Basic Jet NAvigation School

Once Basic Naval Aviation Observer School was completed, the prospective Naval Flight Officers took different training paths depending on which aircraft community they would be joining.  Those slated for the patrol community would head to Corpus Christi, Texas for Celestial Navigation school.  Back in those pre-GPS days, celestial navigation was a primary means of long range navigation, especially over the oceans.  The course lasted several months and included extensive ground and airborne training.  The school even had quite a large planetarium for training in star recognition.  

Backseaters in the F-4 Phantom departed for Glynco, GA to Radar Intercept Officer training, in the T-39 Sabreliner.  An air intercept radar (derived from the F-8 Crusader, I believe) was installed with several cockpits installed in the cabin.  This school was roughly a month long.

Attack NFOs such as myself also headed for Glynco, but to attend basic Jet Navigation School, also flying the T-39.  This was a intensive course with lots of flying, much of it at low level.  Two modes of navigation we covered:

• dead reckoning navigation using conventional navigational tools.  This would used during long range transits

• pilotage, which is navigation by relating ground features with map elements.  This was quite a challenging process since the flights were conducted at low altitudes and relatively high speeds (360 knots or so).

The course was intense but rewarding.  Dead reckoning nav training was done at high altitude, using standard FAA "J" airways.   For these flights we sat in the back at stations equipped with flight instruments and a nav table.  This was navigation that Magellan would have recognized.  You start from a known point, fly for a while, take a fix, and compare where you are with where you thought you would be.  Use this idfference to adjust the winds for the next leg.   This was my first try and navigation of a high speed aircraft.  Checkpoints came up quickly, and turns and recalculating winds seemed to take all my time.   We used radio nav aids such as TACAN for positioning.

Low altitude flights were training for a completely different kind of navigation: pilotage.  This form of navigation we even older than dead reckoning.  Look around you for manmade structures and terrain features, and find them on a map.  Took a while to get a handle on making the translation between the real world outside the cockpit window the sometimes cryptic representations on the maps. 

For the pilotage flights we trainees sat in the right seat.  Visibility from the back of a T-39 was limited, though not as limited as in the RA-5C, but that's another story.  Flying at 300 plus knots at a thousand feet or so was very enjoyable.  The T-39 had a pretty soft ride, due to its transport heritage, I suppose and the  turbulence you often get at these altitudes was minimal.  The visibility from the right seat was excellent and pilotage was pretty straightforwward.  Most of our flying was around Georgia and environs.  Interstate highways and rivers provided key landmarks, and I quickly got up to speed on map interpretation.