Simulated Disaster

The cockpit of a big modern airliner is a nightmare of instruments, switches, knobs, push buttons and warning lights. They crowd for attention in front of the pilot and copilot. They encrust the walls, drip from the roof like stalactites and overflow into the cubbyhole where the flight engineer sits. On a Boeing Strato-liner, there are 598 gadgets to watch. The three-man crew must know what each one is, where it is, and how to use it instantly. In an emergency, a few seconds of fumbling may mean a crash.

Training by actual flight is expensive (over $500 an hour for a four-engine airliner), and not too satisfactory, either (as one airline spokesman put it delicately: "We hesitate to institute disaster conditions in a real, $1,500,000 airplane").

Last week at Caldwell, N.J., Curtiss-Wright and Pan American Airways demonstrated an elaborate training device, the biggest and best of its kind, which can simulate both "disaster conditions" and routine flights. It has no wings; it cannot fly or even move. But crewmen shut in its cockpit (a copy of the cockpit in Pan Am's new Boeing Clippers) experience nearly all the horrors that can overtake a pilot. They are at the mercy of an unseen instructor who can "simulate" violent weather and faithless machinery.

By electronic trickery he can make the controls and instruments in the cockpit behave as if a fuel line had clogged, or as if a deadly crust of ice were forming on the wings and tail surfaces. He can knock out the radio or devil it with static. He can kindle a fire in the baggage compartment or chill the passengers by knocking out the cabin heating system.

In a takeoff, the sound of roaring engines is heard, coughing a little at first with startling realism. The cabin vibrates convincingly. The monotonous beat of the guiding radio beam throbs in the pilot's headset. If the instructor chooses to start a fire in an engine, an alarm bell blasts, the pilot stops the engine, and the controls react violently. The crew must know instantly how to bring in a crippled plane, be able to find the runway with a blind-landing system. Even the squeak of tires is heard as the wheels hit the concrete on a landing. The crewmen come back from their simulated flight in a sweat that is not simulated.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.