Thursday, December 16, 2010

Big brass ones

The Boeing 707 is as old as I am, having received it's FAA certification when I was a month old or so.  That's a long time ago, and it means that a couple things are important to know.

1. It was designed by slide rules, not computers.

2. There weren't any computers on board, because computers of the day filled a room.

That meant that the bird was flown by the pilot.  This is some sort of flying:



That's a roll test for the 707.  Yikes.  They were Giants, in those days.

Via Theo Spark.

5 comments:

  1. This beautiful plane is stored at the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum in Chantilly, VA (The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center). I used to work there. A docent loved to tell visitors the story about that awesome double roll (!) by test pilot Tex Johnson, if I recall correctly. Have a nice holiday, folks!

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  2. The test pilot was quite right, done by a good pilot at altitude high enough any airplane can be rolled in such a manner. If done by a good pilot the only sensation by a passenger is visual with no more stress on the airframe than a normal turn. Scares those that don't know that though.

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  3. DC,

    You'd be talking about the Dash-80 prototype. IIRC, the first 707 was a bit larger than the '80. And yes, Tex Johnson was the pilot. I'd heard a tale that the 'double roll' was made up of the first roll in one direction and the second roll in the opposite -- ostensibly to 'unwind' the first.

    Somewhere in intrawebz land I'm sure is a pic of the roll from the cockpit view while the plane is inverted. Neat stuff.

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  4. Damn straight, it took big brass ones to do something like that. Still does.

    In the interests of picking interesting though trivial nits, though:

    "2. There weren't any computers on board, because computers of the day filled a room."

    Not exactly. It had no electronic computers, that's true. I believe, however, that there were mechanical, analog computers onboard. Analog computers were on aircraft at least as early as WW2, and on ships for half a century before that.

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  5. The first modern computer was the guidance package for one of the ICBMs IIRC. I'll have a rummage through the photo archive.

    Jim

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