Word: beaming
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Trip 21 crossed over the radio range 800 feet above the field level at 11:44, swung left on the southeast leg for the approved instrument approach procedure. Somewhere beyond he made a procedure turn off the beam, held it briefly, swung back and headed for the field...
...eleven years of crack operation.) In that time death on airliners had taken 54 men & women. To Atlanta hurried CAB's crash experts to try to figure out what had happened. To start with, at least, they had a baffler. Trip 21 had gone down while on the beam, headed just where she should have headed. Experienced Pilot Perry apparently had started the same maneuver that brought in two other airliners safely that night under the same conditions. But somehow he had run out of altitude. Whether it was because of mechanical trouble or by his own misjudgment...
Lyman's device uses very short radio waves* which can be focused by parabolic reflectors into beams. (The shorter the waves, the better they can be focused.) Directed into space, the beam will bounce back if it hits metal. Lyman's device rapidly combs the skies with directed beams, picks up reflected signals with a coordinated parabolic receiver. Returning signals are shown by a spot of light in a cathode ray tube (heart of television receivers). The moving spot charts the course of the plane...
...this scheme work out? CAB admitted that it did not work out at all. Howard Fey crashed around 4:42 a.m. The tape showed that the beam had begun to act up three hours before. But none of the four listeners had noticed it. Trip 16's company of ten had been dead on the mountainside for an hour before Operator Daley at Salt Lake City discovered that the range was out of order. (Mr. Daley had overslept, was five hours late relieving Operator Andrews...
Beyond this miserable handling of an emergency, what stunned CAB men most was that none of the four men in the monitor stations knew what the beam was about, none had any idea of the urgency of reporting bad operation. For this, CAB, inferentially, took the blame. It had given each a book to read about radio ranges. All they had to do was initial it, to signify they understood...