A BANQUET SPEECH ON NATIONAL RANGE INSTRUMENTATION AND ITS CONTRIBUTION TO SPACE NAVIGATION

Lt. General L. I. Davis

Peer Reviewed

Abstract: IT IS IKDEED an honor to be asked to speak to this audience-it would be a pleasure but for the fact that I don’t like to talk to experts, without a little understanding of t’he subject. As to space navigation, I am only an interested observer of the results of the intensely complicated engineering and scientific work being done. Now, if we were talking about aircraft navigation, I could claim some familiarity. I qualified as an “expert” based on graduation from a Dead Reckoning and Celestial Navigation School at Luke Field, Hawaii, in 1937. We flew Douglas amphibians and Martin bombers. Our texts and tools were Bowditch, the nautical almanac, log tables, and hand-held octants. I was sufficiently interested in accuracy and precision at that time to dig out an old copy of Bartlett’s Least Squares. With this I calculated probable error of my flight fixes to be ten miles.
Published in: NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation, Volume 13, Number 4
Pages: 382 - 385
Cite this article: Davis, Lt. General L. I., "A BANQUET SPEECH ON NATIONAL RANGE INSTRUMENTATION AND ITS CONTRIBUTION TO SPACE NAVIGATION", NAVIGATION: Journal of The Institute of Navigation, Vol. 13, No. 4, Winter 1966-1967, pp. 382-385.
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