Blind Landing

Again & again the past three weeks a twin-motored Boeing 247-D transport took off from Oakland airport, circled lazily in the California sun, came in swiftly to a perfect landing. Each time the pilot, who could see nothing outside because canvas covered the windows, ignored wheel and rudder bar completely, merely twiddled a few knobs on the dashboard. Last week, with this technique producing 24 perfect landings out of every 25 at empts, United Airlines announced it had finally devised a practicable method of landing "blind."

Flying blind is nothing new. All trans port pilots do it as a matter of course, letting a robot pilot keep the plane on the flying beam radioed from each major airport. Landing blind is another matter. First done in 1929 by Major James Harold Doolittle while a safety man watched from an open cockpit, it was not successfully executed solo until 1932 when Captain Albert F. Hegenberger managed it at Dayton. Since then, though many a method has been tried for commercial use, none has proved satisfactory enough to permit planes to take-off & land when fog shuts down.

United's system embodies no new principle, is merely a new combination of two well-known mechanisms -- the robot pilot and the landing beam system designed in 1933 by the Bureau of Air Commerce. As the plane approaches the airport, it leaves the flying beam and picks up two new beams by means of a special cross-shaped antenna on the plane's nose. One of these is a vertical directional beam about five feet wide at the airport. The other is a lateral, curved landing beam which slants down onto the field from one side, almost vertical ten miles out, 60 feet above ground at field edge, 15 feet above at field-centre. When the pilot has put his plane squarely on the junction of these two beams, he turns the control over to the robot which brings the plane down the invisible slope to a landing. All the human pilot does is to handle the throttle, watch the instruments, apply the brakes when the wheels touch.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.