Hello all,
Since you seem to like classic airplanes here, I thought you might enjoy hearing about a recent flight I completed in the A2A Constellation. I did it the really old fashioned way: dead reckoning and sextant shots only, using the sextant gauge originally developed by Dave Bitzer and Mark Beaumont, and ported to FSX by Kris Ogonowski (Kronzky). I've enjoyed the recent discussions on the A2A board about traditional navigation methods, they inspired me to come back and do a little more of this stuff. So who knows, maybe I can inspire someone else to try it out .
(Due to SOH requirements about 4 images per post, I'll complete the story via several replies to this original post).
So I departed Johnston Atoll in the Pacific at 1251z, (0151 local) on June 01, 2016 (date chosen for relatively quiet weather enroute, just a few areas of storms).
Flight Plan said:
1147 nm
05:03 enroute
Cruising at FL200 at 245 KTAS
3500 gallons fuel on board
(I originally planned this flight to fly in the outstanding Jahn/Visser C-47 v3.14, but then decided to fly it in the Connie instead. That's why the checkpoints are labeled out through "6 Hour fix"; the C-47 is slower. I just re-planned it at Connie speeds and that made every hourly fix happen once every 40 minutes instead lol).
Departure time was chosen using a common technique of the era: plan to fly the majority of the flight at night, so you have multiple celestial bodies to take shots from (resulting in multiple lines of position and therefor a fix); but plan to reach your destination an hour or two after sunrise, so you can intercept and follow a line of position off the sun all the way to your destination. So the plan was to fly a landfall procedure (a turn off course to know for certain which side of destination you're on) to intercept the 158 degree LOP from the sun and follow that into PLCH. Dead reckoning headings / groundspeeds calculated using ASN's wind forecasts, which are pretty true to real life in that they give you an estimate, but what you actually encounter is still a little different so you have to adjust.
Departure was uneventful; smooth climb out of Johnston Atoll, attempting to track 140 true.
Taking the first sextant shot off of Nunki, for a speed line, at the 1st checkpoint:
[CONTINUED]
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