Highest Skill From Automatic Pilots

Northern Advocate, 27 September 1947, Page 5

Highest Skill From Automatic Pilots

(Rec. 10 a.m.) LONDON, Sept. 26. Scientists from the Ministry of Supply’s instrument research division told a Press conference that they believed the use of automatic flying for commercial purposes would largely be restricted to approach and landing phases because automatics could give higher precision than human pilots. Automatics would not, however, replace the need for the human pilot. Landing was the most difficult phase of radio-controlled flight and the stage of 100 per cent successful automatic landing had not yet been reached. EXPERIMENTAL APPROACHES The Ministry’s landing experimental unit had carried out over 200 approaches with the equipment fitted and the plane was still serviceable. The plane had not been landed automatically every time, but brought in down a beam by glide path control. The Ministry’s director of instrument research (Mr E. T. Jones) said it should be possible within two years to land a plane automatically with complete safety in thick fog. About 150 of the experimental plane’s approaches had been made with American automatic control equipment, but the plane had now been fitted with the British made Smith electric pilot, and behaved even more magnificently. BRITISH RESEARCH

Mr Jones praised the American Skymaster’s automatically - controlled flight across the Atlantic, but recalled British research and earlier achievements in automatic flight. The Ministry’s assistant director of communications development (Mr R. F. A. Waystaffe) said that Britain could have undertaken an automatic flight across the Atlantic 10 years ago if the authorities had thought it beneficial to flying to divert the necessary money and technical effort to the construction of the required automatic devices.