Flying at NightInitially, bonfires set along air routes were used to help guide pilots through the darkness. In the 1920s, the Post Office established a system of lighted airways marked by powerful rotating beacons.
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Flying at NightInitially, bonfires set along air routes were used to help guide pilots through the darkness. In the 1920s, the Post Office established a system of lighted airways marked by powerful rotating beacons.
Prior to the jet age, some aircraft used a radio-based system known as Very High Frequency Omni-Directional Range (VOR) flying. In this system, aircraft would receive communications from fixed ground beacons, allowing it to continue its flight path and find its position.
So, for more than a decade, aviators relied on their compasses, crude maps (charts), and dead reckoning (the determining of position by using direction and speed data) for navigation. Dead reckoning in the air, however, was quite different from navigating on the earth's surface.
Early Navigation Equipment Used on Nonstop Transatlantic Flights. Today, communicating and navigating for planes is all done by computers, satellites, and GPS. But during the flying boat era in the 1930s and 1940s, it was a very different story. They literally navigated by the sun, moon, and stars.