| [ Jolitz Heritage William Jolitz - Early Years General Aviation Navigation for Charles T. Jackson Jr and Dallas Denery ] |
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"While working for Leonard McGee in FSN, I got to know the wildly creative aeronautical engineer Chuck Jackson. He was from that school of engineering where if you thought you could do something, you threw together a prototype and got it into the game ASAP, no matter what it was built from. Following high school and into college, did dozens of "mini contracts" (RFP/RFQ) for him and Dallas Denery.
Chuck's concept was to use computer technology to make flying a small plane as easy as driving a car. The idea was to have a "point and click" electronic cockpit, whereby the workload on the pilot is greatly reduced, so that anyone could approach flying. Navigation was first on the list.
There were thousands of human interface, hardware interface, algorithmic, numeric, and of course systems problems involved in taking "off the shelf" components and building a prototype.
Other items of automation were addressed. Among them, a touch screen way of calculating the center of gravity of an aircraft. You could see in real time where the center of gravity was as fuel load, passengers, and baggage was added. If too far forward or rearward, just redistributing the contents would bring it back to acceptable level. Many aircraft incidents on takeoff are due to center of mass being out of position, seriously affecting flight performance and disabling a pilots ability to recover.
A paper on some of this work done along with SRI was given at the 1975 National Aerospace Meeting, Alamogordo, New Mexico. It is in the Meeting Proceedings, page 7, as "EVALUATION OF SEVERAL NAVIGATION ALGORITHMS FOR APPLICATION TO GENERAL AVIATION" by Bjorn Conrad(SRI), Charles T. Jackson, Jr.(NASA), and Andrew J. Korsak(SRI).