Six years ago, Mr. D. H. Sadler, in a memorable Presidential Address, answered the question ‘What is the Institute?’ This leads to the complementary and perhaps even more controversial question ‘What is navigation? What is its scope and its general pattern?’

If we look at the word Navigation in a dictionary, we may very well find that it is associated only with the sea. Today, of course, a much wider view is taken and the word is accepted as having to do with the land and the air and even with space. The definition: ‘the art of conducting a vessel on its ways’, may therefore be amended in words such as:

Navigation is the business of conducting a craft as it moves about its ways.