Autopilot story:
Around the end of WW2, a rather prissy US major just had to get from island A to island B in the Pacific - an overnight flight. He managed to hitch a ride on a freight flight - likely C-54/DC-4. He was told to bed down on the cargo.
Around dawn he decided to go to the cockpit to find out how long before they arrived. There was no one "home". The plane was on autopilot and the crew was "resting" on the cargo. I'm 100% sure this is a true story.
IIRC, the DC-3 had some sort of autopilot, perhaps not in 1935.
In 1951/3 we had a B-25 on a ground controlled intercept project. By 1952/3 we were able to insert heading commands iinto its autopilot over a ground-to-air digital data link. It was directly commanded by MIT's Whirlwind digital computer at least a few times in 1953.
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