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Across The Wide Pacific

J

jimskifs

Guest
I completed my trans pacific B17 ferry flight using dead reckoning (almost). The legs were Sacramento/Oahu/Palmyra Atoll/Kanton Island/Espiritu Santo/Cairns Australia. The longest leg was the first, over 2000 miles which was about the practical range limit of my B17. I think the route is more or less historically typical. I used ordinary maps to plot great circle routes and magnetic variation tables for 1990. Route accuracy could be no more than one or two degrees which is probably about what real flyers of the time might
expect at best . A one degree error will put you 17 miles off after flying 1000 miles which might be about the visual limit of cfs2. On two of the legs I hit the islands straight on but on two I used an ndb to reel myself in as I couldn't see my island when my clock said I should. At Espirtiu Santo I had forgotten to place an ndb at the stock cfs2 scenery and had to "shift Z" to get a fix and correct course. Since then I've studied up on celestial nav a bit and found a navigator with a sextant in daytime can measure only the sun and could get no better than a "line of position" and not a "fix". The experience has led me to believe that most ferry flights ended with an ndb positioning although I can't really find anything in journals to say that. In the old film Air Force I recall the B17 crew sweating out the finding of Wake Island with no resort to ndb. I can appreciate why Amelia Earhart missed Howland Island.

Most of the scenery was Maskrider's great stuff although I did an attempt at modeling McClellan AAF at Sacramento and I put an ndb at Oahu.

Well, cfs2 is actually quite good at this sort of realism and I would encourage anyone to try it just to liberate himself from mission builder and from using the tactical nav window which is way beyond ww2 reality. I suspect ww2 aviators were lost pretty often but were quite good at getting unlost.

Jimski
 
Sounds like you have a good grounding in navigation. There are a lot of nuances involved in such an adventure and it's no wonder the big-long-range planes of the day had a navigator on board. Even flights of fighters and dive bombers from Espiritu Santo up to Guadalcanal usually had a large plane (C-47, PBY, etc.) with a navigator on board to navigate the short (reletively speaking) 645 miles.
 
You can't do it with IL2.

You mean cfs3 doesn't have a world map?

By the way, I just started free flight at N0*48.5', W176*37.1', the location of Howland Island, and found there is indeed an accurate depiction of the real island there. It was flat enough to land a Betty on. Try it and see the dot Earhart was looking for after flying over 2500 miles of open water. She took off from Lea, another stock cfs2 field, so a reinactment could be easily tried.

Jimski
 
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