Deborah Warner Celestial navigation aloft: aeronautical ...

Deborah Warner Celestial navigation aloft: aeronautical sextants in the US 'Failure in navigation is often as serious as failure in the power plant or plane itself.' So wrote Philip Van Horn Weems, a 1912 graduate of the US Naval Academy who devoted his remarkable talents and energies to the promotion of Celestial navigation aloft. This chapter focuses on American efforts to develop one of these instruments: the sextant that navigators used to determine their locations. It is based, in large part, on the Weems papers and the aeronautical instrument collections in the Smithsonian Institution'! Many of these instruments were technically octants rather than sextants, but since the two terms were often used interchangeably, I will refer to them all as Interest in aeronavigational instruments arose with the demonstration of the military potential of aviation during the First World War, and built slowly in the 1920s. The introduction of commercial transoceanic flights in the mid-1930s, together with growing international unrest, led to increased attention to this technology.

Celestial navigation aloft . off when the courts decided that Byrd had been scooped by Luis de Florez, a mechanical engineer who had graduated from MIT in 1912

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  Warren, Navigation, Float, Aeronautical, Celestial, Warner celestial navigation aloft

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