Radio Range Instrument Approaches in the 1930's.
I am reading "Ernest K. Gann's Flying Circus." And it has me spellbound, for want of a corny word. In his description of flying instrument approaches using the radio range and marker beacons, I was surprised to read that the legal minimum descent altitude (MDA in modern terminology) for a radio range let-down was as low as 300 feet. Not only that, but the pilot could get down to that altitude and then using timing to reach the missed approach point. Sculling along at 300 feet at night in IMC in a DC2 or a Trimotored Ford is scary stuff indeed epecially when the landing area could be a field and not necessarily a runway. This sounds like extraordinary risky flying and I wondered how many accidents occured.
Gann says: "In the tight little world of professional flying there are in the whole nation less than a thousand pilots who fly instruments regularly, and fewer still who shoot 300-foot approaches in blowing snow at night."
Ernest Gann was a fine writer with thousands of hours as an airline pilot. Yet dare I wonder if some of his flying stories that thrilled his readers were a tiny bit embellished? In particular, radio ranges in the 1930's were nowhere near as reliable as todays VOR navigation aids, yet the very low altitude to which pilots could legally descend according to Gann, were often lower than some of today's ILS minima and certainly lower than the later VOR MDA's.
Of course radio range MDA's of 300 feet above field level would surely take into account obstacles such as chimneys or masts on the final approach course. But how much tolerance was designed into the radio range instrument approach chart to allow a MDA in blowing snow of a mere 300 feet. Frightening stuff but yet compelling reading. I want to believe Ernest Gann's wonderful stories but as a former military and airline pilot I still have uneasy doubts in my mind. Can someone put my mind at ease?
Todays airline pilots probably wouldn't have a clue of the books by Ernest Gann. More's the pity because those were the days of real airmen rather than the flight deck automation managers of today...