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Aviation History
1944
1944 - 1536.PDF
94 FLIGHT JULY 27TH, 1944 In Topics of the Day " Indicator " Considers that Designers are Asking Too Much of Adaptability —in Pilots and Suggests a Peacetime Standardisation of View in Utility Aircraft with Realism in their Design and Development IF the human being has no other remarkable qualities, he has two which, alone, would permit his continued survival in the strange, artificial, and sometimes ridiculous world which he has succeeded in making for himself and his fellow creatures. These are, first, the capacity for verbal or pictorial memory—so, consequently, of forethought based on previous experience (generally unpleasant)—and, second, the ability to accustom himself very quickly to odd conditions of life and to form habits of ...self-preserving action. I will leave it to the philosophers to enlarge on the first and to explain, perhaps, that mankind's one and only superiority to the mastodon and the ant lies in this power of memorisation and cons#qtfeiit garnering of experience, so that he has become a very efficient reflex machine— much more so than his four-footed or finned automaton cousins. It would be amusing to write a few thousand words, with tongue in cheek, vigorously expounding some spur-of-the-moment theory which would prove us to be no better than mobile automatic telephone exchanges—but this is no place for such cynical meanderings. Both qualities come very mucif to the fore during a war for survival and, in particular, during the training" of pilots. We learn to live in dug-outs and to be no longer quite so naturally allergic to loud noises add bad smells in a restricted world; we learn, in a space not large enough to stand up or even to stretch one's legs, to handle\ mechanisms which require more concentration and co ordination than thaty/of a locomotive; ajpd we learn to ignore the fact that within a few feet m our trembling little organisms there may be a heat wtgine developing as much power as that in the enginafroom of a, .smaL steamship—and all to hoist one chapjp,nd a fawsBBtUi calibre guns into the sky to do battle/withNhis fenemfcar i As I've said before on this page, he/pan ac^is\om Ijint^ self to anything iri the way of controWayouts aq^#ying characteristics, but, at least for the first few hours in a new and strange type, the pilot is incline^ to be vaguely unhappy and uncomfortable. And not only., when he pro gresses from comparatively simple types to 'tbc-se wither massive and lengthy control "drill." The fellow wfcornas been on big aircraft for a few hundred hours is almost as uncomfortable when and if he returns to a fighter type as he was" when he first started to take dual in a multi engined contrivance. Developing Second Nature On "conversion" to the mightier weapon, he feels, for a few hours, that the thing is flying him and that he is merely the brains behind it all-—and not very confident brains at that. He has a very great deal to look after, the controls feel heavy, and the layout in general seems to be unnatural. When the time comes to do the take-off or landing "drill" he suffers almost from a brain-storm. Yet, within a very few hours, the aircraft has become, once again, a mere extension of his own personality, with which he can do exactly as he wishes, without overmuch forethought or worry, running through his '' drill'' while chatting to the rear gunner on the inter-comm. and lower ing his undercarriage or demanding checks from his flight- engineer while he is making a final turn in to land. On his return to somewhat simpler types, his feelings, though different, are very little less unpleasant than they were during his first hour on a "heavy." He feels cramped ; the almost entire lack of forward view when on the ground and while coming in to land worry him im mensely ; and, unless the aircraft is a very simple training or communications type, he is disturbed by the way in which all the various devices seem to be crowded in on him. He may even suffer a little from a mild form of claustrophobia as he closes the lid and settles down to the business of handling all this crowded gadgetry and of reading instruments which are just under his nose—or may even be partly out of sight unless he lowers or raises his seat. Finally, he is conscious, too, of the critical " singleness " of the power which keeps him in the sky. When one of four fades out it is a small matter ; when one of two fades out there is still lots of time for consideration; but when one of one splutters into silence there is no time at all, and the earth below seems to be a mass of tiny fields with brick walls, H.T. cables, houses, and all of what I've described before as the paraphernalia of urban existence. -—« i Standardisation In wartime yry few pilots are lucky or unlucky enough to find it necerfary to accustom themselves daily to different layouts, and#those who need to have become so " accus tomed to accustoming themselves'' that it is of very little .--moment dpeept when a completely new type is being explored^ But in peace years these same pilots will not be in fifty practice—unless, of course, they happen to be stayiiyr in the Service or flying professionally—and we 1 n5gMtthen at least make a real effort to introduce some ^^ortif standardisation in the light and medium classes of SioKift. It is !not so important that occasionally used ityis, such as'undercarriage retraction controls and flap- fearers, should pe in the same relative positions, as that the jyl^QF control^ should be so, and that the view should be •"^jfolerably similar and cover the same range. There should Jrbe a standard and accepted length and position of control m column, /hid a standard height of seat in relation to the ' base of/the windscreen. Iry6lack and white, these things do not sound very iinjfortant, and the business of setting any sort of standard j»fould appear, on the face of it, to be almost impossible, /but I know that the pupil pilot's greatest difficulties in mastering a new type are concerned with these very minor points rather, for instance, than with any slight variations in ground and approach angles or characteristics. And after this war, those who are not flying professionally will be almost back to the position of pupils, and should be given the. best possible chance to see where they are going * and on what they are landing. Forward view is, too, going to be of immense importance if and when touring aircraft come into their own again and are used in any quantity. The owner or hirer, in a crowded sky, is certainly not going to tolerate the -sort of obstructions with which he happily put up once upon a time, or the sort of view which one gets even out of a modern single-seater fighter, and after a few dozen un necessary collisions the underwriters will probably insist on both improvement and standardisation. The latter is almost more important than the view itself; the relative variations in view between one aircraft and another cause most of the danger in casual flying around an airfield, because the pilots may accidentally close in on their different blind spots. Not that I look on the collision danger as likely to be very great for many years to come, and even in the com paratively crowded skies of to-day near-misses or phe nomenal avoidances rarely occur except in the sort of weather conditions which force all the aircraft to fly locally between certain limited height layers. Under a low cloud- ceiling one meets more aircraft per cubic mile than at any
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