HIGHLY IMPORTANT.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20480, 5 December 1934, Page 7

HIGHLY IMPORTANT.

Skilled Navigation Needed Over Water. “It takes a mighty good man to pick out the tiny little specks in the great Pacific Ocean. Captain Taylor did that.” This tribute paid to his navigator by Sir Charles Kingsford Smith when he landed at Oakland last month after flying from Honolulu in the record time of nearly fifteen hours shows how important navigation becomes in flights across long stretches of water. More than anything else Captain Taylor’s magnificent navigation was responsible for the success of Kingsford Smith’s second Pacific flight. Sir Charles gave most of the credit to his navigator whom he compared with Harold Gatty, the world’s greatest authority on aerial navigation. When interviewed at Oakland Sir Charles repeatedly praised Taylor. “ Captain Taylor’s perfect navigation deserves credit for our early arrival. . . . Most of our success was due to the naviga tion of Captain Taylor. I would be willing to fly anywhere in the world with him. ... I want to say that Captain Taylor is far more responsible than I for getting the machine over the ocean. . . .” These were some of his remarks. Ulm is one of the two men in the world who have a first-hand knowledge of the difficulties and risks of transpacific flights and his knowledge was gained from a single and hazardous crossing. Faulty navigation may have been responsible for the petrol supply becoming exhausted so quickly, for although the passage between San Francisco and Honolulu is now a well-beat-en track for aircraft and is served with a radio beacon from both ends, navigation across the Pacific is not a matter of setting a course and distance and then flying along a straight line at an average and known speed. Bad weather, storms, cloudbanks, lightning, thunder and tropical downpours necessitate the pilot twisting and turning, climbing and descending, so that the straight course becomes a wriggling line sufficient to confuse the best navigator. Normally, he relies on his sextant to obtain sights by day and uses the stars by night to fix his latitude and longitude, but the advance of wireless direction-find-ing and the radio beam are rapidly superseding the old-time method of astronomical navigation. Mr Skilling is probably quite a competent navigator over land, but even such experts as Harold Gatty and Captain H. Lyon have found difficulty in keeping a perfect course over water. Lyon actually struck Fiji on Kingsford Smith’s first Pacific flight without sighting a single landmark over the whole 3500 miles. With that as an example it is quite likely that Mr Skilling found difficulty in keeping a course with a resultant expenditure in petrol.