Three quarters of a life time ago I found myself crewing a RAAF Dakota on a most circuitous route between Butterworth Malaysia and East Sale Victoria Oz. We departed Davao, Mindanao for Koror, Palau at around 0200 hrs local, a 7 hour overwater flight. Our navigation aids were, ADF, drift sight and Astro.
After takeoff, but before being established on an outbound radial, the runway lights, NDB, and VHF comms were turned off. There was little incentive to head anywhere but out to sea as, Mt Apo, a 10,000 ft hill is less than thirty miles from Davao.
After 7 hours in cloud, with no nav other than DR, our navigator called TOD, and bravely predicted that Koror would be at 12 o’clock, about 30 miles.
We broke cloud and of course it wasn’t. We had no VHF or HF comms with anybody.
The next hour or so was spent applying tropical navigation 101, as we poked around exploring under the largest of the slowly developing early morning Cu until we found Palau.
Didn’t do any map reading for the entire flight.