FROM PAPER CHARTS TO DIGITAL SCREENS: A QM3 LOOKS BACK

If you went through Quartermaster “A” School at Naval Training Center Orlando in the 1980s, the modern Navy bridge would probably look more like the bridge of a starship than the one I remember.

I went through Quartermaster “A” School in Orlando, navigation was still a very hands-on, deeply tactile job. The school was part of the old Orlando Naval Training Center, in the area that is now associated with Baldwin Park. It is hard to imagine today that the area once trained Navy Quartermasters.

Back then, a Quartermaster's world revolved around the chart table.

We worked with paper charts, pens, dividers, triangles and parallel rulers. Chart corrections weren't something you downloaded by clicking a mouse. They were something you physically made to the chart in front of you. If the chart was wrong, it was our job to fix it.

We weren't living completely without technology, the Navy was already using electronic navigation systems, and I remember working with LORAN-C, which was a long-range electronic navigation system and one of the technologies that helped bridge the gap between traditional navigation and the satellite-based systems that would eventually become commonplace.

We also used SATNAV, an early satellite navigation system. Compared with today's GPS, it was primitive and slow, but at the time it was high tech. The important thing was that we didn't just push buttons and accept what the equipment told us. We still had to understand navigation.

We learned to calculate not in theory, but in practice. Pub. 229, Pub. 249, and the Nautical Almanac were daily tools. We shot stars with a sextant, worked out lines of position by hand, and proved a quartermaster could put a ship exactly where it belonged without a single satellite overhead.

In the eighties, every chart had to be kept current using periodic publications and a stack of summaries from the Defense Mapping Agency, plus updates from local hydrographic offices. Corrections weren’t optional; outdated charts were a hazard. Keeping them accurate was one of the navigation division’s most critical weekly responsibilities. A QM’s precision was the line between safe water and a bad day.

Now compare that to today's Navy. In today’s Navy a modern bridge is almost difficult to comprehend. Paper charts have become electronic navigation systems and digital displays that bring together GPS, radar, electronic charts and other information in ways that I couldn’t begin to fathom back in the day. The technology that once used a lot of equipment can now be displayed across a few screens. Chart corrections can be delivered electronically. Navigation information that used to need calculations, books and instruments can now be done instantly.

We went from dead reckoning and celestial navigation, to systems like LORAN-C and SATNAV, and eventually to today's GPS-driven electronic navigation systems. Each generation made the job easier. But none of them eliminated the need to know what you were doing. That's why celestial navigation is still a part of Quartermaster training. Technology is great until the technology you depend on isn't available. GPS can be disrupted. Electronic systems can fail. Signals can be jammed. But the stars aren’t going nowhere.

Standing a navigation watch still requires the same things it did when I was wearing dungarees: concentration, accuracy and the ability to remain calm when the stakes are high. Or to put it in terms of my Senior Chief on the Bridge, Know where you are. Know where you're going. And don't get the ship lost.