A navigator is the person on board a ship or aircraft responsible for
its navigation. The navigator's primary responsibility is to be aware
of ship or aircraft position at all times. Responsibilities include
planning the journey, advising the ship's captain or aircraft
commander of estimated timing to destinations while en route, and
ensuring hazards are avoided. The navigator is in charge of
maintaining the aircraft or ship's nautical charts, nautical
publications, and navigational equipment, and they generally have
responsibility for meteorological equipment and communications. With
the advent of GPS, the effort required to accurately determine one's
position has decreased by orders of magnitude, so the entire field has
experienced a revolutionary transition since the 1990s with
traditional navigation tasks being used less frequently.Shipborne
navigators in the U.S. Navy are normally surface warfare officer
qualified with the exception of naval aviators and naval flight
officers assigned to ship's navigator billets aboard aircraft carriers
and large deck amphibious assault ships and who have been qualified at
a level equal to surface warfare officers. U.S. Coast Guard officers
that are shipboard navigators are normally cutter qualified at a level
analogous to the USN officers previously mentioned. Quartermasters are
the navigator's enlisted assistants and perform most of the technical
navigation duties.Aboard ships in the Merchant Marine and Merchant
Navy, the second mate is generally the (senior) navigator.Navigators
are sometimes also called 'air navigators' or 'flight navigators'. In
civil aviation this was a position on older aircraft, typically
between the late-1910s and the 1970s, where separate crew members
(sometimes two navigation crew members) were often responsible for an
aircraft's flight navigation, including its dead reckoning and
celestial navigation, especially when flown over oceans or other large
featureless areas where radio navigation aids were not originally
available. As sophisticated electronic air navigation aids and
universal space-based GPS navigation systems came online, the
dedicated Navigator's position was discontinued and its function was
assumed by dual-licensed Pilot-Navigators, and still later by the
aircraft's primary pilots (Captain and FO), resulting in a continued
downsizing in the number of aircrew positions on commercial flights.
Modern electronic navigation systems made the civil aviation
navigators redundant by the early 1980s. Navigator Biography, NetWorth, Height, Age, Weight, Family, Married, Son, Daughter