The Airplane - Jay Spenser [85]
Flying under a hood, Doolittle took off, flew a rectangular pattern, and landed again without ever once seeing the ground.
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution
In contrast to his earlier approach, this one ended with a bounce—Doolittle called the landing “sloppy”—but they were down. It was a momentous occasion. The integrated technical capabilities demonstrated by Doolittle’s team would forever change aviation.
“Fog Peril Overcome,” trumpeted the front page of the New York Times the following morning. “Man’s greatest enemy in the air, fog, was conquered yesterday at Mitchel Field when Lieutenant James H. Doolittle took off, flew over a fifteen-mile course, and landed again without seeing the ground or any part of his plane but the illuminated instrument board.” Rightly heralding the dawn of a new era in flight, the Times observed that “aviation had perhaps taken its greatest single step in safety.”8
Doolittle went on to set more records and win the Thompson and Bendix trophy races in the early 1930s, making him the only pilot ever to win all three of the major U.S. air races between the wars. After leading the daring Doolittle Raid four months after Pearl Harbor, for which he received the Medal of Honor, he held key commands and finished the war a lieutenant general. Granted a fourth star in retirement, Doolittle died in 1993 at age ninety-six.
Perhaps the greatest pilot who ever lived, Doolittle always considered leading the Guggenheim Fund’s Full Flight Laboratory to be his most significant accomplishment.
When the ten-passenger Boeing 247 airliner entered service in 1933, military pilots looked on enviously. Whereas they flew slow, drafty open-cockpit biplanes, United Air Lines pilots—the only ones to get their hands on the sleek Boeing in its first year of commercial service—flew at 185 mph (300 km/h) in the heated comfort of a fully enclosed cockpit.
Unlike military airplanes of the day, the Boeing 247’s instrument panel boasted the gyro instruments and radio gear that let airline flights operate in bad weather. Using the nation’s newly developed four-course radio range system and instrument flight procedures, Model 247 flight crews following primitive electronic guidance signals in their headphones navigated airways and performed instrument approaches to properly equipped airports.
The center of the Boeing 247 instrument panel had three gyro instruments for blind flying: a directional gyro (top left), artificial horizon (top right), and turn-and-bank indicator (middle).
Boeing
It was all highly imprecise and subject to interference. Even so, it was nothing short of transformative—aviation’s equivalent of having ships that could go anywhere versus ones that must hug the coastline.
Boeing was so proud of the Model 247’s instrument panel that it had a female employee model it on her lap. Featured at top center were a gyro compass and artificial horizon developed under the auspices of the Guggenheim Fund’s Full Flight Laboratory at Mitchel Field. The instrument panels of the next three Boeing airliners would also mark aviation milestones.
In 1940, the pressurized Boeing 307 Stratoliner entered international service with Pan Am and domestic U.S. service with TWA. The Stratoliner had so many switches, gauges, and controls competing for space on its instrument panel that Boeing engineers relocated a lot of them to a separate panel on the right-side wall behind the copilot.
The copilot and flight engineer confer aboard a Boeing 307 Stratoliner in 1940.
Boeing
The Stratoliner thus became the first production airliner designed with a third flight crew position, for the flight engineer. Dornier in Germany actually hit upon this idea first,