How did Spitfire and Hurricane pilots navigate
 

Pootlng around Kent the other day trying to find a farm strip VFR with my visual navigation, Garmin box of tricks, VOR and so on, my brain decided to pester me with this question.

How on earth did those young pilots find their field in any weather and any visibility on their return from a no doubt trouser filling mission? What nav instruments did they have? How did they do it?

And whilst I am on the topic can someone remind me of the name of this book or story? I read it loads of times as a kid in a tatty old volume I found and it was about a pilot returning at night from a WWII mission (a twin from memory) and his search for his airfield through the dark and the clouds. It might have been called moonshine but don't trust me! I want to read it again now that I fly and will probably appreciate it even more.

Search the web for a film called nought feet, it has all the answers.

Good question :-)

I know that occasionally when a pilot was unsure of position the Observer Corps would ignite a flare if requested. Eg. Flare lit 20 miles NNW of Biggin. Obviously this had to be done with the coordination of the Fighter Control, pilot and Observer Corps.

( Later to become Royal Observer Corps )


coldair

I don't know the answer for sure and perhaps the film mentioned does tell all but I reckon the fighter boys did most of it by pilotage. Eg follow the river, third airfield on the left. They got used to the major landmarks and probably did some ded reckoning as well. If you had a navigator perhaps a bit more science went into it.

They were doing 200-300kts so you ran out of country pretty fast no matter which direction you chose to go. No matter where you are by my reckoning you will hit the coast in less than an hour.

If they got lost they landed at one of the many airfields scattered across the country asked where they were, refuelled and took off in the right direction, or if the weather was shockers they got a bed in the mess and did it the next day. There are many stories in the books about landing at the wrong place.

The big difference in those days was there was no controlled airspace or air traffic so it didn't matter as much if you were uncertain of your position. I also reckon in real ifr probably a lot of them didn't make it. I wonder what their minima was? You needed good viz to drop bombs so perhaps that precluded flying in terrible weather. They had fido strips for when it was really bad , big wide runways that they burned fuel around the perimeter to burn off the fog.

That's my theory anyway.

Before I retired from Agricultural Contracting, one farmer requested I plough his 40 acre 'Light Field'. About half way through the job, the old Ransom Plough started to dig up big chunks of brickwork, (which I took to the edge of the field.).
When I asked what that was all about, I was informed it was for the air-ministry WW2 Light foundations. Apparently the light was a Navigation aid, which was switched on to help returning aircraft, and was exactly 3nm from the end of the airfield runway.
I looked for any similar structures at the 3 mile distance from the other runways, but could find no trace of anything, after all these years.

I remember reading Alex Henshaw's book and he used to find his way back to Castle Bromwich through 8/8ths when he had been test flying Spits by looking for the rise in the stratus layer caused by the hot air in power stations. He knew where the local ones were and could drop out of the clag right over the airfield.

I never forgot that and it does actually work. There are two power stations near me and flying on top you can see two huge bumps where they are.

There was a tv series where RAF pilots from what was today, flew a simulated bombing raid in a Lanc, that covered it, might be on YouTube etc

You could ask Danny42 in the military forum, as he was one of those guys doing it.

Jayemm: they used a procedure called QGH to let down through cloud cover over their base. This relied on their Radio being serviceable. You transmitted asking for QDMs or QDRs and flew a pattern like an ADF approach without the needle. ie. Pilot interpreted. This procedure was still being taught in civvy and RAF ops in the early '70s.

For IMC bombing runs the allies invented something called Oboe. This is the predecessor of modern day DME and transponders, but they worked in reverse.

The pilots would essentially fly a DME arc until intercepting a different DME arc, and that would be the cue to release the bombs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oboe_(navigation)

I used to teach this in the '70s where it was termed a VDF letdown. The direction finding kit included a "Goniometer" which I still find hilarious as it sounds slightly rude ;)

JM, is the book you're thinking of Bomber, by Len Deighton?

I was but a kid when the likes of Joan Hughes [ATA] and her cohorts were delivering front line fighters and bombers to UK airfields with just a map and compass - no radio allowed.

Often before the Ace RAF types had even flown one and all the ATA crews had was their amazing "Ferry Pilots Notes" and often flew a handful of different types on a daily basis.
Anyone seen that wonderful shot of Joan Hughes dwarfed by the Starboard main wheel of the RAF's biggest bomber of WW2 the Shorts Stirling......

My heros..... I forgot to add that the airfields were camouflaged too! IFR meant "I Follow Rails"

Or could it be The Shepherd by Frederick Forsyth ? If not, it's still worth a read.
BobD

ETOPS;

I learned the VDF procedure in the 1986 while on my commercial course. At least one UK airfield was able to provide VDF let downs until around 1988.

They worked well.

SND

Geoffrey Wellum describes looking for home in the clag first hand in First Light.

There is a strikingly straight railway line that leads straight to London from the coast. I have been told repeatedly that they used this to find their way to London.

On an clear night, you can see the signal lights turning green, one after another before a train passes, then turning to red after it has passed and this seems to extend right to the coast!

Something to consider is that without them ever considering relying on fancy Garmin, VOR/DME etc... All pilots must have been much more proficient at navigating by sight / dead reckoning!

Here you go
 

From reading many Battle of Britain autobiographies, it seems that after being 'temporarily unsure of position' following action the drill was to head to the coast, turn left or right (depending on base location) and follow until a known reference point where they could then head inland. Given you can't be further than 70 miles from the coast - and in many cases, much nearer for airfields - it was probably the safest way to let-down in bad weather.

There were many navigation systems for bombing, as described by R V Jones in Most Secret War. This led to a whole saga of measures and countermeasures.
Well worth reading.

VDF and QGH approaches were significantly different.
With a VDF approach, the pilot was issued with a series of QDRs which was interpreted (using the appropriate letdown plate) by the pilot to decide his/her position in relation to the airfield.
With a QGH approach (latterly called CDTC - Controlled Descent Through Cloud) the pilot is instructed to fly a series of QDMs and is instructed when to descend by the controller and it is thus classed as a type of Ground Controlled Approach.
With VDF being mainly at civil airports and QGH being mainly military (one exception was Goodwood before it became AFIS), the QGH was often designed to get the aircraft within the scan of the PAR.
Both types of approach require similar equipment ie some sort of direction finder display which automatically provided a bearing whenever the pilot transmitted either on a VHF or UHF frequency.
This was not available during WW2 as far as I'm aware; the only D/F systems being 'homers' whereby an operator on the ground manually turned the receiving aerial (a loop antenna) until he/she received a minimum strength signal. The bearing was then read off a calibration ring and passed to the pilot.
Sometimes the 'homers' were positioned in a pattern of 3 receiving stations so that the exact aircraft position could be plotted fron the 3 bearings, the three for Farnborough being at Cove, Medstead and Twinwoods Farm.
Additionally, some airfields were equipped with SBA or 'Standard Beam Approach' which worked in a similar fashion to ILS but with the pilot judging his position by hearing a series of dots when he was one side of the localiser or dashes when the other side, with a continuous note when he was on centreline rather than having a dial to refer to

Did a VDF let-down with Rufus Heald for my initial IMC test at Exeter in 1982. I think he was bored as he also insisted on a Practice Pan just to chat to his mates in D & D.

At Goodwood c.1980 (tail wheel conversion in the 3PFG Chipmunk) they certainly did QGH (controller-interpreted VDF) let-downs, I suspect just because the ex-RAF ATCO liked doing them. I did hear stories of him controlling several aircraft in VDF holds overhead, while he talked another aircraft down the QGH procedure. I did think at the time it was mostly for amusement value: the South Downs just north of Goodwood are quite high and therefore the DH for a non precision approach was around 1500 ft and in extremis a more rational get-home technique might have been to fly south for five minutes, let down over the sea and then Bradshaw over the low ground back to Goodwood, avoiding the cathedral en route.

Extraordinary to think that anyone needs to ask this question. Does no one read books any more?
There may have been letdowns of a sort for bombers on occasion but never enough of them to get 600 aircraft down. Later they had Gee and such, fighters never did.

Nav was Mk1 eyeball, map, compass and stopwatch, ie MDR, what else? There were no navaids on a Spitfire bar the compass. The term navaid hadn't been even been invented.

If above cloud you flew by compass course until the watch said descend, and you trusted you were over the flat ground you wanted to find. Then you popped out of cloud. If you got it wrong you either frightened yourself badly of became the scene of a future aero-ghoul's dig. Look at the number of wrecks on our hills - CFIT was a major cause of losses throughout the war.

The Met flight at Duxford flew in all weather, down to 50m fog on the deck and got back to Duxford almost every time. It can be done if you have the motivation.

But try reading some books, that's where the real story is.

I asked my dad (flew 1942-1945) answer was 'Follow railway lines...!)

I wonder whether any British pilots ever landed accidentally on the wrong side of the channel as I gather one German pilot did after confusing the Bristol channel with the English channel?

I agree that the OP is asking a question that seems to have so obvious an answer?! Maybe that we were taught much the same basic airmanship in the 60s and used panels containing essentially the same air driven gyros, and maps. Remember them, the paper stuff that preceded GPS & iPads? Look outside, or maintain a good DR plot until a positive ID updates your position.

Even RN flying had us developing a 'fog approach' to get back onto Mother when vis was down to SFA. From the island (Ark) you couldn't see the wires some 300ft away with 15knots creating an increase in the lousy vis: needs must, and all that.

When I was a kid I got hold of a real WW2 B-17 navigation sheet, it contained all the rendez-vous coordinates, fuel calculations, drop points etc. It surely did feed my enthusiasm for becoming a pilot myself later on as the sheet somewhat resembled the VFR flight log I used during training.
Bomber navigation was surely different from the fighters I guess.

Having looked into this subject in detail, up to just after the Battle of Britain, most single pilot visual navigation was done using ground features. Pilots would tend to be quite "localised" and would develop a clear mental picture of their locale and be able to navigate using known features. Outside the known area, map navigation was done mostly by "map crawling". And this all seemed to work adequately until after the Battle of Britain when the fight became more offensive and it was now possible to take the fight to the enemy. Single seat fighters were now being used on low level offensive attacks in Europe (known as "rhubarbs" due to their very low level nature) and it was rapidly discovered that the navigation techniques used up to this point were not sufficient due to the lack of visual range at low level, particularly in the flat areas of Northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands which had very few features with vertical profile. Pilots were getting lost and aircraft were being lost.

The Air Ministry looked at ways of improving Navigation and part of the plan was to use (later Sir) Francis Chichester, who had considerable navigation success flying to Australia and New Zealand single handed to help develop these techniques. Chichester had been prevented flying on active service due to his eyesight and had already written several articles and books on Navigation, so was glad to help. He later flew with ETPS developing the techniques as a pilot without wings - which often caused consternation.

What they came up with was the "Clock/Map/Ground" technique which allowed accurate navigation while giving most of the available pilot capacity to looking out and flying accurately. The RAF were still using it in the 1980s when I trained and in the 1990s when I was teaching and it still forms the basis of Navigation learned by RAF pilots today.

A lot of this is covered in Chichester's Biography "The Lonely Sky and the Sea" which I thoroughly recommend.

Assuming you can see bits of the ground it's a lot easier to navigate when you are at 10,000'. And as you go higher, it becomes even easier. There was no controlled airspace and no doubt barrage balloons showed you where the biggest cities were. Now assuming pilots were like they are today, they either knew where home was (one village west of the first bridge over the river sort of thing), carried a crib sheet, guessed or landed at the wrong place and got directions... Or just followed their colleagues.

PM

I understood they used R-Nav. Railways, rivers and roads.

Even in the 80s I used HNS in the 1-11 (human navigation system) You could use the weather radar to find the coast, fly to offset the track, let down over the sea and then turn left or right to find the field. Used it to find Kavala when the NDB was U/S, works well.

JM could the book you are talking about in original post be Pastoral by Neville Shute?

Germans did, according to the R.V. Jones book. The plane was guarded to be retrieved for study. Unfortunately the guards were told "No one touches it!" and stopped everyone from rescuing it from the rising tide....

The airfields also had lights in line with the runway or landing area called Chance Lights. I saw them at Perth in the 1990s. The pilot lined up with the red lights and descended to land to either side and eh, hoped he and the aircraft survived the arrival. Ending up in the hedge was not uncommon and neither was baling out, when all else had failed.

It's how the SD pilots found small fields in France and landed by three torches that always amazes me

Easy with SD surely?

RAF Low Flying Navigation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQWZEVaoFKQ

tilos, that was a brilliant video

FF

Jayemm

The book you refer to may be "No Moon Tonight" by Don Charlwood who was a navigator. I read it several times as a kid too,

Pastoral was excellent, also read many times and although fictional it rang true. I wish they would make a film. It had aircraft, drama and romance. A great combination!