Navworld Quarterly Newsletter -The Navigator Autumnal Equinox 2001 
Keep 'em flyin' 

The Salt Lake City ION GPS 2001conference still managed to have 900 attendees despite the terrorist attacks in the East  September 11, 2001 and the grounding of all aircraft. The ION Technical Meeting 2002 is planned for San Diego, CA  January 28-30, 2002. The INS GPS 2002 Meeting is planned for  Portland, OR September 24-27, 2002.

Selman Field Reunion

 Selman Field, home of a WWII premier Army Air Corps navigation school, held a reunion in April 2001in Monroe, LA   with a dinner- dance, memorial eulogy and a tribute to the Selman Field Remembered  memorial  sculpture.  Louisiana style cooking was served throughout the weekend of the reunion. A Bi-annual association meeting was held during the 2001 reunion. The Selman Field  Historical Association is looking for all personnel who trained or were stationed in Monroe , LA at Selman Field from 1942 through 1946. Write to SFHA, P.O. Box 14962, Monroe, LA 71207-4962.  Readers can reach the excellent Selman Field Memorial web site listed at the Navworld link page and view the fascinating Selman Field Memorial story.

 Certificate in Global Positioning Systems Technology

 University of California Riverside is now offering (Fall Extension Session) a comprehensive study of the principles, techniques and contemporary applications of GPS. A certificate is awarded upon the successful completion of eight courses: Fundamentals of geodesy, GPS Technologies, GPS Data Processing and Analysis, Control Surveys with GPS, GPS Leveling, Survey Data Adjustments and Map Projections.  Two electives are additionally offered: Spatial Reference Systems Seminar and Integrating GIS with GPS.  E-mail : sciences@ucx.ucr.edu, Web: www.UCRExtension.net/gis

 Navigation Using the NY Times

 There are many ways navigation has been practiced but nothing like the innovative method that two aviators in a Bellanca named the Columbia  demonstrated in their flight over the Atlantic in August 1927in their quest for a maximum range record following Lindbergh's successful solo flight. Chamberlin the pilot and Levine his sponsor were approaching England and were attempting to fix their position. The large Cunard ship the Mauretania  suddenly appeared on the eastern horizon steaming at 25 knots at 4:30 pm. The Bellanca swooped down to  top deck level height banked sharply and emerged on the opposite side of the ship. Having identified the ship, Chamberlin reversed the direction of the Bellanca and then tracked the wake of the ship to establish the ship's course. 

 Chamberlin merely needed to maintain a heading matching the track of the Mauretania  to obtain his landfall. Meanwhile Levine studied the New York Times' marine section and determined that the Mauretania sailed from Southhamton the previous day at noon. His charts  showed the shipping lanes in the region.  He assumed a cruising speed for the Mauretania and multiplied it by the elapsed time since noon the previous day. He concluded that the Bellanca was 400 to 500 miles west of Land's End. His unique fixing method placed the Bellanca close to its actual 350 miles distance west of Land's End.

 AFNOA Reunion

 AFNOA (Air Force Navigator Observer Association) is holding its annual reunion in San Diego October 24-26 2001. For details visit  www.afnoa.org. The stated purpose of AFNOA is:

 "To rekindle the friendships of our training days at the schools where we earned our navigator or observer wings. To meet in small or large bunches to regale each other with trivia and matters of importance, and to memorialize our classmates who went before us on the long celestial."

 WRONG WAY CORRIGAN

 Douglas "Wrongway" Corrigan turned the world on its head and became an instant hero for flying non-stop to Ireland in a rickety $325 Curtis Robin from New York in  1938. Although his flight plan showed a destination of Long Beach, CA, he attributed his reciprocally deflected flight to a compass failure.  Earlier he was denied acceptance by authorities of his flight plan to fly from Newfoundland to Ireland since his aircraft was viewed as unsafe for such a flight.

 In 1968 Joe Portney interviewed Captain P.V.H. Weems, Ret. (USN), owner of Weems Systems (co-founder of the ION) and was informed by him that he personally sold Corrigan the Atlantic charts needed to safely navigate to Ireland explaining that Corrigan's deflected  flight was clearly not spontaneous.

 The Jet Stream

 In 1934 Wiley Post had already established many records girdling the globe in record time in his Lockheed Vega, the Winnie Mae, when his focus was shifted to making the first stratospheric long distance flight.  His aircraft had a 20,000 foot ceiling but with a supercharged engine, Post in his specially designed pressure suit and sustained by  a liquid oxygen system was able to attain altitudes as high as 50,000 feet and discover the jet stream. 

 The following year, he flew from Burbank, CA to Cleveland, OH spanning 2,035 miles in a record 7 hours and 19 minutes.  The average ground speed for the flight was 279  mph but at times was in excess of 340 mph. In WWII General Lemay's B-29 crews were perplexed with the large miss distances encountered in high altitude bombing.  They had rediscovered the jet stream.   The meteorologists came up with a remedy for correcting the adverse effects of the jet stream, the differential ballistic wind, producing an adjustment ("Q" correction) to the trajectory computations to improve the bombing accuracy. The bombardiers were using the wind at bombing altitude that ignored the effects of the lower altitude winds.  What was needed was the mean value of the winds between bombing altitude and target terrain level.   More on the differential ballistic wind will be provided in a future article.

 Book Review 

"Gain a day going west and lose a day going east" is a convenient aid for the navigator to reconcile date change when crossing the international date line.  But for the navigator and non-navigator, this was a perplexing issue first challenging Magellan's crew when they discovered that they returned on a Sunday and not Saturday in their westward circumnavigation of the world.  This inspired Jules Verne to write Around the World in Eighty Days in 1872 and mystify Phileas Fogg and the reader on how Fogg could still win his bet even though he perceived he was late by one day.

 To help unravel the confusion on time, Sir Sanford Fleming came up with the concept of  world-wide standard time as early as 1860 (but established in 1884) with 24 time zones that ultimately adopted the  Greenwich meridian at the center of the first zone that gave rise to the  international date line . Clark Blaise has written the book Time Lord that chronicles the life of Fleming and how he was inspired to come up with the concept of  world-wide standard time. Clark Blaise describes the chaos in reconciling time as one traveled across the United States. [The train conductors frequently were seen resetting their watches to local time at stations using a pocket size sundial]. A trip from New York to Boston meant advancing the time on a  clock by 12 minutes in the conductor's belief that the sun rose 12 minutes earlier in Boston than in New York. The book has had mixed reviews.  Time Lord is really two books devoting attention to the 1) quest for standard time and 2) state of technology  during the Victorian Age. Nevertheless the book  manages to  tell the story of the quest for standard time without any time diagrams. Hardcover -256  pages (April 10, 2001); Pantheon Books; dimensions (in inches) 1.06 x 8.48 x 5.80.

 Highest Geological Feature in the World (Terradaily  August 8, 2001)

 A recent study of the world's highest geological feature, the Tibetan Plateau, known also as the "roof of the world," reveals that it reached its current maximum average height of 5 kilometers earlier than previously believed. The study appears in a paper in the August 9th issue of the journal Nature. The paper was written by Bradley Hacker, a professor of geological sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

 World-wide weather is affected by mountainous areas such as the Tibetan Plateau  bringing about such effects as the monsoons of India and Asia that generate considerable interest in knowing more about this region. The formation of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayan Mountains was caused by the collision of the India and Asia tectonic plates.

 This collision gave rise to a reverse fault with the resulting crust thickening until it began to weaken and spread apart. Using a "pats of butter" and "layers of crusts" of the Earth analogy, Hacker explains the plateau height limitation of this region. Visualize a series of nonuniform stacks of butter pats being placed on top of each other in sequence.   The thicker pats of butter generate more heat than the thinner ones and are the weakest. In the formation of the  mountains on the Earth as the crust builds up, the heat generated from the resulting radioactive decay weakens the thickened crust.  In the analogy of both cases 1) the pats of butter and 2) the Earth's crust attain a maximum height and begin to flow outward forming a flattened region. In the case of the Earth, an equilibrium is reached between the  strength of the  thickening of the crust and its weakness caused by the heat emanating from the crustaceous  mass explains Hacker.

 But is this 5 kilometer height the theoretically highest limit of a mountainous region on Earth?  The theoretically highest mountain on the Earth (and other planets) is addressed in the ponderable "How high the mountain"  in  Joe Portney's book Portney's Ponderables. In this ponderable it is shown that the theoretical limit to the height of a mountain is related to its potential energy and the atomic bonding force in the atoms of the crustaceous material in the base of the mountain.  The derivation of the solution was provided by Professor John Barrow  of Cambridge University and is found to be in excess of 50 kilometers for mountains on Earth.

 Hacker and his associates determined the age of the Tibetan Plateau by measuring the decay of rubidium to strontium and potassium to argon (trapped in crystals found in the faults) and concluded that the region could not get any higher in height.  Why are mountains in the region limited to a maximum of 8.8 kilometers (Mount Everest at 29,028 feet)?   According to Hacker, the Tibetan Plateau is in steady state and Mount Everest and other regional high mountains are in equilibrium with the nearby, lower areas divided by the Indus and other major rivers capping the average height of the Tibetan Plateau to five kilometers.