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Show Neiv Aircraft Compass Is Located on End of Wing Have you ever been misled in the woods because you read your pocket compass when it was too near your axe or rifle? If so, you can understand under-stand why heavy metallic armor around fighter-plane cockpits made it necessary to adopt a kind of compass com-pass that could be located in a wing tip, or the tail, but read in the cockpit. cock-pit. Such a remote-indicating com- j pass is now being manufactured by the General Electric company in its instrument factory in Lynn, Mass. Such compasses offer other advantages advan-tages in that one compass unit may have several remote indicating dials so the navigator or other members of the crew oh large planes can have the same information as the pilot. Alnico permanent magnets in the compass unit, placed in a wing tip or the tail of the plane far from the plane's disturbing magnetic effects, line themselves up with the earth's magnetic field. These magnets affect af-fect the electrical voltages in a wire coil so that corresponding coils in the one or more indicators in the cockpit move pointers over a dial in exactly the same directions as the compass. Until this type of compass became available the problem of providing pilots with a compass dial which could be located where they could read it, and still be depended upon to guide them, seemed to be growing beyond practical solution. |