(Walt BJ) wrote:

In primary flight training in 1953 we had to do all those old things
in the T6G.
Radio range was done at Tallahassee; I forget where we did
non-directinal beacon NDB work. 'Manual loop' - RDF - was worse than
chewing gum and walking at the same time. The real answer was to do
the loop bit when straight and level, figure out which way to turn,
concentrate on the turn, level out, fool with the loop again. The
'dirty tricks' department put the ADF panel and loop crank handle down
between your ankles in the T33! FWIW RDF - manual control of the loop
- works better than ADF in bad static conditions. Also FWIW our 25
watt NDB homer at Naha AB on Okinawa was but a few Khz away from a
monster station at Shanghai. RDF worked better when out a hundred
miles or so. The simplest loop I ever heard of was a couple turns of
wire around the aft fuselage of a Piper Cub; gentle turns right and
left sufficed to find the bearing to the station. It took time, but
Cub pilots have a lot of that at 1.5 miles per minute.
Walt BJ
;

C'mon, Cubs go faster than that! I do recall, however, getting my
initial Cub flying around Chicago that with wind conditions right, you
could land and turn off at the approach end taxiway on many days and
with a 100 foot wide runway you could almost always land "into the
wind" by simply flying cross-runway.

As long as we're reminiscing about procedures from the dark ages, let
me throw in the infamous "time and distance" check we used to demand
of students in the T-37. Flown on a VOR, you turned to put the bearing
pointer on a wingtip, then timed how long it took to get a 10 degree
bearing change. Knowing your ground speed (which you usually didn't)
you could then calculate the distance from the station to fly that arc
in that length of time.

I guess it must have been accurate to within about ten miles. It never
made sense in a tiny jet which short legs to waste that much time
determining something you should have had a pretty good idea about
anyway.


Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (ret)
***"When Thunder Rolled:
*** An F-105 Pilot Over N. Vietnam"
*** from Smithsonian Books
ISBN: 1588341038