Any pilots here seen or heard of them? Came across this yesterday and it led to a whole bunch of not working and looking at old photos. Fantastic stuff.
Short summary: During the 1920’s the navigation of flight routes was tough, compasses sometimes unreliable. To help out (and keep the airmail delivered on-time, without lost pilots everywhere) they put down large concrete arrows and beacon towers to light them. Every 10 miles or so, with North/South and East/West mail direction routes marked out. The pilots would literally go from beacon to beacon checking their direction on the arrow below. Here’s a route:
A lot of the arrows still exist today and can be still seen from the air. This site documents them, and is one of those ‘I hope it never goes away’ websites:
A lot of the desert locations still have them pretty much perfect:
I didn’t know about the arrows…but I did know about the beacons. There used to be one on top of the little mountain behind my house (Crowder’s Mountain)… All that is left is the pole, but I didn’t know they also used arrows. Very cool…
I love that some of the arrows ‘bend’ to indicate course changes. I think all the arrows had towers/lights at some point, with the concrete square being the only thing left now:
I’ll see if I can find a link to it, but a gentleman wrote a VERY detailed tutorial for sim’ing flight in the pre-gps days, specifically the 1940’s and 1950’s. He had a couple of detailed chapters about how navigation was done back in the day, and how basically you died if you got it wrong.
If you have any interest in “golden age” aviation I HIGHLY recommend checking his sight out. Easily 90% of my FSX time in the last 5-7 years has been in/over/around something I DL’ed form here.
I wonder with some Ortho scenery, and perhaps one of the desert states, it might be possible to recreate an airmail run by following them? Might be hard to spot but fun.
Anyone know if X-Plane has any 1920’s mail carrier plane models? Maybe an early de Havilland 4 or something?
Jeff Skiles (Sully’s F/O) had a very nice article in Sport Aviation about AN beacons but I cannot find it. If you haven’t read any of his stuff, you are missing out. His writing style is close to @BeachAV8R’s.
