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Aviation History
1979
1979 - 1891.PDF
FLIGHT International, 2 June 1979 1809 Arizona's avionics emporium MIKE HIRST reports from Sperry Flight Systems at Phoenix life aif LI' ki ll --IT "1 *;&» ill Avionics J»LMOST every current aviation pro- f\ gramme in the US, and many abroad, uses equipment developed by Sperry Flight Systems at Phoenix. The company builds avionics for aircraft as diverse as helicopters and air- superiority fighters, and has a large responsibility on many spaceflight pro grammes. About 4,000 employees are based at Deer Valley on the fringes of the Arizona desert, where there is also an airfield next to the plant, pro viding easy access and simplifying equipment testing on the company's own fleet of aircraft. Throughout its 22 years at Deer Valley the company has continually increased plant area and sales. The factory now covers 600,000 sq ft (55,000m2) and sales were well in excess of $150 million during the past twelve months. During a recent visit the company showed Flight several new and current programmes. Boeing's 767 and 757 airliners will have dual Sperry flight management systems (FMS). The company first looked at this market more than eight years ago, when the FAA first en couraged airline operators to consider area-navigation (RNav) routes as part of the air traffic control network. Sperry developed its Tern 100 RNav system, which had a 2-5 megabit rapid-access store, and which has been recently increased to 4 megabits. Applications have been few, although the unique storage unit has found a successful application in the F-18 radar data processor. Sperry believes that the storage unit was ahead of the commercial market and uses it for data storage in the new FMS. It is a small disc which weighs only 4 • 51b (2kg) and rotates at 6,000 r.p.m. Any data on the disc can be identified within 10msec—much faster than a magnetic-tape store. Sperry has the facilities to provide commercial operators with an up dated data base every 28 days, obviat ing any need for customers to main tain an expensive store of spare discs. Don Birkholder, manager of com mercial marketing, expects that pilots will soon become acquainted with the FMS. He stresses that it does not re place the pilot: "It does the jobs he reit wants to do, like tuning up nav Boeii?rs, radio sets and so on." growth »,FMS specification, an out- essentiallv^"nc system specifications, take data fron? for a unit which can •ad provide ur^ serial diSital inPuts embodies RNav u_™,ne outputs. It v' Pfc*formance and 3HMS •^-•••iw^^yjfc Boeing 8-52s receiving new offensive avionic systems will have Sperry cathode-ray tube displays installed at each navigator's station Sperry combined existing technology with modern digital electronic techniques to produce its flight-management system for the new Boeing airliners. The display and control unit are shown here flight-planning features which allow crews to optimise their flight per formance^—to use least fuel, say, or to achieve the shortest flight time. Among its numerous functions will be supervision of navigation position-fix ings—choosing inertial data or radio information as appropriate—and auto matic mode-selection in the automatic flight-control system. It will also be responsible for computing the data which are used on the flight-deck elec tronic horizontal-situation display. Sperry was unsuccessful in its bid to supply colour cathode-ray tubes (CRT) displays to Boeing, and is currently bid ding competitively to supply its equip ment to Airbus Industrie. The com pany uses Penetron displays, in which voltage variations in a single electron gun produce different colours. The sole disadvantage of this technique is the inability to produce blue—prob ably an essential background colour for an electronic attitude display. Penetron displays are easier to install, lighter and more reliable than three- gun full-colour CRTs, according to Sperry, and they are more rugged. The latter advantage has made Sperry choose the technique for the AH-64 and B-52 displays, the latter for navigator and systems operator stations. Data transfer between digital sys tems has to be free from interference. In recent years the trend has been towards the use of a single "data- highway" or data-bus, in which many messages are passed along a common set of wires. An essential feature of a data-bus is high-integrity operation, and for this reason optical data trans fer, using glass fibres instead of wires, has been proposed by many com panies. Sperry has developed a unique fibre-optics connector based on a thick-film hybrid circuit with a light- emitting diode (LED) aligned to a faceplate. The latter transmits light with very little, loss between the optical cable and LED transmitter or receiver. The LED can be connected directly to the electronics without the addition of amplification circuits, and by mounting it off the thick-film sub-
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