Navigation Today

[dilbert123]

Question from an old timer about your job today.

I am in my 60's and retired now. I flew P-2's in the fleet oh so many years ago. Back then all pilots had to learn long range navigation as we started out in the squadron on the nav table and worked our way up to the cockpit. After completing flight training we attended VT-29, a special nav school for pilots in Corpus Christi. We spent a lot of time learning celestial back then.

Question to present day navigators- with the advent of GPS are you still taught celestial? I saw a press release from the Naval Academy some years ago that stated that celestial was no longer a required course which is the reason for my question. Because of the accuracy and reliability of GPS it would seem possible that there is no longer a need for celestial. Do pilots still have to qualify as navigators today?

Just wondering how things are done now. Many thanks for any replies. Hats off to you guys out there in the fleet today. You have our greatest respect.

 

[MIDNJAC]

I'm not sure what the NFO's do, or what the multiengine/maritime SNA's do, but I never did any celestial nav in flight school. My old man was a P-2V driver, maybe a little bit before your time in them (he's in his early 70's now), and I always like hearing his stories about his time in the fleet. Welcome to the board!

 

[NavAir42]

Dilbert,

Our navs haven't been doing celestial nav for a decade or more. I'm not sure when it went out of style but we don't do it today. Pilots also don't have to qualify as navs, at least not in the P-3 world, where we have them on board. As for the rest of naval aviation, I'm 99% sure no one else does it either due to the advent of GPS.

 

[Flash]

Question to present day navigators- with the advent of GPS are you still taught celestial? I saw a press release from the Naval Academy some years ago that stated that celestial was no longer a required course which is the reason for my question. Because of the accuracy and reliability of GPS it would seem possible that there is no longer a need for celestial.

As it was already noted by NavAir42 they have not taught celestial for a while, since about '98 or '99 timeframe for Navy and Air Force navigators. A little background, the Navigators and NFO's who were going to fly the big planes all went through advanced training run by the USAF at Randolph AFB in San Antonio from the early 90's until a few years ago. One of the 5 or 6 major parts of the syllabus when I went through in '97 was celestial navigation. We went out at night with our sextants to do the first part of training then did a few night flights and actually shot the stars to get fixes, pretty funny looking up and down the plane watching a row of students doing their best U-boat captain imitation with their sextants poking through the roof of the T-43. If we got a fix within 10 miles our instructors were pretty happy, close enough for government work. From what little I remember the KC-135 guys seemed to be the only ones who had done it regularly by then and I think it was because they were bored. There was talk at the time they were going to get rid of it soon and I heard they did about a year after I got winged. The only time I used a sextant out in the fleet was when one of my aircraft commanders dared me to do sun shots for heading checks and get it right, promised me a beer if I got the heading on the nose. Having nothing better to do and in search of free beers I did it for a det and got pretty good at it, then never did it again.

The Marines on the other hand were pretty serious about cel nav at the time, at least in flight school. My civilian ground instructor was a retired Marine CWO4 who had been the commandant of the Marine nav school before he retired, their KC-130 navs were/are enlisted with a few warrants from the ranks of the enlisted guys. The Marines had their own Nav school complete with their own nice, new building at Randolph down the road from ours with their own instructors and course of study. They used the same sims and airplanes we did but put a lot more emphasis on celestial nav even when I went through. The CWO said it was because the Marines were cheap and didn't put a lot of nav equipment in their 130's, I asked the Marine instructors and they said it was a still good foundation for nav basics and it was one thing that couldn't fail. It was obvious the CWO had done it a lot, he was pretty damn good at it. They shut down their nav school in 2004 since they are slowly switching to a KC-130J's which do not have navs, I think they were still winging a few after that with OJT but a VMGR guy would have to confirm that.

 

[Able Dog]

In the days of old, when men were bold, it was common for a P-3 to stop at Lajes for fuel when going from JAX to Rota. It was also common to here the following conversation on the ICS:
NAV- Radar, Nav
Radar- Go Nav
NAV- Roger, bring up the radar and see if you can find Lajes

 

[zippy]

Question from an old timer about your job today.

I am in my 60's and retired now. I flew P-2's in the fleet oh so many years ago. Back then all pilots had to learn long range navigation as we started out in the squadron on the nav table and worked our way up to the cockpit. After completing flight training we attended VT-29, a special nav school for pilots in Corpus Christi. We spent a lot of time learning celestial back then.
Question to present day navigators- with the advent of GPS are you still taught celestial? I saw a press release from the Naval Academy some years ago that stated that celestial was no longer a required course which is the reason for my question. Because of the accuracy and reliability of GPS it would seem possible that there is no longer a need for celestial. Do pilots still have to qualify as navigators today?

Just wondering how things are done now. Many thanks for any replies. Hats off to you guys out there in the fleet today. You have our greatest respect.

With the advent of the Nav/Com position, 3Ps no longer had to worry about long range navigation and could focus on the more important skills of picking up good food for the flight and keeping the plane out of the water inflight.

 

[scoolbubba]

With the advent of the Nav/Com position, 3Ps no longer had to worry about long range navigation and could focus on the more important skills of picking up good food for the flight and keeping it out of the water inflight.

Someone's got to keep that radar cabinet from floating away.

 

[helolumpy]

I've flown with a road atlas when flying from Fallon to Jax. (20 hours of flight time over 3 painful days!) Since we won't go above 500 feet, there's more info in a road atlas for finding our posit especially when you can read the name of the town on the water tower!!

 

[OnTopTime]

Question to present day navigators- with the advent of GPS are you still taught celestial?

Cel Nav - both day cel and night cel - was half the syllabus when I went through nav training at Mather AFB in '87-'88. The fleet training and certification requirements for celestial navigation went away, I believe, in '95 or '96.

The first "official" fleet use of GPS on the P-3 was in '91 during Desert Shield/Storm. My squadron was deployed to Sig, with a two plane/two crew Det to Jeddah, SA. Some guys from VX-1/Force Warfare brought over a few planes with first-in-the-fleet mods for a P-3: foam in the fuel tanks, IR sensors in the nose and aft radomes, countermeasure dispensers, GPS, and a marine band VHF radio mounted at the TACCO station (it only took 30 years for the Navy to equip its maritime patrol aircraft with a radio that could talk to civilian ships on THEIR frequencies).

The GPS unit was a COTS Trimble TrimPack that was mounted at the Nav station, powered from the DC outlet there, with the antenna cable running through the overhead soft panels to the pyrotechnic pistol port where the antenna was able to get a signal. There was no interface with the aircraft nav system, just an LCD readout of lat/long and other nav info., with the ability to enter waypoints to get ETA and track information. I haven't flown on a P-3 in a long time, but my understanding is that now there's a GPS signal that is integrated with the inertial units to dampen/cancel inertial drift.

 

[Fog]

Used to fly the north polar regions regularly in the late 60's. Wintertime you're shooting star shots constantly & nav can be fun if you're clear above the clouds - not always the case at 500'. Summertime a different deal altogether: you're constantly shooting sunlines, so you usually know how fast you're going but seldom ever your track. There was no loran, mag compasses were worthless (grid nav) and of course radar was good only when w/in 50 miles of a land mass (Greenland or Alaska). When you got that 1st fix after 8 hrs+ of DR'ing around, you were often quite surprised, to say the least. Oh, and no WX satellites in those days, so the weather guessers were never right. FWIW.

 

[Alpha_Echo_606]

I've flown with a road atlas when flying from Fallon to Jax. (20 hours of flight time over 3 painful days!) Since we won't go above 500 feet, there's more info in a road atlas for finding our posit especially when you can read the name of the town on the water tower!!

Ahh, IFR. (I fly roads) ?

 

[NavAir42]

I haven't flown on a P-3 in a long time, but my understanding is that now there's a GPS signal that is integrated with the inertial units to dampen/cancel inertial drift.

Correct. I'm getting to the limit of my nav systems knowledges but that's the gist of it. On most of our planes the GPS can aide one of the INS units to prevent drift. With the latest and greatest system, I believe it can aide both simultaneously. After spending the last month or so in the sim playing with the system I can say it's very, very capable.

 

[FlyBoyd]

I left E-6s in 2000 and the cel nav was being phased out then. The last I toured an E-6 (May 2010), the cel nav port was still there but not used.

Watching them use cel nav (day or night) to fly thousands of miles to end up at a point +/- 10 miles was pretty amazing. One time I even paused the movie, put down my Maxim, and patted a nav on the back as I made my way to the galley to fix and sandwich. In all seriousness, I have no idea how they did it. It was all f-ing magic as far as I was concerned

 

[FastMover]

With the latest and greatest system, I believe it can aide both simultaneously. After spending the last month or so in the sim playing with the system I can say it's very, very capable.

Pretty much. The CNS/ATM (Communication Navigation Surveillance/Air Traffic Management) RINU-G's have GPS units embedded. The only drawback is not many people have been able to get proficient with it. When I left VP-30 in March of this year they were starting to ramp up the CNS/ATM sims during our TAC phase. The newer Navs seem to be the ones with the most exposure to it, and that isn't really saying much.

 

[HAL Pilot]

The first "official" fleet use of GPS on the P-3 was in '91 during Desert Shield/Storm. My squadron was deployed to Sig, with a two plane/two crew Det to Jeddah, SA. Some guys from VX-1/Force Warfare brought over a few planes with first-in-the-fleet mods for a P-3: foam in the fuel tanks, IR sensors in the nose and aft radomes, countermeasure dispensers, GPS, and a marine band VHF radio mounted at the TACCO station

Except for the GPS, we had all that in VP-46 when we flew out of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in 1988. So did VP-9 when they relieved us.

We actually flew on the Nellis weapon ranges in late 1987/early 1988 testing the the IR sensors/jammers and flare/chaff dispensers against their "toys". We also flew numerous defensive air combat maneuvers flights against F-4s, A-4s, F-16s, F-15s, and F-14s.

To show us how good the foam really worked, they put out barrels full of jet full, some with foam and some without. They than shot incendiary rounds into the barrels. Those without - BOOM! Those with - nothing. Than they fired flares into them. Same results. That shit worked.

We also flew with NVGs and had the lighting in the planes made NVG compatible.

So no, not "first in fleet" except for maybe the GPS.