THE AIR PILOT.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 115, 18 May 1925, Page 7

THE AIR PILOT.

HOW HE FINDS HIS WAY. (By ALAN J. COBHAM, the famous pilot.) I am constantly asked by my fricn.i* and all folk whom I meet, "How do you find your way in the air?" There is no mystery about it: with a little prat-tire you ran find your way far morn racily in the air than on the ground, for the simple reason that owing to the altitude, you have a bettor view and the whole countryside is laid out before you like ;i map, the miniature scale of which yon 'lrry in your hand in the aeroplane. There are many method? of finding your way in the air. ranging from simple map reading, in which a pilot may follow a road or railway, knowing that it leads to his destination, to the most up-to-date methods of scientific navigation, in which the latest types of compasses and drift sight indicators and navigating instrument? are used, more or less in the same, style a? on board ship. In such cases a navigator is carried on board who works out his bearings and corrections and plots out his course, at a little desk in the cockpit and tells the pilot what bearing to take. AVhen a beginner goes.up for the first time he is invariably lo;*t the moment, he leaves the aerodrome, and it is not until the instructor points out. some landmark? that he can find out whore he is. At. first it is simply a matter of getting familiar with seeing the. ground from above, and after that, it is always purely a matter of practice. A pilot has never finished learning something new about cross-country flying and caininp- experience. It is experience which is the great factor in all flying, and the more a pilot flies the wiser and more, experienced he becomes.

On my flight to Rangoon and hae.k I naturally had to be my own navigator, and I carried maps for the entire journey of the country that might he covered on our Rurvey. The. scale of my maps was about 10 inches to one mile, and I carried in all nearly fifty sheets.

Every night I prepared the maps required for the next day's flight, and mafic a littlp study of the best route to be. takpn. Then in most ca?ps T would draw straight lines over the different courses that I proposed to take, and measured with a. protractor their compass bearing and jotted them down alongside.

On th<> following day thp maps required would all be in consecutive order and specially folded for the portion in use, and these would slip into a rack in the cockpit. On the start of the flight I would fly on my first compass course and look out for each little landmark, such as a village, a hill. a. river or railway that crossed or rams on my pencilled line on my map. If these landmarks were not beneath mc. but a few miles away to the rijrht or left, then I knew that owing to the wind I was drifting off mv direct course, and so to allow for th! 3 I would steer two or three points to the right or left so that my compass course after about the first twenty miles with its little corrections would bring mc over every landmark on my pencilled line on the map.

I Of course at times I had to follow the contours of the man. which I would occasionally check with my comj>ass, or in other ca=e* follow my way through a mountain gorcre or just hang on to a track over the desert, and at times we wont over score? of miles on a compass bearing without recognising anything on the way. until we came out on some definite" feature that I would have, to locate.