Presidential Address: Radio-Navigation's Transition from Sail to Steam

Extract

My title is deliberately rather similar to that of Jed Williams' book because it was from his erudite and comprehensive work that I drew my inspiration. There are many volumes dealing with radio navaid engineering development but few, if any, about the very real and practical problems faced by navigators of interpreting, sometimes under very difficult circumstances, what they presented. Very few navigators of the 40s and 50s were expert draughtsman or academicians with degrees in mathematics or electronics, yet they were expected to comprehend and apply concepts that a few years earlier would have earned them such degrees. These fundamental problems of interpretation also seem to have been rather lost on some of those who were responsible for choosing which radio navaids to install. I have terminated my survey at the ‘steam’ era, rather than going all the way to ‘satellites’, not only because we have heard so much of satellites lately that it is time to give them a rest, but also because it was computers — the ‘ steam’ of navaids — that got us into the modern age of automated navaids when interpretation became far easier and the need for specialists doing little else vanished. My own experience is that of an aerial navigator so I hope our marine and land-based members will not object if I confine my remarks to aviation.