HANG Newsletter - Royal Institute of Navigation

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Royal Institute of Navigation of the airport in the morning; Shoreham offered this last time but withdrew the invitation at the last moment on grounds of safety. The selection of speakers is almost complete. The second joint meeting will be with the Solent Branch of RIN. It will be held on Thu 14 Mar 2013 at the Royal Lymington Yacht Club. We are negotiating with a speaker and I can give you details in the next newsletter. The fourth meeting will again be one of traditional HANG format on Wed 15 May 2013 at the Tangmere Military Aviation Museum. The meeting will run from 1100hr to 1700hr with a small event in the morning and two speakers in the afternoon. This programme will give HANG four meetings spread through the year and it will be interesting to see if members find this format suits them better. HANG and Navigation News Every two months a new copy of Navigation News is published. A portion of it is allocated to Special Interest Groups so HANG has an input. What do we do with this opportunity? An obvious use is to publicise the next HANG meeting. After that, what else is there to say? I like to add a few words on some aspect of the history of air navigation. I can either use something already published in the HANG newsletter or write something from scratch. I have decided to do the former. I apologise to those members who are not interested in reading something twice but that way there is continuity – anything that HANG has published will be found in one or other of the newsletters and, with one exception, I have copies available of all back numbers. Missing HANG newsletter I have one gap in my collection of back-numbers of HANG newsletters; in fact I am not even certain that I wrote it but there is an entry in my list. Does anybody have a copy of a HANG newsletter for December 2009 (or at least within one month of this date)? It might have the issue number 12 but I might have retrospectively numbered the newsletters at a later date. _____________________________________________________________ RAF Gee charts Walter Blanchard recently sent me some information about Gee. I thought I would first bring myself up to speed on Gee (for Grid) so I quote Wikipedia.. Gee was the code name given to a radio navigation system used by the Royal Air Force during World War II. It was the first hyperbolic navigation system to be used operationally. Gee was devised by Robert Dippy and developed at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) at Swanage. Gee was originally designed to improve aircraft navigation accuracy, and improve safety during night operations. In practice, it was also used as a bombing navigation system, thereby increasing the destructiveness of bomber raids. For large fixed targets, like the cities that were attacked at night, Gee offered enough Page 2 of 16
Royal Institute of Navigation accuracy to be used as an aiming reference without the need to use a bombsight or other external reference. Gee installation in a Lancaster bomber mock-up. Photo credit jproc.ca. Dippy later went to the United States where he worked on the development of the LORAN system, a system that was similar to Gee but using a longer wavelength. LORAN was used by the US Navy and Royal Navy during World War II, and after the war came into common civilian use worldwide for coastal navigation, until GPS made it obsolete. Gee was also known as AMES Type 7000, for "Air Ministry Experimental Station". AMES was a common universal naming system in the UK, similar to the "AN" series in the US. Walter said… Images 1 and 2. Photo credit Walter Blanchard. “I have in my possession a well-used folder of miniature GEE charts - see image 1 - salvaged from a rubbish bin at Shawbury in 1957. It contains a set of 41 small lattice charts covering the UK GEE chains. An example is at image 2. Page 3 of 16
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HANG Newsletter - Royal Institute of Navigation

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