Word: sextant
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...because it was moonlit, they expected worse hell. But no bombers came at all. The next night it rained again. Again at midnight the bombs fell. Neighbor Littlejohn was wounded, his wife killed. Death missed the Corbetts by inches. Enemy planes had bombed blind, from above the clouds, taking sextant bearings from the stars...
...brought up a case of whiskey, some canned salmon, a flask of water. Diving down again, he found the ship's cat, Fluffy, on a shelf above water level in the cabin, brought her up in a sea bag, along with blankets, the ship's chronometer, a sextant, a flashlight, a picture of his wife...
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 In airplanes traveling 200 m.p.h. such computations are out of date by the time they are made.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...
...made it clear that much more than simple bad luck was involved. Before the hop-off, when capable Navigator Noonan inspected what he supposed was an ultra-modern "flying laboratory," he was dismayed to discover that there was nothing with which to take celestial bearings except an ordinary ship sextant. He remedied that by borrowing a modern bubble octant designed especially for airplane navigation. For estimating wind drift over the sea, he obtained two dozen aluminum powder bombs. For some reason these bombs were left behind in a storehouse. The Coast Guard cutter Itasca, which had been dispatched from...
Navigating was "The Dook," wiry, chaste, non-practicing bridge engineer, whose sober tinkering with the sextant gave their position anywhere from mid-ocean to mid-Australia. Real navigator, says Author Flynn, was Providence. They all took turns at the hand pump, which had to be kept going most of the time. Figuring a couple of months for the trip, they took seven, with many a layover for repairs and beachcombing. Once they made $50 catching kingfish; poker games showed a profit; they poached a sheep, paid for it later out of the fee collected on an opium-runner...