h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Interesting article Phred. I believe that Noonan would have used the moon but I find it hard to think that he would not have corrected for parallax. The moon is not the navigator's favourite body because of the parallax correction but I think its most likely that he would have simply entered the details from the almanac into a proforma which was and still is standard procedure.
Of course it is possible he did not and forgot, especially as fatigue set in.
Some researchers have looked at a similar problem, that of refraction. This would have been significant with the low angle of the sun. Did he fail to correct for it? Again if he was using a proforma it would be difficult to overlook it.

Hi nownnoonan,

The moon is not commonly used by aviators. I actually forgot to make the correction (after three years of navigating in the Pacific for the USAF on a 1966 flight between Wake Island and Guam)....so I can sympathize with Noonan who, as you say, may have been fatigued after a 24 hour flight...one thing is sure....some type of minor or major error was made by Noonan since he failed to find the island.

Phred

Hi Phred.
As a ships navigator he would have used the moon extensively at sea and would not have passed up the opportunity I would imagine in the Electra if thats all that was available. I 'm still 'out' on whether or not he made an error. I tend to think the inherent error in finding a small island by celestial alone played its part on the day. He may have just got unlucky. Howland not being where it should have been cannot have helped.

Nownoonan

Well..acually, the most benign explanation for Fred' failure to find Howland is possibly incorrect maps, as you may be suggesting.

Radio direction finding was the method that was supposed be the fail-safe method to guide them in but If you look at my article closely there is a link that appears to show their anteena being torn off on take-off from Lae.

There are other problems from the Itasaca, including drained batteries that were supposed to be supporting the AM radio direction finding.

Yes it would appear that if the radio was available then they would have made it. Noonan is quoted as saying when questioned if he could make it. 'If I thought I could not make it, I would'nt be going'. He had done similar flights using celestial and radio to Guam and Wake and Midway. He was confident. His navigation appears to have been spot on.One wonders if it would have been different with Manning. Elgen Long believes that crucial information concerning the coupling device was only known to Manning. Fred was primarily a celestial navigator and although he knew the basics he was more into the plotting of the radio bearings passed on to him than the actual electrics. He spoke disparagingly of radio to Lodeesen when they had almost crashed into Mt Tamalpais because of failure with it. He knew enough code to pass his exams but most likely hardly ever used it.

I am also wondering how often he used the Aim-Off technique. I am wondering if he might not have passed to the wrong side of the island as a result of the originating fix being 'out'.

Hi nownoonan,

Amelia and Fred were a fascinating pair.

I used to subscribe to Tigar conversations but it proved to be very tedious receiving endless daily navigation discussions from people who obviously knew nothing about the subject.

I've taken the liberty of adding you to my friends list. You're displaying a very unusual knowledge of this subject with things like the refraction correction. May I inquire about your age, country of residence and background? Are you a pilot?

...and...what's the "off-aim" technique in radio direction finding? My navigation manuals are long gone except for a 1938 copy of "The American Practical Navigator" and googling didn't help me to learn what it was. I never used Radio Direction Finding although it was available to me...preferring the sextant, Loran A or the driftmeter for Lines of Position.

Phred

Hi Phred,
Thanks for adding me to your friends list. A bit of background. I'm Jackie Ferrari, female physics teacher,live on a boat in Oban called the Fred J. Noonan.I am a sailor, passionate about Fred Noonan and have self taught aerial navigation including Fred's method of Dreisonstok.Researcher of Fred for more than 8 years. Once too belonged to Tighar helping with some of the early FN research.I left 7 years ago. Joined AES last year but left. They have a few good navigators, but I couldnt subscribe to the AES Irene Bolam stuff.
May I add you to my friends list?( when I get it all figured out).

I read your personal space and noted you are a diver. Oban is the diving centre of Scotland and there is a famous wreck (The Breda) just round the bay.

Also I agree with you about Bligh! My favourite navigators are Harold Gatty and Frank Worsley.

I'm interested in your nickname. Is Phred 'Fred'?

Nownoonan

Hi Jackie,

Yes..Phred started as Fred Noonan last February, tried to change to Phadreus, and accepted a suggestion to compromise with the name of Phred.

I live in Tampa, Florida, USA. My real name is Bob and I'm an ex-USAF Military Airlift Command navigator/retired Chief Financial Officer. I'm currently travelling extensively in the USA with Mrs. Phred in a recreational vechicle.

I started diving in 1964 with the old double-hose regulator, no bouyancy control device (real divers just swim up and down) and a tank with a J-valve (no pressure gauge or depth indicator). I think I've done about 1500 dives (stopped officilly counting at about 150).

Fred J. Noonan is a great name for a sailboat. I'm pleased to virtually meet you. Your research about Fred sounds much more rich than the few books I've scanned.

You have set me to googling Dreisonstok, Harold Gatty and Frank Worsley. Thanks

Bob

Hi Jackie,

Yes..Phred started as Fred Noonan last February, tried to change to Phadreus, and accepted a suggestion to compromise with the name of Phred.

I live in Tampa, Florida, USA. My real name is Bob and I'm an ex-USAF Military Airlift Command navigator/retired Chief Financial Officer. I'm currently travelling extensively in the USA with Mrs. Phred in a recreational vechicle.

I started diving in 1964 with the old double-hose regulator, no bouyancy control device (real divers just swim up and down) and a tank with a J-valve (no pressure gauge or depth indicator). I think I've done about 1500 dives (stopped officially counting at about 150).

Fred J. Noonan is a great name for a sailboat. I'm pleased to virtually meet you. Your research about Fred sounds much more rich than the few books I've scanned.

You have set me to googling Dreisonstok, Harold Gatty and Frank Worsley. Thanks

Bob

Oh Fudge! A double post. Stupid computer.

Hi Bob,
Its great to be able to communicate with a real navigator and especially one who has used the old methods. Getting a fix to 1 - 3 nm is pretty impressive! Fred himself worked to about 10 and Weems reckoned this was about as good as it got in the thirties but he said that should rapidly improve. I have never used a bubble octant but have a decent sextant which gives good accuracy for marine sights anyway.

I do agree with you that the moon and sun gave a perfect cut that day. I posted all the details on AES over a period of weeks trying to convince the navigators there. So he should have been able to get close enough to the island. I must assume then that he either made a gross error such as parallax or refraction or arithmetical or he was prevented from getting a moon sight in the morning for whatever reason. I am inclining towards the latter because of the proforma business.
The panic and extreme fatigue must have been terrible and of course could have been a factor. This, for me, is the tragedy.
In addition,I think it is a terrible injustice that the alcohol side of it all was ever used as a possible reason for the demise.

Jackie

I don't have any working knowledge of the older sextants used in the 30s. By the 60s they were equipping us with a periscope type "bubble sextant". The object was to pre-calulate the altitude ond azimuth (spelling?) of the body. You dialed it in, then held the body in the bubble of the artifical horizon for a time period (I seem to recall 30 seconds before and after the desired time of observation....a mechanical analog device provided an average altitude which took care a lot of the problems caused by auto-pilot corrections.

Do this for a body four minutes before, at and four minutes after the fix time and advance and retard the early and late lines and you have a triangle.....or maybe just three perfectly crossed lines and no triangle...They told me three miles was a standard error in navigator school, but I never tested it except standing flat on the ground in school.

They also said that AM radio LOPs were very inaccuate, so I never got one. Usually if you were close enough to get a semi-accurate LOP from an AM signal you could also get high frequency TACAN and VOR signals of extreme accuracy.

We will never know and all your possible reasons are valid. I just picked parallax because it bit me badly one day and I had been spending 120 hours a month for two years doing day and night celestial continuosly for three years.

You're right. The first thing you hear about Fred was that he was a drunk, but shamefully, there is little evidence to support that.

I'd love to see you do an edited guide piece about Fred's life

Thanks for the description of your working method with the bubble sextant. Its the most detailed I have read. Its interesting how things had indeed moved on. I'm pretty sure Fred used a Pioneer . I dont think it had an averaging device. However experiment showed that a large number of observations increased accuracy considerably.The pioneer was supposed to be difficult to use and had to be adjusted before each set of observations.It had to be handled carefully.

Do you recall which method of sight reduction you used?

Did you use precomputed altiude curves to get a rough idea of the altitude which you would then set on your sextant?

How long would it take you to work up one sight? (it takes me forever!)

Its very interesting you saying about LOP's from AM radio being inaccurate. Fred wrote a report in which he tested the accuracy of them on one of the Clipper Flights. He concluded that it was a useful aid to navigation but one senses reading between the lines that he was not exactly jubilant. And there were a few instances of it letting them down..indeed with certain terrible consequences.

Regarding the slur on his character regarding drinking. I have read the literature but it really came home to me when a friend from the States visited me a few weeks ago. I asked her about this and she said that she thought it was in the public consciousness(at least those who even know his name). It was the first thing that someone said to her when she asked if the person had heard of Fred Noonan. I was horrified.

However, I do believe he had an acute problem(caused by pressure of work and personal problems) as opposed to a chronic one. In my eyes an acute episode does not merit either the word alcoholic or drunk. I do believe it cost him his job though. I dont think however that it had anything to do with the demise of the Flight.

Finally..! You suggest me writing an edited piece. Mmm..I'll bear it in mind!

Jackie

Jackie,

I'm sure you've read this Tigar link about an old fashioned German nautical sextant found with some bones on a Pacific Island that possibly had a link to Fred.

http://www.tighar.org/TTracks/14_1/The_Noonan_Project.html

Navigator school was a very nice high-intensity year in California. I made a 98 percentile on my navigator aptitude test but only a 50 percentile on pilot aptitude so I thought perhaps that I would be a very good navigator and a dead F-105 pilot.

I seem to recall that I had a book that listed six or so first magnitude stars at any given approximate position and time based (probably) on GMT and longitude. With clear conditions one would do a "pre-comp" on three stars that cut nicely and would form (as nearly as possible) an equilateral triangle 120 degrees apart. The pre-comp would give the expected altitude and azimuth of each star at the dead-reckoned position at the time of observation.

I seem to recall that the azimuth needed to be adjusted for the aircrafts true heading. The whole pre-comp position for three bodies took maybe 15 minutes and the observation and post-observation plotting took another 15. Since we "fixed" every 45 minutes that left some time to have a smoke, eat a can of beans or take a brief nap.

The post observation plotting, as you are well aware, was based on the theory that if a star is observed to be at a given altitude in relation to the (articial) horizon, then the aircraft must be located somewhere on a great circle on Earth where that altitude would be observed (Thanks to the genius Captain Thomas Sumner).

Of course, with a general idea of position, this is reduced to a short straight line perpendicular to the azimuth of the observed body.

The mathematical details of all this, after forty years, are becoming very fuzzy, like a native language not spoken since childhood. I do remember the physical details more clearly. The sextant, the APN-9 short range LORAN oscilliscope, the whiskey compass, driftmeter, the gyro compass, the radio altimeter, short range terrain and weather radar, TACAN and VOR...It was a rich environment compared to what Fred had to work with.

So...please explain a little how you work a marine sextant...I've always wondered how the horizon can be accrately observed with things bobbing about?

Phred

Oh! I see your name on the link above. You are a serious reseacher.

Irene Bolam…It’s hard to believe that one. Did many of the AES people believe it? Probably the same people who believe the CIA killed Kennedy?

Is do see that the Tasmanian, Harold Gatty, invented a drift meter that could measure drift and groundspeed and went around the world with Wiley Post.

Speaking of drift meters, the following conversation was interesting:

http://www.tighar.org/forum/Highlights41_60/highlights52.html

It describes a kind of primitive, non gyro-stabilized drift meter that Fred may have had as an instrument….

Flying down a an advanced sun-line using the off-aim method would be difficult to do accurately without a wind and drift estimate. If, as you say, ten miles would have been a standard error on two successive and accurately calculated sun/moon fixes, his estimate of the winds would have been unreliable, at best.

I wonder what kind off circular error you would see if you took the angle of the sun/moon crossing and looked at all the possible crossing points with a ten mile assumed error on each LOP? I think it would be a very large area.

With those Nav Aids to start with and forced to fly under the mixed cloud cover, at 1,000 feet, while trying to distinguish between a small atoll and cloud shadows with a chart that was five miles off, they had a very difficult proposition...

Hi Phred.

Yes I absolutely agree that it would have ben a very difficult proposition. I am considering different error margins and plugging them into the Aim Off scenario. Its hard to explain without drawing it but there is a danger with traditional Aim-Off that if the error is large enough when he aims off that it will actually put him the other side of the island. Howvever he thinks he is to the opposite side so continues to fly on thinking he is going towards when he is going away. I'm sure you will be aware of this anomaly. Presumably when not making landfall he would reverse his track...but maybe Amelia exhausted and panicking might have done her own thing. Circled perhaps. Or maybe the fuel did not allow a reversal.If this scenario is correct then they could well have been flying more and more into the cloud in the NW and unable even to get a confirmatory fix. I dont know if you are able to view the archives on AES Forum but several weeks of trying to put the idea to the navigators there should be there if you are interested. Elgen Long's book has a great treatise on the errors by the way.
I am also looking at another method, a variation of Aim-Off which I think he may have used.

Thanks for the driftmeter link.I'll have a look at it. I believe he used a Kollsman on the Clippers. He certainly used drift flares but may have just used his pelorus for sighting. I am inclined to think he did.

Jackie

Fascinating to chat with you about this subject of common interest. If I can do anything else to aid your research, we should perhaps continue this discussion by e-mail.

Phred

no it make really interesting reading, and will provide a bit of background to the finished article.

Waves at Logicus