Word: cockpits
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...cockpit of a big modern airliner is a nightmare of instruments, switches, knobs, push buttons and warning lights. They crowd for attention in front of the pilot and copilot. They encrust the walls, drip from the roof like stalactites and overflow into the cubbyhole where the flight engineer sits. On a Boeing Strato-liner, there are 598 gadgets to watch. The three-man crew must know what each one is, where it is, and how to use it instantly. In an emergency, a few seconds of fumbling may mean a crash...
Last week at Caldwell, N.J., Curtiss-Wright and Pan American Airways demonstrated an elaborate training device, the biggest and best of its kind, which can simulate both "disaster conditions" and routine flights. It has no wings; it cannot fly or even move. But crewmen shut in its cockpit (a copy of the cockpit in Pan Am's new Boeing Clippers) experience nearly all the horrors that can overtake a pilot. They are at the mercy of an unseen instructor who can "simulate" violent weather and faithless machinery...
Queen Victoria (following the confidential advice of Canada's Governor General, Sir Edmund Head) chose Ottawa as Canada's capital in 1857. The late Goldwin Smith* thought it a poor choice. His snorted comment: "A subarctic village converted by royal mandate into a political cockpit." Ottawa (pop. about 160,000) is no longer a village. Neither is it the "Washington of the North" that Sir Wilfrid Laurier hoped that it would be. It is not for want of trying...
...hazards of the air age is the risk of being roasted in a friction-heated cockpit. The fastest jet planes need refrigerating systems to keep cockpits bearable. But what if the cooler goes haywire while the plane is in flight? Air scientists have wondered what the pilot should...
Wright Field has been experimenting with a pilot's seat that is shot out of the cockpit, pilot and all, by a 37-mm. shell. The difficulty is getting the seat out fast enough to clear the plane, but not so fast that the sudden acceleration will injure the human spine or break the hip bones. The prospects for this look fairly good. Wright Field workers have proved by experiments on themselves, says Baldwin, "that a man can take even the forces of 20 'Gs' [20 times the force of gravity] on his hip bones...