Have Sextant Will Travel

Prior to WWI little thought had been given to flight, until those innovative gas balloons (Civil War inspired) were used by artillery post spotters during that War. Those balloons, tethered high above enemy lines, enabled observers to direct artillery fire upon enemy positions.

Even then, air travel wasn’t even envisioned when those balloons were first created. Yet there were dreamers who saw them as possibly weapons of war or even transportation. Two of them, Orville and Wilbur Wright, developed a heavier than air craft that successfully became airborne and would revolutionize both future wars fare and world air travel.

Barely into my twenties, I was given the opportunity to participate in a large-scale military project that would greatly impact the war effort, and eventually global travel.

Prior to WWII, there was comparatively little international air travel as, though the aircraft were capable of flying long distances over water or untracked lands, the air crews had little knowledge, or means, of plotting courses over tractless expanses of water, of being able to ascertain their positions in the sky along the flight path to distant nations. Surface transportation, (ships) had a crude, but workable, method of determining their position on those waters, via the stars and planets.

It was called "celestial" navigation, via which the stars, sun, moon and planets could enable the ship’s navigator to establish and maintain a path upon those rough seas in relation to the positions of those celestial bodies in the skies. Yet, until then, the instrument used to determine those positions was not adaptable for use in aircraft.

There was one, comparatively small (compared to today,) airline that experimented with, and developed, a method to adapt that instrument, for such use. That airline, Pan American Airways flew aircraft with fuselages in the shape of streamlined boats and called Clipper ships (or "flying boats") that were capable of taking off from or landing upon the surfaces of large bodies of water.

That instrument, known as a sextant, was eventually adapted for usage in large aircraft as Army officials, via negotiations with the Pan American Airways, (and it’s top navigator Charlie Lunn) established a school of celestial navigation at the University of Miami, Fla. to teach the art of celestial navigation to military personnel.

With Hitler running amok in Europe the USA was rapidly being drawn into war, it was imperative that the U.S. be able to utilize large aircraft (then on the drawing boards) to transport needed supplies, vital materials and personnel to Europe and other points of the world as quickly as possible so those navigators were needed yesterday.

At that period of time we, members of the 639th tank destroyer battalion (29th Field Artillery Div.) were on maneuvers in the Carolina’s (when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941). We were immediately returned to our home bases to await new orders and be given opportunities to apply for flight training.

There we, who had successfully completed those very grueling tests by the Army Air Corps, were assigned to train in the various flying categories. We qualified for bombardiers, navigators or pilot training. I, for navigational training, was sent to Pan American’s school at the University of Miami.

Question? Would this training making us pioneers in this field or merely guinea pigs in a large-scale experiment? And what of the passengers, we’d transport to all areas of the globe, would they too, be "pioneers of air travel", or merely lowly guinea pigs, as we struggled to become experienced "celestial navigators"?