While both the Army Air Corps and (to a lesser extent) Navy, were teaching air navigation with the tools and techniques advanced by Weems, Gatty and Albert Hegenberger (the Air Corps’ navigation authority), navigation was still seen as the responsibility of the aircraft commander or pilot. Despite the efforts of Weems and Gatty (who managed the Weems System of Navigation for a period), by 1937, the navigator as a dedicated non-pilot aircrew member was still a largely untested idea. His initial students and clients included Charles Lindbergh, eager to find a better way than simply relying on luck to cross oceans (see the author’s article in Air and Space Magazine on this topic), polar explorer Lincoln Ellsworth, and Harold Gatty, the soon-to-be-famous navigator of Wiley Post’s Winnie Mae on its around-the-world record stating flight of 1931. By 1928, Weems had gone into business teaching air navigation. He developed simplified methods of celestial navigation that, when combined with improved sextants, provided a reliable means of determining position (either a fix or a “line of position) when the sun or stars could be seen. A small community of innovators worked to find better tools and techniques. However, the decade between Lindbergh's Paris flight and the disappearance of Amelia Earhart witnessed a transformation of aerial navigation technology and practice. Though it worked well for Lindbergh who was the beneficiary of ideal wind conditions at the time of his flight, almost half of his peers attempting long distance flights that year either lost their lives or had their flights end in near disaster. Charles Lindbergh’s reliance on nothing more than an earth inductor compass and a simple clock for finding his way during his 1927 solo transatlantic flight was emblematic of the often dangerous or ineffective state of air navigation. The cramped confines of aircraft, high speeds, variable weather, and turbulence greatly complicated the process of fixing position. Though these techniques were tried and true in maritime navigation, adapting them to the aerial environment was a new challenge. While Europe and the United States were developing networks of radio beacons and direction finding stations over their own territory, transoceanic navigation was only reliable with proficiency in celestial and dead reckoning navigation. Understanding how Earhart fits into the story of this profession provides some useful insights into the evolution of long range flight on the eve of World War II. Today, the navigator as a crew member has largely disappeared from most commercial and military long-distance operations, replaced by microprocessors in the form of GPS and inertial navigation systems, but from the 1930s to the 1980s, the navigator was an essential crewmember on many long-distance commercial and military flights. How did Earhart’s planning fit with other flights over the South Pacific? How did their navigational training compare with that of other aviators? And, what was the professional standard of air navigation at the time? In less than two months, the National Air and Space Museum will unveil a new permanent gallery – Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting From Here to There – that will in part chronicle the development of air navigation as a profession. This musing is not meant to provide definitive clues to the disappearance, but rather to provide some further topics of discussion that might be useful for future scholarship. One way to come to terms with the moment is to look at the larger historical context of air navigation at that time. Did she have the right training and equipment? If Fred Noonan was one of the greatest aerial navigators of the time, how did they get lost? The evidence for these questions is often vague and contradictory. Viewed as a stand-alone episode, the tale of Earhart’s last flight is confusing.
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