FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1960
1960 - 0335.PDF
FLIGHT, 11 March 1960 335 SYSTEM SURVEY The Vickers Vanguard flight deck during the climb from London to the South Coast on a recent proving flight. The three-pilot crew, two of whom can be seen, work close together, surrounded by the features of convenience and roominess which go to make o pleasant and efficient office. At one time five other people stood watching without interfering with the crew MoA and FAA Exchange Personnel FOLLOWING an agreement concluded last October, an exchange oftechnical personnel has now been made between MoA and the FAA. Three members of the FAA Bureau of Research andDevelopment have been assigned to the MoA for two years. They are David J. Sheftel, an electronics engineer; Charles E. DowlingJr, an air traffic control specialist; and Lt Cdr Homer D. Savage, USN, an operations specialist. A four-man British team shouldby now have reached the FAA's National Aviation Facilities Experimental Center at Atlantic City, NJ. They are Wg CdrH. I. Wood, Deputy Director of Control and Navigation Develop- ment; W. H. Garnett, Superintendent of the Civil Aviation Tele-communications Engineering Establishment; Gp Capt R. Burns, formerly Commandant of the Empire Test Pilots School; andA. N. Beresford, a scientist attached to the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington. The purpose of the programme is to exchange information ontechniques and systems in communications, traffic control and navigation used by individual countries for the solution of commonaviation problems. The American team is particularly concerned with transatlantic navigation. The FAA is also discussing withFrench, Japanese and Federal German air officials the possibilities of closer working co-operation with those countries. Automatic Landing by Radar THE Federal Aviation Agency has begun a six-month trial of thelatest version of the Bell automatic landing system at Atlantic City. An FAA C-54 transport and a USAF F-86 are being con-trolled by the new duplicated tracking radar and computers, auto- pilot commands being supplied by a VHF radio link operatingthrough the standard ILS receiver in the aircraft. Bell claim that the equipment can land two aircraft every minute from a "gate"position between two and four miles from touchdown. Details of the operation of the system were given in Flight for May 16,1959.Duplication, a new feature of the system, presumably offers the safety factor required for civil operation, but Bell state thatthe system controls two aircraft at a time, using both radars at once. For the Atlantic City trials the two radar aerials are mountedtogether on a trailer and the computer and monitoring positions, manned by two supervisors, are housed in a trailer. A power trailer is also included. It is intended that in any civil installationthe computers would be housed in the control tower, leaving only the aerials beside the runway. With the earlier single-channel military equipment, designatedAN/GSN-5 some 4,000 automatic landings have been completed on both airfields and aircraft carriers. Adaptation for civil opera-tion raises a number of problems, and particularly that of whether the airlines will be prepared to trust to ground-based equipmentover which they have relatively little control. An important human factor in the system is the fact that the correct settings for anyparticular type of aircraft must be made on the ground before the automatic landing starts. ,..-,.,„?,, , IATA Technical Agenda MAIN purpose of the IATA technical conference at Lucerne earlyin May will be to assess what the airlines have learnt from the first year of world-wide jet airliner operations. About 300 technicaland operations experts will come from many countries, represent- ing IATA's 90 member-airlines and also government agencies, airforces, manufacturers, research establishments and other inter- national organizations. The chairman will be Knud Hagrup,vice-president of SAS, who is also chairman of the IATA technical committee. Principal items on the agenda are:—exchange of views onDoppler navigation, heading references, and navigation computers and displays; review of high level and terminal area ATC problemsaffecting jet aircraft; cockpit design and layout and presentation of flight information; flight-despatch, take-off and planning pro-cedures; maintenance problems; airline requirements for flight recorders; jet crew-training; minimum noise techniques; andturbine fuel requirements. Redifon's New Radar Simulator " w r Now being produced at Crawley, Sussex, is the new air trafficcontrol radar simulator Type C.835 designed by Redifon Ltd. The equipment is intended for the training of civil radar controllers orfor the development of new techniques by experienced controllers; and one of its main features is that the controls for the targets arevery simple and do not call for trained operators. The prototype system contains four targets in two consoles connected to aRedifon display which is virtually identical with the latest MoA Type 3A display. Each console is on wheels and can pass throughthe standard doorway width. The target generators may alternatively be connected to a liveradar of almost any manufacture to introduce additional targets. A video mapping unit based on a flying spot scanner can displayany video picture which can be reproduced on a phototrans- parency. The transparency may also be made to move to represent,for example, moving storm centre. For military applications, radio counter-measure simulators may also be added. During a demonstration last week, one pair of targets wascontrolled by an operator co-opted at the last minute. He was able to control his two "aircraft" simply by pressing keys to select rateand direction of turn and to set on a dial the heading on which the "aircraft" should straighten out. Speed was set on a linearscale. Target position in eastings and northings may also be read and set on the same pair of veeder counters and a small c.r.t.display will show position without use of the main display. Another key may be depressed to cause the target to orbit at therate of turn already selected. Six intercom channels are provided between target and display consoles. The complete system may befrozen, leaving the scanner trace rotating but all targets still. Space remains in the system for provision of a height display and moreelaborate wind-setting systems if required. The new duplicated Bell automatic landing system under test at the FAA experimental centre at Atlantic City (news item above). A six-month test programme has begun
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
