Staying On The Beam

[mgc1961]

Disclaimer: Some editing has been performed in the following submission.

Here's our Flagship story thus far: Kessler is wowing the bowlers at the Fort Worth maintenance facility with his arthritic knees. Mrs. Wilcox recovered from an mysterious illness. Love birds Percy and Doris finally got hitched and Buck's lower forty is now fully stocked with chickens, ducks and a bucket. In Tucson, Harold Dent finally arrived from the school at La Guardia after a five day delay in Abilene.

In the northwest, American Airlines crews and aircraft are running supplies from Edmonton to points in Alaska where people have been freezing their butts off while the Alcan Highway is nearing completion just in time for the first season of Ice Road Truckers.

North and east, American just completed the initial survey flights over the Atlantic. Kim Daingerfield, the navigator on a return trip described in his log the return trip thusly:

The flight that departed from Greenland on the afternoon of Feb. 3, 1943, and landed on Lake O'Connor will always be vivid in my memory. The flight plan called for 5 hours, but at the end of eleven hours, we were hunting for a place to land. We departed from Greenland in clear weather, but as we approached Labrador, the weather closed in. All navigational aids failed us at one time. We could see no landmarks. Night had fallen. We could get no bearings because of the snow static. We could not top the overcast to get celestial shots. With no means of locating ourselves, we continued to fly our heading, hoping the situation would improve. For six hours we endeavored to find stations and follow on leads on the ADF, but nothing was good enough for homing. We finally landed on Lake O'Connor. On the lake we took many sun shots and many star fixes. This placed us about 150 miles east of James Bay in the Province of Quebec.

John Bookman, part of the rescue team, noted in his log that since they didn't know the survey aircraft's exact position they used sun and moon fixes to close in on their position and then homed in on the emergency radio beacon.

As for the flight from Newfoundland to Marrakesh, navigator Jim Brown recorded the following in his log:

A 15-hour flight of which approximately 10 hours were in daylight...used multiple drift thru cloud breaks and lines of position from the sun...Crossed coastline on ETA 5 miles to right of course.

Let me repeat that, only 5 miles off course.

American Airlines navigators received extensive training in several disciplines before joining the fleet. At that time, the certification course included 18 weeks of classroom training and 1000 hours of Atlantic flying.

F. W. McLarry gives us the navigator training scoop in this Flagship World article:

ETA 23:30 Z

5SJ DE 7465 ETA UU7 23:30 Z position 54 degrees 10N 12 degrees 15W 22:10 Z was written on the slip of paper that the Navigator handed to the Radio Officer. It was immediately relayed to Control in Prestwick, Scotland, and meant that another C-54 flown by an AA crew was located 50 nautical miles south of the Great Circle Course and was estimating the Irish coast at 23:30 Greenwich Civil Time. It also meant that another lone flight across the North Atlantic was about to be successfully completed.

It also meant a weary Navigator had calculated his final hourly position and was in range of his destination.

The average person's conception of the term "navigator" usually involves a mental picture of some genius of astronomy and integral calculus, who's stock in trade consists of a sextant and mysterious tables that somehow determine latitude and longitude. Others, who are familiar with domestic aviation, have the idea that the ATC North Atlantic operation is merely an extension of the New York - Boston airways: that the overseas crossing is accomplished simply by lining up on the "radio beams," and that staying on course, a major navigation problem, is as easy as following a radio range.

Both of these concepts are extreme, for actually the Navigator needs be no expert in higher math or in the calculable movement of the heavens. However, understanding these phases is a basic component of navigation.

As for flying the big C-54's on radio "beams" across the Atlantic, that is the gleam in the radio technician's eye, but today the Navigator must rely on other aids, principally celestial (lines of position from the stars and sun) to guide his ship successfully. The experienced Navigator uses all the aids he possibly can; depending on the circumstances and purposes of the flight. He evaluates the radio bearings, celestial lines of position, dead reckoning, forecast and actual weather conditions constantly. His ability to analyze these factors depend on his basic training and on his experience in the school of trial and error.

Reprinted in the same edition of Flagship World is a story by Stanley Washburn, the AA National Promotion Manager who temporarily left domestic flying to became a first officer for the Air Transport Command. Stan seems to be a self-effacing guy. He learned to fly de Havilland's aircraft in the Army in '25. He occasionally jokes about his weight and doesn't take his occupation too seriously. He refers to the flight deck as his office, just like the one many other guys go to everyday. He says,

I'm just a hairy aeronaut. I've been flying good and bad clunks for the past twenty years - even since the days of wooden longerons and single-ignition. Dusting cotton; towing signs; testing new types; flying mail and for the past ten years tooling American Airlines flagships over just about all the routes they fly from Boston to Burbank...When the weather's bad we just sit there and listen to the beam and maybe do a little hand labor over the range stations, augering down at the end of the run in standard instrument approach procedures. When the weather's good we just sit there and admire the scenery.

But Stan's a little different in that he had two Air Medals. One was for saving a plane will delivering mail out of Washington D.C. During this incident, flying a Ford Tri-motor, a

vibration tore an engine out of its mount and the busted battery cable started a gasoline fire in the wing.

He says his co-pilot had a new suit and an important date for the evening so naturally he had to set the plane down safely on the other side of the Potomac.

The event for which the second medal was awarded was more interesting and involved the war. When asked, "How the devil did you ever get the Air Medal?" Stan tells 'em this story.

Two years ago (1943our company contracted with the newly created Air Transport Command to operate a bunch of converted Liberators (C-87s) carrying cargo across the South Atlantic. I signed up for the job and went down to live in Natal,(Portuguese for Christmas), Brazil, for a while. The operation was a lead pipe cinch. No weather at all except for occasional thunderstorms along the equatorial front off the Gold Coast.

The routine settled into airline regularity. We'd take off from Natal after dark so as to get a celestial shot on the first leg to Ascension (an island in the middle of the South Atlantic about 1400 miles east of South America. and 1600 miles west of Africa. Its also known as Wideawake for the sooty terns who begin squawking very early in the morning). We'd generally raise the island about dawn; eat breakfast there, and shove on through to Accra (Ghanaon the Gold Coast that same day. Every now and again we'd draw a flight clear through to China - hauling General Stillwell's laundry out to him or rendering some other small delivery service to the boys in the 14th Air Force out in Burma. We flew through all theatres of operation - Africa, Arabia, and India - just like we go though Nashville, Ft. Worth, and El Paso on the way to the west coast back in the U.S. Most of the time, however, we'd turn around in Africa and after a day or two to rest up, start back to Natal.

After three or four trips we discovered that the Ascension range was so powerful that you could crank it up on the radio compass long before you were even half way out. But we carried the navigators along anyway just in case the radio aids on the rock broke down. Toward summer, the Army started sending the tactical ships down through Natal and across the way to the war (A-20s, B-25s, and B-26s). The crews of these ships were all young, good looking kids fresh out of the States and so new at their work they didn't even know what risks they were taking. For us old airline pilots the job was easier than flying the commercial schedules back home. But thee kids had no experience; no time at all! I wondered at them sitting there in those orange-colored South American boots they just bought at the PX, feeling proud, sorry and guilty all at the once. I couldn't help thinking that the whole bunch of them ought to be at home playing tennis and keeping the local girls happy on the swimming beaches instead of having to blunder out into a global war in those B25s and B26s which under certain conditions are plenty hot merchandise even to the most experienced pilots.

I used to talk to them in the Officer's Club Bar and was amazed at the self-confidence and enthusiasm that the Air Force training had instilled in them. If worst came to worst - if they missed Ascension they'd just ditch according to the book; rig the rubber life rafts and feel perfectly confident that someone would soon hear their emergency radio and send a surface vessel out to pick them up. Just like that. Well, I knew better after watching the regular lists of missing ships posted on the bulletin board. Once or twice I'd seen oil slicks on the cobalt blue water and spent as much gasoline as I dared looking around but after seeing those heavy seas and the teeth in the sharks caught off Ascension I knew the odds against ditching out there and living to tell about it were about as good as my getting rich playing the stock market.

Then, the fateful episode that led to his award.

It was a beautiful during the first few hours of the flight, then we began running under a high stratus layer which blackened out the stars for our navigator. We had plenty of good fixes before and as the flight was in the bag, I didn't pay much attention to the fact that the radio compass needle was swinging wildly. They do that when there are thunderstorms around and I was amusing myself watching the play of lightning in a big nimbus formation a couple of hundred miles south of our course. About two hours before we estimated Ascension, I turned the command receiver carefully to the Ascension range frequency to read it through the static. I was getting an "A" so I turned North into the leg to verify my exact position. After twenty minutes I still heard the "A" so I called the navigator up and we plotted our dead-reckoning position from his last star fix. It was obvious that something was screwy with that range, so I flew a course directly perpendicular to the leg for ten minutes which would certainly have put me on the "on course" of the Ascension beam if something had not been radically wrong with that leg. After killing a half hour horsing around with that Ascension beam, I decided we better go back on course as there are no alternative airports in the South Atlantic. My radio operator came up about that time and said the distress frequency was completely jammed up with signals from the Army boys. He couldn't read a complete message due to the fact they were all trying to send at the same time. He did hear however, that they were out of gas and were ditching - giving estimated positions. I wanted to report that Ascension range out of commission, but thought we'd better keep off the air and give the Army boys that much of a break to get off their SOS messages.

When Stan reached Ascension he found the command center in complete disarray, over-whelmed by the distress messages coming in and what to do about it. Stan pulled the CO outside where he could be heard over the din coming from the radio room.

I told him what I thought. It was simple enough. Some smart Nazi was out there on a boat about 150 miles northwest of the island putting out a phony radio signal on the same frequency as the Ascension range. I could tell by the sound of the key clicks when I got near that station that it was not automatic like a regular range. There were slight irregularities in the cadence, that signal was being hand-keyed. Besides, I told him, there was no directional property of that signal out there. It was merely an "A" being broadcast in all directions, not beamed in a narrow path like a searchlight beam the way a range is oriented. Those poor Army boys when they ran under that overcast and could not get star fixes, cranked up that phony station and got an "A" the same as I did. They naturally turned north to pick up the "on-course: and follow it in to Ascension. Instead, they just flew north indefinitely- getting the "A" because that was the only signal that Nazi phony was sending out except for the periodic identification letters of the Ascension range which he copied faithfully.

The young major was convinced Stan was on to something. He ordered up six B-25's from the Ascension Island Bombardment Group to find the culprit, but Stan

explained that there was not point going out now except to try and locate the crews down in the water, because the Nazis would be off the air until late that night when they knew another flock of tactical ships would be homing in on Wideawake.

Stan continued,

The bomber boys were so eager they could hardly wait for night. We just sat around drinking cokes and reading reports from the PBY which was out searching for survivors. They didn't find any.

Finally, it was time to go and the conditions were perfect.

All the stars were out but there was no moon and the ocean was very dark.

Stan sat in the first officer's seat, next to the major. They flew out ahead of the other bombers with Stan's advice and a "trick gadget," ready to locate the false station as soon as it went on the air. They would then drop a targeting flare and let them have it.

After two hours of searching Stan's estimated position of the Nazi station a signal suddenly blasted into Stan's headset

with a deafening roar in spite of the fact that my volume control was turned way down.

It almost completely silenced the true Ascension signal. Stan adjusted the volume on his headset while the major began his decent to about 2000 feet above the waves. Squinting into the darkness, they spotted a faint light. It was shinning up from an open manhole in a conning tower.

It's a submarine - let go the flare - open bomb bays," yelled the major.

Before I knew what it was all about, tracer bullets were coming up toward our greenhouse like the sparks from a grinding wheel. Everything happened at once, our 50 calibers opened up with the most deafening clatter I ever heard and during the dive I watched four parallel streaks in the phosphorescent water slowly close in and focus on a black shape. The bullets ricocheted off the metal hull in flaming arcs.

The B-25 then went into a screaming dive, followed almost instantaneously by the most terrific shock I have ever felt in an airplane Then I heard an exultant yell in my headphones, "Bombs away - scratch one!" We turned on our landing lights and made a couple of passes across the bubbles at a very low altitude. Spurlos versenkt, sunk without a trace.

When we got back to Wideawake we all had a drink - not cokes- at 5:30 am and the bomber boys came in and sat around while I had breakfast. We shook hands and I took off in my clunk for Africa - a day late with General Stillwell's laundry.

From the standpoint of an old pilot it was just another piece of labor in a space machine. But we've got to have hero's, I guess, and I'm the fattest one that flies.

Be careful out there.

In closing let me make a modest suggestion, treat yourself to a viewing of Captain America. It's fun, really. There are Nazis, motorcycles, disintegration rays, trains, airplanes, a dude with a shield, and a lovely brunette. Did I forget to say the movie has Nazis? And don't miss the Captain reading his "Buy Bonds" pitch from crib notes taped to the back of his shield while surrounded by a singing red, white, and blue chorus line. It's priceless.