Word: gyropilot
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...controlling direction). They are connected, electrically or by air locks, with the plane's controls (rudder, ailerons and elevators). When the plane pitches, banks or makes the slightest deviation from a set course, the gyroscopes make instant corrections in the controls to put it back on course. The gyropilot acts much more quickly and holds a course more steadily than a human pilot...
...group that it had gone the "Queen Bee'' one better. According to the Air Corps, an old single-motored Fokker had taken off from Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio, with three men aboard, climbed to some 2,500 ft. where one of the men cut in the Sperry gyropilot and threw a mysterious switch. Then all three men leaned back with folded arms while the plane flew ten miles to Patterson Field and made a perfect landing, controlled not by a ground operator but solely by its own ability to follow a radio beam...
...constant view-halloos but never a commercial installation. Whether the Army's new device at last fills the bill was, in the absence of real evidence last week, doubted by most airfolk. Most promising indication was the fact that an integral part of the system is the Sperry gyropilot. This extraordinary device is already capable of so many feats that it is not difficult for some professionals to believe that it can effect blind landings...
...Sperry gyropilot is named for famed Inventor Elmer Ambrose Sperry who was the first man to bridle the principles inherent in the gyroscope. The gyroscope is a carefully balanced flywheel and gimbal assembly so mounted that when at rest it is free to turn in any direction. When spinning it has a quality known as "rigidity in space" or gyroscopic inertia. Turn or move the gyroscope mounting and the flywheel will continue to rotate in the same plane. This stability provides a known factor which can be used to determine or counteract all sorts of variables. Sperry Gyroscope...
...pioneering commercial venture in aviation," and in Manhattan Eastern Air Lines officials pointed out that passengers constantly request to be "put on Dick Merrill's plane." But some professional aviators agreed with Boake Carter, pointing out such facts as that Pilot Merrill relied greatly on a Sperry gyropilot in his jaunt but did not bother to test it or learn fully how it worked before starting...