Computers—the machines we think with

by D. S. Halacy

Once the optimum flight plan has been figured, an electronic computer in the aircraft itself may one day assure that the desired flight path is actually flown. The ASN-24 computer, developed by Librascope, Incorporated, and the Air Force, weighs only thirty-one pounds, yet performs more than 20 million computation steps in a six-hour flight. The electronic navigator, with information from Doppler equipment and other navigation aids, evaluates which is the best “fix,” weighing for example the relative accuracies of a Loran fix and a dead-reckoning fix. The computer even shoots celestial fixes and plots the results! Obviously faster than its human monitor, the electronic navigation computer solves navigation problems with an error as small as one part in 32 million.

A broader use of the computer in aircraft is proposed by the Convair Division of General Dynamics. Because today’s airplane is far more complicated than those ten years ago, and those ten years hence will extend this trend, the firm feels that checkout of the aircraft will require electronic computers. While adding about 3 per cent to the total cost of the plane, such equipment could perform a variety of functions including maintenance analysis and would add an hour a day to the profit-making flight time.

There would be no profit for the airlines with the best flight planning and in-flight control in the world if there were no passengers aboard; the “traffic problem” extends from the sky to the ticket counter. For this reason most airlines have already recruited the computer for another important job—that of ticket reservation clerk. An example, recently installed by United Airlines, is the “Instamatic,” a giant, far-flung system weighing 150 tons and requiring 12,000 miles of circuits. Instamatic cost $16 million and can handle 540,000 reservations in a single day. So complex is the computer system that it requires 40,000 printed-circuit boards, 500,000 transistors, and 2,000,000 ferrite memory cores. But it gets the job done, and any one of 3,000 agents all over the country can confirm space on any flight, anytime, within seconds!

There are other systems used by competing lines, systems called Sabre, Teleflite, and so on. But Remington Rand UNIVAC has proposed an over-all system that will make any of them look like a child’s do-it-yourself walkie-talkie. The UNIVAC plan is for a single interline reservation system, used by all twenty-four domestic airlines. Called AID, for Airline Interline Development, the new scheme would cost the airlines only 12 cents per message, and could be tied in with foreign carriers for international bookings.

Remington Rand UNIVAC
Console for airlines reservation system permits pushbutton booking of space.

Present methods of reservations among airlines require from less than a minute for easy bookings to several hours for the tough ones. The AID system uses a dial phone, with direct lines to a central computer in Chicago. The response to the dialed request is an immediate voice answer. If space is available, the computer also stores all the needed information for the reservation and transmits a teletype message to the boarding point of the proper airline.

To go back another step, the aircraft on which the computer confirms seat space was most likely built with the help of another computer. A typical production system is that used by Lockheed in its Marietta, Georgia, plant. There an IBM 305 RAMAC computer keeps track of 45,000 parts orders continuously. The result is better and faster operation, and a saving to Lockheed of $3,500 a month. In California, Lockheed is using a computerized data acquisition system called EDGE, for Electronic Data Gathering Equipment, that feeds production information directly into a computer memory for analysis and action orders. Remote reporting stations can be operated by production-line workers and will relay production data to the central computer. Although the Lockheed EDGE system will cost more than $600,000 a year, officials feel that it will save the company three times that at the outset, and perhaps more when wider use is made of its potential. An interesting feature is the tying together of Lockheed’s widely separated plants at Sunnyvale, Palmdale, and Van Nuys, California.

North American Aviation links its complex of plants in the Los Angeles area by microwave, even bouncing beams of data from reflectors atop Oat Mountain where there is no direct line-of-sight path between the different locations. Douglas Aircraft maintains a data link between California and Charlotte, North Carolina, to permit use of computers over a distance of 2,400 miles.

The airlines are also using computer inventory systems to control their stock of spare parts. Material costs represent 60 per cent of airline revenue and are rising; some larger carriers have investments of as much as $75 million in spare parts. It takes the computer to control the flow of repairable parts through the shop efficiently, schedule the removal of those requiring periodic checks, spot high-use items, and so on.