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>But then I would have the immediate problem of dead-reckoning that ancient Curtis biplane 500 miles over that empty ocean and back to the ship — not where it was when I left it, but someplace new — where it had zigzagged in those five hours.

>The pattern was a huge ‘U’ out from the ship and back, so as to cover everything to the limit of sight. During this time, the wind, which had to be estimated solely from the appearance of the sea far below, was drifting the plane sometimes as much as thirty miles one side or the other in an hour — a hundred and fifty miles in the five-hour flight — and the ship was also moving.

>We had no automatic pilot or mechanical aid whatsoever. You figured out everything by vectors, compass course, speed, distance, time and gas, and then prayed fervently that you and the ship would wind up somewhere in the near vicinity at the end of the flight. If you made a mistake of adding the magnetic variation instead of subtracting it or forgot a single wind figure or made any other ordinarily slight mathematical error, it was curtains.

>We lost several pilots just this way. One panic-stricken pilot broke radio silence against orders when he missed the ship, ran out of gas and sat down in the middle of the ocean someplace.

-George Lincoln Rockwell in his book This Time the World