Question about older FMS's

jwp_145 said:
Who is "PI"

Please don't flame me for asking!
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Piedmont. Route of the Pacemakers. Our 'birds' had names on them like the Pan Am Clippers.

Ground school was a SYSTEMS school and this thing had some of the craziest systems I have ever seen. "wild frequency' electrics. High and low stop lock-outs on the props. And an air conditioning system that didn't have enough power to cool a high school locker. (not locker ROOM. LOCKER. I carried a small towel to wipe the sweat away)

piedmont.jpg
 
I love hearing stories about the good ol' days! Certainly there are still a few companies out there making stories. Which companies party the hardest?
 
Ollie said:
I love hearing stories about the good ol' days! Certainly there are still a few companies out there making stories. Which companies party the hardest?
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XYZ Regional had an FO fired after he threw some chairs into the pool a few years ago.
 
Ollie said:
I love hearing stories about the good ol' days! Certainly there are still a few companies out there making stories. Which companies party the hardest?
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By all accounts I've read, Great Mistakes. Now, to be fair, any self-respecting freight dog would drink them under the table and steal their women, but for the 121 world, they have the crown, at least apocryphally.
 
That looks like something similar to a Litton 72. I never got to use those, but I did (and still do) have the pleasure of using it's descendant...the Litton 92.

Unlike the modern FMSs, you have no ability to program in airways....each waypoint must be typed in individually. This gets interesting when flying over Europe, as Germany in particular feels the need to insert an intersection ever 10 miles on jet routes.

The improvement over the LTN 72 is that you can now program in up to 99 waypoints...I'm sure it was a marvel in it's day. The display itself compared to the LTN 72 also makes it look like an HD TV. Talking about displays....this unit has no ability to send images/interact with a moving map display. A CDI is all you have.

Our DC-10s have been upgraded, and we now rely on GPS nav, HT9100 FMSs and color moving map displays to get us to where we need to go. The LTN 92 is still there, but only as a lonely control head to the #3 INS unit on the center pedestal. It's a comforting backup to have, though.

(BTW, I've attached a picture of a LTN 92. It's the first time I've done this, and I have no idea how to control where it appears on this post....so my apologies if it's in some akward spot and/or too big)
 

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Bandit_Driver said:
Wow...We still carry towels in the 72...The packs aren't what they used to be in the 70's.
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The YS-11 still stands out as one of the most weird airplanes I flew.
The center panel. First.. EGT. After you got airborne you called "14.2 and 770" which was RPM (not percent) and EGT. The second row is the engine tach and as noted, it was RPM, NOT percent.

The panel with the fire switches also has the prop lock-out lights. ???

The 'crowbar' with the red handle is the flight controls lock. Elevator trim manual (and sensitive). At the very bottom, two green lights for when using water/meth injection for takeoff.

One thing though about PI. ALL cockpit instruments were the same. All had dual F/Ds and instrument panel the same.

The YS would moan when it started picking up ice which was frequent in the winter and where it flew. Then it would get mad and start throwing ice off the props into the fuselage. That could be a bit unnerving. But droning around at 8-10,000ft was, at times, fun. I got some USAF low level charts and enjoyed playing with those. The Capts some times saw nothing funny about my game but I only flew the YS for about 11 months before going to right seat 737-200. And that was one FUN time. 737-200 with -9 and later -15 engines.

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Don't forget the spill valves, fuel trim switches and putting your hand up as a guard when you move the prop locks!

That cockpit configuration is the one that I flew. Good times for a 500 hour guy. At least I'd never seen glass, so I thought all airliners looked like this upfront. ;)
 
Polar742 said:
Don't forget the spill valves, fuel trim switches and putting your hand up as a guard when you move the prop locks!
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We had one guy who was the constant screamer. EVERYTHING was a trigger for a furious vent. So we are on day 3 headed home and he has chewed me down to my sock tops. You touched NOTHING without him telling you to. You did NOTHING without him telling you to. We are descending into ATL and he had moved the prop control out of the high-stop lock (?) or something and we do the checklist which calls for that. He looks over, the high-stops are already moved and he explodes. He is GD this and that.. what a pisspoor F/O I am and how I just don't get it. When he pauses for a breath I said, "For three days now you have cussed me, berated me, insulted me and yelled at me and do you REALLY think that I would touch anything in this friggin airplane without you telling me to to?" He thought for a minute and said, "I guess not." That was as close to an apology as he ever got. Did he change though? Nope. Same thing next trip.

I can think of a lot of guys that I would head to the airport RIGHT NOW to fly with them one more time. One guy was renowned in that you never heard him say ANYTHING bad about anyone and it became sort of a game to see if you could get him to badmouth someone. To my knowledge no one ever did and about the worst he ever said was, "He is a character." That was the extent. Then we had Dean with landings well into the shaker and full nose up trim. George who taxied at close to Mach 1. Mack who was never without a cigarette going. And the good old boy from TN who was into tobacco.. either chewing, dipping, cigars or cigarettes all the time. And Joe who was the resident expert on everything and who never shut up. And Wayman who loved to wind up high so he could slip the 737. And Rick who said all flt plans HAD to be done in a #2 pencil or he tore the flt plan up. And the violin player who was always chewing on the FE if the wing tanks were more than 100lbs out of balance. It was a different era.
 
Last weekend my dad was telling me a story about a Continental captain he flew with. The guy was upgrading from a Viscount to 707’s. He was based at DAL and drove out to LA for school towing his boat to stay on. He was not doing well in the 707 school and one day just loaded up his boat and headed home without telling anyone. Continental was calling his wife, my dad and anyone else that knew him to find out where he was. A couple of days later he gets back home and got read the riot act. Ends up he has to fly CP on the Viscount for a while before they will send him back to 707 school.



I went to his retirement party when he turned 60 back around 1981 and he was flying DC10-30’s. During WWII he flew the hump in B-24’s and C-46’s. Defiantly old school.



He soloed me in my first nose wheel airplane his C-150.
 
On another note I remember flying with an old Global Global/Wulfsberg GNS500A Series 2 in Falcon 20’s. It used VLF/Omega and had 9 waypoints total, no flight plans other than the one you were using. No database so you had to enter the lat/long for each waypoint. We used it until about 4 months before they shut down the VLF’s and upgraded to a KLN 900 and thought it was great. What fun it was flying in the northeast with the old Global. Kept a notepad in the cockpit saying what waypoint was what,
 
Corporate Pilot said:
I went to his retirement party when he turned 60 back around 1981 and he was flying DC10-30’s. During WWII he flew the hump in B-24’s and C-46’s. Defiantly old school.
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I flew F/O for Hugh on his last trip. Hugh was a B-24 driver in WWII and had flown many hairy missions but he wasn't one to talk about them. He was one of those guys too that had never lost a hair on his head. Jet black and probably as full as when he was a newborn. Anyway, he got off the airplane and headed into the boarding area and started crying. He said, "Somehow I just never thought it would end." He loved flying that much.

And then we had the other George. Flew -51s in the Pacific. God help the F/O who couldn't fly the 727 and make a decent approach and landing. :eek:
 
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