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A Short History Of Making Flying Safer

Nov 22, 2016

Aviation Week & Space Technology

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  Lawrence Sperry’s autopilot was the first avionics system, in the sense of an electrical or electronic device designed for aircraft use. In a spectacular demonstration in Paris in June 1914, Sperry flew his Curtiss C.2 seaplane over the Seine, with his hands off the controls and his passenger standing on the wing. When the autopilot was engaged, the manual controls were locked and the pilot could control the aircraft through a separate pitch-roll stick. Powered by a small generator on the engine and using servo-motors to move the flight control cables, the autopilot had enough inertia in its gyros to run for 30 min. after a complete power failure.

  
  

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Flying in its early era was unabashedly dangerous. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but accident rates were certainly orders of magnitude higher than even the early jet age. A related problem was that it was hard to identify the best ways to make flying safer, and, as a result, the pioneer years of aviation included both successful and misguided efforts to make the number of safe landings approximate to the number of takeoffs. Here are some notable examples on both sides of that record.