I Can Blog... I Can Blog!

Sad to say I am not in my hotel room at the Hyatt Columbus Dive. I had actually tried again to get online with T-Mobile and thought I was making progress and was still denied. I was able to activate a user name form one of the hot-spot cards but when I tried to go to even google.com it would not located the site as it was trying to redirect me to a new login. It was an endless circle of frustration and finally after talking to two T-Mobile support people and on hold for fifteen minutes waiting for another I hung up and just watched some video podcasts.

So where am I, in one of the training rooms at work hooked into the pilots lounge wireless. That is a nice segway to my topic of the day.

The first image below is of a Narco (North American Radio Company) Omnigator Mk II. This is a very old-school form of avionics (even before that name was defined) that required the pilot to dial in, or tune the radio into a specific frequency. The pilot would flip a switch that would create a tone that would vary based on the strength of the signal. When the tone was at its maximum, so was the signal. The switch was flipped from tone to navigate and the needle could be used to determine if you were to the right or left of course. All this dialing and tuning earned the Mk II the nick-name the "coffee grinder".

The second image is of a gyro horizon (left) and a directional gyro (right). I learned to fly instruments using these exact types of instruments. The DG could be especially confusing as when you wanted to go from 220 (as indicated) to lets say 180, you would turn left which makes perfect sense. The problem was the aircraft rotated around the compass card which gave you the feeling you were moving in the wrong direction as the card would rotate left so you thought you were actually turning right. Confusing eh?

While this gives very rudimentary information on pitch, roll, direction was invaluable when you were in the clouds. It did however force the pilot to maintain a meticulous mental map of where he was every minute.

Today we have such wonderful equipment with mounds of information that initially there is the problem of information overload. It amazes me how the human mind can eventually filter out what is important for a given moment and what is not. While at a different moment the information that had always been there but not "seen" all of a sudden is picked up by our visual sensors. There is some degree of de-cluttering on these units but that is not what I am talking about here.

I sure enjoy my old school heritage but do not want to go back to the informationless age for one minute. At a simple glance at one display, I can attain attitude, airspeed, altitude, and heading. all requiring individual instruments not too many years ago. 

It is hard to imaging what the technology will be in the years to come. Photography is the same way. What will we be looking at as far as imagery in ten years. No doubt HDR will be coming into the camera; Will holographic images not be too far away. We will see.

Well I'll wrap it up for today, it's off to dinner with a bud and listen to a little band play at a local BBQ joint.

Cya... Doug