In the days before GPS, how did planes find their way back to their aircraft carrier, especially since the carrier would not be where it was when they took off?
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It was a heck of a lot less accurate, for one. Planes would use a compass and stopwatch to estimate where they were and told where the carriers would be when they came back. If this sounds horribly janky and unreliable, it’s because it was. There are cases of pilots getting lost and disoriented and not making it back to their carriers before they ran out of fuel. Thankfully, pilots had a Commanding view of their surroundings due to being at altitude so even if they were a dozen miles off a pilot could still spot the carrier. For those that didn’t, that’s what search and rescue was for.
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