How the Disappearance of Flight 19 Fueled the Legend of the Bermuda Triangle

There was a Belgian passenger plan that got lost on its way to Teheran and had to land in Grozny. Before GPS planes had literal human navigators with maps and sextants!

I would be more inclined to believe in the Bermuda triangle myth if it happened with modern planes and their transponders.

Your comment reminded me about the concrete arrows deployed across the U.S. for pilots.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/before-radios-pilots-n...

According to that, Montana still uses them.

Absolutely unbelievable there's not an overhead picture in that article.

Plenty of pictures are here instead

https://www.dreamsmithphotos.com/arrow/

Unfortunately, they de-commissioned the airway beacon system as an official navaid and stopped maintenance for the ground markers during the pandemic. Most are still there, but unlighted and unmaintained. A limited few are being operated by a historical society.

https://www.mdt.mt.gov/aviation/beacons.aspx

IIRC some passenger aircraft had a sweet periscopic sextant installed, and even the 747 still had a sextant port - not that it stopped KAL-007 crossing the Kamchatka peninsula...

Reminds me that there were a number of planes that landed accidentally on the runway of an Air Force base close to Heathrow, apparently because it shared some similar landmarks, some kind of gas tanks the pilots were using as waypoints:

https://simpleflying.com/pan-am-707-raf-northolt/

The British hid the Taj Mahal in WW2 from planes. In Indo-Pak war in 1971, cities and towns far from the border had to blackout. There was blackout in Punjab in 2025 war too.

.. how do you hide the Taj Mahal? Was there significant bombing against India, and if so from where?

Taj Mahal disguise https://old.reddit.com/r/OldPhotosInRealLife/comments/112cci...

There were Japanese and German attacks in world wars, and wars later with China and Pakistan.