The Brain

A new and mighty gadget for aircraft, good in peace as well as war, was taken out of military wraps last week. It is an automatic navigation instrument that helps a flyer to know where he is at any instant, even in bad weather. The machine, officially known as the Air Position Indicator, but called "The Brain" by its makers, greatly reduces the amount of calculation a navigator needs to make.

The instrument was developed by a famed navigation expert, Colonel Thomas L. Thurlow, who was killed in an air crash last year, and by the Bendix Aviation Corp. Its chief use so far has been in B-29 Superfortresses and in carrier planes, which have found it very helpful in getting back to their ships.

The indicator is a small black box about the size of a milk bottle, with a computer hooked up to the plane's compass and speed indicator. When a pilot takes off, he records his latitude and longitude on the instrument. From the data about direction and speed automatically received during the flight, the computer calculates the plane's latitude and longitude, without allowing for wind drift. To find out exactly where he is, a navigator reads the indicator's dial and makes corrections for drift by means of a driftmeter.

The instrument's most remarkable feature is its ability to translate a plane's position into longitude and latitude. If the earth were flat and longitude lines parallel, the job would be relatively easy. But navigation engineers have long been stumped by the problem of creating an instrument which would compensate for the fact that longitude lines converge toward the earth's poles. The indicator solves this problem by means of mechanism with over 500 parts.

To use the indicator efficiently, a navigator needs occasional glimpses of the ground or, over the sea, a celestial sight, for checking wind drift. But the gadget is sometimes surprisingly accurate by itself. In one test, a Bendix pilot took off at Boca Raton in weather that had grounded all air traffic and, flying solely by the indicator, without the use of radio and with only one brief glimpse of the ground, hit within six miles of his goal at Salina, Kans.

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