Integrated Instrument System

Abstract

Through the years the art of aircraft control has progressed from the use of fundamental human observations that restricted operations to contact conditions, to modern flight instrumentation that permits the precise control of modern high speed, high performance aircraft under very restricted ceiling and visibility weather conditions. The story of improved flight instrumentation in this paper includes the evolutionary trend toward more stringent control requirements which has pointed up the limitations of pure human response and resulted in a philosophy that a system capable of greater accuracy must, in addition to providing a fine degree of instrumentation, take human characteristics into consideration. Through a discussion of the symbolic and pictorial approaches to providing the ideal flight instrumentation, the present trend toward combining the two approaches is explained and the features of a production system incorporating these modern concepts is described.