From the secondary GPS

They also have an exhibition on how sailors and aviators were oriented from the beginning of aviation and how difficult everything was. In the museum I learned to use a sextant. It was an exposed one to play with and I was always curious to understand how it works.

The sextant tells you at what angle to the horizontal is a certain star of your choice or even the Sun. It's a kind of reporter with a telescope attached, to aim well at that star. Navigators could recognize at least a few important stars in the sky. The sextant tells you with high precision that angle, and then the trick is that you open a navigation book, a kind of table with the position of the stars, and you find there written things like "if on October 18, 2020, at 21:20, you measured that the north star is at 62.5 degrees from the horizontal, it means that you are at the x and y coordinates of the planet ”. There's a pretty long table in that booklet, and without it the sextant becomes useless.With such a device it has sailed for decades, even centuries, on the seas and oceans.

However, the next section in that area talks about the problems of the first decades of aviation. The sextant could not be used accurately inside an airplane, especially in small airplanes of that period, especially in turbulent conditions or heavy cloud cover. And fixed in such conditions you need the most accurate guidance.

So a lot of aviators died trying to find the destination airport. Imagine clouds, gusts of wind from various directions, a small, completely analog plane with an unpressurized cockpit in which the windows are still steaming or visibility is hampered by rain or fog. Imagine that the airports of that time were a small runway, maybe grassy, ​​without the current high-performance lighting systems, when the runway can be made visible through fog or clouds.

Or imagine flying over the sea or the ocean when everything looks the same even when you have visibility.

Aviation has progressed at a very fast pace. In 1903, the Wright brothers made their first flight with a plane only 37 meters long and only 3 meters high. In 1923, just 20 years later, the first flight across the coast of the United States from New York to San Diego was made by a Fokker-produced plane called the T-2 . It lasted 27 hours, but it ended well. By that time they had had World War I, and aviation had become crucial in military, mail, and even passenger transportation. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic.

T-2, the plane, is in this museum. It looks so fragile that I would carefully climb on it and on the ground, that I would not have the courage to fly. Aviation, like many other fields, was for the brave, for the pioneers, and many did not reach their destination.He writes there in the museum that a turning point in air navigation was the invention of much more precise clocks. The introduction of the secondary on the clock and its good accuracy mattered enormously. In those days, if you knew the speed of your plane, you timed how many minutes and seconds you went in a certain direction and thus calculated the distance traveled, so you know when you need to change your course.

A clock that stays behind for a minute or more every hour is no big deal for a normal person. This error, however, is amplified in a cascade for a pilot and a deviation of a few miles from the route may mean that you no longer see the airport you need to reach and you do not know how and where you went wrong navigation, especially in cloudy conditions. or fog or at night.

So the best watches mattered a lot and so did the famous manufacturers like Longines or Breitling and that's why even today we have many watches in the range of "aviators", although they are no longer needed.

After I started playing Flight Simulator 2020, I also started learning about aircraft navigation systems and how to use them. For example, across the country, around the globe, there are stations called VOR, VHF Omnidirectional Range. They emit a different radio signal in each direction around them, like the spokes of a wheel or umbrellas, and the receiving plane therefore knows in which direction it is facing that VOR station.

If the station also emits a DME signal, Distance Measuring Equipment, the plane (if equipped with the right receivers for these signals) also finds out how far it is from that VOR-DME station and practically determines where it is on the map. He does not know the altitude, but this is determined by other means.

VOR navigation was widely implemented in 1946 and since then has been the main method by which aircraft have been oriented in their flight, regardless of distance. They generally fly from one VOR station to another, using them as waypoints, and each airport usually has its own station that can be used as a guide for the final destination.

Henri Coandă Airport has two stations nearby, Floresti which broadcasts on 112.2 MHz and Roșiori on 117.1 MHz, both marked on the map with the symbol VOR-DME. From Roșiori station, if you go directly west (or let's say a 265 degree) you get to the airport.

You look at such a map (this is from Skyvector ) and make your own flight plan, write down the frequencies needed by the radio on the plane to "catch" the stations, the distances between them and other such information. It wasn't that simple either, that you had to take into account the deflection induced by the side wind or other factors, but with VOR-DME, humanity has managed for several decades, including intercontinental flights.

Then came the GPS system. Saturn-launched satellites in space with atomic clocks on board, transmitting a signal to everyone that could be used to determine position on the map. Originally intended for military use, but also permitted for civilian use in 1983, following an order signed by President Reagan.

The entire satellite constellation became operational in 1993. Probably since then, modern aircraft have begun to make extensive use of GPS for positioning and navigation, along with digital maps.

Modern aircraft still use VOR-DME. Aviation has backup over backup and is not only based on GPS, it can crash the system, it is attacked, it is closed in case of war and so on. Modern airplanes also have other positioning systems on board, in fact, and assistance in descending to the runway, including in conditions of good sword-cutting fog.

However, think about this technological evolution. Once upon a time, about a hundred years ago, a revolution in the field was a watch with a secondary and a small deviation that allowed you to do some mathematical calculations to know where you are.

Now, any pilot with an iPad and Google Maps knows exactly one meter or less where they are. Sometimes I play Flight Simulator with a Cessna 152, which has only old-school analog indicators, and I find it stupid that I have to use them to follow the route from one VOR to another when, in the normal world, I would take my phone out of pocket right there on the plane and I would see directly on the map where they are.

I did this as a passenger.

I don't even need the Internet. Google Maps can be used offline, and I gave a pre-installed application as an example, but there are many others designed specifically for navigation. It doesn't matter what the plane or the altitude is. A year ago I wrote about applications with which passengers at 10,000 meters altitude in planes flying at 850 km / h can find out where they are at the moment, what is below them and so on.

The first flight, in 1903, was 37 meters long at an altitude of 3 meters. 20 years later, it was already flying across the ocean. Nowadays, flying anytime, anywhere is commonplace (ok, not fixed at this time, buy you get my drift). I will be disappointed if over 100 years of flying to the Moon or Mars are not trivial, something to do while listening to music directly from the chip in your brain and playing Angry Birds 278 in augmented reality inserted directly into the optic nerve.