USAAF WW2 Aircraft Sextant In Original Bakelite Carrying Transit Case

Historical Scientific Instrument. The B-29 was equipped with a radio direction finder which was located on the top of the fuselage behind the forward gun turret. Just in front of that, and just behind the flight deck there was the gunners position which could double as an astrodome. The radio direction finder was used to guide the plane and locate its position whenever there were suitable radio stations available. For long overwater flights, the astrodome was used with a sextant to use the sun and stars to navigate. Bubble sextant Type AN 5851-1 with altitude averaging device for use on aircraft. Made by Bendix Aviation Corporation, Teterboro, New Jersey USA. Instructions for use with and without averaging device on two metal plates screwed onto instrument, one plate a continuation of the other. These sextants were used by the US Army Air Corps and the Navy in the later years of World War II, it recorded an average of 60 altitude readings over a 2 minute observation period, see Ifland, P (1998) 'Taking the Stars' p 185. The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF), informally known as the Air Force, was the aerial warfare service of the United States of America during and immediately after World War II (1939/41?1945), successor to the previous United States Army Air Corps and the direct predecessor of the United States Air Force of today, one of the five uniformed military services. The AAF was a component of the United States Army, which in 1942 was divided functionally by executive order into three autonomous forces: the Army Ground Forces, the Services of Supply (which in 1943 became the Army Service Forces), and the Army Air Forces. Each of these forces had a commanding general who reported directly to the Army Chief of Staff.

The AAF administered all parts of military aviation formerly distributed among the Air Corps, General Headquarters Air Force, and the ground forces' corps area commanders, and thus became the first air organization of the U.S. Army to control its own installations and support personnel. The peak size of the AAF during the Second World War was over 2.4 million men and women in service and nearly 80,000 aircraft by 1944, and 783 domestic bases in December 1943. By "V-E Day", the Army Air Forces had 1.25 million men stationed overseas and operated from more than 1,600 airfields worldwide.

The Army Air Forces was created in June 1941 to provide the air arm a greater autonomy in which to expand more efficiently, to provide a structure for the additional command echelons required by a vastly increased force, and to end an increasingly divisive administrative battle within the Army over control of aviation doctrine and organization that had been ongoing since the creation of an aviation section within the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1914. The AAF succeeded both the Air Corps, which had been the statutory military aviation branch since 1926, and the GHQ Air Force, which had been activated in 1935 to quiet the demands of airmen for an independent Air Force similar to the Royal Air Force which had already been established in the United Kingdom / Great Britain.

Code: 21550