He survived a remarkable 75 bombing missions during the war, some of which saw airframes and equipment shredded and fellow aircrew killed.

After the war, he returned to civilian tax office duties, but after a few months he accepted an extended service commission in the RAF and, for the rest of his career, was primarily engaged in training and navigational duties; these included being a staff navigator at the Telecommunications Flying Unit at RAF Defford and teaching low-level navigation on Meteor jets at Advanced Flying School. His flying duties included a 15-hour Aries North Polar flight in a modified Lincoln bomber.

His service career ended with postings abroad: to Egypt shortly before the Suez crisis; as a flight commander at RAF Laarbruch in Germany; and to RAF Episkopi in Cyprus.

Sqn Leader Bernard ‘Bob’ Culpin DSO DFC    27 December 1921 - 30 May 2019

A full obituary can be found in The Times

INTRODUCTION

David S. Jones, a former Decca employee, provides this very fitting introduction to the Decca Navigator system

"I have been struck by one fact that is perhaps unique to Decca amongst the hyperbolic systems featured in this web page. The fact is that Decca was proposed, developed, designed, promulgated, manufactured, sold-by, operated, maintained and supported by one company during its entire fifty year life.

All of the other systems were developed as part of a quasi-government research program and subsequently farmed out to various contractors for manufacture; leaving their deployment and support in the hands of some government department. Typically an armed forces agency or the like was tasked with system operation and staffing. Since these agencies just looked upon their task as budgetary administration, no continuous bond developed between the product and it’s keepers. Routine changes in personnel and re-assignment of government agency responsibilities would only serve to break any continuity bond. All of these agency staff would only consider their time spent with these systems as part of a routine assignment, however dedicated the individual. Hardware manufacturers would likewise have a similar transitory relationship with the system.

Not so with Decca, which maintained a closely bonded group of developers and engineers for many years, all of who played a part in the history of the system. Even Bill O’Brien, the systems founder stayed active in the company for almost forty years after he first joined. This common pool of knowledge, stories and pioneering spirit is something which I believe sets Decca apart when compared with others."

ORIGINS

The difficulty of navigating a minesweeper across the English Channel and making a precise landfall at night was considered impossible without some form of precise radio navigation. Established on the south coast of England, Decca began transmitting on the day before the D-Day invasion force landed. Had this radio navigation aid not been available, it is now believed that D-Day would have followed a completely different plan. How did this all came about?

The Decca Navigator system found its origins in the United States but was later developed into an operational system by Decca Radio and Television Ltd. of London. Originally it was conceived by an American, W (Bill). J. O'Brien as a method of measuring the ground speed of aircraft undergoing trials and was simply named 'Aircraft Position Indicator'. Without knowledge of the patents of Harms or Honore and without even being aware of developments in the US by Shanklin, Donnelly, and Holmes, O'Brien worked on the system independently from 1936 to 1939. He was unsuccessful in raising any interest in the US Armed Forces or the civil authorities so the system lapsed until the outbreak of war in 1939. Thereupon he offered the idea to the British Air Ministry through his friend H. F. Schwarz, an American working in London for the Decca Record Company. Neither was aware of the work which was proceeding on pulsed navigation systems in Britain so the idea was rejected by Watson-Watt as being prone to jamming and subject to interference.

O'Brien and Schwarz, with support from Decca, then tested a prototype system in California using a master transmitter at 300 kHz and a slave at 600 kHz. Comparison was made at 1200 kHz and the accuracy of the system was demonstrated in a car. It proved the basic viability of the system and was a major departure from earlier proposals by using harmonically related radio frequencies for transmission. This solved the problems of identification and phase comparison at the lowest common multiple of the carrier waves without needing any sort of modulation. It was a neat solution and had the additional advantages of occupying a very narrow bandwidth and only using low power for the transmissions. It did not however, eliminate the problem of "ambiguity".

The British Admiralty, which started planning the eventual landings in France, had a requirement for an accurate navigational system so it started taking an interest in Decca in 1941. There was also a need for a stand-by navigational system to guard against any possibility of the existing "Gee" system being jammed hence further impetus was given to the development of Decca. Trials were organized off Anglesey in mid-1942 using the same frequencies and equipment that were used in California. This trial was highly successful and resulted in further research with assistance from the Admiralty Signals Establishment (ASE).

Early in March 1943, Decca was given the order to produce 27 receivers plus the driver and phase control units needed for the transmitters. All equipment was delivered by mid-May when the Royal Navy began its training and preparations in earnest. In January 1944, a test of Decca (or QM as it was then known) on new frequencies was carried out in the Irish Sea and it was also compared with the Royal Air Force Gee system for accuracy.

It is important to note that the Gee system was in widespread use at the time. The naval version of Gee (Outfit QH) was first used by the Royal Navy in the Dieppe raid in August 1942 and was subsequently established as a standard system for surface navigation. For Operation Neptune (D-Day), the initial legs of swept channels were planned to coincide with the same lines as the Gee lattice maps. So important was accuracy that some 860 invasion ships were outfitted with Gee Outfit QH.

Read More

On Friday 24 May 2019 more than 8,700 flights were handled in UK airspace in what is likely to be our busiest day of the year.

Highly specialised and experienced controllers, assistants, engineers, analysts, software developers and many other people, possessing more than 10,000 years of combined ATC experience, all worked together with sophisticated electronic aids in air traffic control operations rooms, control towers, remote radar sites, communications links and the wider aviation system to ensure this was a ‘normal’, if busy, day.

In contrast, on the 6 June 1944, there were 14,674 flights handled with nothing more than flare guns and signal lamps, paper and pencils, blackboard and chalk, rudimentary radio navigation and an enormous amount of pre-planning, hard work, and determination driven by necessity.

Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, arguably remains one of the most complex tasks ever devised. The statistics of those 24 hours are astounding: 160,000 troops (of which 24,000 landed by glider or parachute), 5,000 vessels and 11,000 individual aircraft took part.

While obviously bearing no relation to each other, today’s air traffic operation can trace some roots back to that day and to similar operations in preceding years.

By 1944, radar, used to great effect by the RAF in the Battle of Britain, had advanced in sophistication, as had an understanding of its application and countermeasures. In the early hours of the 6 June, as the first pathfinder paratroops were jumping out over Normandy, heavy bombers of Nos. 617 and 218 Squadrons RAF were flying race-track patterns over the Channel near Calais and north of the Seine estuary, gradually creeping closer to the coast of France on every circuit. At precise intervals, the crew of each aircraft would throw bundles of aluminium foil strips now known as ‘chaff’ out of the aircraft. These strips, then called ‘Window’, were cut to the wavelength of German coastal radar stations, and would, given the aggregate movement towards France, resemble invasion fleets on their radar screens. This was an effort to sow confusion as to the actual target of the invasion, and perhaps to persuade the German High Command that any troops and fighting reported in Normandy would initially be dismissed as a diversion.

Radar’s susceptibility to interference was also exploited. At the same time, sixteen Short Stirling and four B-17 Flying Fortress bombers were airborne, forming a line from Portland in the west, to Brighton to the east. These aircraft were equipped with radar-jamming equipment called ‘Mandrel’, and drew an electronic veil over the real invasion fleet. None of the long-range German radar stations in Belgium and France could see through to pick up the tracks of the 1,200 transport aircraft ferrying parachute troops, or the 5,000 ships and landing craft, to Normandy. There were, however, carefully planned, intentional holes in this veil, in order to allow those same German radars to detect the ‘fake’ invasion fleet being created off Calais.

Many aircraft that night were using radio navigation systems. ‘Oboe’ was a forerunner of today’s SSR (secondary surveillance radar) where a ground station broadcast was then received by an onboard transponder which then transmitted a reply. The time difference between the broadcast and the reply being received allowed the aircraft position to be determined. The ‘Gee-H’ navigation system was also in use. This was the world’s first hyperbolic navigation system, where the aircraft would send a radio pulse and then measure the time difference between replying signals from various ground stations. The principles of ‘Gee’ were developed by the USA into LORAN for the war against Japan, becoming a navigation aid more suited to the vast distances over the Pacific Ocean. LORAN was then continually modified and served many users, including civil aviation well into the 21st Century.

Read more about this on the NATS website

Trinity House lights up for end of WWI

Sunday 11 November marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War.

By way of tribute a series of unique events are being organised, including ‘WW1 Beacons of Light’ in which Trinity House is proud to take part. At 1900 hours, over 1,000 gas-powered Beacons of Light will be lit, symbolising an end to the darkness of war; a number of Trinity House lighthouses and locations will take part, being lit by volunteers from Trinity House.

Members of the public are invited to join us at the locations listed below to take part in this unique event.

Please note that those wishing to attend need only turn on the day, but it is important to note that access to these locations is often difficult and there are no comfort facilities on site.
Trinity House will light beacons at the following locations:

Heugh Hill Lighthouse (Holy Island, Northumberland)
Flamborough Head Lighthouse (Yorkshire)
Harwich Pier (Essex)
North Foreland Lighthouse (Kent)
St Catherine’s Lighthouse (Isle of Wight)
Portland Bill Lighthouse (Dorset)
Lizard Lighthouse (Cornwall)
St Annes Head Lighthouse (Pembrokeshire)
Start Point Lighthouse (Devon)
Cromer Lighthouse (Norfolk)

Organised by Pageantmaster Bruno Peek LVO OBE OPR, Battle’s Over takes place on 11 November 2018, with events throughout the United Kingdom, Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, and at scores of locations overseas, including New Zealand, Ireland, Australia, Bermuda, France, Belgium, Canada, the United States and Germany.

This event is inspired by a comment made on 3 August 1914 by Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey. He was looking out of his office window at dusk as gas lights were being lit along London’s Mall when he remarked to a friend “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

For more information, please visit the Pageantmaster’s website: www.brunopeek.co.uk