The Airplane - Jay Spenser [81]
Born in Alameda, California, on December 14, 1896, James Harold Doolittle spent his formative years in Nome, the raw Alaskan town to which his father had drifted following the Klondike Gold Rush’s northward lure. Nome’s hardy, rough-and-tumble lifestyle instilled in the boy a strong sense of fair play and self-reliance. Frontier life also taught him how to use his fists.
Doolittle’s mother brought him back to California, settling in Los Angeles. There he attended the first U.S. air meet, which was held at Dominguez Field at the start of 1910. Later Doolittle built an unsuccessful glider and was halfway through constructing a Santos-Dumont Demoiselle monoplane in 1912 when a windstorm put an end to his early aerial aspirations.
Jimmy Doolittle attended high school in Los Angeles, where one of his classmates was legendary film director Frank Capra. Short and compact, Doolittle excelled at boxing and tumbling. Marrying his high school sweetheart, he studied mining engineering in college until World War I interrupted his studies.
Doolittle volunteered for the Army Air Service. From the outset of training, he proved such a good pilot that, to his frustration, he was kept stateside to train others rather than going overseas into combat. In 1924, he flew across the United States in less than twenty-four hours. In 1925, he won the Schneider Trophy Race. Two years later he performed what is believed to be aviation’s first outside loop.
Archie League, history’s first air traffic controller, evaluates a searchlight and experimental radio equipment in the battle against fog.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
At Mitchel Field, Jimmy Doolittle began by defining the missing instrument capabilities that would allow “safe and reliable flights despite weather conditions,” as he put it.6 At his disposal during all this brainstorming were experts from the Radio Frequency Laboratory and Bell Labs, MIT, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Aeronautics Branch and Bureau of Standards, and various private companies in the New York area.
Chief among these was the Sperry Gyroscope Company of Brooklyn, New York. Doolittle met with Elmer Sperry Sr., a noted U.S. inventor in his late sixties, to discuss a new flight instrument he wanted developed. As sketched out by Doolittle, this instrument’s round face had a peripheral ring marked like a compass rose surrounding a central depiction of the earth’s curving horizon. The ring would rotate to display the airplane’s heading while the central horizon would indicate its attitude in relation to the ground.
Sperry’s earlier inventions ranged from electric streetcars to arc lamps, but he specialized in gyroscope applications. What really put his company on the map was his gyroscopic compass for guiding ships, whose pitching motions and steel hulls made navigating by a conventional magnetic compass problematic.
Sperry assured Doolittle his company could develop the requested instrument, but he proposed doing it as two separate instruments for ease of manufacture. One would be the gyroscopic compass (later simply called gyro compass) and the other the artificial horizon (today attitude indicator).
The gyro compass was needed because a floating magnetic compass, while fine for straight-and-level flight, oscillates and precesses badly when the airplane turns, climbs, or descends. It is also affected by changes in acceleration. The result is constant bobbing and spinning that renders a floating compass virtually useless during the maneuvering that would be required for instrument approaches and landings.
Equally critical to Doolittle’s mission was the artificial horizon, an instrument that shows an airplane’s orientation relative