🚀 go-pugleaf

dementia@cheshire.oxy.edu (Daniel Steven Reinker) writes:

>Here is something I've been trying to figure out lately. I'm not
>sure if there is actually an answer, but there must be.

>Say I live in Hawaii and go to Los Angeles for college. While
>I am in Los Angeles, I discover that I have the ability to fly
>at a fast speed. Now, I decide that since I can fly, I should
>be able to fly back home to Hawaii. Consider that I am a college
>student with about $50 in cash and a library at my disposal. How
>can I navigate my way to make sure that I arrive in Hawaii?

>Hiz Lord Dementia
>-- 
>"You can't help that. We're all mad here."-The cheshire cat, Alice in WL

>"A mass hysteria/a megalomania/reveal Dementia/reveal"-Metallica

You could follow a commercial airliner, if you can keep up.  Just go
to the airport and wait for a departing flight.

Assuming you aren't up to such speeds...

Get an AM radio.  Find the frequency for some radio station in Hawaii.
It would as probably be helpful to find the approximate direction to
Hawaii, so you know which direction to start.  Go in your initial
direction until you can recieve the radio station.  Determine in which
direction your radio is most sensitive by tuning an LA station as you
leave and note which direction you must point your radio for best
reception.  When you are in the vicinity of Hawaii (within several
hundred miles at night), you should be able to follow the signal in.
As you get closer, the signal may be strong in all directions, so you
may have to switch to a low-power station so you can determine
direction more accurately.  Hopefully, this should get you close
enough to follow city lights in at night, or perhaps sea traffic
during the day.

This is just one idea. I could probably come up with several others if
I thought about it.  One problem is that the AM radio can not tell you
if you are moving towards or away from the transmitter, so you may
have to backtrack if you discover you are getting farther away and the
reception becomes worse.  Send me a postcard when you get there.

Robert Brunner
brunner@uirvld.csl.uiuc.edu

dementia@cheshire.oxy.edu (Daniel Steven Reinker) writes:

>Here is something I've been trying to figure out lately. I'm not
>sure if there is actually an answer, but there must be.

>Say I live in Hawaii and go to Los Angeles for college. While
>I am in Los Angeles, I discover that I have the ability to fly
>at a fast speed. Now, I decide that since I can fly, I should
>be able to fly back home to Hawaii. Consider that I am a college
>student with about $50 in cash and a library at my disposal. How
>can I navigate my way to make sure that I arrive in Hawaii?

   As someone else suggested, follow a jet if you can fly at 600mph.
However, even if you could, you might need more protective clothing
than you could buy with $50 to protect yourself at that speed. Also,
you would run the chance of losing the jetliner, because you would
have to fly low most of the time (not enough money for breathing
equipment) and a heavy cloud cover might separate you visually. Of
course, a quick climb could be done up through the clouds (Would you
want to fly through a storm cloud?) Then again, you might be able
to fly above most clouds (no problem breathing at 10,000 feet, maybe
up to 15,000 - you might be used to that if you lived on a mountain
in Hawaii) and watch the jet at 30,000 feet.
   I think that you could do it even without the jet. Just buy a good
compass, test your flying speed and look up the direction of Hawaii in
the library. Fly the right distance, watching the compass, then take a
quick climb up to 30,000 feet and look around. You could not breathe up
there for long, but there are 9-10,000 foot mountains that you should
be able to see from hundreds of miles away. A little calculation would
tell you how far you could see Manua Kea, and how accurately you would
have to follow the compass.
-- 
Rolf Wilson     Illinois State Geological Survey    rolf@geoserv.isgs.uiuc.edu