AEROPLANE STABILISER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21543, 15 January 1932, Page 4

AEROPLANE STABILISER

AN AUCKLAND INVENTION A PERFECT SAFETY DEVICE. (Special to Dailt Times.) AUCKLAND, January 14. The testing of the New Zealand-in-vented aeroplane stabiliser m England, mentioned in yesterday’s cables, represents the culmination of six years’ thought and study on the part of its inventor, Mr Bernard Roberts. Born at Tariki, Taranaki, 38 years ago, he went with his parents, Mr and Mrs J. Roberts, to Otorohanga when he was 10 years of age. During the war he was a munition worker in Britain, and later a pilot mechanic in the Royal Air Force for several years. He owned a motor garage in Waihi, and two years ago he came to Auckland opening a similar business. A born inventor, Mr Roberts experimented with machinery, even in his earliest boyhood years. It is related that when he was .12 he built a stationary steam engine out of an oil drum, and employed it to do all kinds of work on his father’s farm. Some years ago he invented and improved a washing machine for photographic films, and after vainly trying - to sell the patent in New Zealand and Australia he took it to England, and sold it for £SOO to one of the leading camera firms in London. Two weeks later he received a belated offer of £2OOO for the machine from another firm. He also built an aeroplane in Waihi, but came to Auckland before he had time to complete it.

“ He is one of the cleverest mechanics I have ever known,” said Mr J. F. Nelson, chairman of the Roberts Aeroplane Stabiliser, Ltd., when questioned about the invention to-night. “ The device is simplicity itself. It works by gravitation, and amounts to an automatic pilot, attached to the joystick. There is no mechanism and no machinery to govern it, yet it controls an aeroplane perfectly automatically, preventing nose-diving, tail-spinning, and sideslipping, and returning the machine to an even keel more quickly and surely than a human pilot. It is, in fact, a perfect safety device. If the pilot should faint in mid-air it will bring the machine to a perfect three-point landing—that is to say, the aeroplane will come down with two wheels and the tail level with the ground. At any time the pilot can leave the controls and go out along the wings or tail, leaving the stabiliser to keep the machine automatically on a level course. Indeed, Mr Roberts claims than an aeroplane fitted with his stabiliser can commence a flight without a pilot and come down safely, and make a perfect landing as soon as the petrol is consumed. In other words, the stabiliser will do all that the gyroscope will do, and that the robot pilot will do, with this difference, that, whereas the gyroscope is a cumbersome and very expensive appliance and the robot weighs from 2001 b to 3001 b and costs about £2OO to install the Roberts device weighs only 201 b, and can be made and installed for about £20.”

It is understood that mercury plays an important part in the' new stabiliser, and that actual tests were impossible in New Zealand owing to the difficulty of obtaining sufficient quantities of the metal.