The Wayward Navigator, Part II

Searching

So we took off, and we're flying at 1,000 feet above the water.  The airplane is flying on automatic pilot, so we don't have to sit there and physically fly the plane.  Everybody's looking out the window, looking for the Japanese fleet.  And we see nothing but water, except every now and then you'd see a pod of whales--big whales, two, three, four, maybe five--and every now and then one of them would jump out of the water completely, and fall back into the water.

So the navigator, of course, is navigating.

We've been flying for quite a while, probably 5 hours, and somebody says, "Look at that front up ahead of us."  A large mass of clouds, cumulus, which are the boiling type of cloud.  And about that time, somebody says, "That looks like land."  Immediately the navigator says, "Do a 180 degree turn."

So we didn't fly our 60 miles over to come back 800 miles, we just turned and started back.

What happened?

Well, in flying over water, it's very difficult to tell where the wind is coming from and how it's affecting your airplane.  For example, if you're flying north and you have a wind from the west, it's pushing you to the east, so you won't maintain your northern heading unless you correct the aircraft to fly the course you want.  So we had a drift meter, it was called, in the B17, which was a telescope in the bottom of the aircraft that looked down, and the navigator would look through it and look at a whitecap, and then he would put his cros  hairs on that and watch which way the aircraft was drifting.

Only our navigator hadn't flown in an airplane since he got our of navigator training.  Which was a couple of months ago.  And he studied the drift meter, probably in Kansas, where you don't have any water.  And what he did was, he read the drift incorrectly.  He read a tail wind as a north wind.  So we had in effect a tail wind blowing us further along, and that's why we got close enough to see those islands.