Plain Tale from Brazil

An "infuriating story" is told in FORTUNE for January: the futile effort of Drury A. McMillen, Yale graduate, engineer and businessman of Sao Paulo, Brazil, to persuade the U.S. armed forces to adopt a new, simplified system of aviation navigation.

Minutes count in the air. With McMillen's system, much faster than previous methods, only ten minutes is needed to calculate a plane's position, accurate to ten miles, often as close as three.

The system uses a blank globe and four drawing instruments to locate positions graphically. The navigator must "shoot the angle" of two stars with a sextant. He marks on his globe the exact substellar spots of these two stars (i.e., the spots where these stars are directly overhead--obtained from star tables). Then he uses these two spots as centers of circles, drawn with the angle measured by sextant. The two circles intersect at two widely distant points; one is the location of the plane. At high speeds and at mind-fogging altitudes the quickness of the method may be literally lifesaving.

Yet Drury McMillen has gone back to Brazil with his method applauded but unused. He encountered the same obstacles that many U.S. scientists and engineers have protested. Visits to numerous Army and Navy groups, to the Office of Scientific Research & Development in Washington and to the National Defense Research Committee in Boston all convinced him that there is no agency that can give an outsider any practical assistance toward the adoption by the armed forces of a revolutionary idea.

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