There I Was...flying an overnight repo flight from Misawa to Moffett via Barbers Point. We had a borrowed VP-47 aircraft manned by the CPWP Tactical Training Team (which include four qualified VP-31 instructor NFOs) with additional pilot and flight engineer support.

We had problems aligning one of the inertials so we set it in the slave mode to the other functioning inertial. After we got to altitude and were well on our way, we started to pick up the jet stream. Or maybe it was the other way around, the jet stream picked us up. Winds were soon over 200 kt and we truckin' right along. Soon we exceeded the ground speed threshold for the functional inertial (I believe it is around 540 kt). When the inertial dumped...so did the slaved inertial as well.

The aircraft did not have LORAN or OMEGA. With the combined wisdom of our four qualified NFOs, we decided we needed a cel shot to figure where we were. Cel shots are easy to shoot...when you have a clear sky. As we tried to find a clear patch, I began to plan for the worst and start finding ships or any of the small atolls that appeared on the charts.

It wasn't a bad idea but I forgot that part of my signal flow on where the radar got its nav info...you got it...it came from the inertials. Radar contacts would jump in whatever direction 10 miles at a time between each sweep. Even above 20K ft, it seemed a little wise to start donning my survival gear.

Just about the time we got the cel shot, we accidentally brushed up against the Midway Island TACAN. At the point, we were around 140 miles off course. Somehow someone got the bright idea to land on Midway at midnight during gooney bird season to re-align the inertial. We quickly demonstrated good wisdom in not pursuing that option. We eventually lowered our altitude, started the inertials again, and somehow did an inflight alignment over the TACAN position (don't know how they did it).

Anyways, we made it to Hawaii at a much lower altitude and arrived still an hour ahead of our original ETA. In retrospect, we could have made it all the way to Moffett in one flight...if we knew where we were and where we were going!

Lessons Learned:
Even a repo flight can become exciting. Know your signal flow and the cautions associated with the equipment. If there was some way we could have slowed ourselves down, we would have never dumped the inertials.
Even minor quals like Cel Shots can become quite important when you have no other nav source. If we had been shooting cel shots (weather permitting), we would have had a clue about how bad off we were.

Fly safe and come back dry
Dave "Devo" DeVarney
AWCS (no stinkin'AW) Retired