Aeronautics: Iron Pilot

One by one the 18 newsmen and other guests in a Curtiss Condor which flew over Newark Airport one afternoon last week, walked forward to the control compartment to see what was going on. Ordinarily they would have seen a somewhat annoyed pilot working the controls to compensate for the shift of weight caused by their movements. Instead they saw Pilot Ralph G. Lockwood comfortably sitting with legs crossed, hands clasped behind his head. The control stick in front of him moved slightly fore & aft, side-to-side; the rudder pedals budged now and then. The big Condor flew smoothly on, directly over a predetermined spot, taking its directions from a small box under the pilot’s seat—the Sperry automatic pilot, a device not unlike the Sperry gyroscope which guides vessels.

The flight was in nowise astonishing.

Army and Navy planes have been experimenting with the “iron pilot” for several years, but this was the first commercial installation. A sharp-eyed reporter for the Baltimore Sun found the newly equipped Condor at the Berliner-Joyce aircraft plant, shrewdly wrote that Eastern Air Transport proposed to use it in regular service. The transport company was deeply embarrassed because it had not yet applied to the Department of Commerce for permission to use the robot. To check further gossip and placate the Department, it conducted last week’s public flight, stated with great emphasis that it was “preliminary to official flights soon to be made for inspectors of the Department of Commerce.”

Although it is often referred to as the “robot pilot,” the Sperry device is not supposed to take the place of a plane’s crew. The human pilot must take his plane off and land it. But once in the air and on his course he adjusts the automatic device to the proper compass direction, throws in a clutch, turns his attention to weather maps, radio reports. The risk of blind flying is eliminated; the automatic pilot requires no visibility to remain on course and on even keel. Moreover, the device flies a plane more smoothly than a human. At the beginning of a flight a human pilot can make about 50 corrections per minute; after flying for a long period he can make only about 20. The robot never tires, begins correcting a variation the instant it occurs.