الطائرات والملاحة الجوية .. الحاسبات تعمل

Aircraft and Air Navigation .. Computers work

Aircraft are exposed to rapid fluctuations in weather conditions during their flight, such as sudden changes in atmospheric pressure and changes in wind speed and direction. At the beginning of the aviation era, the pilot had to respond to these continuous fluctuations by taking appropriate measures, but the increase in aircraft speed and safety requirements in aviation made this manual response difficult, which led to a steady development in the machines that help control the aircraft in the air. The autopilot was used before World War II to drive in level flight, and was initially a non-electronic analog computer that performed the required calculations using gears, cams and arms.

In the early fifties, advanced electronic analog computers were used for various purposes in aircraft, such as calculating and adjusting air navigation, automatic driving, controlling engines and aircraft movement. Strict safety requirements required that each of these analog devices have a limited function, so that the failure of one central device would not lead to the loss of control entirely. Sometimes, some of these devices were doubled or tripled, as an extra precaution. However, analog computers generally lack the effective ability to analyze data and rely on the results of these analyses to decide between two or more options or to predict the course of events. Analog media indicate the event after it occurs, and the analog computer that measures the speed relative to the air, for example, shows the change in speed after this change actually occurs. The increase in flight speed required taking control decisions quickly. Since analog computers are not qualified to do this, large aircraft needed an aeronautical engineer to review the data of the control devices, analyze it and make appropriate decisions regarding it. Thus, the aeronautical engineer, like the aircraft navigator, calculates a large amount of data. However, these calculations must be done at a rate of thousands of times per second to be completely useful, and this is something that the human analyst is unable to do.

Fast digital computers were used to perform this task on the aircraft, collecting huge amounts of data from different parts of the aircraft and converting analogue data to digital data using fast converters. The computer examines all this information, processes it, performs the necessary calculations, and makes appropriate decisions. The results may appear in a way that benefits the aircraft crew, or the results may be digital signals used to control the aircraft's equipment, either directly or after converting them to analogue signals. A single model computer can be used to perform several functions on different aircraft, as the digital computer only needs to change its programming to perform a new function. In the early days, digital computers were large and heavy, such that

(Automatically checking radar devices. Each device in the most advanced systems includes a checking computer. The external computer checks all the checking computers and explains what needs to be done to repair the devices.)

It was impossible to use them on aircraft, especially since information was entered and exited by cards or paper tapes, the handling of which required machines that increased the size and weight of the computer. However, the development of integrated circuits, semiconductor memories, input/output devices and display devices reduced the size and weight of the computer dramatically, so that it was possible to use more than one computer on the plane as a backup.