Word: grounding
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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Prompt Response. Both systems put a severe strain on the pilot. Besides flying his airplane and watching intently for the first sight of the ground below, he must also watch the ILS instruments or listen to the GCA talker, or do both to check one against the other. When the plane gets near the ground, both landing systems abandon it. The pilot must make the final approach and landing himself, though the visibility may still be too poor for him to see the ground properly. With the pilot's attention so completely occupied, any emergency, such as minor mechanical...
...Already the autopilot flies many airliners on long, boring hops, keeping them on course by its own gyroscopic control of the aircraft. It responds more promptly than a human pilot. Instrument men believe that it could be made to listen for electronic orders and follow them down to the ground...
George can probably do it. Experimentally at least, the automatic pilot has been hitched to both ILS and GCA. When following the ILS glide path, George accepts electronic signals from the ground and nudges the airplane's controls to keep it in the center of the beam. The pilot is free to watch the plane's flying instruments and to monitor the whole operation...
Additional equipment will allow George to make the actual touchdown. One gadget, for use with ILS, is a sensitive altimeter that tells George when the airplane is close to the ground. Then George flattens the approach angle so that the touchdown will be gentle. With the GCA system, a special short-range radar does much the same thing, guiding the plane with extra precision just before it hits the runway...
...thus control oil prices and profits also. (Since gas is a byproduct of oil development, the big oil companies are also big gas producers.) The result was that many of the big producers refused to sell gas to the interstate pipelines. They pumped the gas back into the ground, sold it only within the state, or let it go to waste...