Hi Greg,
Yes, I'm aware of the theory here. Goes some like they flew hundreds of miles off course in the cloulds all night using DR only. That is the only explaination since the fuel useage has been revised. I've read countless explainations.
Years ago, from reading and studying this site page
here .
I was under the impression that AE had attempted to located Howland on the 157/337 line, never located it and when they realized they’d missed it, just decided to keep on keeping on since that LOP crossed Gardner anyway. Perhaps the conversation when something like this.
AE “Well Fred, it seems we missed Howland, we should have been there a half hour ago.”
Fred “ Yeah, Ami, I’m in agreement. Tell ya what. Since we’re on the same line as Gardner let’s just go for it. Heck, it’s only about 3 bucks down the trail by now.
Very logical, so it seemed, at the time.
That’s pretty much what is written and the illustrations imply. I was quite excited back in the earlier days, and then after expedition after expedition hadn’t turned up any smoking guns so I lost interest. Whoa, then someone found a landing gear and wheel. Oh boy, let’s go! Shucks no gear or wheel or sign of it could be found. It must have slipped down over the abyss and too deep for divers to locate.
As I’ve written above here, for many years now I’ve flown the Microsoft flight simulator. At first I liked the modern aircraft, but being that you can just let the GPS fly the plane, it’s more like letting the computer fly the computer. What’s the use? Then a number of years ago a couple of developers designed a sextant. That grabbed my attention, as being a sailor I’ve always been interested in celestial navigation. So I learned to navigate with the sextant. I even started a thread a year and a half ago during the 75th anniversary of the tragic event.
I decided to shorten the Lae to Howland flight, because almost no one would fly the whole thing in one setting. So my simulated flight consists of only the last 542nm starting at the Tabiteuea North Airstrip in Kiribati.
here.
As you can see, I worked on this project for months and thought I’d come up with a pretty good flight. I’ve flown it at dozens of times using just the sextant. Some successful some not, as I’ve limited the fuel to 200 gals, which is much less than AE would have had at that distance; however in FS we can afford to ditch and restart. Then I discovered this thread asking about the moon.
Hmm I asked myself the same question. I had no moon in my flight plan! What’s going on here?
I can explainit now.
When Microsoft developed the flight simulator they went to great lengths of add accurate celestial bodies. They even got the moon right! That has to be some fabulous software programming. You can go back in history as far as you like and the moon and the sun will be there just as it was then. EXCEPT for a couple nuances, they couldn’t program in. One is the phases of the moon, so they left it at that. Still pretty impressive I’d say.
The reason I couldn't we can’t see the moon, on July 2, 1937 in FS is that FS was in the new moon phase. Another thing is that FS doesn’t include the crescents. It is only visible from quarter to quarter. So when I start on July 3, 1937, quite by accident, FS loaded the scenery for that date and sure enough shows the first phase of the moon. I’m aware that the moon was waning that night in 1937. Yes, something that has taken me years to figure out. What I discovered was two very important things. You can study the sextant and take many classes, but no one seems to teach the importance of the moon. As I said before here, which no one seems to have grasped what I've been trying to explain.
The moon is quite an asset to the navigator when an the days of the month tht they have it at their disposal to use. The moon, unlike any other celestial body, varies in altitude and declination by about 14 degrees each day. The variation of the sun, planters and stars only varies less than 1 degrees from day to day depending, on the altitude and azimuth from the navigators assumed position.
Now, what does all this mean?
Here is "a single star landfall procedure" by the book. The fact is, that while working for PanAm FN was the best of the best. He probably had input to whomever wrote the book. I’m sure he did it many times prior to this.
At about 128nm out he would turn left or right to offset their position x amount of degrees, to offset x amount of distance from their destination. I’d say left in this case, because they would have reached the 157 LOP before passing Howland’s longitude instead of after crossing passing it if he'd turned right. By the use of DR and timing they would turn 90 degrees to intercept the 157 degree LOP. Again with DR FN would know when they should have reach W176 degrees 38 minutes, the longitude of Howland.
After several minutes had passed and they hadn’t seen Howland he would proceed to the next step in the procedure, which was to turn into the wind, and fly for 10 minutes, the turn 90 degrees +/= the WCA angle and fly cross wind for 10 minutes, then again turn 90 degrees and fly down wind for 20 minutes, turn right again and fly for 20 minutes across wind, and again turn 90 degrees and fly 30 minutes downwind. He would do this two or three time, slowly increasing the downwind leg of the square This produced a squared downwind pattern that was constantly expanding in the area they were searching.
The book doesn’t spell it out, because the navigator knows he only has one and only one recourse after failing to locate the destination. That is to increase altitude or whatever was neccessary until they could the sun, get a shot and find W176 dgr 38 min longitude.
Why, you may ask, just not continue down the 157/337 LOP? Because they had simply lost it while flying the landfall procedure. Remember that they had only reached that LOP by the use of DR alone. No rocket science here folks but basic navigation 101.
Here’s another thing that may interest you. Read AE's 2013 messages again. Notice the pause, after saying they were flying the 137/337 line. After a time she then stated we are flying north and south. That is because they had NO IDEA of what latitude they were at and no means to read the latitude during daylight hours.
As I’ve stated before, the 137/337 LOP is a onetime shot. That’s it. It can’t be located again without a latitude shot.
I hope this shed some light
Thanks for reading all
Fred