NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Long-range airplane navigation
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2004 Nov 25, 21:33 -0500
From: Fred Hebard
Date: 2004 Nov 25, 21:33 -0500
I ran into a B-52 pilot who retired in the 80s or thereabouts. The conversation turned to navigation without much difficulty; he also was qualified in nav. He mentioned that they had automated star trackers for much of their navigation, but that they still carried a hand-held bubble sextant, in case the electronics got shot up. I wonder if that is still the case today. He also mentioned that they could get fixes to within about a mile. I don't know how they assessed the accuracy. He said it depended strongly upon the sextant operator. Fred
