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NATIONAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE FOR AERONAUTICS1
TECHNICAL NOTE NO. 145.
AERONAUTICAL INSTRUMENTS. *
By Kurt Bennewitz.
The task of observing the position of an airplane engages the
attention of the pilot constantly. He generally solves it by
means of his sense of sight and his sense of feeling, the former
being the more reliable. When sight fails, as, for example, in
fog or at night, with no horizon visible, he can then only rely
on his feeling and it has been found that even good pilots fail
under such circumstances.
The necessity of making the reliability of piloting independ-
ent of such conditions has recently become more urgent. To aid
the muscular sense, a number of instruments are in use or proposed,
the success of which depends not only on their serviceability but
also on the capacity of the pilot to interpret their indications
correctly. Such instruments are called "aeronautical instruments."
The failure of the pilot's natural sense of position arises,
for example, in a fog, due to the loss of the systems of reference.
There are two such systems: the stationary ordinates of the earth,
most clearly defined by the horizomoahd the orientation of some
distant point of the landscape; and the system moving with the air
current, that is, the coordinate system stationary in the air,
which is not visible but which the pilot perceives through the ac-
celerations or, in other words, through his sense of feeling.
* From Technische Berichte, Volume III, Part 5, pp. 160-165 (1918).
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Bennewitz, Kurt. Aeronautical Instruments, report, June 1923; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc53948/m1/2/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.