Before GPS: How Did Pilots Navigate in the Early Days of Aviation?

Now, even the 60s, 70s, and even the 80s seem like early days of aviation. We used our brains, VORs, NDBs, maps, and clocks.

IFR = Ifollow roads. In the old days we just looked out the window for the highways

For us old country bumpkins....wheat fields, corn fields, cotton fields, beet fields, and "old" man Jaworski (he was actually in his 40s) silos.

Easy in, Easy out just watch the roads. Like my pappy used to say, I don't need all them gadgets when driving I know my speed. RIP Dad and "old" man Jaworski.

the garmin dependent generations are ill served by not knowing round dials. And this results in these kind of dumb questions. DEad reckoning is not familiar to them as well.

With charts, paper & pencil, E6B computer and plotter, VOR, ADF, LF Range stations, and a good timepiece.

Pilot Spouse Perspective: What a fun read, especially the history of the Jepp charts. During the years when my husband was flying a Kingair 350, I took on the job of cleaning the interior, restocking the snacks and updating the chart books while he did the exterior maintenance and uploaded the database (on floppy disks, no less). I thought it was wasteful to toss all those old Jepp charts, so I took them home, along with the "pilot notes" sheets. I peeled many a potato onto those charts, and wrapped more than a few Christmas and birthday gifts with them - and I still use the "pilot notes" sheets for shopping lists.

The transition to electronic charts was no doubt a wonderful thing, but I miss the old days.

As someone who has flown across the Pacific many times and flown around Japan. Before the days of the CADC (Central Air Data Computers), all flights crews had NAVAGATORS. Yes, a real person with a Sextan.

My second nav exercise was across the Simpson desert. 500 or so massive sand hills. It was heading and height and duration. Backups were the Alice Springs NBD and or following the main highway towards the end of the flight. My flying ended pretty much spot on to the VFR approach point.

VORs
NDBs
DMEs
Pilotage.

I can do all of that. The GPS makes it easier, but in the old days, that's how we flew.

The ancient days when airlines on overwater trips had to have a Flight navigator on board and they knew how to navigate.. The old Wiz Wheel and experience was the main tool used. Sextant readings and time also helped and if the PIC could keep a constant heading, that made things a bit easier. However. The FE looked after the engine management and few flow side of things allowing the navigator to determine endurance. What was well used in those days was the Point of Now Return and being a multi engine Aero, Critical Point if one of the mills got tide of pulling it's weight. There was a saying about twins, lose an engine and doubly the flow burn. So before the flight at the Briefing Office the crew learned the best guessed expected conditions of the flight, besides the weather briefing and synoptic charts, a Radio Flight Plan was also issued on the expected areas for best HF Frequency usage en-route. HF being the go to radio for over water flights. So with the old RNC Charts to hand either by Jepps or the local countries government suppler and at one time BOAC issues their own world wide coverage of NavCharts. One would deterring the the heading for the track, the time to the first waypoint and the fuel burned during the taxi, climb and initial en route cruse and have something o work with for the rest of the flight. Fuel management was a major responsibility and a good FE could adjust mixtures to get the best MP for the RMP that as set for the cruse. All shred information as a working tool for their own task. The Navigator would constantly keep up to date at were the Aero was, one tool was a scope that looked downwards at the water below and form that, a sense of the drift determined, mental and wizwheel calculations and a few minutes later, another look at the water below. The experienced Navigators knew the need corrections tot eh heading and so a new ground speed meaning a new fuel burn calculation, a sextant check that they were were they actually thought they were. Then came the time came when te expected waypoint was to be crossed and the Flight Radio Operator would share what he was about to say with the Skip, then call up the station handling traffic in the UFR/FIR with the full position report. The five letter FMS waypoints are way better than those back them The overwater points were usually named after some form of marine life, like GREAYNURSE, SOARDFISH. The routine was repeated for the entire flight. Jepps have their oceanic plotting charts, in those ancient days they were used to keep a visual idea where the Aero was above the water. Flight Navigator Licence Holders were excellent at helping the PIC put the Aero on track and heading were it was supposed to be going. Now when one had to divert off track and regain trick, that was an art and the Air Plot on the chart helped as did the use of the other tools at hand. Brining up a FMS page and requesting to display the green ring at were X is about to happen, is far easier and relaxing, but when all fails, how may know who to use the WhizWheel to help determine certain parameters?

early in my career i navigated by lighted beacon and A - N radio range. primiative by todays standards & accuracy.

Electronics are really nice, but we always have redundancy or carry our backups. I learned to fly when you paid attention to ground details, rivers, roads, railroad tracks, and radio towers. Radios fail. One night I had a total power failure. Good thing I had a flashlight in my bag. Don't be naïve, pilotage is part of being a capable pilot.

beautiful memories, shame the young 'hot dogs' with the new & latest toys did not get to enjoy things like 'whistle stop' upgrades

In the past we ferried Dorniers from Munich to Manchester NH using ADF and dead reckoning most of the way.

Yes, I surely did poorly on my spelling. I am going to blame that on my old age! LOL

Thanks. All have a great day....

The camel jocks seemed to figure it out for the spice trade and there was nary a sattelite in orbit over the gobi desert.

The camels probably had an IQ on par with their pilots. They could smell the water from one hundred miles away!

I am 90 and have flown a lot of places, even around the world 8 times. Rated in J-3 thru 747 and helios also.. Nav was a learned item on my living list..Yes I have followed R R tracks, but not into the tunnel! (Korea) Are sectional maps still in use?? That is /was the basic learning device. 87 knots and you go 100 miles. Do that in your head!!! Then move to a E 6B /wind screen. Learn to NAV. THat is living insurance!!!

Great article that every aspiring aviator should read. A slight gap, as touched on by a few comments below, is the use of celestial navigation, pressure navigation, and others such as LORAN and grid (for flight near the poles where the magnetic compasses are not reliable). As a member of one of the last USAF navigator classes to “shoot cel”, it’s a vital piece of historical relevance that we honor those great navigators of old, including Magellan, da Gama, Columbus, Vespucci, and others ….. (and the Phoenicians who started celestial navigation 4000 years ago) upon which our modern aviation navigational marvels were founded.

I remember as a young kid in the 1950s sitting in our parked family car tuning the AM radio to the low end of the band. The completely analog radio would actually tune frequencies below the 540 KHz AM band lower limit, and I would pick up the nearby San Francisco airport low frequency omni navigation station. Our car was parked in the "N" stream side of the airway, so I would hear "dah dit" over and over, and then the call letters every 30 seconds; I remember morse "S R F", but the maps from that era say "S F R" ("San Francisco Radio"), My young imagination would run wild listening to that beacon.

Fun little movie on exactly this subject - guy ferrying crop sprayer over open water to New Zealand drops his ADF and breaks it. Now what... Fortunately the (Airbus?) pilot at 35K can hear him and remembers "how we did this during the war". Based on an actual event involving Dead Reckoning and the Old Ways...

Mercy Flight - the Rescue of Flight 771

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107556/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_84

I'm still trying to figure out some of the geometry they use...

My dad was a Hump pilot in WW2 and made 140 trips over the Himalaya mountains. Enemy aircraft were not too much of a concern but it was the worst weather in the world and you flew regardless of the conditions. It was generally complete darkness as there were no cities or other sources of light other than your instrument display. Using time, distance and direction with a map, wristwatch and compass was generally all you had to navigate through the mountains. It was called the aluminum trail due to all the wreckage of aircraft. If a crew went down 95% were never heard from again. Thirty-five percent of all Hump crews did not survive to the end of their term of service. It was called the "forgotten front" as most people are not familiar with it. There is quite a bit of information about it online.

So lets put you in my seat as an early flyer.

Crossing water. No landmarks. Except you noted the location and direction of every ship you passed....

Single engine, over water, compass setting. Seems crazy without a life jacket or survival suit... but we did it, surviving to tell the tail.

Even late 80’s/90’s flying charter to very rural towns, SD, MT, WY,ND. Head out on a radial till it dies then use your wac chart. Much of that looks pretty much the same though, especially if you’re staying low under an overcast, kinda challenging at times

Wouldn’t Cicero Ave point the way to Midway Airport?

Interesting navigator true story: There were still ocean station vessels positioned in the North Atlantic when I first crossed the pond in 1971 in a USAF C-130. After I radioed Ocean Station November to get a range and bearing to confirm course, I heard the radar operator contact a Pan Am 747 heading over to Europe; he asked the 747 if they wanted a range and bearing too. The 747 politely declined and mentioned to OS Nov that he had a triple INS on board so he was just fine. There was a silent pause of about 30 sec and the OS Nov radar operator came back up on comms and asked the 747 if he could get a range and bearing on him so he could update his precise OS Nov sea position. How times have changed!

In the squawk about GPS spoofing a few months ago, I brought up the need to know older forms of navigation and the use of manual tools to be able to plot a course and the ability to follow what navaids still exist. This ties into it. Allowing the younger students to learn about them ensures that they do not get lost, or at the wrong airport.

I will say that one thing I learned early on while flying in either a light plane or helicopter, is that one may know the area around them while on the ground, but it looks entirely different once in the air above it all.

My father piloted a B24 bomber out of Alice Springs Australia and bases in New Guinea back in 1942 and described what it was like after a bomb raid (Philippine shipping location, harbors) heading home in horrible weather and listening for the dah dit dit dah sequences on his headset waiting to see the lit oil cans indicating the pathway to the landing field. FYI it took them 60 minutes after takeoff to reach altitude (20-24k ft) fully loaded!

Fortunately I was in a area with good VOR coverage but it was still hard finding airports in rural North Carolina at low altitudes. Also the landscape looks entirely different in the winter than in the summer. Landmarks very familiar seem to disappear in the lush summer landscape. My first airplane I bought had LORAN and what a step up. Those were the days,

IFR - I Follow Roads/Railroads!

I recall my navigator on C130 from McMurdo Antarctica to Christchurch, New Zealand, having an awful time with his celestial navigation. We departed McMurdo late in the evening but of course in the summer Austral season this meant the sun remained up in Antarctica and had that 1500 in the afternoon look about it. We used grid nav in Antarctica because magnetic nav wasnt possible but there is that point going north where neither give a great deal of comfort and celestial is your friend. Unfortunately, with twilight following us for the first four hours the poor navigator had neither sun, stars or moon to work with. Finally he managed to get in a couple of shots but by then we were approaching New Zealand where the sun was starting to rise and so he was in the same boat for the rest of flight until we finally picked up the invercargill VOR.

It feels very lonely and isolated flying in that part of the world so I think I'd really appreciate a magenta line if I was still flying today.

I'm on the fence here. Yes, you need to know the basics, of course. You're not a "man" (or woman) until you've shot a complex VOR approach with one vor receiver in a Cessna 150. On the other hand, the climb out of LGA to Florida is a rather task saturated scenario in a steam-gauge MD80, which I did many years ago. It takes teamwork between the crew. ATC is barking at you. It's dark. Can I go direct somewhere?...No. Am I looking out the window for traffic?...No.

I'll take the magenta line, please.

A friend of my father's and a FAA check pilot said that my dad, for former DC-3 pilot, was the only pilot he ever saw using a Shell oil map in a DC-8. Dad liked having road maps as backup just in case, lol. Probably not a terrible idea in the 1960s, aircraft were lost, including another UAL DC-8, because they lost awareness of where they were when the navigation instruments of the time failed them.

I am not a pilot. Not even close.

Do (did) pilots ever use gyroscopes? I see no mention of that except the article says something about "precise accelerometers mounted on a gyro-stabilized platform".

Mr. Harry Ellet , You Have a great Personality.
“ Who cares About “ spelling “ it’s not what you say it’s how you Say it .
At times , One might mistype Letters or words by mistake and it’s just Fine .
As we all know this is not a spelling contest site and “ others Should Refrain from criticizing members “

The giant cement arrows still exist. I came across one while hiking around S. Nevada.

Good coverage of technologies before and after NDB/ADF and VOR/DME. but short shrift for those, which were main stream for decades.

Before GPS we used Loran C, and before that NDB's and VOR's.

Sometimes poorly

I remember drawing wind vector triangles on graph paper and then going to the teletype machine in the FSS to get the weather reports and forecasts. Somehow, I still managed to navigate from CYXX to CYCW. And back.

IFR - "Roads, Rivers, and RailRoads"

The real question is what will happen 'after GPS' cause back in the day when flying in the NE, (to TEB, CYYZ or where ever) in an old freight dog LJ25 in light snow, (dry air, max. static electricity) the old ARNAV 40 loran C needed a cane. It got lost.

Next came cleared direct to ? and any prudent pilots response was 'uuuhhmmm, could I get a heading for that' and you hoped he got the subtle hint.

Finally the ARNAV 40 came back and you quit wondering if the controller or the one down the road would be an ally or a prosecutor when he didn't ask you to get out a pen and paper to write down this phone number.

One could make this stuff up, but why, the skies weren't quite so full at night and gross nav. errors weren't quite so rare. remember the mid-continent gap?

...I read once that that was why they put windows in the front of AC for terrain observation...I used to get manage just fine in my ultralight by just looking around...now granted, those weren't cross country hops but still...

They put homing carrier pidgeons in the cockpit.

The same way you would if the GPS failed! Look out the window! Eventually someone on this forum will say they used a sundial and plumb bob in an open cockpit!