Davin Olafson, age 13, of La Mesa, Calif., for his question:
HOW DOES AN AUTOMATIC PILOT WORK?
Navigation is a way of finding your way from one place to another and knowing where you are going along the way. In air navigation, consideration must be taken of the wind since it can change the course and speed of an aircraft. The air navigator has the use of many special electronic instruments and aids to help him. Air navigation issometimes called avigation.
Many large airplanes include among their simple and sophisticated instruments a device which automatically steers the aircraft. The device is called an automatic pilot or a gyropilot, and it can steer the aircraft closer to a course than a human pilot can.
The gyropilot makes possible a more accurate aircraft navigation and more economical operation as well.
An automatic pilot for airplanes contains two gyroscopes. The vertical gyroscope controls the ailerons and elevators of the airplane. The aileron is a movable surface, mainly near the trailing edge of a wing, that controls the roll of an airplane. The elevator is a hinged horizontal surface on an airplane that is used to control the longitudinal inclination and is usually placed at the tail end of the fuselage.
A second gyroscope, called the gyrosyn compass, controls the rudder.
Corrective signals to the aircraft controls are produced when the aircraft moves from its proper course and position. These signals are voltage displacements which are amplified and sent to servo units, which have small electric motors that move the aircraft's controls.
Lawrence Sperry, son of Elmer A. Sperry who developed the gyroscope for use in navigation, invented and flight tested in 1912 an automatic gyroscopic stabilizing device for airplanes that used four gyroscopes. In 1932 the Sperry Gyroscope Co. Cnow called Sperry Rand) developed its first gyropilot flight control for modern planes. The automatic pilot was used by Wiley Post on the first solo flight around the world in 1933. The flight was made in an airplane called the Winnie Mae in a little more than seven days and 18 hours. The gyropilot is also used in ships. Controls forthe rudder receive corrective signals from a gyrocompass.
The first automatic pilot for a ship was the one used on a Standard Oil tanker, J.A. Moffett, in the early 19_20s.The automatic pilot aboard ships is often called the Iron Quartermaster or the Iron Mike. .