This unit is designed for middle and high school students.
The unit will focus on problem solving through real life situations that will involve aviation.
For more than eighty years men and women have been designing and building airplanes in an amazing variety of shapes and sizes. In spite of the shapes and sizes, all airplanes fly in the same way and the problems of the aviation industry are basically the same.
Some of the problems in this unit will deal with the tests that have already been made in the United States by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Federal Aviation Agency, and by the Department of Defense. These tests were done in order to ensure safety, convenience, and efficiency in this swift, and powerful aviation world of ours.
The current control facilities are barely able to cope with the movement of supersonic traffic. Scheduled supersonic flights will very soon saturate the present airways facilities. Transports will move at speeds more than three times those of the present jet-liners. Traffic-control sectors will have their control time proportionately reduced.
In the past decades aviation has progressed tremendously in many ways making use of modern technology.
Aircraft instruments have largely relinquished their individual roles to become part of integrated systems tied to navigation and automatic flight control. Instruments and systems will be covered, included will be Air-operated Indicators, Gyroscopic instruments, Flight Directors, Autopilots, Radio and Inertial Navigation Systems and Weather Radar.
Today’s modern aircraft can fly under most conditions. In general aviation is safe. It is one of the safest ways to travel. Statistical safety analysis have been generated for every facet of flight. Every accident, every cause factor, every related factor are matters of record. The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are the two agencies that operate in a cooperative fashion with regards to aviation safety. The National Transportation Safety Board is an independent federal agency that serves as the overseer of U.S. transportation safety and its responsibilities are internodal. The Federal Aviation Administration is on a level equivalent to that of the N.T.S.B.
Under the Independent Safety Board Act both boards have the authority to investigate, determine the facts, condition, and circumstances and determine the cause or probable cause of aircrafts accidents, and to issue recommendations, recommending corrective actions.
Since 1903, the boundaries of wing-borne flight have been pushed back. The top speed has risen from around 50 to 1,330 miles per hour and height from a 30,000 feet to 45,000 feet in altitude, and most other planes can fly 6,000 miles nonstop. The time it takes to cross the Atlantic has been cut from days to hours and in the process a worldwide, multibillion dollar multimillion passenger air transport industry has been developed. (see figure 1).
