OCR Text |
Show AMERICA IN ACTION : ADVANCED INSTRUMENTS TRAINING The maze of 40 or 50 dials and controls that stare out from the instrument in-strument board of a large bomber is just as complicated as it looks. It takes a skilled man to adjust and care for them. Such skilled men are products of the army air forces technical training command's advanced ad-vanced instruments' course at Cha-nute Cha-nute Field, 111; Such instruments require constant attention and, needless to say, bullets bul-lets or crackups wreak havoc among them. It is the task of graduates grad-uates of the instrument school to test them frequently to keep them in order, make adjustments and repairs re-pairs and diagnose their condition in case of major injury, to determine deter-mine whether they may be repaired or are hopelessly damaged. Students first take up the mechanically mechan-ically operated instruments, such as pressure gauges, altimeters, rate-of-climb and airspeed indicators, drift-meters, drift-meters, chronometric tachometers and the like. After several days of exploring the principles on which these instruments operate, and of taking them apart, re - connecting them, adjusting and testing them, the students pass on to electrically operated instruments like the electric elec-tric tachometer, fuel mixture indicator, indica-tor, and the autosyn instruments, a type which show at a glance whether wheth-er such elements as wing flaps and landing gear are in operating order. Work is done on the indicating and transmitting apparatus, and again all the working tests are mastered. Third in order come the most complicated com-plicated instruments of all, those operating on the gyro principle, such as the bank-and-turn indicators, directional di-rectional gyro compass, flight indicator indi-cator or artificial horizon, and at least three types of the automatic pilot. The automatic pilot, mainstay main-stay of long-range bomber operations, opera-tions, is difficult to master, as it is a highly corriplex instrument. But by this time students have been so thoroughly initiated into instrument technique that few fail to become masters of it. , The final stage is that of practical application of the principles and knowledge gained in previous phases. Test work is done on instruments in-struments actually installed in planes, and done under conditions as near like those of field operation as possible. Airplane instruments usually have oil running in or through them. Hence tests of the students include a "cold-test chamber" in which instruments instru-ments are placed with dry ice, duplicating du-plicating conditions far aloft. Released by Western Newspaper Union. |