A look at how aviation's frontier lasted only a scant 3 decades, then vanished as commercial and military imperatives made flying routine.

When darkness falls, storms rage, fog settles, or lights fail, pilots are forced to make "instrument landings," relying on technology and training to guide them through typically the most dangerous part of any flight. In this original study, Erik M. Conway recounts one of the most important stories in aviation history: the evolution of aircraft landing aids that make landing safe and routine in almost all weather conditions. Discussing technologies such as the Loth leader-cable system, the American National Bureau of Standards system, and, its descendants, the Instrument Landing System, the MIT-Army-Sperry Gyroscope microwave blind landing system, and the MIT Radiation Lab's radar-based Ground Controlled Approach system, Conway interweaves technological change, training innovation, and pilots' experiences to examine the evolution of blind landing technologies. He shows how systems originally intended to produce routine, all-weather blind landings gradually developed into routine instrument-guided approaches. Even so, after two decades of development and experience, pilots still did not want to place the most critical phase of flight, the landing, entirely in technology's invisible hand. By the end of World War II, the very concept of landing blind therefore had disappeared from the trade literature, a victim of human limitations.

An authoritative guide to the various systems related to navigation, control, and other instrumentation used in a typical aircraft Aircraft Systems offers an examination of the most recent developments in aviation as it relates to instruments, radio navigation, and communication. Written by a noted authority in the field, the text includes in-depth descriptions of traditional systems, reviews the latest developments, as well as gives information on the technologies that are likely to emerge in the future. The author presents material on essential topics including instruments, radio propagation, communication, radio navigation, inertial navigation, and puts special emphasis on systems based on MEMS. This vital resource also provides chapters on solid state gyroscopes, magnetic compass, propagation modes of radio waves, and format of GPS signals. Aircraft Systems is an accessible text that includes an investigation of primary and secondary radar, the structure of global navigation satellite systems, and more. This important text: Contains a description of the historical development of the latest technological developments in aircraft instruments, communications and navigation Gives several “interesting diversion” topics throughout the chapters that link the topics discussed to other developments in aerospace Provides examples of instruments and navigation systems in actual use in cockpit photographs obtained during the authors work as a flight instructor Includes numerous worked examples of relevant calculations throughout the text and a set of problems at the end of each chapter Written for upper undergraduates in aerospace engineering and pilots in training, Aircraft Systems offers an essential guide to both the traditional and most current developments in aviation as it relates to instruments, radio navigation, and communication.