In 1952 the Institute set up a working party, with Captain F. J. Wylie as its chairman, to make a study of the desirability of plotting radar observations of other ships, to investigate the relative merits of different ways of plotting, taking some account of the errors involved in each, and possibly to make general recommendations on the use of radar for avoiding collisions at sea. The working party has completed its study of the desirability of plotting and of different systems and methods and the report on this part of its work is given here. It is now engaged in assessing the magnitude of errors of observation and computation and the results of this assessment will be published in due course.

Introduction. The judgments discussed in this paper are mainly those which the pilot of an aircraft has to make in order to land. Some of these, as, for instance, the judgment of alignment, are similar to those made by the driver of a moving surface vehicle, but some, as, for instance, the judgment of approach slope, are peculiar to the pilot, and are very much more difficult. The main difficulties of the pilot arise, however, from the fact that an aircraft has six degrees of freedom and is controllable about all three axes, whereas the surface vehicle has only three degrees of freedom and is controllable only about the vertical axis. In bad visibility these extra freedoms confuse the visual indications in ways of which the person who has only driven a surface vehicle has no conception. The result of this has been that until recently most of the engineers concerned in the layout of airports have not realized that pilots have special difficulties; while the pilots, not having studied visual psychology and perspective, have been unable to analyse these difficulties, or even explain them in terms intelligible to the engineers. In this country, we have been able to find methods of bridging the gap, and enabling both parties to talk the same language. The practical result of this can be seen at London Airport.

History. The foundation of a ‘British Oceanographical Institute’ was first proposed, at a meeting of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the War Cabinet in 1944, by Vice-Admiral Sir John Edgell, K.B.E., C.B., F.R.S., then Hydrographer of the Navy, who expressed the view that Great Britain, in its contribution to research in oceanography, had fallen behind other countries, including many with no comparable traditions of interest in the oceans of the world and their navigation. The Scientific Advisory Committee accordingly suggested to the Royal Society that its National Committee for Geodesy and Geophysics should be invited to discuss, through its Oceanography Sub-committee, the general question of the need for and the appropriate constitution of a National Institute of Oceanography, and to present recommendations for the consideration of the Society and eventually of the Government.

The report of the Sub-committee for Oceanography, which was accepted by the Royal Society and referred to the Scientific Advisory Committee, was strongly in favour of the setting up of a National Oceanographical Institute in Great Britain with the purpose of advancing the science of physical oceanography in all its aspects. The Scientific Advisory Committee supported the proposals in the report, but considered that the work of the Institute should embrace both physical and biological oceanography.

In December 1953, a Canberra of the Royal Air Force Flying College was christened Aries IV, and thus became the first jet aircraft to bear this name, long associated with navigation development flights. This paper describes the first operational mission of Aries IV, an attempt on the F.A.I, point-to-point record for the London–Capetown route, in both directions.

The flight was originally planned as a final long-range exercise for students of the College, but since a great deal of practice had already been gained in maximum range cruise techniques it was decided instead to concentrate on the more complex problem of covering the distance in the minimum time. To add incentive, permission was sought and granted for the flight to be officially timed by Royal Aero Club observers.

Two crews were chosen, one for the outward and one for the homeward legs, each consisting of one pilot and two navigators. A two-man navigation team is rather lavish for ordinary route flying, but was adopted in this case to give experience to as many students as possible; in addition it resulted in faster astro work and more continuous map-reading, and gave a foretaste of the working conditions to be expected on arctic flights where a two-man team is thought to be necessary.

In 1935, Van Veen, Chief Engineer of the Dutch Waterstaat, wrote about some giant sandwaves which he had recorded on the Varne Bank and the Falls in the Straits of Dover. They were up to 40 feet high from trough to crest, and were found at either end of the banks. Although these dimensions seemed somewhat unusual at the time, such waves had been known to exist since the end of the last century, when Osborne Reynolds, experimenting in a model tank, discovered in 1899 that tidal streams could produce what he called ‘very large current ripples, possibly 7 or 8 feet high and 80 to 100 feet apart.’ In 1901, Vaughan Cornish described having seen giant ripples of that order in several localities, among them the North Goodwin Sands.

Giant waves are by no means rare. Early in 1953, H.M.S. Challenger obtained a trace on the Cross Sands, east of Lowestoft, on which several waves between 25 and 30 feet high were recorded in about 20 fathoms of water. During the summer of 1953, one of H.M. survey vessels recorded waves up to 50 feet high in a depth of water above the crests of about 12 fathoms on a sandbank north of Perim Island in the Red Sea.

The following discussion on marine pilotage took place at an Institute meeting held at the Royal Geographical Society on 19 February 1954, with Wing Commander E. W. Anderson in the chair. Commander Akerman, who has had considerable experience as a Trinity House pilot, first of all outlines the general requirements of navigation in restricted waters, and Mr. Hansford then proposes what he conceives to be the best solution at the moment to the problem of pilotage in poor visibility. Both contributions are here presented in summary.

The problem of navigating a vessel under conditions of bad visibility in open sea and in coastal waters has in recent times been largely solved by the advent of modern aids. The problem in pilotage waters, however, still remains severe and the handling of a sizeable ship in estuaries and harbours in bad visibility is today the exception rather than the rule.

The lack of progress in this field is due mainly to two causes. The first of these causes is the lack of a clear understanding of the pilotage requirements; the discussion at this meeting may help to shed some light on this problem. The second is referred to later. Commander Akerman has stated some of the pilot's requirements and the object of the present paper is to illustrate and further clarify the problem by examining some of the possible systems available to aid its solution. The paper will concentrate on radio systems since these seem the ones most likely to aid in solving the bad-visibility problem.

Anchor work is generally considered to be a question of seamanship rather than navigation; Commander Sharpey-Schafer's paper, which deals with a number of subjects only indirectly allied to navigation, is, however, presented here because what he has written will be of interest to so many navigators.

It may be interesting to report some measurements of refraction which Professor A. N. Black and I made this winter. These were made on the setting Sun, and as the altitude of the observing station was 480.0 ft. it was possible to carry the observations down to the horizontal and, in fact, under clear conditions, to −20′.

Mr. J. B. Parker, in his review of Sight Reduction Tables for Air Navigation, published on pages 98–103 of Vol. VII of this Journal, states that the time required by him to resolve a three-star fix by means of A.P. 3270 is 10 minutes (p. 100). He comments on the ‘errors due to the plotted fix being a hundred or more miles behind the aircraft's position’ (p. 101). Later he says: ‘An accuracy of sight reduction of anything better than certainly 5 minutes of arc, and more logically 10 minutes of arc, will therefore be wasted on a navigator flying with present-day instruments in a fast modern aircraft in high latitudes’ (p. 102).

The 10-in Douglas protractor can be modified to reduce the time taken to plot astronomical sights in the following manner. Two narrow slots are cut parallel to the central E.–W. line, and ¾ in each side of it, from the central N.-S. line to the western margin of the graticule.

Two practical measures might go a long way at the moment towards solving some of the questions raised by Captain F. J. Wylie in his paper (Vol. VI, p. 271) and discussed in the last number of the Journal (p. 202). The first is the provision of a suitable plotting device. It should not be too difficult to evolve a mechanism whereby a strip of transparent tracing material is passed across the face of the radar screen by means of two rollers (similar in operation to the echo-sounder paper passing over the plate in the modern sounding machine) in a direction parallel to the ship's course and at a speed representing that of the vessel and proportional to the scale of the radar picture in use. Plotting would be done by marking the ship's position and all other objects on the screen at short intervals and joining the consecutive positions of each object with a line. There would then be a continuous and up-to-date true plot of the area, which would be no more cluttered up with plotting than the actual area was with ships and objects.

The Nauticator is a vectorial computer for the solution of spherical trigonometrical problems, designed by Captain Leiv Jernæs of the Royal Norwegian Navy, who is at present captain of the training ship M.S. Sjöveien, Oslo. The instrument has been designed particularly for the rapid reduction of astronomical sights, and the calculation of great-circle tracks, distances and vertices. It has been sent to the Institute to assess its value, and this note will discuss its value to the air navigator.