airway beacon 📷 🗺

So geocacher as I am I stumbled upon the airway beacon at Simpnäs due to there being a cache in honor of it. An airway beacon is (or was) a kind of lighthouse for airplanes. It was used to navigate at night. At daytime other landmarks and landscape features could be used for navigation. This is - as you may already grok - before GPS and such. Often this was a thing for post flights done during the night. They started to be a thing in the 20s and onwards. The beacon the caused this post was created in 1944 as part of the post route from Stockholm to Helsinki over Norrtälje, Mariehamn and Turku.

As a result of a tiny bit of research I stumbled upon fyr.org with a nice page about this beacon. In Swedish though….

written by fredrik at 2023-06-05