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Aircraft Detection Before RADAR
- Thread starter Sabre170
- Start date
Hmm... Talk about a listening post! Ha!
It's fun to point and laugh, but these pics are a good illustration of why "the bomber will always get through" mentality developed in the 20s, and why Douhet got such an audience in the 30s (and in the USAF up through and including yesterday...). Without radar to provide early warning, you were reduced to sound detection - which at best was going to be pretty sketchy. Fighters would always be time late to an intercept, and the bombers were fast enough to get in and out before they could be localized and run down.
You could get an approximate range if you got cuts from multiple stations (the acoustic analog to passive direction finding), but that was always going to be sub-par if you were trying to put together an air defense. The Brits had built a network of these (called "sound mirrors") along the coast before radar was proven, and even later they still stayed in operation as a backup. (http://www.andrewgrantham.co.uk/soundmirrors/ for some more good pics.)
