You Want to Do What?

I know some of the things I will talk about in this post will be alien to anyone born after 1980 but trust me these things really worked when used correctly.

When I was assigned to the Pacific Air Forces as part of the 1^st SOS at Kadena AB, Japan we had a theater orientation program that took our aircraft to some places we seldom got to go to, both to familiarize ourselves and the hosts. It also served to establish a presence if we should need to go there on a real mission, so perhaps it wouldn’t raise as many alarms.

My PACOM trainer took us go to Singapore for a few days, a small island off Malaysia called Penang for a couple of days, and then Diego Garcia, a British owned, US controlled atoll in the Indian Ocean.  By the way, if you ever get to Penang stop into the Cobra temple and see all the stoned (as in high) hooded cobras hanging out watching and hissing as they slither by on the ground and in bushes.

When we got to Diego Garcia we needed to fly about six-hours of local training so the AC suggested we do a navigation trainer.  I could only laugh, but okay whatever.

For those who’ve not had the privilege of visiting Diego Garcia, it is an atoll that sits south of the Maldives and east of the Seychelles.  Its coordinates are about 7⁰18’ south and 72⁰25’ east.

The MC-130E we flew was pretty advanced for its time with a basic INS that had 9 waypoints, a really good multi-mode Radar, a navigation system called Omega, another called LORAN, as well as a sextant and a radar altimeter for something called pressure navigation.

We were going to take off at about noon and buzz around the Indian Ocean for 6-hours practicing our long-range navigation.  The same skills we had actually used to find the damn atoll in the first place.  The only problem was, neither the Omega, LORAN nor the pressure worked well in that part of the world.  LORAN had about a 2500-mile range, but there were no stations in the Indian Ocean, Omega had 8-stations worldwide and worked like an INS giving lat/long and course guidance (but coverage in the middle of the Indian Ocean was spotty) and pressure, which helped determine a line of position using the difference between an aircraft’s absolute altitude and its pressure altitude.  Unfortunately, within about 10 or 15 degrees of the equator it was worthless.  That left us celestial with the sun, and dead reckoning, as our basic navigation skills to practice. 

The only problem -- it was the middle of the day and the sun would only give us a single line of position.  So, while finding the sun was easy, getting a good line of position not hard we would never really establish a fix and would have to use the INS to really back up what we were doing.  While we were pretty good at turning the INS on and off so that wasn’t a problem, without some kind of fix how do you update it to know it is working okay?

As a compromise, I suggested we stay within 200 miles of the atoll (so I could find it on radar or TACAN), and sight-see the 60 or so smaller islands were part of the group. The guy who represented the British interests on Diego Garcia asked us to look for a boat that had been reported in the area but had not checked in with them to gain government approval to stay. 

We now had a new mission.  We would do “sea surveillance.”  This was one of our secondary chores back home; we would go around trying to identify various ships and report their location back to the squadron.   Kind of like a Navy P-3, but without torpedoes and any real training.  

You would be surprised how many good-sized sailboats with naked people hang out around Diego Garcia.