The Japanese radios should be mentioned worked fine in the more Northern parts of the world (ie. home islands). It wasn't like the Japanese gave radios to their aircraft despite the radios not working. It worked and it was standard on all modern Japanese aircraft. There is a reason why the famous "Tora tora tora!" line could be transmitted during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The model 21 radio the A6M used were actually fairly decent but they did not properly shield them from electrical interference. But in the South Pacific, the Earth's magnetic field was particularly troublesome for HF radios. There was also solar minimum during the time the conflict took place which made the interference even worse. This was not as bad in the Japanese home islands. The conditions in the South Pacific were so bad, the pilots often just removed the radios since it was just dead weight. This was AGAINST regulations but was done regardless. This affected the US too, but they grounded and shielded their radios so minimized the effects. Nonetheless, the situation in the South pacific is the worst out of all combat theaters and radio range are noticeably shorter there than in Europe even if you used the same radio sets. Early in the war, the combined allied fleets also had communication issues although it is unknown how much can be attributed to the magnetic fields and electrical interference.
Speaking of Japanese’ radio reliability - Saburo Sakai famous Japanese ace who flew A6M found the radio unit so useless that he decided to remove it completely in order to decrease drag caused by the antenna
My uncle Yukihiko was an IJN pilot who flew to late war Japanese bases around the Pacific. His last post was Taiwan. I've wondered how he could fly a little plane around the Pacific with so few landmarks.
According to Saburo Sakai, the japanese air ace, they were trained to recognize stars in daylight. Training was hard and they were often beaten if they didn't accomplish these tasks.
After Saburo Sakai was wounded, he was flown to Japan as a passenger. Partway into the trip a pilot asked him for help --- they were lost! Fortunately for everyone on board, SS was a good navigator and was able to put the aircraft back on track.
@@Doc-n7u With respect, there's one big star which you can see in daylignt. If you know the time of day, and can see the elevation of the Sun above the horizon, you can find your longitude. The planets are close to the ecliptic, and can be seen during daytime if you know where to look.
Another technique for overwater navigation is plotting your base course to an offset point from your destination, so you know which direction to turn if your destination is not in sight when you get there. Let's say your destination is an island but that island isn't visible when your chronometer says you've flown long enough. If you plotted your base course directly to that island you can't be sure which way to turn to find it unless you are really, really confident in your wind drift calculations. But if you plotted your course to a point South of that island you could be reasonably confident it was somewhere off to your North and you could start your search in that direction. This becomes a lot more difficult with moving ships. The diagonal markings on the horizontal stabilizers of some Japanese aircraft may have been aids to help calculate wind drift.
Robert Mason wrote a book called "Chickenhawk" about flying UH-1 helicopters in Vietnam in the mid-1960s during the war. They would plot towards the target, but not try to account for wind drift. Then when they had flown long enough, they turned upwind to find the target. Since helicopters are slower than WWII fighter aircraft and much shorter ranged, I'm not sure how well this could have worked over the Pacific. Sounds like the Japanese pilots had to be much more confident of their dead reckoning and/or celestial navigation skills than the US pilots that had a radio assist.
This is an amazing aspect of the intricacies of flying a plane back in the day! One doesn't really give much thought to these aspects of piloting a fighter at sea! Similarly, how to adjust fuel mixtures in flight during a dogfight!!!! Yow!!! Wow!!!
There's no mention of the fact that the wake of a carrier, which displaces tens of thousands of tons and thrashes a lot of air into the water, is many miles long. It's kinda hard to miss.
@@TheDavidlloydjones Navigation is much easier with less than about 2/10 clouds. Low ceilings make locating landmarks very difficult over open water. Fly at 500 feet and see how far you can locate anything.
You probably should have mentioned that Japanese Navy planes were equipped with a domestic copy of the Fairchild RC-4 direction finder, licensed before the Second World War, in addition to the radio for communication, although they were unreliable.
Excellent video and great content! I would like to add a small note. The carrier units always operated in mixed formations of fighters and bombers, so single-seat fighters mostly relied on two-seat and three-seat bombers with dedicated navigators for guidance. Of course, during the chaotic battles over the enemy carriers fighters would naturally get separated. However, a couple of bombers were typically assigned at specific pre-arranged gathering locations with respect to the enemy carriers (e.g., southeast) to wait for any stray fighters and be guided back. There are cases when fighter pilots missed that opportunity as well and were on their own. For example, PO Komachi Sadamu during the Battle of the Eastern Solomons was one such case where all he could do was roughly head in the general direction where his carrier was when he took off. Since the battle took place in the late afternoon, the sun was also rapidly sinking toward the horizon (imagine the stress) but luckily he was heading somewhat west which saved him some crucial daylight time. Still, he could not find the carriers before the dark but miraculously found some friendly destroyers where he ditched his fighter and was picked up. We can only guess how many fighter pilots found themselves in a similar situation but were not so lucky. Regarding land-based naval units in the Solomons, most operations also included mixed formations where the bombers took care of navigation for the fighters. However, sometimes when fighter sweeps were sent and navigation was deemed challenging, they allocated a couple of bombers to handle the navigation. For ferrying operations, twin-engine bombers typically guided single-seat fighter units between islands (that is of course, when ferrying was not done by an auxiliary carrier).
I'm full of admiration for a Japanese pilot who could risk their life one moment then fly out into the blue yonder trying to find a moving aircraft carrier using just a sextant etc. I'll admit I didn't quite grasp how the sextant worked but I'll try watching again. A suggestion for another video might be how German pilots used radio waves for night bombing. Also perhaps one on the allies Norden bombsight. Other more general topics might be how air speed and altitude is measured on aircraft. Artillery aiming might also be a good (and topical) one.
Don't rely on this video- it's nonsense. A sextant is nearly useless in aircraft for finding small things like an aircraft carrier. Errors in ideal weather can be up to 100 km. That's why the US invented radio navigation aids like TACAN. Bristish bomber pilots in World War 2 used astro-navigation and often couldn't even find the right German city to bomb. Japanese carriers in WW2 transmitted homing beacons. The bubble sextants were provided just to give aircrews some hope of getting back if their radio developed a fault and the signal range dropped.
@@keithammleter3824 Agree. I know how to use a sextant and I have great doubts that a fighter pilot could get anything that comes even close to a useable fix (let's stick with the 100km). A dedicated navigator in a bomber might be able to do so after intense navigation training and practice. Getting a fix takes patience, a few large books, concentration, a drawing table with a large enough map, no stress, and NO calculation errors. All this while keeping a steady flight and doing the dead reckoning simultaneously. Not to mention shooting at occasional things or getting shot at...
We see so many videos about what happened in this battle or that but your videos on how things worked are so valuable and interesting. Like "Shattered Sword" by Parshall and Tully
That book is a mixed bag and should be read with extreme caution. While it provides details of Japanese carrier operations found in few other works, their analysis of the battle is flawed and the central "revelation" of the work is incorrect.
Allied navys had developed their technical radio based solutions bacause of the risks and losses that would result from getting lost over water using techniques such as described for the Japanese
Its a wonder any of them ever located their target and /or ever got back to their ship. It would be interesting to know how many were actually lost forever.
The difficult thing about a sextant is that it can only reliably give you latitude. Longitude is so dependent on the exact time and stability of the instruments that you can be off by a couple of degrees, which is as much as 70 miles error.
Nice video! I had to think about the bubble sextant for a while. Would that work on a moving platform, like an aircraft? The bubble might be anywhere, because of centrifugal forces. Well, I guess, if you are flying straight and level, and not turning at all, you'd be okay.
I suspect they made use of the DF homing to get back to the ship, along with guidance from the carrier itself. The Japanese made extensive use of reconnaisance aircraft going out to do weather reports before they launched strike groups.
Japanese had some sort of radio beacon called „kurushi”. It was supposed to be used in case of emergency. When the pilot was lost he broadcasted the distress signal „kurushi” and the Carrier was supposed to turn on the radio homing beacon. But because IJN was too afraid to reveal carrier’s position to allies the system was seldom used
In WW2 the Brits used dead reckoning, bubble sextants, radio direction finders, and special floats they'd drop into the ocean to judge drift. Over land, they'd use landmarks.
Dye markers for navigation ... You rapidly touched this topic in closed captions, but went so fast I couldn't read it ... Could you repost that. Info on dye markers?
I found the transcript about the IJN use of dye marker at the end of the video. Very interesting! I've read that carrier pilots sometimes follow the wake of the carrier to find home. Is that true?
I’ve heard about these two methods but I haven’t found any reliable source to verify them. You can find photos of IJN planes with narrow stripes painted on the fuselage, wings and horizontal stabilizers. It is said these stripes were used to verify the plane’s heading relative to the sea waves. Quite an interesting theory and I’m digging deeper to find out if that’s true or not😉
I'm a sailor and have taken a lot of coursework in paper navigation. I can do it but it's hard. Boats are a lot slower and take a lot longer to get somewhere than a plane, so the time it takes is reasonable. Even so errors are easy to make. I can imagine a navigator in a small cockpit plane plotting courses. But a pilot alone in a Zero, both flying and navigating? I just can't picture it.
I think celestial navigation is very limited if you are in a hurry, because it requires two sights with a time interval of an hour or so just to obtain a single position line, not a complete fix.
Wow this is horrible. So let me get this streight: - If you can't plot location because of, idk, a prolonged dogfight, you are f***ed. -If you are inattentive because of sleeplessness or any other factors you are f***ed. - Japan didn't rescue their pilots so if you ditch nobody is coming to rescue you so you are f***ed. - If you got rushed threw training (as was the case in late war) and didn't have enough familiarity with these complex navigation systems you are f***ed. - If your calculations are off by a tiny margine you are f***ed. - If the carrier has to change heading because it gets attacked or whatever you are f***ed. Actualy crazy. I am suprised this worked at all.
Something not mentioned is that the wake of an aircraft carrier is enormous and very long, so it's considerably easier to spot from the air than just trying to see the ship in the water.
Planes tend to float for a while upon hitting the ocean due to the fuel in the wings - would it have been possible for an escort vessel to fish out a plane shot down by AA (or the pilots body), or simply check it with a rescue swimmer, and use the maps to launch an attack on the home carrier (if the pilots were given course and position data for the return trip, it could be used for a counterattack as it would have to have accurate data for the next several hours)
Not very possible nor practical, first of all aircraft doesnt swim due to the fuel, but rather due to the empty tanks and being light i general. But again it doesnt swim all that long couple of minutes at best. Also maps should be brought, translated and that would take time and by the time you have info at the right table it is already of little value. Besides that if an aircraft carrier aircraft attacked you, then you are aware of the presence of CV in the area and you can already roughly estimate its position or general area where it is so theese maps that are already inacurate by the time you get them are not really of that big value.
They used a secret weapon called the "Divine Wind". The wind would always return them to a rendezvous with the carriers. They stole the weapon from the Chinese in 1935 and perfected it for naval aviation navigation soon after.
The biggest problem of dead reckoning method is that measurement errors accumulate over time and, especially while flying over a large body of water, can't be corrected using known ground features as visual reference.
Flying by Dead Reckoning in a single seat fast aircraft over water would be nearly impossible. You need a calculator, charts, a clock, pen, possibly rewrite your route and take notes, all this under threat of enemy fighters and looking inside. It could only end badly unless there was a multi crew aircraft caring for the formation navigation. Astronomical navigation in a single seat is unthinkable for many reasons. Besides, the Carrier wouldn't stay dead on the water waiting for her aircraft. She would be somewhere else. Are you sure the IJN only used Dead Reckoning and nothing else?
Bear in mind that aircraft almost always fly in formations so not every aircrew had to deal with navigation. One plane in the formation was enough and the rest just had to follow him. Besides Japanese Navy put a lot of emphasis on navigational training
Yes, I guess that, for example a _Kate_ or a _Judy_ would provide the Headings for the rest of the blokes, but this had several risks too. I had a PPL when younger and remember how demanding pure Dead Reckoning can be when flying alone, even in good weather over land at 80 knots in a C152... it requests all your permanent awareness. 🤯
You don't have to navigate with absolute precision to find a large island or a fleet of ships as long as the weather is good enough that you can spot them when you get close. Also, dead reckoning is more rather than less accurate in faster aircraft because the wind has a smaller effect on ground speed and drift.
For comparison, American aircraft formations were often guided by a New Zealand crew flying above the formation. US navigators failed selection for being pilots. New Zealand is a small pair of islands in the middle of an ocean. Navigators had to be good to fly vast distances between islands.
Doubt pilots of single seat aircraft were using Bubble-sextants as their primary navigation means. Sure in multi crew aircraft/bombers with proper navigators. But you didn’t really answer how single pilot aircraft navigated other than by dead-reckoning, which is notoriously unreliable over great distances.
Beautiful research. I hope you all are under-paid, under-employed university professors; rather than under-paid, under-employed adjuncts, not that it would change anything really. Either way, as one who won the liberal arts lottery, I have great respect for one and all of you. I like it.
This video is nonsense. Carrier borne aircraft such as the Nakajima B5N had a combat radius of nearly 1000 km. If you think dead reckoning over ocean will get you hone, you believe in fairies. Navigating with a bubble sextant and chronometer in perfect weather conditions will give you a single sighting error of up to 100 km - useless for finding your carrier. By taking repeated sights over a period of time a skilled operator can get the error down to about 7-8 km, still not good enough if cloud hides the carrier. Japanese aircraft all carried radios, and the carrier transmitted a homing beacon at regular intervals. Often several ships were operating in the general vicinity. Aircrew could tune in more than one beacon to get a fix. That's why things like radio direction-finding, TACAN, Omega, and the later GPS were devised - a sextant is just about good enough for ships looking for a land mass, but for an aircraft looking for a moving runway floating in an ocean, its almost useless.
@@RodCornholio Unfortunately RUclips is becoming clogged with similar videos, made by people using AI to write their scripts, and not knowing anything about the subject. The advent of video editing software on PC's of virtually no cost, together with AI voices, means that almost any ignorant schoolboy can make a professional appearing video, upload it, and make a bit of money without knowing anything about the subject.
@@keithammleter3824 My hunch as well. Once the feedback loop of AI-mining-inaccurate-AI-generated-data-producing-more-inaccurate-data to be mined by future AI begins, I expect a huge amount of problems. LLM AI is terrible, epistemological ly speaking. I'm waiting for someone to lose their life because, say, a doctor made a decision weighing an LLM's input too much.
As you know how important an accurate timepiece is to celestial navigation, I wonder if the Japanese pilots even had a chronometer (watch) accurate enough. Reportedly, a 2 second error would equal to about half a mile (that would be one mile diameter).
@@RodCornholio We understand the time factor very well here in Australia. After the Australian continent was discovered (1788), the coastline was extensively mapped by skilled British Navy navigators. Their maps have features plotted perfectly good enough for sea navigation in terms of latitude, because they took multiple sextant sightings. However the longitudes are all over the place, because they had no radio time signals. But for Japanese aircrew, timing should not have been a problem, since their navy could broadcast time signals. And if not, they could pick up the signal from American time stations WWV and WWVH, which were strong enough to be clearly heard world-wide and accurate enough to get you within about 100 to 150 feet. These stations transmitted on multiple frequencies, so you could always find one free of interference.
6:09 The English word "Corps" is derived from a French word. In French there are many dropped sounds. In this case the "p" and "s" are silent, so the word is pronounced "kor."
Francis Chichester flew a Gipsey Moth biplane from England to New Zealand over Africa and India navigating with a ship’s bubble sextant, compass and a watch all by himself in 1929. He had to maintain 50 feet of altitude and held the stick with his knees.. When he took off from England he only had 20 hours as a pilot.
The sextant is useless in an airplane. Ask the historical department of RAF Bomber Command. No one can shoot stars in a plane that moves in 3d. An aircraft is not a slow vessel on the sea.
And yet a lot of E-3B, RC-135, WC-135, KC-135A, and many, many other WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War thru the Cold War aircraft equipped with navigators and sextants somehow managed to do it regularly. Ask the USAF.
@@timothy____1989 They did it with radio aids such as TACAN and Omega. The sextants were just a back up in case of radio failure. Once they got within range, they would be detected on radar and talked home. The British used sextants in WW2 and often couldn't find the right German city to bomb.
@@timothy____1989 Yes, its no good having a manual back up method if through lack of practice you've lost the skill involved. In WW2 the Germans (unlike the British who didn't really care what they bombed, so long as it was German), tried using a crossed-radio beam system to hit specific targets, bombing where the beams crossed. They were foiled though, by the British transmitting on the same frequencies, which had the effect of displacing the beams. I didn't say sextants were useless. Someone else said that. I explained how sextants were a backup to radio aids and could get you within range of being talked down - which is hardly useless. The British didn't do very well at all relying on astro-navigation under combat conditions. Fortunately, on returning to England after bombing a German city, right one or not, all they had to do was cross the English coast, about 600 miles on a north-south line. Landmarks would then guide them, although it was not uncommon for crews to land at the wrong RAF airbase. There ae no landmarks if your home is a navy carrier in the middle of nowhere.
@@keithammleter3824 you are correct, my apologies. You did not say sextants are useless in airplanes, that was @EK-gr9gd to whom I intended my reply. I need to read more closely, so I deleted my 2nd reply since it does not apply to your statement, both of which I agree with.
I would assume that the Japanese carrier planes did often miss their carriers. Ex. the carriers had to chenge their course. Within a 4 hour mission the carrier could run 100 knots in another direction and the planes had no chance.
Russian naval aviators have the easiest way of finding their aircraft carrier by looking for the smoke coming from the Admiral Kuznetsov hundreds of kilometers away..
Very good, but that's not all. On the upper surface of the horizontal stabilizer of many Japanese planes stripes were painted at an angle. These stripes helped the pilots judge the direction of the wind, presumably by aligning the stripes with the ocean swells. After the Pearl Harbor attack, a line of green dye markers were dropped onto the sea at the point where the planes were to rendezvous after the attack indicating the direction to the carriers. Still, without radio aids they must've lost a great many planes and pilots over the vast area of the Pacific. Too, single-engine Japanese aircraft were often guided to their destinations by bombers The Japanese copied so much aviation technology from America yet it never occurred to them that starting an air war with the country that invented the airplane was not a good idea.
Both of these methods are familiar to me but I read about them from only one questionable source and I could not confirm them in any reliable publication so I decided not to post them. As for these stripes, I also read the version that they were a cue for the gunners. If you could share the source of Your information, I would be grateful
@@x-planed Here you go: P.18, first and second paragraphs in 'Beyond Pearl Harbor' by Ron Werneth. "Before departing for our mission, Lt. Commander Egusa ordered us to guide all the Zero fighters to their mother ships by dropping several lumps of silver powder on an imaginary line drawn between the mother ships and Cape Kahuku....The dispersed powder formed a white line on the sea, which would act as beacon for Zeros to gather together..." There are two full paragraphs describing this. Can't remember where I read about the stripes on the horizontal stabs, but I seriously doubt they had anything to do with shooting.
In 1954, the Royal Aeronautical Society of Great Britain exhibited a model of the “Tamamushi flying machine" invented by a Japanese, Chuhachi Ninomiya, in their exhibition hall and introduced him as “the man who discovered the principle of the airplane before the Wright Brothers. In 1891 his plane flew for the first time with propeller propulsion. In other words, there are many Japanese inventions, not only aircraft carriers and airplanes, that Americans mistakenly believe are American inventions.
I wonder how much of this our commanders knew. You could take down entire squadrons by harassing them enough that they couldn't take accurate readings or by forcing the carriers off course. I wonder how much that affected Yamamoto's decisions at Midway. His rationale makes a lot more sense knowing this.
There is a very good 3 part series on Midway from the Japanese perspective called, "The Battle of Midway 1942: Told from the Japanese Perspective (1/3)" (2/3 & 3/3 of course). The Japanese carriers didn't have a lot of time to launch, land, and service their planes due to the piecemeal attacks during the Midway battle. That really messed up their options for responding to new info. The details are very well laid out in those three videos and are well worth the time to watch.
It sounds as if the Japanese decided to stick with a winner and copy the procedures and devices the USN had developed in the earliest days of naval aviation. It's my understanding the radios they did use in aircraft were American made until we quit selling them to Japan. The IJN borrowed a great deal from the Royal Navy and even bought a number of Capital ships from British shipyards before they began building their own. It sounds an awful lot like how the Chinese have borrowed, stolen and on occasion even purchased western technology.
Americans had better technology like the YZ-RB system to get them back to their carriers. My father was an SBD pilot and flew missions from the USS Hornet (CV8) and the USS Lexington (CV16) during WWII. The YZ-RB system served him well on his scouting patrols, raids on Japanese installations as well as during the battles of Midway, Santa Cruz and the Philippine Sea which got him back to his carrier. The only time he got "lost" and had to ditch off the shores of a remote island was when the USS Wasp was sunk in September of 1942. His carrier, the USS Hornet, was alerted when the Wasp was torpedoed. They asked for their pilots to volunteer to fly their planes to Navy's base at Espiritu Santo to make room for Wasp's planes to land on the Hornet. He and the other volunteers were given faulty coordinates. (No YZ-RB was available to guide them to Espiritu Santo.) He and his gunner spent two week on the remote island with a French planter and his family before being rescued by a PBY just in time to participate in the Battle of Santa Cruz.
@@johngarrett4288 Actually there is a book currently being written about my father's combat experiences during WWII. It's being done by published author and professor of history from a major university on the East Coast.
The Japanese radios should be mentioned worked fine in the more Northern parts of the world (ie. home islands). It wasn't like the Japanese gave radios to their aircraft despite the radios not working. It worked and it was standard on all modern Japanese aircraft. There is a reason why the famous "Tora tora tora!" line could be transmitted during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The model 21 radio the A6M used were actually fairly decent but they did not properly shield them from electrical interference.
But in the South Pacific, the Earth's magnetic field was particularly troublesome for HF radios. There was also solar minimum during the time the conflict took place which made the interference even worse. This was not as bad in the Japanese home islands. The conditions in the South Pacific were so bad, the pilots often just removed the radios since it was just dead weight. This was AGAINST regulations but was done regardless.
This affected the US too, but they grounded and shielded their radios so minimized the effects. Nonetheless, the situation in the South pacific is the worst out of all combat theaters and radio range are noticeably shorter there than in Europe even if you used the same radio sets. Early in the war, the combined allied fleets also had communication issues although it is unknown how much can be attributed to the magnetic fields and electrical interference.
Speaking of Japanese’ radio reliability - Saburo Sakai famous Japanese ace who flew A6M found the radio unit so useless that he decided to remove it completely in order to decrease drag caused by the antenna
@@x-planedwhy didn’t he just remove the antenna?
What good is radio unit without antenna? It only adds weight
@@x-planed So he removed it for the weight.
@@annoyingbstard9407How dense are you?
My uncle Yukihiko was an IJN pilot who flew to late war Japanese bases around the Pacific. His last post was Taiwan. I've wondered how he could fly a little plane around the Pacific with so few landmarks.
Not even a radio beacon for navigation? That's gutsy. Best I could do for Dead Reckoning is "Reckon I'm lost and be dead when I run out of fuel".
米国のFarchild社製の無線方向探知機を国産化した「1式空3号無線帰投方位測定機」は、零戦、99艦爆、97艦攻、彩雲、天山等局地戦用航空機を除く殆ど全ての機体に装備された
この装置は空母からのビーコンを捉えることができたが、使用方法を間違えて海に沈んだパイロットも多いでしょう
According to Saburo Sakai, the japanese air ace, they were trained to recognize stars in daylight. Training was hard and they were often beaten if they didn't accomplish these tasks.
... What
After Saburo Sakai was wounded, he was flown to Japan as a passenger. Partway into the trip a pilot asked him for help --- they were lost! Fortunately for everyone on board, SS was a good navigator and was able to put the aircraft back on track.
You can't see stars during daylight hours
@@Doc-n7u
Ok, I can't. But I wrote my comment according to his autobiography...
@@Doc-n7u With respect, there's one big star which you can see in daylignt. If you know the time of day, and can see the elevation of the Sun above the horizon, you can find your longitude. The planets are close to the ecliptic, and can be seen during daytime if you know where to look.
I appreciate you thinking of us. Thank you for answering our question from the American video.
You Guys are my audience, so I have to pay attention to Your comments😉
The bubble sextants are cool. I didn't know anything like that existed.
Love the current content you're producing! Please keep up the amazing work!!!
Wow thank You. Apreciate it🙏
Another technique for overwater navigation is plotting your base course to an offset point from your destination, so you know which direction to turn if your destination is not in sight when you get there. Let's say your destination is an island but that island isn't visible when your chronometer says you've flown long enough. If you plotted your base course directly to that island you can't be sure which way to turn to find it unless you are really, really confident in your wind drift calculations. But if you plotted your course to a point South of that island you could be reasonably confident it was somewhere off to your North and you could start your search in that direction. This becomes a lot more difficult with moving ships.
The diagonal markings on the horizontal stabilizers of some Japanese aircraft may have been aids to help calculate wind drift.
Robert Mason wrote a book called "Chickenhawk" about flying UH-1 helicopters in Vietnam in the mid-1960s during the war. They would plot towards the target, but not try to account for wind drift. Then when they had flown long enough, they turned upwind to find the target. Since helicopters are slower than WWII fighter aircraft and much shorter ranged, I'm not sure how well this could have worked over the Pacific.
Sounds like the Japanese pilots had to be much more confident of their dead reckoning and/or celestial navigation skills than the US pilots that had a radio assist.
それは「偏流測定線」です。日本海軍の機体には、他にもコックピット外部前方の側面に「急降下目安線」、フラップ翼の前方に「フラップ作動角指示線」など、他にもいろいろな種類の線が塗装されていました。
Very interesting. As someone who navigated yachts at sea, and small planes here in the UK , I found this fascinating !
This is an amazing aspect of the intricacies of flying a plane back in the day!
One doesn't really give much thought to these aspects of piloting a fighter at sea!
Similarly, how to adjust fuel mixtures in flight during a dogfight!!!! Yow!!!
Wow!!!
There's no mention of the fact that the wake of a carrier, which displaces tens of thousands of tons and thrashes a lot of air into the water, is many miles long. It's kinda hard to miss.
@@TheDavidlloydjones Navigation is much easier with less than about 2/10 clouds. Low ceilings make locating landmarks very difficult over open water. Fly at 500 feet and see how far you can locate anything.
Very cool, no wonder trying to go for an island landing was preferred, this seems like it could easily go wrong.
You probably should have mentioned that Japanese Navy planes were equipped with a domestic copy of the Fairchild RC-4 direction finder, licensed before the Second World War, in addition to the radio for communication, although they were unreliable.
Excellent video and great content!
I would like to add a small note. The carrier units always operated in mixed formations of fighters and bombers, so single-seat fighters mostly relied on two-seat and three-seat bombers with dedicated navigators for guidance. Of course, during the chaotic battles over the enemy carriers fighters would naturally get separated. However, a couple of bombers were typically assigned at specific pre-arranged gathering locations with respect to the enemy carriers (e.g., southeast) to wait for any stray fighters and be guided back. There are cases when fighter pilots missed that opportunity as well and were on their own. For example, PO Komachi Sadamu during the Battle of the Eastern Solomons was one such case where all he could do was roughly head in the general direction where his carrier was when he took off. Since the battle took place in the late afternoon, the sun was also rapidly sinking toward the horizon (imagine the stress) but luckily he was heading somewhat west which saved him some crucial daylight time. Still, he could not find the carriers before the dark but miraculously found some friendly destroyers where he ditched his fighter and was picked up. We can only guess how many fighter pilots found themselves in a similar situation but were not so lucky.
Regarding land-based naval units in the Solomons, most operations also included mixed formations where the bombers took care of navigation for the fighters. However, sometimes when fighter sweeps were sent and navigation was deemed challenging, they allocated a couple of bombers to handle the navigation. For ferrying operations, twin-engine bombers typically guided single-seat fighter units between islands (that is of course, when ferrying was not done by an auxiliary carrier).
the 3 seat Kate also had a Morse key so the navigator could send messages to the ship or other aircraft.
後期の単座機の隊長機には無線電話機があり、部下は隊長の声を聞いたり聞こえないふりをしました。
I'm full of admiration for a Japanese pilot who could risk their life one moment then fly out into the blue yonder trying to find a moving aircraft carrier using just a sextant etc. I'll admit I didn't quite grasp how the sextant worked but I'll try watching again. A suggestion for another video might be how German pilots used radio waves for night bombing. Also perhaps one on the allies Norden bombsight. Other more general topics might be how air speed and altitude is measured on aircraft. Artillery aiming might also be a good (and topical) one.
Don't rely on this video- it's nonsense. A sextant is nearly useless in aircraft for finding small things like an aircraft carrier. Errors in ideal weather can be up to 100 km. That's why the US invented radio navigation aids like TACAN. Bristish bomber pilots in World War 2 used astro-navigation and often couldn't even find the right German city to bomb.
Japanese carriers in WW2 transmitted homing beacons. The bubble sextants were provided just to give aircrews some hope of getting back if their radio developed a fault and the signal range dropped.
pilots*
or his*
@@keithammleter3824 Agree. I know how to use a sextant and I have great doubts that a fighter pilot could get anything that comes even close to a useable fix (let's stick with the 100km). A dedicated navigator in a bomber might be able to do so after intense navigation training and practice. Getting a fix takes patience, a few large books, concentration, a drawing table with a large enough map, no stress, and NO calculation errors. All this while keeping a steady flight and doing the dead reckoning simultaneously. Not to mention shooting at occasional things or getting shot at...
Can you imagine the Japanese who survive the fight with Americans at Midway and make it back only to find your carrier on fire or sunk?
Brilliant, really, really interesting.
What I learned is that I wouldn't have made it back.
Excellent content. Subbed already.
Thanks Mate. Apreciate it🙏
We see so many videos about what happened in this battle or that but your videos on how things worked are so valuable and interesting. Like "Shattered Sword" by Parshall and Tully
That book is a mixed bag and should be read with extreme caution. While it provides details of Japanese carrier operations found in few other works, their analysis of the battle is flawed and the central "revelation" of the work is incorrect.
First rate educator - thanks
Nicely done! Ty!
Thanks Mate. Hope U subscribed😉
@@x-planed But of course!
Allied navys had developed their technical radio based solutions bacause of the risks and losses that would result from getting lost over water using techniques such as described for the Japanese
I was just wondering about celestial navigation yesterday and this pops up. amazing coincidence so I had to sub. more upload pls...
Very informative. Thank you.
Its a wonder any of them ever located their target and /or ever got back to their ship. It would be interesting to know how many were actually lost forever.
日本海軍機の場合は計器飛行に習熟していたのでマシだった。
日本陸軍機の場合は地文航法に慣れていたので島から島への飛行で多くが失われました。
Ive always wondered about aviation sextons,. Im assuming a bubble sexton can be used in almost any craft.
But there was an RDF antenna on the Zeros and other IJN aircrafts. Or they were quite unrealible too?
エンジンの点火プラグのシールドが良いものでは無かったので無線機には騒音が多く、日本海軍でその対策が行われたのはかなり遅い時期になりました。
Interesting!
Very interesting
Thank You. Hope U subscribed😉
@@x-planed Yes sir I did 😊👍
Thank You🙏
Interesting. Thank your
🇦🇺 Kudos to any Japanese pilot in a single seat AC using these methods.
If you believe that, you believe in Father Christmas.
If you believe that, you believe in Father Christmas.
The difficult thing about a sextant is that it can only reliably give you latitude. Longitude is so dependent on the exact time and stability of the instruments that you can be off by a couple of degrees, which is as much as 70 miles error.
Nice video!
I had to think about the bubble sextant for a while. Would that work on a moving platform, like an aircraft? The bubble might be anywhere, because of centrifugal forces. Well, I guess, if you are flying straight and level, and not turning at all, you'd be okay.
I think a lot of Japanese fresh pilots could not return to their carrier due to the reasons described in this video.
新人パイロットが単独飛行することは想定されていません。
新人パイロットはベテランパイロットの尻を追いかけなければなりません。
I suspect they made use of the DF homing to get back to the ship, along with guidance from the carrier itself. The Japanese made extensive use of reconnaisance aircraft going out to do weather reports before they launched strike groups.
Japanese had some sort of radio beacon called „kurushi”. It was supposed to be used in case of emergency. When the pilot was lost he broadcasted the distress signal „kurushi” and the Carrier was supposed to turn on the radio homing beacon. But because IJN was too afraid to reveal carrier’s position to allies the system was seldom used
This is a great series. How did the Brits navigate over the ocean?
In WW2 the Brits used dead reckoning, bubble sextants, radio direction finders, and special floats they'd drop into the ocean to judge drift. Over land, they'd use landmarks.
Over a cup of tea
Corps, around 6:15, is pronounced "core" or corrr, emphatically not "corpse."
thanks
Dye markers for navigation ... You rapidly touched this topic in closed captions, but went so fast I couldn't read it ... Could you repost that. Info on dye markers?
I found the transcript about the IJN use of dye marker at the end of the video. Very interesting! I've read that carrier pilots sometimes follow the wake of the carrier to find home. Is that true?
I’ve heard about these two methods but I haven’t found any reliable source to verify them. You can find photos of IJN planes with narrow stripes painted on the fuselage, wings and horizontal stabilizers. It is said these stripes were used to verify the plane’s heading relative to the sea waves. Quite an interesting theory and I’m digging deeper to find out if that’s true or not😉
I'm a sailor and have taken a lot of coursework in paper navigation. I can do it but it's hard. Boats are a lot slower and take a lot longer to get somewhere than a plane, so the time it takes is reasonable. Even so errors are easy to make. I can imagine a navigator in a small cockpit plane plotting courses. But a pilot alone in a Zero, both flying and navigating? I just can't picture it.
Bear in mind aircraft fly in formations so one plane was responsible for navigation and the rest just had to follow him
多くの戦闘機は単座機なので、偵察機や爆撃機が戦闘機の編隊を先導しました。
I think celestial navigation is very limited if you are in a hurry, because it requires two sights with a time interval of an hour or so just to obtain a single position line, not a complete fix.
The Japanese pilots must have been incredibly good navigators.
What a dumb thing to say
日本軍の初期のパイロットはそれぞれが中学や高校でトップクラスの成績で卒業した秀才たちでした。
飛行学校でも学業が優秀だった学生は、爆撃機の操縦士から士官学校へ進み指揮官になることが多かった。
@@かこうえん-l4l Thank you for this additional information.
Wow this is horrible. So let me get this streight:
- If you can't plot location because of, idk, a prolonged dogfight, you are f***ed.
-If you are inattentive because of sleeplessness or any other factors you are f***ed.
- Japan didn't rescue their pilots so if you ditch nobody is coming to rescue you so you are f***ed.
- If you got rushed threw training (as was the case in late war) and didn't have enough familiarity with these complex navigation systems you are f***ed.
- If your calculations are off by a tiny margine you are f***ed.
- If the carrier has to change heading because it gets attacked or whatever you are f***ed.
Actualy crazy. I am suprised this worked at all.
Yeah, I kind of doubt they didn't have any other way of navigating besides dead reckoning.
It's a clusterf😱ck. 😂😂😂
ME too!!. I wouldn't last very long. Maybe 1/2 mission. Leaving and not returning.
Something not mentioned is that the wake of an aircraft carrier is enormous and very long, so it's considerably easier to spot from the air than just trying to see the ship in the water.
Thankfully the Japanese lost their carriers pretty quick.
I use IFR navigation ( I follow railroads ) .
Lot of work to do while still operating the plane AND watching for the enemy !
What was the additional info in the captions? It's too fast to read even at .25x
Which one?
You can check the 'Transcript' for the video; link is in Description box.
Planes tend to float for a while upon hitting the ocean due to the fuel in the wings - would it have been possible for an escort vessel to fish out a plane shot down by AA (or the pilots body), or simply check it with a rescue swimmer, and use the maps to launch an attack on the home carrier (if the pilots were given course and position data for the return trip, it could be used for a counterattack as it would have to have accurate data for the next several hours)
Not very possible nor practical, first of all aircraft doesnt swim due to the fuel, but rather due to the empty tanks and being light i general. But again it doesnt swim all that long couple of minutes at best. Also maps should be brought, translated and that would take time and by the time you have info at the right table it is already of little value. Besides that if an aircraft carrier aircraft attacked you, then you are aware of the presence of CV in the area and you can already roughly estimate its position or general area where it is so theese maps that are already inacurate by the time you get them are not really of that big value.
A6M等の日本海軍機には不時着水時に浮力を提供する浮袋が主翼と胴体後部に装備されていた。浮袋に被弾していなければ機体は海面で数時間漂う事ができた。
長いものでは3日間以上漂っていた機体もあるそうだ。
This had to be very difficult ,
Great video! Thanks. I was one of those who asked about this.
They used a secret weapon called the "Divine Wind". The wind would always return them to a rendezvous with the carriers. They stole the weapon from the Chinese in 1935 and perfected it for naval aviation navigation soon after.
The biggest problem of dead reckoning method is that measurement errors accumulate over time and, especially while flying over a large body of water, can't be corrected using known ground features as visual reference.
navigation before gps
Flying by Dead Reckoning in a single seat fast aircraft over water would be nearly impossible. You need a calculator, charts, a clock, pen, possibly rewrite your route and take notes, all this under threat of enemy fighters and looking inside. It could only end badly unless there was a multi crew aircraft caring for the formation navigation. Astronomical navigation in a single seat is unthinkable for many reasons. Besides, the Carrier wouldn't stay dead on the water waiting for her aircraft. She would be somewhere else.
Are you sure the IJN only used Dead Reckoning and nothing else?
Bear in mind that aircraft almost always fly in formations so not every aircrew had to deal with navigation. One plane in the formation was enough and the rest just had to follow him. Besides Japanese Navy put a lot of emphasis on navigational training
Yes, I guess that, for example a _Kate_ or a _Judy_ would provide the Headings for the rest of the blokes, but this had several risks too. I had a PPL when younger and remember how demanding pure Dead Reckoning can be when flying alone, even in good weather over land at 80 knots in a C152... it requests all your permanent awareness. 🤯
I remember from my PPL training course😉
You don't have to navigate with absolute precision to find a large island or a fleet of ships as long as the weather is good enough that you can spot them when you get close. Also, dead reckoning is more rather than less accurate in faster aircraft because the wind has a smaller effect on ground speed and drift.
Look how many planes disappeared in the so-called 'Bermuda Triangle' before the advent of GPS nav.
For comparison, American aircraft formations were often guided by a New Zealand crew flying above the formation. US navigators failed selection for being pilots. New Zealand is a small pair of islands in the middle of an ocean. Navigators had to be good to fly vast distances between islands.
Were they able to navigate home at Midway when their carriers were converted to submarines??
Yes.
They just converted their planes to submarines too. 😂
Some techniques are similar to the ones used by scuba divers
The fighter pilots didn't use bubble sextants, so this video doesn't really answer the question.
Doubt pilots of single seat aircraft were using Bubble-sextants as their primary navigation means.
Sure in multi crew aircraft/bombers with proper navigators.
But you didn’t really answer how single pilot aircraft navigated other than by dead-reckoning, which is notoriously unreliable over great distances.
Beautiful research. I hope you all are under-paid, under-employed university professors; rather than under-paid, under-employed adjuncts, not that it would change anything really. Either way, as one who won the liberal arts lottery, I have great respect for one and all of you. I like it.
So, the hard way
Thx ❤
English please.
This video is nonsense. Carrier borne aircraft such as the Nakajima B5N had a combat radius of nearly 1000 km. If you think dead reckoning over ocean will get you hone, you believe in fairies. Navigating with a bubble sextant and chronometer in perfect weather conditions will give you a single sighting error of up to 100 km - useless for finding your carrier. By taking repeated sights over a period of time a skilled operator can get the error down to about 7-8 km, still not good enough if cloud hides the carrier.
Japanese aircraft all carried radios, and the carrier transmitted a homing beacon at regular intervals. Often several ships were operating in the general vicinity. Aircrew could tune in more than one beacon to get a fix.
That's why things like radio direction-finding, TACAN, Omega, and the later GPS were devised - a sextant is just about good enough for ships looking for a land mass, but for an aircraft looking for a moving runway floating in an ocean, its almost useless.
Agree. This video is misleading at best. More like misinforming.
@@RodCornholio Unfortunately RUclips is becoming clogged with similar videos, made by people using AI to write their scripts, and not knowing anything about the subject. The advent of video editing software on PC's of virtually no cost, together with AI voices, means that almost any ignorant schoolboy can make a professional appearing video, upload it, and make a bit of money without knowing anything about the subject.
@@keithammleter3824 My hunch as well. Once the feedback loop of AI-mining-inaccurate-AI-generated-data-producing-more-inaccurate-data to be mined by future AI begins, I expect a huge amount of problems. LLM AI is terrible, epistemological ly speaking.
I'm waiting for someone to lose their life because, say, a doctor made a decision weighing an LLM's input too much.
As you know how important an accurate timepiece is to celestial navigation, I wonder if the Japanese pilots even had a chronometer (watch) accurate enough. Reportedly, a 2 second error would equal to about half a mile (that would be one mile diameter).
@@RodCornholio We understand the time factor very well here in Australia. After the Australian continent was discovered (1788), the coastline was extensively mapped by skilled British Navy navigators. Their maps have features plotted perfectly good enough for sea navigation in terms of latitude, because they took multiple sextant sightings. However the longitudes are all over the place, because they had no radio time signals.
But for Japanese aircrew, timing should not have been a problem, since their navy could broadcast time signals. And if not, they could pick up the signal from American time stations WWV and WWVH, which were strong enough to be clearly heard world-wide and accurate enough to get you within about 100 to 150 feet. These stations transmitted on multiple frequencies, so you could always find one free of interference.
😃😃😃
6:09 The English word "Corps" is derived from a French word. In French there are many dropped sounds. In this case the "p" and "s" are silent, so the word is pronounced "kor."
Bubble sextant or not, I don't see a single seat fighter doing that
Francis Chichester flew a Gipsey Moth biplane from England to New Zealand over Africa and India navigating with a ship’s bubble sextant, compass and a watch all by himself in 1929. He had to maintain 50 feet of altitude and held the stick with his knees.. When he took off from England he only had 20 hours as a pilot.
Plenty hrs to train on sextant i would die of boredom
The sextant is useless in an airplane. Ask the historical department of RAF Bomber Command.
No one can shoot stars in a plane that moves in 3d. An aircraft is not a slow vessel on the sea.
And yet a lot of E-3B, RC-135, WC-135, KC-135A, and many, many other WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War thru the Cold War aircraft equipped with navigators and sextants somehow managed to do it regularly. Ask the USAF.
@@timothy____1989 They did it with radio aids such as TACAN and Omega. The sextants were just a back up in case of radio failure. Once they got within range, they would be detected on radar and talked home.
The British used sextants in WW2 and often couldn't find the right German city to bomb.
@@timothy____1989 Yes, its no good having a manual back up method if through lack of practice you've lost the skill involved. In WW2 the Germans (unlike the British who didn't really care what they bombed, so long as it was German), tried using a crossed-radio beam system to hit specific targets, bombing where the beams crossed. They were foiled though, by the British transmitting on the same frequencies, which had the effect of displacing the beams.
I didn't say sextants were useless. Someone else said that. I explained how sextants were a backup to radio aids and could get you within range of being talked down - which is hardly useless.
The British didn't do very well at all relying on astro-navigation under combat conditions. Fortunately, on returning to England after bombing a German city, right one or not, all they had to do was cross the English coast, about 600 miles on a north-south line. Landmarks would then guide them, although it was not uncommon for crews to land at the wrong RAF airbase.
There ae no landmarks if your home is a navy carrier in the middle of nowhere.
@@keithammleter3824 you are correct, my apologies. You did not say sextants are useless in airplanes, that was @EK-gr9gd to whom I intended my reply. I need to read more closely, so I deleted my 2nd reply since it does not apply to your statement, both of which I agree with.
Fred Noonan, the navigator for Amelia Earhart, used a sextant to "shoot the sun" on their flight from New Guinea to Howland Island.
I would assume that the Japanese carrier planes did often miss their carriers. Ex. the carriers had to chenge their course. Within a 4 hour mission the carrier could run 100 knots in another direction and the planes had no chance.
Russian naval aviators have the easiest way of finding their aircraft carrier by looking for the smoke coming from the Admiral Kuznetsov hundreds of kilometers away..
I can also find my way home in my Mitsubishi.
By 1944 the Japanese were losing half to 3/4 of all their planes trying to deploy them.
Small wonder that the loss rate for Japanese carrier pilots was so high. If they didn't get shot down, finding way home was just as challenging.
Very good, but that's not all. On the upper surface of the horizontal stabilizer of many Japanese planes stripes were painted at an angle. These stripes helped the pilots judge the direction of the wind, presumably by aligning the stripes with the ocean swells. After the Pearl Harbor attack, a line of green dye markers were dropped onto the sea at the point where the planes were to rendezvous after the attack indicating the direction to the carriers. Still, without radio aids they must've lost a great many planes and pilots over the vast area of the Pacific.
Too, single-engine Japanese aircraft were often guided to their destinations by bombers
The Japanese copied so much aviation technology from America yet it never occurred to them that starting an air war with the country that invented the airplane was not a good idea.
Both of these methods are familiar to me but I read about them from only one questionable source and I could not confirm them in any reliable publication so I decided not to post them. As for these stripes, I also read the version that they were a cue for the gunners. If you could share the source of Your information, I would be grateful
@@x-planed Here you go: P.18, first and second paragraphs in 'Beyond Pearl Harbor' by Ron Werneth. "Before departing for our mission, Lt. Commander Egusa ordered us to guide all the Zero fighters to their mother ships by dropping several lumps of silver powder on an imaginary line drawn between the mother ships and Cape Kahuku....The dispersed powder formed a white line on the sea, which would act as beacon for Zeros to gather together..." There are two full paragraphs describing this.
Can't remember where I read about the stripes on the horizontal stabs, but I seriously doubt they had anything to do with shooting.
Thank You🙏
In 1954, the Royal Aeronautical Society of Great Britain exhibited a model of the “Tamamushi flying machine" invented by a Japanese, Chuhachi Ninomiya, in their exhibition hall and introduced him as “the man who discovered the principle of the airplane before the Wright Brothers.
In 1891 his plane flew for the first time with propeller propulsion.
In other words, there are many Japanese inventions, not only aircraft carriers and airplanes, that Americans mistakenly believe are American inventions.
I wonder how much of this our commanders knew. You could take down entire squadrons by harassing them enough that they couldn't take accurate readings or by forcing the carriers off course. I wonder how much that affected Yamamoto's decisions at Midway. His rationale makes a lot more sense knowing this.
There is a very good 3 part series on Midway from the Japanese perspective called, "The Battle of Midway 1942: Told from the Japanese Perspective (1/3)" (2/3 & 3/3 of course). The Japanese carriers didn't have a lot of time to launch, land, and service their planes due to the piecemeal attacks during the Midway battle. That really messed up their options for responding to new info. The details are very well laid out in those three videos and are well worth the time to watch.
The Japanese aircraft had good range, so they could also fly around looking.
When they found home, they exclaimed, "Ah so."
They would adjust their coke bottle glasses first, then say "Ah so" with buck teeth showing.
It sounds as if the Japanese decided to stick with a winner and copy the procedures and devices the USN had developed in the earliest days of naval aviation. It's my understanding the radios they did use in aircraft were American made until we quit selling them to Japan. The IJN borrowed a great deal from the Royal Navy and even bought a number of Capital ships from British shipyards before they began building their own. It sounds an awful lot like how the Chinese have borrowed, stolen and on occasion even purchased western technology.
Phew, sounds pretty hopeless.
Particularly for a 1 man crew in a Zero.
This can't be the whole story.
How many got lost?
Flew Alot Lucky and Despicable. IJN weren't any good but Lucky!
By the time Japanese zeros turned green they were mostly not returning...
I was going to watch your video, but you started off with an obnoxious YT ad. I clicked off in 2 seconds.
No wonder they lost
Americans had better technology like the YZ-RB system to get them back to their carriers. My father was an SBD pilot and flew missions from the USS Hornet (CV8) and the USS Lexington (CV16) during WWII. The YZ-RB system served him well on his scouting patrols, raids on Japanese installations as well as during the battles of Midway, Santa Cruz and the Philippine Sea which got him back to his carrier. The only time he got "lost" and had to ditch off the shores of a remote island was when the USS Wasp was sunk in September of 1942. His carrier, the USS Hornet, was alerted when the Wasp was torpedoed. They asked for their pilots to volunteer to fly their planes to Navy's base at Espiritu Santo to make room for Wasp's planes to land on the Hornet. He and the other volunteers were given faulty coordinates. (No YZ-RB was available to guide them to Espiritu Santo.) He and his gunner spent two week on the remote island with a French planter and his family before being rescued by a PBY just in time to participate in the Battle of Santa Cruz.
@@BP-1988 Dude that needs to be a book
@@johngarrett4288 Actually there is a book currently being written about my father's combat experiences during WWII. It's being done by published author and professor of history from a major university on the East Coast.