The EAA needs an Atmosphere Dude Ranch

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First Flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter: Live from Mission Control - YouTube I got brought up short in my understanding of the usefulness of Mathematics and Measurement sometime in 1968 when I had done what I considered a major milestone. I had fitted an equation to a pattern of human behavior. My later attempt at trying to fit an overall mathematical construct to the behavior of a guided missile finally showed I was no better at describing the relation between humans and flight than I had been earlier with humans and horses.

Yesterday, I went in Microsoft Flight Simulator to a place I had been in my earliest looks at this new version of code I have interacted with since I stopped making my own code in 2002. My father had made jokes about a private pilot he knew who had a broken altimeter. This pilot would take off and then tap at the broken glass in the indicator dial. I had approached this fuss in 1968 when trying to choose an atmosphere for global military use. Along with this choice I needed to mechanize in code or hand calculations the height above the terrain. Another engineer who had recently come to our operations analysis had collected information and literature on radar, and aneroid altimeters. In an airplane you could also look out the windscreen or the out the side windows and see over the fuselage panels how far up one is.

Yesterday, I was at a grass field in Central America looking again at the difference in sea level between the Atlantic and Pacific sides of the isthmus. I landed at 1000 feet below sea level. This was the Pacific side. The nearest airfield on the Atlantic side is far North in mountains and clouds where earlier lightning ran me off.

In the literature collected by the other engineer, who transferred from Long Beach to Missouri with a group identified by Bob Eberhard, the Operations Analysis Manager for MACAIR, was error data for devices that showed the radar altimeter at +/- 10 % of the actual value generally up to 1000 feet. The aneroid altimeter was estimated at +/- 200 feet at any altitude.

My personal experience with measurement of errors in constructing mathematical function representation of physical phenomena was with apparatus for measuring the black body radiation of a cavity in a metal (platinum) tube as presented at a hole in that tube. Kind of thin experience for a young analyst, who needed to describe a Boost Glide Standoff Missile for the purpose of creating a boundary and parametric contours of exploration in a test range.

The major interest was in the inflight instrumentation aircraft size and flight characteristics to collect this information. Unlike my earlier chastisement for making a mathematical fit to the grading of Navigators in Training which escaped the negative mathematical behavior near the origin of a cubic, this time a competitor had not just finished a study for the military. This time I was reaching into a flight regime where the concept of gliding was negated by vanishing atmospheric pressure. The only humans involved at the time of measurement were to be in an air plane. It wasn't just to be a measurement onboard telemetered to earth or a line of sight optical theodolite and radar tracked. But then I sublimed to more scientific questions like, "What is the speed of sound on Mars?" and how does the sea surface height vary on the moon Titan? Basic stuff to an analyst looking forward to ?? 2021