Automatic Flying Machine

The public got a preview of the postwar private plane in a St. Louis air show last fortnight. The plane, it appeared, will be equipped with self-starter, automatic brakes, will be spinproof, stallproof, non-capsizable on landing. One model even got rid of most of the controls, reducing the pilot's job to turning and tilting a steering wheel. Missing from the show, however, was a plane that can fly with an automatic pilot.

Last week the veil of military secrecy was lifted to reveal such a plane. Rear Admiral De Witt C. Ramsey, chief of the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics, spoke in a report to Congress of "target aircraft."* The Army's great aviation testing laboratories at Wright Field confirmed his hint.

The Gyroscopic Autopilot is the basic instrument for all automatic flying. This is a contraption with two gyroscopes, one spinning on a vertical axis (controlling the plane's tilt), the other horizontally (controlling direction). They are connected, electrically or by air locks, with the plane's controls (rudder, ailerons and elevators). When the plane pitches, banks or makes the slightest deviation from a set course, the gyroscopes make instant corrections in the controls to put it back on course. The gyropilot acts much more quickly and holds a course more steadily than a human pilot can.

Landing is accomplished by means of radio. In a normal instrument landing, a pilot aligns his plane on a radio signal beam from the field and steers his plane along it. In the new system, the radio signals themselves steer the ship; the pilot need not touch the controls. One instrument, the "localizer," guides the plane toward the middle of the runway; another, the "glide path," controls its descent. The instruments can pick up a plane 15 to 35 miles away at 3,000 feet altitude and glide it in to a perfect three-point landing.

The research which perfected this automatic landing system was directly inspired by the operations of the Eighth Air Force in England; it was developed to take the strain off pilots in landing their heavy bombers at the end of long, tiring missions over Europe. It can bring a plane in with zero ceiling and visibility.

Soft Job. These two basic instruments are supplemented by a number of others: a gyro flux gate compass (TIME, Oct. 25), an automatic control for the supercharger, electronic devices to open and close the engine cowl flaps for proper cooling. The Flying Fortress now has 323 instruments, of which five of the most important are automatic, gyro-operated controls.

Does all this add up to postwar pilotless cargo planes, shooting through the stratosphere at inhuman speeds and heights? The engineers who have developed the automatic devices think not. They believe that for some time to come it will be necessary for a pilot, to go along to correct the machines' mistakes or inadequacies. But the pilot will not have much else to do.

*He also mentioned "guided missiles." controlled from parent planes, but left them undescribed.

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