Word: vor
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...Washington's bitterest technical squabbles, the long rivalry between aircraft-guidance systems, reached a new phase last week. The Air Coordinating Committee announced a compromise plan that looks like a desperate attempt to offend no one. The plan recommends that both guidance systems, VOR (Very High Frequency Omnirange) and TACAN (Tactical Air Navigation) be "combined" under the hybrid name of VORTAC...
...VOR, with "Distance Measuring Equipment" (DME), is the present civilian-guidance system. The Civil Aeronautics Administration has installed 480 of its ground stations, and will install 82 more during the current fiscal year at a cost of $86,000 a station. The stations tell a properly equipped airplane its direction and distance...
Under the compromise proposed by the Air Coordinating Committee, the VOR stations will continue indefinitely to tell aircraft their direction. They will gradually stop, however, telling aircraft their distance. In many cases this service will conflict electronically with TACAN and so must be eliminated. Unless the Government foots the bill, civil-aircraft operators will eventually have to buy costly new electronics. Cost of a full VORTAC system...
...need is for broader use of Distance Measuring Equipment, which, with VOR (very high-frequency radio signals), tells a pilot where he is within one-half a nautical mile. To install the DME system will cost the airlines about $6,000 a plane. Says T.W.A. President Ralph Damon: "Certainly, we have no objection to putting a $6,000 device in a million-dollar plane-if it will work. But that's a pretty big if. The system has not been too well demonstrated to date." But Pan American World Air ways started using DME on some of its planes...
...most out of long-range radar, VOR and DME, better communications are needed between ground and air. The airlines want a more complete net of Government-built communications control stations, enabling airports to talk directly with pilots several hundred miles away (maximum range in most places is now 30 miles). With such new radar, DME and communications equipment, the airport control tower at La Guardia could pick up a plane an hour out, slow it up if necessary, reserve a landing time and guide it to a straight-in landing. By thus eliminating stacking, much wasted air space could...