Procedures for intercepting aircraft in WWII and Korea?

What was the procedure pilots used to do an intercept outside of seat of the pants in the days before radar scopes in the cockpit?

I can't seem to find any information about intercepting aircraft during the world war 2 time frame or the Korean war time period.

Was wondering if anyone knows of a good document, book, or place to go online to find above info?

You can do some research on the Dowding system, which is the first effective GCI (Ground Controlled Interception) system used by a modern air force during World War II.

Dowding System: http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-was-the-dowding-system

Also, for the german side:

The Dowding system was used even during the Vietnam war to great effect. The philosophy of interceptor aircraft was simple: go where the ground control tells you to as quickly as possible, find your target, fire, get the hell outta dodge.

Regarding aircraft radars, the first versions I heard of were fitted on night fighters.

Chuck is correct, however the first fighter that could really operate independently of GCI was the F-4 Phantom. The night fighters that operated during WWII were guided to target by GCI and used the on board RADAR to determine if they were in firing position.

GCI is still used today and AWACS essentially does the same thing. This makes me wonder why people are so against having map icons turned on in multiplayer.

This makes me wonder why people are so against having map icons turned on in multiplayer.

it's a pretty massive leap in resolution between gci and the map labels. the actual pilots would not have a precise real-time updated picture of where things are relative to him -- and in fact neither the gci since the gci only gets updates once every sweep.

The night fighters that operated during WWII were guided to target by GCI and used the on board RADAR to determine if they were in firing position.

right, and the night fighter was a concept that continued into korea. for a long time airborne search radars were just so heavy and workload intensive that the role of a night/bad weather interceptor had to be distinct from the light and maneuverable day fighter. it really wasn't until 4th generation fighters that the the day fighter role was more or less retired.

Guys while all this information is fascinating. I'm talking about the procedure for the pilot in the cockpit.

In todays world they talk AA, ATA, CATA:

Aspect Angle

Antenna Train Angle

Collision Antenna Train Angle

ATA, and CATA... wouldn't of existed for the pilots of WWII or Korea... so I'm wondering how'd they do that.

Thats the procedure I want to know. How'd they gauge ?,000 feet displacement, and at what angle to make their turn, when they had to guesstimate target Airspeed, Aspect Angle, and Altitude from target.

This is still a relevant task for an F-86 to get on the six of an unwary target without being too far behind or overtaking the target, or missing it all together.

There are two projects in development now that might help GCI implementations by motivated and interested experimenters.

Moose Framework (Lua mission framework that extends built-in DCS mission capabilities) is making experimenting with GCI scipts easier. Moose gives realtime controls to the player via Function Commands (the menu system used for ATC and other comms).

Viacom Mod allows Voice Attack control of DCS Function Commands (ATC and other Comms).

So using the two projects together you could try and generate 100% voice driven GCI gameplay.

I think some decent predictive math (a bit more advanced than basic distance and heading calculations) is required to make server based GCI truly as useful as the type that pilots received from human operators in Korea.