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Genius

Very similar to the British system that also used a rotating beam. When the beam passed the aircraft, it would give the pilot and navigator a beep, and they would look at their watch to determine the azimuth they had to turn to return to their carrier. Great mines think alikie.

excellent

I vaguely remember reading in a book that aircraft had a transmitter to being them back to the carriers in my early 20s. But this 4 1/2 minute video really added a lot of detail. Thank you.

Couldn't the japanese simply triangulate the signal?

So, the hard way

Very informative. Thank you.

Veryy cool but how did the IJN pilots find their way back? Japanese had no fancy electronic gear, most barely had radar.

Couldn't the Japanese just triangulate the signal to find it?

How did changing the letters "make the system very secure"?! Couldn't the enemy just direction find / triangulate on the signal, and/or measure signal strength changes, whatever letter is being broadcast?!

I had no idea this system existed.

3:30 what everyone came for........

Man having to memorize the letters and heading that changes everyday must be a nightmare, though I think nobody would stop you from taping a note onto the cockpit to remind you what the day’s codes are.

How often do those wires snap? It would suck to be nearby if and when that happened.

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.

Did the Neptune had enough speed and altitude to escape a nuclear blast?

Please don't add music to videos where you are talking. It makes it harder for some listeners to understand you. Thank you.

yeah ..all well and good but you have to be within range of the signal .. no good if you are 300 miles out not knowing which heading to take even get within signal range ..never mind carrier range

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.

Corps, around 6:15, is pronounced "core" or corrr, emphatically not "corpse."

No wonder America won the war. We didn't have to deal with all this.

An idea would be how the pistons and shuttle predictably decelerate at the end. Its all pretty fascinating.

You often see ww2 carrier pilots carrying a plotting board. heres a brief explanation th-cam.com/video/aW-09UK0QVw/w-d-xo.htmlsi=C3t0mwWf7HlbqMQr

the British used a clock-based system iirc...?

I don't think this is true. Such a system would allow the enemy to radio-locate the aircraft carrier. I believe the crews were told where the carrier would be after the mission, and the pilots had to navigate their way back. Not easy to do, but the priority was to protect the carrier.

Ive always wondered about aviation sextons,. Im assuming a bubble sexton can be used in almost any craft.

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."

Thks. I now know something I didn't know before I saw your video.

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.

We used a similar Pie chart for Airfield operations in Iraq.

Reminds me how the modern VOR works. Except, VORs are a lot more precise than this system and uses two signals to interpret bearing information on the VOR receivers on aircrafts

Now that’s something i never knew. Thank-you!

My gramps was a navigator on B17s in the pacific. They would need to locate tiny remote islands for landing using using his hand calculations alone. Using a "computer" which was something like a very specially designed slide rule.

I was going to watch your video, but you started off with an obnoxious YT ad. I clicked off in 2 seconds.

Why Japanese didn't use direction finding to locate US Carriers?

By the time Japanese zeros turned green they were mostly not returning...

America's pilots should not be chemming Americans

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.

So how did the Japanese solve this problem? And the British?

Interesting!

At the rate America was producing carriers, by the end of the war, all a pilot had to do was look down to spot one!

The Japanese pilots must have been incredibly good navigators.

Very interesting. First time hearing about this system.

The Japanese aircraft had good range, so they could also fly around looking. When they found home, they exclaimed, "Ah so."

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.

Very Interesting. I'm an old WW2 buff and never knew this!

Good video (the voice-over needs work). Thanks! 😃

Clever but simple at the same time.

No wonder they lost

1:08 / 2:00 - I think you said the antenna resembled a hay rake?