Science: Flying on the Ground

The Navy accepted for tests last week a small, light, glass-roofed truck which may save thousands of dollars, weeks and months of time, and many a trained man lost in navigation training. The truck teaches Naval Air cadets all they need to know about aerial navigation while cruising on the ground. Inside the truck are a desk, books, charts, maps, a position finder, and two standard drift indicators. The truck makes use of the fact that if the drift indicator is set parallel to a course, as in flight, each deviation from that course on a twisting highway will give an effect of drift. The flying student simply plots his course—a straight line on a map —takes findings as he goes along, reports to the driver how far off the course he is and gives him the necessary correction. If the student’s navigation is not sound, he does not fetch up against a mountain peak as he might in a plane.

The training truck is the inspiration of small, peppery Frederick Hayes Hagner of San Antonio, Tex. Driving along a dark highway one night several months ago, Hagner began to wonder where he was in relation to the spreading, whirling universe. From this random wonder came the idea for the Hagner Mobile Navigation Trainer. Hagner is also the inventor of the Hagner Position Finder and the Hagner Sextant, which are standard equipment in the U.S. Air Forces and Navy and among aerial navigators all over the world.

Inventor Hagner did not learn a lick of navigation during his five youthful years in the Navy. His scientific career began when friends twitted him for being an ex-sailor who could not navigate the ketch they were sailing across the Gulf of Mexico. Hagner, who left school at the eighth grade, began to study. The idea for his position finder came to him in a flash one day. The instrument is so simple that it seems absurd that none of the world’s eminent technicians had thought of it before. The model which Hagner took to Wright Field in 1931 (where it was approved by the Army) is now displayed in the Hayden Planetarium in New York City.

When Hagner demonstrated his position finder to the Navy, one of the officers observed: “If you want to do something for your country, invent a sextant without a bubble.” Hagner went to work. In 1939 he perfected his sextant. Besides eliminating the elusive artificial horizon provided by the bubble, the Hagner sextant also provides a permanent record of its findings. Army & Navy men say it is a thousand times faster, three times as accurate as other sextants.