This is a bit of thread drift but it is nostalgic for me and there is an aeronautical connection. After leaving Tofino and driving south through the Pacific Rim National Park, I turned off the highway and made a detour to Ucluelet (You-CLUE-let), which like Tofino, I hadn't visited for many years.
I drove through the town right to the end of the road at Amphitrite Point (named after HMS Amphitrite by Captain G H Richards, who subsequently became Hydrographer of the Navy) and walked down to the lighthouse:
Back in the early days of my career, I had been supervising a marine seismic survey in these waters and we used SHORAN for navigation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHORAN...um_exploration
SHORAN was originally designed as an airborne navigation system, but was modified into a blind-bombing system. An excellent description of SHORAN and its operational use in Korea:
http://napoleon130.tripod.com/id763.html
Two SHORAN base stations were set up on shore, usually near lighthouses, because of the ease of access and the availability of reliable geodetic benchmarks and one of these base stations had been at Amphitrite Point. Two operators would camp at the base station to keep the transponder running and point the high-gain Yagi array at the seismic vessel.
We used one station to measure along-track distance and the other for cross-track deviations, a bit like Oboe. The intersection angles were usually far from ideal and sometimes we were a long way offshore, so the absolute accuracy was 200-300 m, but that was good enough for the reconnaissance work that we were doing. A far cry from today's GPS precision.
The current lighthouse, which is now automated, was built to replace an original wooden one, which was swept away in a storm in 1914. I found the choice of location rather odd, since there is high ground inland from the point, where a conventional lighthouse tower could have been built, that would have been immune to storm damage.