the technology behind these ship-based direction finders was still subpar, and combined with operator error, led the PN-9 to miss a refueling ship. Instead, they relied on radio navigation, finding their bearing by determining the direction of signals transmitted by support ships along the route. Though they carried sextants, Rodgers’ crew lacked confidence in the sightings they made from their PN-9 flying boat. When Navy Commander John Rodgers attempted the first flight from California to Hawaii in 1925, the expedition ended disastrously, illustrating just how unreliable the equipment could be. Aviators had attempted to cross the Atlantic with various degrees of success since 1919, but they were still using tools and methods designed for seafaring, and those were proving unsuitable for the skies. It may be hard to believe Lindbergh didn’t learn to navigate until the year after his nonstop New York-to-Paris flight, but in 1927 the practice was still more art than science. A few months later, the newly famous pilot would meet a young Naval officer, and their collaboration would change the world of flying. His nearly tragic Caribbean trip, however, turned out to be a critical moment in time, not only for Lindbergh’s understanding of navigation, but also for the advancement of the practice for all aviators. Had this occurred nine months earlier, over the Atlantic, the name “Lindbergh” might today be no more than a forgotten bit of aviation trivia. I had flown at almost a right angle to my proper heading and it…put me close to three hundred miles off route! Nothing on my map of Florida corresponded with the earth’s features I had seen…where could I be? I unfolded my hydrographic chart …. But haze thickened as my altitude increased…. If I could see Polaris, that northern point of light, I could navigate by it with reasonable accuracy. I started climbing toward the clear sky that had to exist somewhere above me. ![]() ![]() A few stars directly overhead were dimly visible through haze, but they formed no constellation I could recognize. I had no notion whether I was flying north, south, east, or west. Over the Straits of Florida my magnetic compass rotated without stopping…. It happened in the middle of the night, and it alarmed Lindbergh enough that years later he recalled the incident in his memoir The Autobiography of Values: Louis, lost his way somewhere between Havana, Cuba, and the southwest coast of Florida. In the year following his historic transatlantic flight to Paris, Charles Lindbergh, flying again in the Spirit of St. ![]()
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