>
>I share your wariness, Chris. I’ve never been enamoured of totally glass
>cockpits, and RAF pilots
>are now trained on the Hawk T2, which has a HUD as well as a glass cockpit.
>
A HUD display was something I would have liked very much in the C-130. As
it was, one pilot flew the instrument approach and the other pilot plus the
flight engineer looked for the field environment.
>
>Mind you, vacuum-operated artificial horizons were fraught with risk, as I
>understand it. If you
>had a leak in the supply from the engine you could have an insidious failure
>of the instrument, a
>failure which could easily cause disorientation in cloud etc . . .
>
All sorts of things can go wrong with mechanical artificial horizons,
whether vacuum- or electric-operated. That's why you must readily recognise
any serious disparity between it and the other instruments. On the C-130E/H
there is a 3" diameter standby horizon just in case the large one failed.
I learned another thing about basic instrument flying, which is NOT to rely
entirely on the fancy horizontal situation indicator (HSI). If you are in a
"civilised" pat of the world where ILS and other sophisticated approaches are
abundant, fine. But in many parts of the world lesser technology prevails, and
you often find yourself with nothing but ADF approaches. On my first trip
through the Mediterranean I found this to be the case, and after that
experience I flew non-precision approaches using the RMI card as the primary
instrument with the HSI as a backup. That was a proficiency that I did not
want to compromise.
The crash in Yugoslavia that killed Secretary Brown many ears ago was due
partially to a lack of proficiency with ADF approaches, though in the final
analysis the pilots executed a missed approach turning left instead of right
and flew into a cloud of rocks.
Chris
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro
- Hunter S. Thompson
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