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    Re: Admiral Byrd and the North Pole
    From: Brad Morris
    Date: 2013 May 10, 17:51 -0400

    Hewitt

    There is a 1930 film called "With Byrd at the South Pole" filled with actual expedition footage.  FANTASTIC STUFF and well worth the price of admission.  I stumbled across it one day and was astonished to see Admiral Byrd in the movies.

    I can't be sure of course, but I'd bet donuts to dollars that Gary's footage came from this film.

    Brad

    On May 10, 2013 5:34 PM, "Hewitt Schlereth" <hhew36@gmail.com> wrote:

    Thank you, Frank. Now I know Byrd's was a bubble and what type. Back in the day I never did get a bubble for my Plath, so I have no notion of the results you could expect using one on a marine sextant from an airplane. I don't imagine they would be too great. 

    As far as Balchen v Byrd goes, I never know what side to come down on in that kind of situation. You don't and can't know the persons involved, and it was all a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.

    Gary, fascinating to think there is video of Byrd using his sextant. Alas, neither my iPad nor IBook would open it. (sigh)

    Speaking of Zeppelins, one of the most absorbing books I've read in the past couple of years is Doctor Eckener's Dream Machine - years and years of scheduled trans-Atlantic flights from Germany to Rio in the 20s hanging under a million cubic feet of EXPLOSIVE gas! A flight around the world. And not one accident - till the Hindenburg. What a saga.

    BTW Gary, so far I haven't found out from Elgen whether Fred Noonan's A-7 had an averager or not. Yours in the video of your flight looked like it did, but the labeled photo in the A-7 manual on your AE-FN site doesn't.

    Thanks again, guys,

    Hewitt


    Sent from my iPad

    On May 10, 2013, at 12:48 PM, "Frank Reed" <FrankReed---com> wrote:


    One note: in this era, and even more so a few decades earlier, it was not unusual to quote angles to seconds. This by itself does not indicate fraud since it does not imply accuracy of seconds. If you wanted to specify any angle less than a minute of arc, seconds were considered the normal option. Fastidious navigators worked everything out to seconds of arc because they believed that this was "correct procedure". The distinction between accuracy and precision was not widely understood and rarely practiced in that time period. Of course in reality, the accuracy of their sights could not have been better than 5 or 10 minutes of arc or possibly much worse, due the likelihood of unusual refraction for low altitudes which Brad and Hewitt already mentioned and also the simple fact that he was using a bubble horizon from a bouncing aircraft.

    Hewitt asked if this had been discussed before. The first reference to Byrd in NavList messages that I can find was in a passing reference in a post back in October 2002 by Robert Eno in a thread on Astro Compass History. Five years and a few days later, Gary LaPook also mentioned Byrd in the same context.

    In May 2009, Bill Morris described his restoration of a sextant of a type similar to the one used by Byrd. It's a marine sextant with a bubble attachment. He included a photo of his restored instrument:
    http://fer3.com/arc/m2.aspx/g8452

    In March, 2010 Peter Fogg quoted from a book review which said "Byrd ... claimed to be the first to fly over the North Pole but almost cer­tainly didn't, faking his navigation observations. His pilot, Bernt Balchen, was once asked why Byrd was blocking his career and replied: "Because he didn't fly over the North Pole and he knows I know it." Balchen then detailed statistics showing that Byrd, worried about oil leaking from one of the engines of the Fokker Trimotor, turned back 190 kilometers from the Pole and fudged his figures."

    In early 2010 and with follow-ups a year later, there were a few references to Byrd's sextant in a thread on zeppelin navigation:
    http://www.fer3.com/arc/sort2.aspx?y=201001&y2=201112&subject=zep
    In this thread, there is a short video posted by Gary showing Byrd using his bubble sextant: http://fer3.com/arc/m2.aspx/g15807

    -FER


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