AMAZING BEACONS

Waipukurau Press, Volume XXX, Issue 62, 18 March 1935, Page 2

AMAZING BEACONS

GUIDING AIR MAIL PILOTS INGENIOUS DEVICES Some amazingly ingenious devices are now being installed upon the Empire’s airways, to make the job of the night-flying pilot certain —and secure. For centuries the sea navigator picked his way across the waters with the sun and stars and the light of native intelligence as his only guides. The 'air pilot of recent times may thank his stars (or, more strictly beacons) that he has not had to reckon darkness among his enemies. From their earliest ventures into the night sky, airmen have seen below them the friendly candle-power of good lights; and as the year draw on such counsellors will multiply, defining the inr terse citin g routes of the Empire, glittering across oceans, sending a radiance among the mountain peaks, pointing a thoroughfare over plain and desert, and giving the veiled •world —as the pilot turns from the glow of his instruments to the nether beacons—the semblance of a vast and

luminous map. The first aerial lighthouse shone at Hounslow in 1919. Hounslow then was London’s terminal airport, and the "beacon came from the Aga Works at Brentford, from whose wharf in a •back-water of the Thames ten thousand lights have left to record the channels, rocks and coasts of the nav- ' igable seas. There is no beacon or buoy marking I the entrance to this secluded creek of > the old river; yet it is here that in-; numerable signals, which night and ! day scatter their messages through every latitude, are first kindled, and, flare into life. t The acetylene lanterns that an-| nounced London, with its unwinking ■ beam of 53,000 candle-power, seemed ! at that date a notable step in the safe ; conduct of aircraft. Yet, just as the aeroplanes of 1919 to-day look crude and tentative, so does the earliest

beacon erected to show them home. The advance in ground indication is tremendous. A light known as the AGA Oscillating Beacon has recently been devised at Brentford, which not only informs the pilot of position, but signals him on his course. As liners are now led into harbour by wireless directional beam, so the drift of an air-liner is corrected, or the pilot’s error adjusted, by a beam of light. It is difficult to perceive what further service a lantern can afford, and these beacons to be stationed along the Empire airways will probably define lighting principles for many years. To enable the lighthouse to act as a tell-tale, a combined oscillating and rotating movement has been worked out. Watching close to the weathertight windows of the lantern, one sees the heavy lenses twirl smoothly, abruptly recoil and pause; and the effect translated at a distance, is a regular triple flash sent every five seconds up and down the pilot’s fairway. Should the nearing machine be off course to starboard, the message degenerates to a single, followed by a double flash; and if the leeway is to port, the warning changes to a double, followed by a single flash.

A machine which has strayed more than ten degrees to either side of the route recives an admonishing flick every five seconds. The airman casting about for his course has merely to swing into the fiercest brilliance of the three steady flashes. He passes over the beacon, assuring himself of its identity by The Morse from a crimson lamp on its crown; and then, glancing back, sees that the light speeds him on with a triple wink — 1 1 All’s well. ’ ’ The first of these ingenious sentinels has gone for duty in the midst of the Syrian desert, where its 1,800,000 candle-power will streak over a radius of 70 or 80 miles.