Bombs Away (14 page)

“There is something in this background and report I want to talk about,” the officer went on. “You should be a good pilot, but with your engineering background you should make an even better navigator.” Allan leaned forward in his chair. “I thought I’d like to be a pilot,” he said. “Everyone wants to be a pilot,” the officer said, “but we need navigators as much as we need pilots. The ships have to get to the targets and back. It isn’t a second-choice job. On your record, I would like to recommend you for navigation school. After fifteen weeks, if you pass, you will be commissioned a second lieutenant. Your ground pay and your flying pay will be the same as a pilot and rank and promotion are on the same basis. And you must understand that a navigator is not a washed-out pilot. He is a specialist in his own line and your background qualifies you particularly. Think it over and report to me tomorrow morning.”

Allan sat in the induction center post exchange, drinking Cokes and thinking it over. His mind was quick to grasp implications. The specialty he was offered was work for all his life. He knew that when the war is over a great part of the commerce of the world will be air-borne, that great ships and possibly strings of towed gliders will carry the people and the produce of the world from place to place. He knew that, except for short hauls, the old methods of transportation, ships and rails and trucks, were going to disappear because they were slower and more expensive and less efficient than air transportation. In college he had talked often with students and instructors about the future of air commerce, and all of these ships would need navigators and the route plotters and dispatchers would be navigators. It was a whole life work that was being offered him, and it seemed to him a better and more interesting life than a civil engineering job which, during his memory at least, had been precarious.

He went to the counter and got another Coke and sat down again. The war was going on. It had to be fought and won. If he wanted action, he would have it. A bomber doesn’t hide its head, even its defensive work is attack. He would see all the action he wanted and would take a definite and important part in it and when the war was won, he had a profession which would continue to be action. Allan had always done his own thinking. He went over the question carefully. Pilots would be necessary too after the war, but there would be a great many more pilots than aerial navigators. There would be all the combat pilots and the copilots, all the thousands of civil pilots. Navigators would be very definitely in demand. In the middle of his third Coke, he thought with some guilt how he was considering a future in peace and was selfishly figuring what he would gain. It was true, the future of the navigator, and it was to be considered. And now that he had considered it, he shut it out of his head. There was a war to be fought, and he was very tired of Coke. As he walked back to his quarters he thought how he would see the world at war and would see it at peace, all of the world, the cities and peoples of the Orient and of South America. He would help to carry food to the new-born peoples of Europe when the German locust was killed and driven out. Probably the seed which would make Europe fruitful again would be carried through the air. If he wanted to see the life of his planet during his own time he could not want a better profession.

The next morning, after a second interview, he was assigned to an aerial navigation school.

Aerial navigation is a technical job. It is learned in the classroom and the laboratory, and for that matter the laboratory, the training plane AT-7, is a classroom itself. In each ship there are three desks and three sets of instruments so that three students may work at the same time. Classrooms in the training centers look like any classrooms. They are long and the desks are arranged in line. At the front is the instructor’s stand with a blackboard behind it, while on the instructor’s table and on his stand is the demonstration equipment he uses as he lectures to his class. The room looks like other schoolrooms, but there its similarity stops. In the cadet classrooms are no sleepy students slopping in their seats, no whispering or writing of notes, no horseplay. There isn’t time for it. The class marches to its desks. Each man stands at attention until he is ordered to be seated. He sits up at his desk with his eyes forward on the demonstrable assumption that an alert posture is concomitant of an alert mind.

In the navigation school a great deal must be learned in a very short time. The work has been designed to be as much as a very good man can stand. A second-rate man cannot stand it at all, but with the initial testing a second-rate man rarely gets into navigation school.

Allan marched to his desk and stood stiffly until the class was ordered to be seated. The instructor did not waste any time. He went quickly into the definitions of navigation. On the sphere before him, which represented the earth’s surface, he explained the system of co-ordinates, meridians and parallels, latitude and longitude. He explained the great circles and small circles, the difference between a great circle course and the Mercator course. He spoke of the statute mile and the nautical mile. In the first classes the different projections of maps were discussed, the Lambert-Conformal Conic projection and the Mercator projection, gnomonic, stereographic, and other projections, and the methods of measuring course and distance on each. Definition was immediately followed by application in every case. And after each set of definitions there was a quick questioning of the class not only to find out how much the individuals had learned, but to set in their minds what they had learned.

But the navigation school was not solely class work. Their military drill and formation was as rigid and continuous as that of any other school in the Air Force; and from class they went to the athletic fields where they played the active games the Air Force encourages, football and basketball, volleyball and baseball, obstacle races, running and jumping. After the hours in the classroom they needed the playing fields to shake the kinks out of their backs. They hadn’t really time to get tired and after the class work and the athletics were done and the formations were done and they had eaten their dinner, it was still a good idea to get out the textbooks and to study what had gone on during the day. For the work goes very rapidly and it is difficult to go back and pick up.

The training ships for navigators are AT-7’s, twin-engine, all-metal ships equipped really as flying classrooms in navigation. Along the right-hand side of the plane are three desks for three cadets and beside each desk is a drift meter and a compass. In back of the pilot, and in sight of all the desks, there is an auxiliary instrument board with dials showing altitude and air speed and air temperature—in fact, all the information that is needed for a navigator to do his work. In the roof of the ship there is a turret through which the navigator can shoot the sun or a star to find his position. The driftmeter is really a simple instrument: a glass, through which one can look down through the floor of the plane, on which are parallel lines. A knob allows one to rotate the field of the glass. Looking down through it the navigator finds an object on the ground, a tree or a house, and catches it in the parallel lines of the glass. Then, by rotating his glass, he makes the object stay within the parallel lines and not slide across them. Having done this, a relation is established in the figures on the side of his instrument which gives him the amount of his side drift. At night he drops a flare to use as an object.

In these flying classrooms each student plots the course, takes position, each without consulting the other. It is in this way that immediate application of the lessons of the classroom is obtained.

In the beginning the cadets use their octants outside the classroom until they become familiar with the use of the instrument. In the classroom Allan learned the use of the plotting sheet. He prepared plans for flights he would later fly, by plotting in the locations of airports, lighthouses, and other actual objects in the immediate area. He learned map symbols and how to do pilotage.

The class studied the magnetic compass and its variations and deviations. The other instruments used by the navigator were studied, altimeters and air-speed meters, air-temperature thermometers, the airplane clock, directional gyro, the artificial horizon, bank and turn indicators, rate-of-climb indicators, and automatic pilots. Study and practice were constant and simultaneous. They studied the celestial sphere and practiced in identifying stars, estimating their declination and hour angle. They learned the names of constellations and of the navigational stars. They committed to memory the pattern of each constellation and the names of the navigational stars in each constellation, and finally all of the accumulated knowledge was put into the practice navigation plan. Here was the study of the mission to be accomplished, the rate and alternate routes, the weather forecasts for the area, and emergency landing fields along the route were chosen, each student for himself.

The physical aids to navigation were filled in the plan, radio stations, light beacons, prominent landmarks. The plan for observation was included, data on celestial bodies to be observed. The navigation plan considered all circumstances and all accidents and deviations so that the mission would surely be carried out.

Throughout all the work the mission is of first importance. Now all the apparently unrelated lessons began to fall into place. Of the whole bomber crew the work of the navigator is the most intellectual. He does not handle any control of the plane. His work is committed to paper. He makes a map of what the ship will do and where it will go, and when his map is made he guides the ship through his figures to its objective and home again.

The ship is a pin point hovering over a globe with sun and stars swinging over it and the navigator must know every moment exactly where he is in relation to all space. Allan’s class moved through its course, working and studying too hard even to know they were working hard. Armed with their figures and their facts and their instruments they made practice flights and were a little surprised to find that the formulae worked, that the ship went to the spot on the earth which was the spot on the map. Navigation is good clean work and there is a great satisfaction in plotting the course of a flight and carrying it out.

Someone once described navigation as being broken up into three phases—(1) determining a place to go, (2) determining how to get there, and (3) determining that you get there. Navigation is work for a perfectionist. It is not enough to come close to a given spot. A closeness is as worthless as a great miss. Three planes take off at different times and at night. Their mission is to meet at a spot over the world which is not marked and to meet in the dark at a given moment. The basic instruments are stars and time to which man-made instruments are applied by the prime instrument of all, the navigator. If he misses his unmarked place by even a mile or gets there inaccurately in point of time, the rendezvous will not be made.

Navigators should be able to navigate by dead reckoning means with a maximum course error of one degree and maximum E.T.A. (estimated time of arrival) error of 1½ minutes per hour of flight since the last landmark or fix. They must be able to navigate during daylight by celestial means to within 25 miles of objective over distances approximating the full tactical range of aircraft; while during darkness they must be able to navigate by celestial means to within 15 miles of objective over distances approximating full tactical range of aircraft. And finally they must be able to locate reasonable objectives at night under blackout conditions from a definite landpoint 25 to 50 miles away from the objective with pilot taking evasive action.