So did you ever get lost ?
 

I mean totally, absolutely, no radar vectors, no VOR, no comms, no fix and one eye on the fuel gauge lost ?

Question prompted by my recent research into this tragic loss:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Be_Good_(aircraft)

You are only lost if you THINK you know where you are; otherwise you are uncertain of position!

Not me, RCC at Pitreavie we get a call that a PA28 on delivery is lost over the Atlantic. Scramble the Nimrod (remember them) from Kinloss no joy. Pilot eventually calls visual with land, definitely the west coast of Scotland he says. Pilot was found in the Sahara with his aircraft.

On my final nav test in a JP with only a radio and true bearings to navigate with at 25000ft over 8/8 cloud.
The tester just remained mute, so I declared an emergency, got a fix and DR'ed back to base.
I was passed with the dry comment about not being the first aviator to be totally lost!!
Unforecast jet stream the reason!

Lost
 

My first instructional trip at Valley. High level to Chiv, Low level back up the Welsh border to Valley. It became obvious that stude was unaware of his whereabouts somewhere Ludlow when we passed two ENORMOUS masts. I tried to help: "Look for features unique in elevation" Silence, then "Pylons" said he. 630 feet high. I learnt early about students.

Old Native American saying "You are not lost. It is the place you are looking for that is lost"

After some manoeuvring QFI asks student out of Valley, "OK, where are we?"

"Over my girlfriend's house"

"Where's that then?"

"I'm not telling You"

"What do all the crewmen on 72 Sqn have in common?"

"They've all been flying with D*** B***** when it's the first time he's ever been lost..."

I seem to remember the motto on the crest of nav school when I was there was "Man is Not Lost".

Yeah, right!

French ATC to Victor, heading South

"Confirm you are 'eading for Nice?"

Me, after quick look at H2S screen

Erm, come 30 degrees port captain!

Well all those flipping headlands looked the same on radar!

Mid 70's. 0200 hrs. 1000ft above the Mediterranean. Surface surveillance. Intermittent radar, random tracks tactics. Got a radar fix as we descended at about 2200 the previous day. Loran is a fickle friend - one line since about 2300. We are setting up to side scan the Egyptian coast and the Soviet anchorage at Sallum - latest int is that there are 12+ vessels there. I brief radar operator to give me a fix off the headland.
Switch on - scanitty, scannity, scan. Switch off. Good radar fix - Nav system within 2nm, and .... no contacts. Eh? Turn round, do it again ..... no contacts. Something is not quite right here ... continue west.
Co-pilot then says he has the lights of a village on the coast to port. Err, we're meant to be at least 25nm from the coast. I visit the flight deck - there are the lights of a largish city on the coast to port. Turn right I say, descend to 500ft and head north sharpish. This buys me some time to look at the topo - it has to be Tobruk, and there is a headland bearing a marked resemblance to the one at Sallum. I readjust the radar fix.
We turn the radar on again south of Crete - not too bad but turning east and a few more radar fixes establishes a serious ground speed input error. We can't complete the job and go home early - using airplot. Beer for breakfast.

I confess to being something of a Larson fan, and this came to mind, click for the larger image.

Attachment 2491

Final nav test at valley in Aunty Betty's Fun Jet. Low level phase looking for a small railway station near the Wash ranges. Getting closer and closer to ToT. Starting to sweat and to mutter under my breath. From the back seat "You'll see more at 200 feet than 50". Came up a "few" feet, and there it was and only + 1 second on target. Thanks M...S... (had a large Alsatian, would let people into the house but not out again)

Ah, Reynolds, same period, same sea, opposite coast, same targets.

Also intermittent radar - truly intermittent. It kept cutting out. Also choice of nav kit IIRC, Doppler or computer but not both.

So we eases in for Mk 1 eyeball. Nowt. Went up the front and practically flying along the coast at Malaga, I remember a man walking a dog onthe beach, about 5-6 am.

Still we surprised our target approaching radar off from the north. Caught them with lots of plates open on.deck.

Chistopher Columbus

Didn't know where he was going when he set off.
Didn't know where he was when he got there.
Didn't know where he'd been when he got back.

Wherefore Christopher Columbus is known as the "Great Navigator".
[Trad.]

I'm still looking for Grafham Water. My logbook says I took-off in a JP5 at 1015hrs on 10 Oct 1986. :)

Big wet thing near the former Midland Radar/North Luffenham. Unmissable (or not, clearly!!)

Did your JP have floats? Waiting for Spazsinbad to produce the photo :)

Following a railway line in southern Germany headed N-S, forgot to look outside for a while and when I did, no railway line. Took some significant back tracking to see where it had turned 90 degrees and entered a very long tunnel. So back to the old adage, I wasn't lost because I knew I was in Germany, probably Bavaria, hadn't yet crossed the Alps, so I had a good stair rail check feature. Lost, certainly not - did I know where I was - not in the slightest.

I have never been lost!
I have, however, operated overhead unfamiliar terrain for considerable periods of time.
I think Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett said..."I have never been lost..I have been dreadful confused for a month or two!"

Ah,, that would explain it, he was obviously looking in Cambridgeshire when he should have been looking in Rutland.

No wonder my Navigation was cr@p :)

His map was too up-to-date, he should have been searching in Hunts not Cambs.
Fitzwilliam country not Cottesmore country.

"You’ve never been lost until you’ve been lost at Mach 3."
~.Paul F. Crickmore, SR-71 test pilot

Copilot, out of Aden, "nav, what's that island down* on the right"

"Africa"

*Bad news if it wasn't down"

Before the days of FMS in the FunBus, if off-airways and out of ground-based navaids, one relied on the skill of the directional consultant...

One of who was the late 'Admiral Zig-Zag' (RIP). Thoroughly nice chap, whose nickname resulted from an exchange tour as whatever they call flight commanders at BRNC Dartmouth....but his heading changes were often rather large, shortly followed by equally large corrections in the opposite direction. In a second aircraft we once followed the Admiral from ASI, whereupon our nav announced that we were heading 30 deg in the wrong direction - it was later discovered that the Admiral had fat-fingered the next waypoint and it hadn't been cross-checked.... So not all his fault that time.

As one captain once said after a flight with the Admiral "Doesn't he know a number smaller than 20?"

So on a double-crewed jaunt to the Pacific, it was agreed that the first tourist would navigate from McClellan to Hickam, while the Admiral would navigate back - on the grounds that America was a bigger target than Hawaii, so he'd probably be able to find it.

But, as I say, a really nice chap - and one of the few Flt Cdrs honest enough to admit that his professional skills weren't perhaps the best.

I had a flight commander who when a Vulcan navigator directed an internal aids approach to St Mawgan, he thought. The French took it differently. "Lost in France" by, was it Bonnie Tyler, was often sung in his presence.

Night bomber ops in 1940/41 record a number of occasions on which, at night and in or over weather, crews became very palpably lost. The tasks facing crew of that era, with the minimal kit they had, sometimes make me shudder. The most egregious example of which I'm aware has to be the Whitley crew from 10 Sqn that headed out for a target in the Ruhr in late May 1940, and who suffered a lightning strike outbound. They could not identify a legitimate target in the industrial haze and searchlight glare - remember, they were given point targets at that time, well before area bombing became the norm. They turned back west to head for the designated 'last resort' target, the airfield at Flushing. They finally got a glimpse of an airfield with a lit flare path, dropped bombs, and headed home to Yorkshire. Some later calculations suggested the airfield would have been Schipol. In fact, as became clear within a few hours, they had bombed RAF Bassingbourn, near Cambridge. The time and distance aspects of that night's work make one wonder where that aircraft really went after the lightning strike. (The Nav was exonerated in the subsequent Inquiry, the pilot was demoted to 2nd Pilot, and both were back on Ops in days. Very little damage was done, causing the Air Staff to wonder a little about the 250lb bombs then in use.)

I recall 'Fate is the Hunter' has a very cautionary tale about using magnetic heading and distance in areas where variation changes rapidly and significantly over short distances. Luckily the survivors were found by reflying the route as reported rather than drawing it on a chart.

I have far too many stories to tell about getting lost :)

Does being temporarily uncertain of ones position count as being lost ?

I guess my request for a QDM would negate the first question.........

NEO

There was a stude on my Flying Scholarship Course at Sywell in 1961 who allegedly set course on his landaway in an Auster using the little domed fuel gauge in front of the cockpit as a "compass". I think he eventually landed at Watton and wad surrounded by RAFP on arrival. He went on to be a senior and respected Canberra operator

I took a PA38 from Cardiff to Halfpenny Green with another instructor. After about 20'seconds in the cruise we both became bored and decided to fly there purely using the rudder.

After about 20 minutes of self congratulations on our expert further effects aviating, it dawned on us we hadn't a clue where we were. We were shortly joined by a Gazelle, complete with angry door gunner.

Now neither of us were experts on military communications, but we both agreed it wasn't "Hi chaps, fancy a look around our new Hereford base"!

Question, particularly for pilots.

You are planning a route at about 1000-1500 feet. There is a TV mast some 1700 feet en route. The weather is potentially Midlands poor.

How do you plan your route in relation to that mast?

Plan to fly straight at it.

That way, you are sure to miss it!!

Having thought long and hard about the question, my considered opinion is that I would plan a suitable route to avoid the mast....:rolleyes:

WTF else would anyone do?

Apparently there are still a few B17s, B24s and other USAAC aircraft still in the Arctic somewhere.

BEagle, I ask as that was my plan but my very green driver's airframe, a pilot officer to boot, had planned the route before he was allocated a nav to hold his hand in the Chippie.
I was under enthused by his plan to use it as a waypoint.

I have some sympathy for BomberH's plan but suggest that is more appropriate for a navigator :)

Enough said!

To be fair; back seat of an F4 to a Wessex everywhere at 50' was a different game; and the banter was pretty harsh. I would rather salute the skills of the crewmen who could step in and give a perfect tactical talk-on to the exact field whilst looking 90deg off axis. Gentlemen may be a stretch; scholars of the art for sure.

A few "directionally challenged" examples here...

Foreign Aircraft in Ireland 1939 - 1945