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Navigation and Bombing System

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Wader2 (talk | contribs) at 20:23, 25 January 2021 (Removed references to the Mk XIV bombsight which was never fitted to the V-bombers. Stated the radio altimeter was actually a Mk 6 Radar altimeter that was not connected to the computer. Mentioned the T4 bombsight vice Mk XIV.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Navigation and Bombing System, or NBS, was a navigation system used in the Royal Air Force's V-bomber fleet. Primary among its parts was the Navigation and Bombing Computer (NBC), a complex electro mechanical computer that combined the functions of dead reckoning navigation calculation with a bombsight calculator to provide outputs that guided the aircraft and automatically dropped the bombs with accuracy on the order of a few hundred metres on missions over thousands of kilometres.

Inputs to the NBS system included late models of the H2S radar, the True Airspeed Unit, a gyrocompass, the Green Satin doppler radar. A Mk 6 radar altimeter was used for accurate height measurement but was not connected to the NBC. These inputs were used to set the Ground Speed Unit, which carried out the navigation calculations, which in turn fed the autopilot system. The NBC did not feed the T4 bombsight computer for visual sighting.

References

  • Bonnor, Norman (1997). "Chapter 10: From the 60s to the 80s, The Last Days of Airborne Analog Computing" (PDF). History of Air Navigation in the RAF. pp. 98–106. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-08-03. {{cite web}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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