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Thread: Should we Still Teach Old Tech???

  1. #21
    Mayhemxpc's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by DaleB View Post
    All true. I would point out, however, that learning to use an E6B really does not teach the fundamental principles, it just teaches one how to manipulate an E6B.
    The E-6B is actually the back side of the computer. That is a graphic representation of the wind triangles and does a very good job of helping the pilot to understand what the wind does. The front side was originally called the Dalton Ded-Reckoning Computer. It is a circular slide rule and involves all of the estimation skills of a regular slide rule. Besides, if Mr. Spock in Star Trek TOS is using one in the 23d century, it must have some value.
    Chris Mayer
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  2. #22

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mayhemxpc View Post
    The E-6B is actually the back side of the computer. That is a graphic representation of the wind triangles and does a very good job of helping the pilot to understand what the wind does. The front side was originally called the Dalton Ded-Reckoning Computer. It is a circular slide rule and involves all of the estimation skills of a regular slide rule. Besides, if Mr. Spock in Star Trek TOS is using one in the 23d century, it must have some value.
    What's your source on that Chris? Slow day at the flight school one day and we had several people researching the history of mechanical flight computers from every imaginable angle (no pun intended). They have been called by a dozen different names, even three variations for E6B, also written as E-6B and E6-B. Dalton didn't call his the E6B, the "E" names came several yrs later from the Army Air Corps, E-1, E-1B, etc. E6B became the default name during WWII (A WWII pilot once told me it got the "six" name because it performed 6 basic flight calculations-anecdotal evidence only). I have come across flight computers that did not have a graph for plotting wind triangles, time speed distance on one side, TAS on the other side and those too are called E6B. There are some pretty unique flight computers that show up on eBay from time to time.

    Interesting in the Star Trek episode is Leonard Nimoy is using the calculator side. Could the Vulcan brain not do simple arithmetic? But then the wind drift side would be pointless in space?
    Leonard Nimoy was an avid general aviation pilot so I'm curious if he and Gene Roddenberry consulted before using the E6B prop. There is an episode where Capt. Kirk, signed a glass faced tablet with his finger which makes Gene Roddenberry one of the greatest visionaries of all time, basically predicting an iPad tablet device!!!

  3. #23
    rwanttaja's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by martymayes View Post
    Interesting in the Star Trek episode is Leonard Nimoy is using the calculator side. Could the Vulcan brain not do simple arithmetic? But then the wind drift side would be pointless in space?
    Solar wind, laddie, solar wind. If you look carefully, you can even see Sulu pressing left rudder pedal. :-)

    Back when I flew early-warning satellites as a young lieutenant, our birds would tend to weathercock in the solar wind. The silver section was all electronics and focal planes, and the blue section was basically an empty drum. Plus there are nice paddles back there, too. The center of mass was about the level of the red star sensor RBF covers.


    Ron "Looks good to TAG" Wanttaja

  4. #24
    Mayhemxpc's Avatar
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    To be honest, the information came from an article in AOPA some years back that compared the different computers in use by the various air forces of WW2. I now understand that some of that information was incorrect. The front side being the Dalton Dead Reckoning Computer is correct, although Dalton and Weems may have ever called it that themselves. It seems that was the British nomenclature for it. Several versions in the Smithsonian's collections carry that name.
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    Chris Mayer
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  5. #25
    My comment pertains to charts. If you want to learn Celestial Navigation, I recommend an old copy of AFM-4-1 "Navigation Training" which describes how to make precomputations for a B-52. eBay may have one. You have to stay ahead of the airplane.

    Charts, -- I began at work making my own Mercator vellum latitude lines and longitude lines. 60 n-mi is 1 degree of latitude. Let's see if that is right--yes 21,600 n-mi. You could look up the earth's radius and multiply by 2 pi but that varies. We only want chart.

    The Inertial system in an F-4B was rhumb line for heading. The later F-4J inertial navigation system was great circle where the heading keeps changing. When the LTN-51 came out for the lead the force C-141 and could do polar great circle without magnetic reference it was then put into 707's and DC-8's with some challenges about classification.

    I met ONC's and GNC's before I met WAC charts. I had to hark back to the NDB's and A/N I had learned from my dad teaching his doctor and Chuck Corbishly, a haberdasher, about radio navigation to do 1998 Microsoft Simulator of a 737 flying to the post deregulation Midway airport decades later.

    No, it was jet penetration from altitude that needed JN charts. In university I had Goode's Atlas of Equi-area and equi angle projections. In the 60's and 70's I met Lambert conformal, conical projections and then polyconic as well as polar projections for the North pole.

    That was then, this is now. Even the national keepers of charts did not complete the full set of WAC charts and when I got a "Lightning II" simulation in 1997 the Army had made new Transverse Mercator charts for the world to coordinate air and ground perhaps for helicopters or tilt wings.

    Google maps? I have Side looking radar tapes of Venus and Mars by the Planetary Society. Quite old now in VHS. My watch keeps close tabs on me to my surprise much more accurate than the 30 feet CEP once predicted. (But not Lat, Long).

    On the KC-135 I began with in 1965 it was the boom operator who did navigation taking sun shots and getting wind from Doppler. Dead reckoning got him to the rendezvous with Apollo in the Pacific with satellite and ships in 1969.

    Weems plotter? B-6 calculator? My boss was more interested in the mechanical wheel measurer of the plots I made of how an antenna cone masked by a rocket nozzle intersect a sphere laid on the Apollo track estimated for Declinations of the moon made by a computer from NASA.
    Last edited by 2ndsegment; 04-14-2020 at 11:06 AM. Reason: Give it at least a rhythmn. Difficlut to read is abrasive.

  6. #26
    The kind of navigation that is so pervasive (like that word?) today I first met in the TAB or Thor Vertical Assembly Building, a very high bay enclosure that had domes for presenting data captured from rocket launches and fly offs. DELTA was the launcher of NAVSTAR which Global Positioning System grew from after a lot more rocket launches. DELTA was Thor Delta.

    It was not the biggest satellite booster. That was Titan which became CSB for Commercial Space Booster with two big strap-on solid boosters. Even Atlas was much bigger. DELTA had much smaller strap-ons in as many as 5 around the base. NAVSTAR was Geosynchronous on orbit.

    Now where I became disinterested. My father was the radio guy. I could content myself with gyros as they were mechanical and even hands on if a toy. And folks became aggressive about MANPAD which was a siting in of a mobile platform for a shoulder launched missile. This went on from mortar bases.

    So, I was happy decades later when my son gave me a Christmas present of a Polar watch that had a chest band to monitor heart rate even though it would be decades before I had one from Garmin that did not need a foot pod to track from calibration to stride but not only could tell space time without being pinged on line by Boulder, but could follow my telemetry and show a record after.

    Along the way my father received a Magellan that could locate and track his car except on a divided road or when the road came to a bayou where the other side was only 40 feet away but there was no ford and no bridge.

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