The Modern Auto-Pilot

Extract

When in 1937, I last had the privilege of lecturing to the Royal Aeronautical Society on the subject, the automatic pilot was still in its infancy. The automatic pilot then described was known as the Mark IA. It may now be revealed that it had developed out of researches at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in the field that came to be known during the Second World War as Special Weapons. The Royal Navy had been backing the work, primarily with the object of developing a pilotless target aeroplane.

Under the guidance of R. McKinnon Wood, at that time in charge of the Aerodynamics Department of the R.A.E., the World's first successful pilotless aeroplane was developed as an anti-aircraft target in 1925, after a series of abortive attempts in which failure was due primarily to instability arising from the unsuspected coupling between the yawing and rolling motions caused by downward tilt, in relation to the flight path, of the rotor axis of the azimuth gyroscope used to control the rudder.