In 1947 an USA Air Force plane flew from America to Europe completely by autopilot. There were no computers at the time. How was it done?
The plane took off from America, flew over the ocean, arrived in Europe and landed on a British airport completely under control of the automatic pilot. No man interfered; the autopilot took all the decisions and did everything by itself. I would have thought this impossible without a computer AI to control the plane. Anyone can explain how did that autopilot work?
The problem was it was supposed to be flying to Canada.
Analog machines.
There WERE computers in the 1940's, but they tended to not be digital; they were analog computers.
Which does not mean that they didn't work. Which they did. But they were hard to program.
Not having all the details on Bill Lear's F-5, I presume that the crew on board kept feeding it navigational information as the flight progressed, with the autopilot essentially keeping the heading on track. For the landing, it zeroed onto a homing radio signal emitted on the landing strip axis.
Back in the day, autopilots were just high-tech radio receivers. They used radio direction finders to track beacons transmitted from ground stations along the airplane's route. Current instrument landing systems (ILS) still use similar radio signals to guide the aircraft to a landing.
Here's a good web site to learn the history of radio navigation…
Mousefarts 🐁 💨
Even in 1947, you could build analog electronics that would hold the wings level, and maintain altitude and gyro bearing. Analog computers, not digital, but they got the job done.
That s actually a much simpler problem than Navy firecontrol computers - which were also analog at the time.
All Auto pilot does is lock the fly path direction an keep the plane headed in the right direction. You do realize that Europe is a large area to fine or miss, right!
Old school transponders were used. Plane honed in on one then the other to get from point A to B.
I guess us old farts are smarter than you thought we were.
Yes there were, The programmable loom was the first computer.
The computers used for the autopilot were analog, not digital.
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