John Slade wrote:

Sort of a solid state, no moving parts, attitude gyro.

As soon as these are available, someone will try to fly home in zero vis
using one.
Natural selection?

Yep. There are some that say that like yourself :-)
Too bad pilots don't learn to fly before the age
of their ability to fertilize :-)

I would think twice about taking off in 00.
Actually taking off is no problem. It is flying through
mountain passes in low vis.

If you are IFR it is a good check on the controllers.

I wonder if that will prove to be true. Statistically
zero visibility happens less often. We shall see. This stuff
is coming. Burt's idea is to use synthetic aperture radar or some such
to see through fog. Cadilac's have a flir to enhance visibility I wonder
if people are driving faster in Cadilac's in fog. Probably.

If you removed the brakes from cars people would drive slower :-)

Paul Lamar

"Sneed, Glen" wrote:

You are absolutely right.  If you give the average person something to
improve there safety, they will push the envelope into the new margin zone.
Around here, the majority of vehicles in the ditch after a snow storm are
the 4x4s.

The moving map with 3D is an excellent cross check of that ATC Controller if
you are in IFR conditions or an additional aid in keeping you oriented in
Marginal VFR condition.

The static GPS data shows a CPE of 600ft.  That is reasonably accurate.  If
I remember correctly the briefing I attended over a decade ago, 600ft was
all the accuracy the military was going to allow the public.

The GS and True Course are internally computed by the receiver unit.  If you
except the fact you will only receive data to the above level of accuracy
and round to the nearest 100th place, the Course and GS are zero.

A suggested True Course and GS filter for GPS data could be two - 2
dimensional arrays acting as two FIFO (First In/First Out) queues.  Each
array contains 15 rows representing 15 reading at 1 second intervals.  The
True Course and GS average would be computed from the newest and the oldest
GPS readings giving a spot True Course and GS spanning atleast 4-5 interval
between the CPE error circles.  The computed values are inserted into the
second array and averaged with the other 14 True Courses and GS values to
achieve a weighted average.  Additionally, the True Course and GS would be
reasonably accurate 20 seconds after a major heading change and could easily
be used to compute a wind corrected mag head to fly outbound.

The TAWS sounds good on paper but is not a good idea for the GA environment.
One form or another of TAWS has been around since the mid '60's.  The
computers have gotten smaller and faster but the GA aircraft performance has
not improved significantly.

I have very little experience with non-military airborne radar.  The older
civilian weather radar would do terrain avoidance if you knew how to tune
it.  Most crews are not trained to configure it for terrain avoidance and it
is usually at a time in flight when ATC is keeping them busy.

Beside, who wants to put a 60-80lbs of mini-tower in there RV6 so they can
be flying where they shouldn't be.

Glenn Sneed

Hey a PC mother board does not weigh that much :-) See the North Star unit
if you want to see what is possible.

Paul Lamar


The Aircraft Rotary Engine Newsletter.              Powered by Linux.

http://home.earthlink.net/~rotaryeng/            http://www.linux.org