Originally Posted by
Paul852
Great post. Thank you,
Are there any commercial pilots these days who use the stars even for a basic sanity check on their heading/route?
When I joined xxx-air in the 80s there were Captains around who had been familiar with astro navigation and knew many stars still. It was nice to fly with them. Some had even been navigators in the past.
Earlier, in the xxx Force, astro was being used as a backup system (limited nav) and the Copilot did the timing, the Nav Radar the shooting while standing in centre cockpit and the Nav Plotter the calculations. These shots took a minute and averaged out the errors you could get in a single shot such as Brown was able to make - theoretically - a bit of turbulence could upset that theory though.