air navigation

The glamorous ghosts of early air travel

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , ,

Now called Airport House, this building was one of the world’s first purpose-built air terminals/air traffic control towers. It is on this Croydon site that – until the 1950s – London’s main commercial airport used to be. It now houses a museum full of fascinating artifacts that evoke the exciting – and rather dangerous – adventure that was air travel 100 years ago.

The very first commercial airline flights in Britain – just after the First World War – took place in noisy, uncomfortable aircraft, carrying between two and four passengers in machines converted from their wartime role as bombers.

But toward the 1930s, when Croydon’s new, modern airport terminal was built, things got a lot better, and the glamorous and wealthy flocked to be among the first to fly to Paris in the promised three hours.

Ordinary people could mostly only afford to watch, which they eagerly did from the observation deck on the roof of the terminal, overlooking the grassy aerodrome and watching film stars and royalty walk out to their aircraft.

Everything about aviation then was still so new, so experimental, and the public attended air shows in huge numbers, watching daredevil aviators carry out gravity-defying feats in their flying machines.

The Historic Croydon Airport Trust does an excellent job in bringing all this aviation history to life.

For those curious about how early aviation – and particularly early air traffic control (ATC) – actually worked, this is the place to discover it. As it happens, just a few years ago – in February 2020 – Croydon airport celebrated a century of ATC, because this is the place where it was invented and developed.

Indeed, ATC is something about which even today’s frequent flyers know very little, and learning about its origins – the very basics of early air navigation – will serve to bring to life the essential aspects of modern ATC, because the essentials never change.

In the 1920s the aircraft flew very low by today’s standards – only a couple of thousand feet above ground level. At that height, geographical features like rivers and coastlines, or man-made features like railway lines, could easily be seen if the weather and visibility was good, making navigation by map-reading possible. But if it wasn’t, help from ATC following the advent of radio-direction-finding (see link above to “A century of ATC”) was very welcome to the crews. In marginal visibility, getting lost was quite common, because it was easier than you might think to end up following the wrong railway line!

Pilots now are still expected to do their own navigation, and abide by the rules of the air. ATC’s task is principally to ensure that the flow of air traffic proceeds in an orderly fashion in today’s much busier skies, and that conflicts between aircraft are avoided.

But if pilots do need assistance, ATC is there to help them. Indeed it was at Croydon Airport that the international emergency call “Mayday Mayday Mayday” was first proposed and adopted.

Germany studies air navigation fundamentals

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Germany’s aviation agency DLR is using a non-stop flight from Hamburg to the Falkland Islands in the far South Atlantic ocean to study the earth’s magnetic field, a navigational resource for aviation and migrating birds alike.

The same flight, operated by Lufthansa using one of its Airbus A350-900s (D-AIXQ), is enabling a crew rotation for scientists working in Antarctic waters in the German research vessel Polarstern.

Lufthansa Airbus A350-900 D-AIXQ is preparing to carry scientists to the South Atlantic

On 30 March Lufthansa’s A350 departs for this, its second non-stop flight on this route, chartered by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven. The first such trip, which took place in February, was the longest non-stop flight a Lufthansa aircraft had ever made – more than 13,000km, with a duration of more than 15h.

This time, the A350 will also be carrying scientists from the German Aerospace Center (Deutschen Zentrums für Luft und Raumfahrt) who will be collecting measurement data to provide further insights on the influence of the Earth’s magnetic field as it affects aviation.

The surface location of the North Magnetic Pole, located at present among the far north-eastern Canadian islands near northern Greenland, is continuing to migrate in the direction of Russian Arctic waters at a faster rate than a few decades ago.

At this rate the magnetic North Pole is expected to pass the geographic North Pole moving in the direction of northern Russia in the next few years. The full significance of this increased rate of changing polarity is not understood, but the earth is – according to scientists – overdue for a polar reversal of its magnetic field. The last polar reversal is believed to have occurred about 750,000 years ago, and although the potential consequences for earth-dwellers are not fully understood, they are believed to be significant – and not only for air navigation.

In fact navigation would be the least of the problems mankind is likely to face. Marine navigation has been based on True North since the early 1970s. Aviation has had the capability to change, but is still plodding on with navigation referenced to the magnetic poles because the industry is reluctant to incur some modest, one-off costs in making the changeover.

“With the second flight to the Falkland Islands, we are not only pleased  to be able to support the AWI’s polar research expedition, but also to make an important contribution to further research into the Earth’s magnetic field,” says Thomas Jahn, Fleet Captain and Falklands Project Manager. “We have already been supporting climate research projects for more than 25 years now.”

The main reason for this second flight to the Falklands is to rotate the Polarstern crew and to pick up the research expedition team. Since the beginning of February, a team of about 50 researchers have been collecting important data on ocean currents, sea ice and the carbon cycle in the Southern Ocean, which, among other things, enable reliable climate predictions.

On 2 April, using flight number LH2575, Lufthansa’s A350 will be bringing AWI’s international research team and the DLR scientists back to Germany. The landing is scheduled for 3:00 p.m. on 3 April at Munich Airport.