Multimedia Gallery
- Topic: Navigating In The Air
Radio navigation relies on the transmission and reception of electromagnetic signals to determine position or course.
Antennas create four “beams” that aviators locate by listening to audio signals. When the signals overlap into a constant tone, the aviator is “flying the beam.”
Navigators used radio time signals to accurately set their second-setting watches. Stations around the world broadcast these time signals hourly.
This is a typical radio range receiver used in the late 1930s on private airplanes.
The Fokker C-2 America with the engines running on a specially built takeoff hill on Roosevelt Field before Richard Byrd's transatlantic attempt.
Distance flier and polar explorer
Ruth Elder was an aviatrix of the 1920s and 1930s who attempted a transatlantic flight with George Haldeman in 1927.
Ruth Elder and her co-pilot/instructor George Haldeman arrive in Lisbon, Portugal on October 25, 1927 aboard the steamer SS Lima, which brought them from Horta in the Azores. She holds flowers that were dropped to the ship by airplane in celebration of her arrival. In spite of her traumatic ditching and rescue, including the fiery loss of her airplane, Elder was determined to reach her original destination of Paris.
Elder's note to "Mother" Tusch echoes the appeal of female aviators from the era to be treated just as the "boys."
Ruth Elder’s airplane was paid for by investors from Wheeling, West Virginia who saw great financial opportunity in the prospects for cashing in on the fame of a female Lindbergh. The plane was certainly capable of an Atlantic crossing and compared favorably with Lindbergh’s Ryan NYP. Elder and Haldeman’s flight was plagued by severe icing that required the jettisoning of fuel and, ultimately, an oil leak that lead to the ditching of the “American Girl” hundreds of miles from the Azores.