NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Averaging
From: Jared Sherman
Date: 2004 Oct 7, 21:28 -0400
From: Jared Sherman
Date: 2004 Oct 7, 21:28 -0400
Alex- Some years ago I spoke to someone who had been a B52 navigator, pre-GPS, relying on sextant. They routinely did 48+ hour patrols, airborne with nuclear weapons. (Up to 54 hours flight time was not unusual.) He mentioned that one trip "north" (i.e. Arctic duty near Siberia) wx had been so bad for so long that when they finally crossed the US coast somewhere in California, they were supposed to be about 400 miles north. But as far as he was concerned, that got them back to base only an hour off schedule and given the wx and the duration, that was literally good enough for government work. Don't ask me about inertial nav or other options...I have no idea why but sextant and DR were his only tools on that run. Apparently the B52's also had a navigator's "viewport" set in the top of the fuselage aft of the main cabin, until a refueling accident happened. A refueling boom bounced aft, smashed the navigator's viewport resulting in a navigator being literally sucked out of the aircraft. In later models of the B52 (including the current one) that port was sealed over with a metal plate. The provision for a sextant periscope was, as I understand it, separate from that viewport.