WASHINGTON — If you successfully navigate to the coordinates posted at the entrance — 38 degrees 53 minutes 18 seconds north latitude and 77 degrees 1 minute 8 seconds west longitude — you will find yourself at the new permanent exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum, “Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting From Here to There.” And if you then make your way through the 5,000 square feet devoted to this show, most of which is superbly executed, you will realize just how astounding that initial feat was: to journey to a particular spot on the globe, consulting, perhaps, no more than a pocket-size smartphone, without risk of loss of life.

After all, as we learn in this exhibition, the inability to judge longitude with any accuracy in 1707 led a fleet of Britain’s Royal Navy ships to slam into coastal rocks and sink, killing more than 1,000 men. The disaster inspired the Longitude Act of 1714, promising £20,000 (equal to more than $3 million today) to anybody who could invent an instrument that would give a ship’s location within a rough accuracy of 30 nautical miles. But the invention of such instruments later in the 18th century did not do much for early navigators of the air in the 20th. Charles Lindbergh, we learn, made his famous trans-Atlantic flight in 1927 with little more than a compass and a clock, but he succeeded more through luck than skill; pilots with better training and equipment disappeared in the unfriendly skies. We also see a painting of a United States Navy navigator sitting in the open nose of a Curtiss NC-4 crossing the Atlantic in 1919; instruments originally designed for ships were clutched in a whipping wind in an effort to determine location.