For centuries strategically placed lighthouses have stood like guardian angels in the night, guiding passing ships and warning of nearby danger. Standing white, tall and deliberate at Australia’s most southwestern extremity, where the Great Southern Ocean collides with the Indian Ocean, is the Cape Leeuwin lighthouse.
This the tallest of Australia’s mainland lighthouses, it’s lamp at 56 metres above sea level, has been flashing the same code every night for more than 122 years. From 1955 until 1992, Cape Leeuwin also provided navigation services to aircraft. When the Bazflyers visited today only some blocks of concrete, once the foundations of a high radio antenna, remained as evidence of what was once the Cape Leeuwin (NDB) Non Directional Beacon.
NDB beacons transmit a continuous radio signal in Morse code and for Cape Leeuwin this was the relevant dots and dashes for the letters “AXB”. In the same way as a lighthouse is critical to shipping navigation, so once were NDB’s for aircraft. Today this function has been almost ubiquitously supplanted by GPS. The NDB receiver equipment that once guided the Bazflyer’s airplane, Comanche ZK-BAZ safely along airways in the sky, was ironically discarded in favour of GPS technology about the same time as the Cape Leeuwin NDB was decommissioned.
Cape Leeuwin lighthouse
Climb 176 steps to the top and this is the view
Two oceans collide at this point
Fly past a few days later
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