Sir Francis Chichester (1901-1972), best known today for his solo single-handed voyage around the world in the yacht Gipsy Moth IV, first learned to navigate in the air. In fact, he was a pioneering aviator (the first to fly solo across the Tasman Sea from east to west) and he only took to sailing towards the end of his career.

Chichester was to become an expert navigator, but, like the rest of us, he had to learn. Here’s his entertaining account of how, in 1929, he flew a Gipsy Moth aircraft from Liverpool to North Devon, not long after he had acquired his solo license (‘Bradshaw’, I should explain, was the standard railway handbook of the day):

The aeroplane was so knew that it had not yet been fitted with a compass. I was ‘flying by Bradshaw’, following the railway lines across the country, and I wondered if I could fly by the sun. The sky was overcast…I climbed up into the cloud, and proceeded until I had passed through a 9,000-feet layer of it to emerge at 10,000 feet in brilliant sunshine over a snowy-white field of cloud. Not only had I no compass, but no blind flying instruments at all…After flying along for half an hour by the sun, I climbed down through the 9,000-feet layer of cloud. I then wanted to find out how accurately I had carried out this manoeuvre, and I used a sound principle of navigation. I fixed my position by the easiest method available – I flew round a railway station low down, and read the name off the platform. By some extraordinary fluke I was right on course. I probably uttered for the first time the navigator’s famous cry ‘Spot on!’

From The Lonely Sea and Sky, Chapter 7. (Hodder and Stoughton, 1964)