AIR “HOMERS”

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 47, 18 November 1933, Page 18

AIR “HOMERS”

Telling the Way to go Home

One of the most important inventions in the history of aviation—a device which makes aerial navigation automatic —has just been tested by Imperial Airways Limited. This new device, perfected under the supervision of Senator Marconi, will reproduce almost exactly the mysterious “homing” instinct of pigeons, the secret of which science has never been able to discover. Fitted to an air-liner, the “homing device,” as it is called, will enable the pilot to bring his ’plane home in the worst weather as surely as a pigeon flies straight to its goal. When the new air route to Australia is opened next year all the machines on this vast 10,000 miles aerial highway will be equipped with the homing device to enable the pilots to fly with absolute certainty over desert, jungle, or sea, and be certain that they are always dead on their course.

The device has been tested with complete success on the London-Paris and Croydon-Capetown air routes. Details of the homing device, which has aroused the keenest interest among air experts all over the world, were given to the “Sunday Chronicle.” “In front of me on the instrument board,” a well-known pilot .aid, “is a simple little switch that can be turned to the right or left. If I am in any

doubt as to my right course, it is only necessary for me to put on a pair of headphones and turn the switch to the right. “A musical singing in the headphones denotes that the aeroplane is flying too far to the right of its true course, and if the note comes through with the switch to the left it means I am steering left.

“I only have to steer, the machine so that there is no sound at either switch position—left, right or centre—to know that I am steering straight for the radio station whose signals are being picked i.p.” With this new device it is possible for a pilot to steer his way across the world without either maps of compass. He does this by choosing as his guides wireless stations —any one will do. whether it is working specially for airmen or sending out an ordinary broadcast programme—and steering straight for them

The pilot will just lly from one station to another in a dead straight line, no matter whether he is flying in dense fog at night or in a sandstorm, for the homing device will allow him to fly from one place to another without ever seeing the ground once. The device can be fitted to any machine possessing a wireless receiver at a cost between £3O and £4O.