IFR realism for the time period

[FireRescue85]

Hey guys,

Quick question: when flying the B377 and L049, is it realistic to do an IFR flight during bad weather? What I mean is, did they use IFR back in the 1940's, or would they fly mostly VFR and just cancel a flight if the weather was too bad?

Thanks ,
-Scott

[DHenriques_]

Hey guys,

Quick question: when flying the B377 and L049, is it realistic to do an IFR flight during bad weather? What I mean is, did they use IFR back in the 1940's, or would they fly mostly VFR and just cancel a flight if the weather was too bad?

Thanks ,
-Scott

IFR back then was a LOT harder than now but it was done all the time. The basic instrument scan was needle, ball, and airspeed. Then gyros appeared and were improved. Avionics were low frequency ranges, a lot of ADF, and then early VOR.
Approaches were basically ADF and NDB, then VOR and ILS came on line.
It was NOT a lot of fun !

Dudley Henriques

[Alan_A]

IFR is completely realistic - those were all-weather aircraft. Navigation over land would have involved a combination of VOR and ADF. Instrument landing systems were also becoming widespread. Over water, you would have used a combination of celestial navigation and radio navigation via weatherships.

If you check out the Constellation forums, you'll find threads about celestial navigation and about Wothan's freeware weathership gauge. On YouTube, have a look at Sim CFI's channel for a couple of good tutorials about navigating the Connie using period instruments.

Now, if you want to backtrack a decade to the 1930s (pre-Connie and pre-Stratocruiser, of course), you'd have to master the four-course radio range - which unfortunately isn't modeled in FSX/P3D except as a gauge locked to the Milviz T-50 Bobcat. I'm one of several people hoping they'd someday release an unlocked version for general use, but that's apparently not in their plans.

Hope this helps. I'm sure others will chime in with more detail.

EDIT: And they already have. Thanks, Dudley! Agree about how hard it is - I often try it in the Connie, then re-install the modern avionics option while muttering "OK, it's incredibly hard, I get it!" Not admirable but that's where I keep coming out.

[Jacques]

If you can find it, “The Stars Are My Friends” by Eric Holloway is a fascinating read. Trained during the early part of WW2 as a navigator, he worked as such until jet age technology made that skill redundant. A very informative book on period navigation techniques.


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[Alan_A]

And in a completely different (non-airline) vein, there's Harry Crosby's WWII memoir, "A Wing and a Prayer." Crosby was group navigator for the 100th Bomb Group, and became extremely adept at a kind of improvised ded reckoning, throwing in doglegs on the fly, so to speak, in order to meet rendezvous points with precise timing. Beautifully written and there's a lot of insight into operations and the life of the group, but the navigation material is a fascinating insight into how it was done with minimal resources.

[Hook]

Bob Buck's "North Star Over My Shoulder" is a good read about the early days of flying up to the modern. The author started his airline career in the DC-2 and DC-3 and retired out of the 747.

He talks extensively about various navigation methods from dead reckoning, celestial navigation, flying the beam, ADF/NDB, some about VOR navigation, to eventually inertial navigation systems and GPS. He has a very readable "down to earth" style of writing and explains things well.

I don't think I'd like flying the beam except to try it once. You have a continuous tone from the radio if you are dead on the beam, Morse code A or N if you are on either side which overlaid the continuous tone and was stronger the farther off you were from the center. If it is not obvious, a continuous tone gets pretty annoying and fatiguing after a while.

I modified the stock DC-3 gauge to perform the function of the beam. With one needle pointing to a radio station ahead and another behind, if the needles perfectly overlapped you were "on the beam" but without the continuous tone. The modification involved getting needles to point directly to VOR stations.

You can make radio navigation as primitive as you like. For example, I normally fly with just ADF, no VOR, no GPS. I may have to do some dead reckoning to get in range of the ADF signal. By the time of the Stratocruiser and Connie, you should have most of the navigation aids available, so you might as well use them.

Early airmail pilots flew in all weathers, without instruments and no radio navigation aids. The DC-3s did as well but by that time there were some radio aids available. You would prefer to avoid flying in clouds but needle-ball-and-airspeed was an option if you didn't have an artificial horizon, and Bob Buck describes when this was first published and he tried it. One good reason to avoid clouds is icing, so you're generally in them only long enough to climb or descend to clear air.

You had to be able to see the runway to land even after instrument landing systems became available. Companies and individual pilots had acceptable minimums for this. Ceilings of 200 to 500 feet and visibilities of 1 to 3-5 miles were typical, depending on the company and the area being flown, with the higher numbers being more common. Early pilots landed in conditions that would get their license pulled today.

So to answer your question, IFR flight in those aircraft is realistic.

Hook

[n421nj]

I’m sure it’s all relative. Back then that was all they knew and it was a vast improvement from the decade before. I bet they had the same discussion we are having now about the guys that came before them. Even now with glass cockpits and gps taking over old steam gauges and ndb’s I’m sure people in the future will be asking how we did things.

[DHenriques_]

I’m sure it’s all relative. Back then that was all they knew and it was a vast improvement from the decade before. I bet they had the same discussion we are having now about the guys that came before them. Even now with glass cockpits and gps taking over old steam gauges and ndb’s I’m sure people in the future will be asking how we did things.

Of some interest in this discussion should be the fact that in accident investigation and in the training communities we are at present engaged in what is widely considered an over dependence on glass and fancy avionics and a serious lacking in the basic flying skills both primary and basic instrument regimens .
We have in effect gone full circle and the modernization of the panel is being found to be in all to many cases as a detriment as pilots become more and more dependent on glass and less and less proficient in the basics.
Dudley Henriques

[Hook]

... a detriment as pilots become more and more dependent on glass and less and less proficient in the basics.

Along the same lines...

I was surprised when I read in Stephen Coonts' book "The Cannibal Queen" that the author, when he had to have his head in the cockpit to update his charts, experienced disorientation. Even though he was an expert A-6 pilot with extensive experience in flying by instruments, the Stearman he was flying did not have an artificial horizon to keep him oriented. The Stearman does have a turn and bank indicator, so he shouldn't have had the problem. Apparently at some point needle-ball-and-airspeed was no longer taught or practiced. He also mentioned having to avoid clouds.

Hook

[Jacques]

Technology is always capable of failing anytime, and for a number of reasons. If you have analog backup instruments, why would you not continually drill yourself in their use? Thats just a very hard thing for me to understand.


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[n421nj]

I’m sure it’s all relative. Back then that was all they knew and it was a vast improvement from the decade before. I bet they had the same discussion we are having now about the guys that came before them. Even now with glass cockpits and gps taking over old steam gauges and ndb’s I’m sure people in the future will be asking how we did things.

Of some interest in this discussion should be the fact that in accident investigation and in the training communities we are at present engaged in what is widely considered an over dependence on glass and fancy avionics and a serious lacking in the basic flying skills both primary and basic instrument regimens .
We have in effect gone full circle and the modernization of the panel is being found to be in all to many cases as a detriment as pilots become more and more dependent on glass and less and less proficient in the basics.
Dudley Henriques

I agree completely. You can have all the fancy bells and whistles and top of the line next gen equipment but if you lack stick and rudder skills then it’s all moot.

[BrettT]

I'm liking this post. Is it fair to say that since these period airliners for the most part preceded the establishment of the victor airways/jetways (Federal Aviation Act 1958) that the pilot/navigator pretty much picked their own route stringing together VORs and NDBs then would set up their own approach to pick up an ILS if the airport happened to have one?

What other sort of navigation aids did they have at this time? (sectionals?, crude approach charts?, etc)

How did they handle traffic during transit?, did they check in with an airport as they passed overhead?

[BrettT]

https://archive.org/details/TM1-205

Came across this in my search for additional information and thought I would share 1940 Air Navigation manual for the Military

[DC3]

@BrettT

Take a look at this wikipedia article, it should answer some of your questions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_Gran ... _collision

[MatsH]

A heads up that I posted in another thread a while back:

Yesterday I found a Radio Range beta for FSX here:
http://dca1013.com/

I have yet to try a full flight but after installing it in the Jahn C-47 and circling the Tampa station results are promising: Dit-dah, dit-dah, daaaaah, daaaah, dah-dit, dah-dit...

No luck in P3D3 or P3D4!

BrettT - great find!

/Mats