Word: compassable
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...unannounced point an hour's drive away. Hour or so later an American Airlines transport ship took off from the same field. Mounted horizontally just behind the throttles between the pilot and co-pilot was a circular dial face marked off in degrees like a compass. Over this swung an indicator hand. A little tuning picked out the truck's signal, and the hand froze like a pointer on the bearing. Following this bearing, the plane chased over villages and farms, finally passed over Valley Stream Airport. As it did, the tell-tale needle swung full around, pointed...
Computations by which navigators determine their position from sextant observations of the altitude (elevation above the horizon) and azimuth (true bearing by compass) of heavenly bodies may take up to 15 minutes. In airplanes traveling 200 m.p.h. such computations are out of date by the time they are made. The Navy's Hydrographic Office published tables last year covering latitudes of 30 to 39 degrees, from which navigators could check their position in a few seconds...
Incredible was the bare-faced yarn Corrigan told: "I left New York to return to Los Angeles, but by an unfortunate mistake I set my compass wrong, and when I got up above the clouds the visibility was very bad* When I had flown 25 hours I came down through the clouds and I was in Ireland...
...down out of the air at neighboring Roosevelt Field in a 1929 Curtiss-Robin monoplane with an old Wright J-6 motor that could turn up only 95 miles an hour. By modern standards the ship was a crate, but in it, with nothing to fly by but a compass, a bit of a map and the beam in his eye, 31-year-old Douglas P. Corrigan of Los Angeles had flown the 2,700 miles to New York nonstop. A vacation trip, he said, and a fairly pleasant one, from his job at the Northrop Corp. aircraft works...
Thomas L. Thurlow, lent for the flight by the U. S. Army; Flight Engineer Edward Lund, and Radio Engineer Richard Stoddart. Flier Hughes was guided by the most reassuring set of flying gadgets ever packed into a private airplane. Kept on his course by a homing radio compass, another taking bearings from ships at sea, and a new periscopic drift indicator perfected by Lieutenant Thurlow, Flier Hughes let a gyro-pilot do most of the flying, chatted every half hour or so over a powerful radio transmitter to a base at the New York World's Fair that...