Quote from
bafanguy:
"Fixed-azimuth ADF...that was also a mental gymnastics event."
Surely you can't be talking about relative-bearing indicators? Easy-peasy...
Quote from
ICT_SLB:
"My last design work at BAC Hurn in the late 70s was on a 1-11 for RAe, a Type AP/H. This had every modern Navaid known to man including Decca Navigator, Decca Type 72 Doppler Radar (with a linked TANS), LORAN and, IIRC, a huge Litton IRS. When I saw my first L aser IRS at Boeing a year later, I couldn't believe how small it was."
AP/H?
My first experience of INS was around 1976 when my airline retrofitted dual-INS (Litton) to its B707-320C fleet and retired its specialist navigators. A few years later the airline started acquiring DC-10-30s, with triple-INS. They also had PMS - a rather crude tool for descent guidance - but no FMS.
My first experience of la ser IRS (Honeywell?) was in 1984 on the A310, the two of which we operated mainly between London and various parts of west Africa, plus Lusaka. You'll appreciate that pilots are not normally aware of the size of individual black boxes in the electronics bay, but the drift performance was noticeably better than the old INS.
The A310 also had FMS with radio position-updating (pairs of DMEs), although the shortage of DMEs in Africa meant that we were navigating on IRS most of the time. The Smiths FMS was, IMHO, more than a match for the Sperry/Honeywell in the early, lateral-nav-only configuration, but the two a/c were sold before Smiths made V-NAV available.
We soon got used to taking the FMS's display of PPOS on the CRT ND (Navigation Display) with a pinch of salt over Africa, where the nav-accuracy assessment was almost invariably low. Unsurprisingly, the presidential palaces in African countries are often within a mile or two of the runway approaches. In the normal absence of radar vectoring from ATC, it was all too easy to fly near one when self-positioning for finals on Rwy 10 at Lusaka, for example, if the (green) FMS line on the ND was taken too literally after several hours with no radio updating.