Originally Posted by
Chris Scott
Quite. No doubt Dai Davies would be turning in his grave (assuming he is dead?) on reading most of our stuff.
I'm not so sure. His MO always seemed to be to make sure that the engineers got things as right as possible so that pilots would only have to use their superior skills in seriously abnormal situations. That said, the fact that he wrote HTBJ implies that he felt pilots should have a deeper understanding of what advanced aircraft were doing!
I now find that he is yet to get a Wiki entry, despite that book - and being responsible for the redesign of the early B707's empennage (ventral fin added) to improve directional stability.
Same for his colleague (and later successor) Gordon Corps - who was instrumental in the Concorde minimanche testing and development programme, and later, the A320 flight control system design and development. I've long said that if more people knew about him then there would be far less misunderstanding of the impetus behind that system. I've also long held that one of the biggest tragedies in aviation was his premature death from altitude sickness before he had the chance to write *his* book (which could have had the potential to do for line pilot understanding of modern digital FBW systems what HTBJ did for swept-wing jets).
Early yaw dampers, stick-shakers and stick-pushers were essentially the electro/hydro-mechanical forebears to the modern flight control systems with envelope protections.