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Originally Posted by golddog
This got me to thinking about old-time flying, how tough it must have been. I assume there was a point where it was all visual?
In the beginning...
It was all visual and when guys started flying the mail in their open cockpit biplanes, they pushed the bounds of visual flying. The mail had to get through and those early pilots were under threat of losing their jobs if they elected not to fly due to weather. Consequently, many of them died as a result of flying into instrument conditions. The inner ear is easily fooled and this is one of the early demonstrations that a flight instructor makes for beginning pilots.
The danger of losing spatial orientation is that it is easy to stall or overspeed the airplane. Of these two possibilities, the overspeed was the more serious as you could very quickly exceed the structural integrity of the plane. Once a flight control surface breaks, bends, or departs the aircraft, you're just a passenger until impact.
If a pilot got into a situation where he lost spatial orientation, one life saving technique was to put the plane into an intentional spin. This is a very low stress maneuver and the idea was that you would exit the bottom of the clouds, regain visual cues, and recovery from the spin. One obvious potential problem was if the base of the clouds was too low to allow for recovery. Also, this was not nearly as useful during a night flight.
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During your career, what were the greatest innovations/changes? i.e., if you took beginning W0X0F and fast-forwarded him, what things would blow his mind the most?
The three big ones that came before my time were instrument flying, the autopilot, and the jet engine.
Since I started flying, I guess I'd list the following:
(1) Navigation
When I started, all navigation centered on the use of VOR (VHF Omni-Directional Range). VORs superseded the
low-frquency radio range which my father used flying in the Navy, and before that there were actual
visual beacons across the country for use by the airmail pilots. You'd fly towards one and the idea is that the next one would become visible allowing you to continue on your route.
Everyone used VOR for domestic flying and the international flights used Inertial Navigation Systems or LORAN (LO RANge navigation). LORAN started becoming available for light aircraft in the late 70s and I had my 2-seat Grumman Yankee equipped with a Maritime LORAN, which was not technically legal for instrument flying, as it was not certified for aviation, but it worked well. One of the drawbacks is that the early units did not have named waypoints; everything had to be entered as LAT/LON.
LORAN had a very short shelf-life as GPS came on the scene and was better in all aspects. The entire airspace system started to be revamped, adding named waypoints where before all we had was VORs.
[Aside: I flew the VOR route structure for many years and I can still tell you the frequency for many VORs in the Northeast U.S. just from memory. In my immediate area: Washington National (DCA 111.0); Casanova (CSN 116.3); Montebello (MOL 115.3); Armel (AML 113.5). I swear I didn't have to look those up.
The three letter identifier was broadcast every 15 seconds to permit a pilot to confirm that the proper waypoint had been tuned. A knowledge of Morse code was nice but not essential, as the dots and dashes were depicted on the navigation charts. After a while, you inevitably become pretty familiar with Morse.
I'll never forget the identifier for the ILS to Runway 12 at Dulles airport because for some reason it sounded to me like the cadence for a dance step. The identifier was I-AJS: .. .- .--- ... di-dit di-dah di-dah-dah-dah di-di-dit
At this point, I'm probably starting to worry some of you.
]
With VOR flying, we flew a route structure with numbered airways that went from one VOR to another. With GPS we could go direct to any point and many of the small heading changes en route became unnecessary. To this day, we use the numbered airways but now it's not uncommon to be given a short cut to fly direct. Quite often, flying the red eye out of Las Vegas to JFK, once we got above FL180 and talking to L.A. Center, they'd give us direct to Wilkes-Barre PA, a feeder into New York. You couldn't have done that in the VOR days as the maximum distance at which you could receive a VOR signal was about 160 NM.
They also started just naming fixes, just LAT/LON points which they created for handling greater volumes of traffic. All fixes have a 5-letter identifier and the original naming was often left to the local ATC facility. For example, one arrival into New Orleans has fixes RYTHM and BLUEZ. I remember flying an arrival into Denver and the fixes on the arrival were DHATT FFFAT DOGGG DONTT BARRK. And my all-time favorite were the fixes on the ILS to Runway 16 at Portsmouth, NH (PSM): ITAWT ITAYA PUDYE TTATT. The missed approach point for the ILS was IDEED.
(2) TCAS
You'd be surprised how many old-timers were resistant to this bit of progress and I'm not sure why. TCAS (Traffic Collision and Avoidance System) was introduced in the early 90s and now many pilots don't want to take a plane if the TCAS is deferred. It's a great thing to have throughout the airspace and particularly useful in the terminal environment for situational awareness.
The display will show all traffic within 40 nm of your plane and +/-2700 feet in altitude relative to your plane. Those limits can be increased to 8700' above or below by selecting a switch on the box. We make this selection when climbing or descending but leave it at the default when in level flight, just to de-clutter the display.
They've incorporated advisory and resolution capability into the box and this will give commands if a collision is imminent (within 30 seconds). We are trained to obey those commands without question and it is a legitimate reason to deviate from an ATC clearance. I've only had them in the simulator where we practice complying with the evasive maneuvers. (It will only say climb or descend; it doesn't give heading changes.)
(3) GPWS
A follow-on to TCAS is the Ground Proximity Warning System, which will give warnings and, if necessary, resolution commands (e.g. "CLIMB! CLIMB NOW!). The system has incorporates a database of the world's terrain (and, iirc, man made structures) and will depict terrain in various colors to show the threat level: GREEN- no problem; YELLOW- terrain within 1000' below us; RED - terrain above our altitude.
The warning system isn't limited to terrain avoidance. It will also make an aural warning if you get too close to terrain without flaps or gear down. ("TOO LOW! FLAPS!" or "TOO LOW! GEAR!"). If you start going below the glidepath on an instrument approach, it will shout "DON'T SINK! DON'T SINK".
I had a terrain warning one time, flying from SWF to HPN (Stewart Newburgh NY to White Plains NY), repositioning an empty J-32 at night. There is a ridge line there and ATC had us at 3000' when we got the "TERRAIN! TERRAIN!" warning. We climbed and notified New York Center that we were complying with GPWS (pronounced Gyp-Wis). His response, "Yeah, we get that a lot out there," seemed a little casual for my taste. Certainly got my heart rate up.
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Also, was there anything that seemed like a good idea, but didn't work out in practice?
That's a tough one and nothing comes to mind. If something occurs to me later, I'll come back to add to this.
Did anyone make it through this entire post?