Word: pilots
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...speed of aircraft increases, the strain on the pilot's judgment increases even faster. A good part of the trouble, thinks Commander George W. Hoover of the Office of Naval Research, is that the aircraft's swarm of instruments make their reports in figures, usually the positions of needles on round dials. The pilot's brain, however, is designed to work with pictures taken from a visual world. Before the instrument readings mean anything to it, the brain must transpose and combine them into something like a visual picture. It takes time for the brain to function...
Commander Hoover believes that the best solution of this problem will be to make the instruments' reports as visual as possible. A simple example is to make the altimeter display a line that rises with increasing altitude, instead of the present clocklike dial, which demands interpretation by the pilot...
...ultimate instrument system, says Commander Hoover, should be completely visual. When the pilot runs into thick weather and loses sight of the ground, a screen before him will light up, showing him a map of the ground below. The moving silhouette of a small airplane will tell him his position, and a luminous curve on the map will tell him how far he can fly without running out of fuel. Another luminous screen will show him a radar view of the terrain ahead, with mountains or other obstacles. These meaning-packed pictures will be the output of a lightweight computer...
...ground, the airlines already employ about 5,000 Negroes, roughly 4% of their working force, as fuelers, cleaners, mechanics, ticket sellers, secretaries. But in the air, no scheduled U.S. passenger line employs a Negro pilot, stewardess, navigator, flight engineer or radio operator. Since 1945, New York's antidiscrimination commission has investigated 16 complaints filed by disappointed Negro applicants against seven airlines, found some discrimination in half the cases...
Died. Michel Detroyat, 50, flamboyant French stunt pilot who in 1932 set a record for flying upside down (26 min. 2.4 sec.), later (1936) became the first foreigner to win the UfS.'s Thompson Trophy race (at a record 264.261 m.p.h.); of a cerebral embolism; in Paris...