Blind Landings Conway, Erik Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Conway, Erik. Blind Landings: Low-Visibility Operations in American Aviation, 1918–1958. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.3283. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/3283 [ Access provided at 28 Sep 2021 09:26 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Blind Landings This page intentionally left blank Blind Landings Low-Visibility Operations in American Aviation, 1918–1958 erik m. conway The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2006 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conway, Erik M., 1965– Blind landings : low-visibility operations in American aviation, 1918–1958 / Erik M. Conway. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8018-8449-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Instrument flying—United States—History—20th Century. 2. Airplanes— Landing—United States—History—20th Century. 3. Landing aids (Aeronautics)— United States—History—20th Century. I. Title. tl711.b6c66 2006 629.132′521409730904—dc22 2006003795 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. To my parents, Richard and Barrie-Lynn Conway This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xiii Introduction 1 1 Instrumental Faith 12 2 Places to Land Blind 35 3 Radio Blind Flying 57 4 The Promise of Microwaves 80 5 Instrument Landing Goes to War 104 6 The Intrusion of Newcomers 123 7 The Politics of Blind Landing 137 8 Transformations 163 Conclusion 177 Notes 187 Index 211 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments A dozen years ago, I was afloat in the vast tracklessness of the Pacific Ocean when I received an e-mail from John Beatty welcoming me to the University of Minnesota’s Program in the History of Science and Technology. “Welcoming” proved an understatement, and I want to thank John, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Arthur Norberg, Robert Seidel, Alan Shapiro, Roger Stuewer, and John Euler for fostering an atmosphere of collegiality amid the horribly cold Minnesota winters. The friendship and camaraderie o¤ered there made a sometimes-diªcult tran- sition from navy oªcer to (hopeful) scholar the most pleasurable years of my life. The idea for this project came from a conversation with another of Minnesota’s graduates, Robert Ferguson. I am certain that this is far from what he expected it to be, but I hope that it is still satisfactory. My friends Eileen and Andrew Wein- gram provided a comfortable home away from home on too rare vacations. And I cannot thank Barton C. Hacker and Margaret Vining enough for the many re- search visits they have hosted at their Clio house in Washington, DC, over the years. As all historians do, I have accumulated debts to librarians and archivists at various institutions. At the New England branch of the National Archives, Helen Engle aided this project enormously through her knowledge of the MIT Radia- tion Lab papers and her work-in-progress finding aid, more than 600 pages long. Patricia White at the Stanford University Archives guided me to important files on klystron development and the Sperry Gyroscope Company’s involvement in blind landing research. Mary Pavlovich, librarian at the National Air and Space Museum, was unfailing in her attempts to procure obscure materials via inter- library loan. Marjorie McNinch at the Hagley Museum and Library provided ac- cess to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association records and additional Sperry Gyroscope Corporation records, and she arranged permission for use of Hagley images in this book. Kate Igoe at the National Air and Space Museum provided access to many images used in this book, and I am grateful for her e¤orts to iden- tify and secure permission for several rare photographs. x acknowledgments Completing this project required access to records still held by operating agen- cies. Mr. V. Pattanyak, at the International Civil Aviation Organization’s head- quarters in Montreal, kindly provided access to an extensive collection of docu- ments related to international technical negotiations. The records oªcer at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, Lisa McGlasson, provided access to many documents still in the agency’s possession, while FAA’s now retired historian, Ned Preston, provided key documents from its few remaining historical files. Fi- nally, Hal Moses at the Radio Technical Commission on Aeronautics allowed me to use the organization’s collection of 1940’s documents. Without the assistance of these agencies and their representatives, this history would be poorer. The assistance of survivors of the World War II–era U.S. Eighth Air Force was also invaluable. More than thirty veterans responded to an advertisement I placed in the Eighth Air Force Historical Society’s newsletter to tell me about their ex- periences flying and landing in the European theater. Collectively, they provided an insight into wartime problems that I could not have gotten from the published literature. I cannot thank them all here, but Dr. John A. Clark, Col. Bruce Ed- wards, Col. Francis L. Grable, Charles W. Halpen, J. W. Howland, Joseph E. Manos, William D. Reeder, and Bill Rose took the time to write detailed letters about their experiences. Dan Raymond and George Reynolds sent me articles that had appeared in various other veterans’ newsletters that I would never have found, and Chuck Derr sent me a self-published book on his wartime experi- ences. Most extensive of all has been the correspondence of Col. Robert W. Vin- cent. Thank you all for your sacrifices. The National Air and Space Museum supported this project through a pre- doctoral Guggenheim Fellowship, freeing me from the usual demands of gradu- ate student teaching and allowing access to the vast archival collections there. The U.S. Army Signal Corps alone collected more than 13,000 pages on blind land- ing work between 1933 and 1939, and the Air Corps, Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, and Civil Aeronautics Authority each accumulated similar volumes of material. Residence in the Washington area made this project feasible. The National Sci- ence Foundation, via dissertation improvement grant NSF/SBR-9729517, sup- ported research conducted outside Washington. I largely completed the revisions to this manuscript while a contract historian at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. I am indebted to my advisors, Arthur Norberg at Minnesota and Michael Neufeld at the National Air and Space Museum, and to Sally Gregory Kohlstedt at Minnesota, for their careful readings of and comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Conversations with my friends and colleagues Deborah G. acknowledgments xi Douglas and Stuart G. McCook were important to my thinking about airfields and landing aids. Their thoughtful comments have improved this book immeasur- ably, yet all errors, whether of fact or interpretation, are mine alone. Finally, I thank the National Air and Space Museum, the Hagley Museum and Library, Unisys Corporation, and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association for permission to reproduce images contained in this work, and to the Johns Hop- kins University Press for permission to reproduce much of chapter 7 from an ear- lier article. This page intentionally left blank Abbreviations A-1 a U.S. Army Air Corps landing aid, also known as the “Hegen- berger system” AAF Army Air Forces ALPA Air Line Pilots Association AN/MPN-1 a World War II–era GCA system AOPA Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association ARINC Aeronautical Radio, Inc. ARL Aircraft Radio Laboratory (Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio) ATA Air Transport Association BABS blind approach beacon system CAA Civil Aeronautics Authority (until 1940); Civil Aeronautics Ad- ministration (after 1940) FCC Federal Communications Commission FIDO a thermal fog dispersion device GCA ground-controlled approach IATCB Interagency Air Traªc Control Board ILS instrument landing system ITRM/ITD International Telephone and Radio Manufacture; International Telephone Development Company (same company as the Federal Telephone Development Corporation) NAS National Academy of Sciences NBS U.S. National Bureau of Standards PGP pulsed glide path PPI planned position indicator RAE Royal Aircraft Establishment RTCA Radio Technical Commission on Aeronautics SBA standard beam approach system SCS-51 U.S. Army version of the instrument landing system UAL United Air Lines xiv abbreviations UHF ultra-high frequency (after 1944; frequencies between 3 MHz and 30 MHz) USSTAF U.S. Strategic and Tactical Air Forces VHF very high frequency (after 1944; frequencies between 30 MHz and 3 GHz) YB a U.S. Navy version of ILS Blind Landings This page intentionally left blank Introduction Pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in his classic novel Night Flight, told of a French mail pilot and his radio operator who, surrounded by storms while flying between Patagonia and Buenos Aires, were unable to find a place to land. The pilot’s supervisor, driven by the need to conquer the distance between iso- lated cities, had ignored the worsening weather and insisted that the mail go through on time. Saint-Exupéry did not recount their deaths; instead, the two men simply vanished from the narrative.1 Their fictional deaths, like the real deaths that occurred all too frequently in the first thirty years of the aerial enterprise, were counted as merely two more casualties in the struggle to bring about avia- tion’s great future. Saint-Exupéry’s novel reflected Charles Lindbergh’s own experience. Lind- bergh was flying for a mail contractor one night on the St.