Radar

Flights on this route were suspended for a few days in April 2010 due to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. This stalemate shows how much the modern world depends on airplanes. Not only do 10 million people travel by air every day, but the temporary suspension of this air route alone has reduced the output of the global economy by five billion dollars.

Air travel required many inventions. Not just jet engines, airplanes, etc., but many other inventions to make travel possible and safe. And the story of one of them begins with the "death ray."

No, not by that, but by trying to invent it. It was 1935. The British Air Force was concerned about lagging behind Germany in military technology. And the idea of ​​a ray of death was interesting to them. A reward of up to 1,000 pounds was announced for anyone who killed a sheep a hundred paces away. (No one has won this award to date).

Suppose you have four liters of water one kilometer above the ground and its temperature is 37 degrees and you have to heat it to 41 degrees. How much radio frequency power would be required to do this from five kilometers away?

Skip Wilkins was not stupid. It is understood that four liters of blood is in the human body at 37 degrees and if it can be heated so much, the pilot can be killed in the air.

The answer to this question showed that it is impossible, but at the same time, they saw an opportunity. The Air Force had a budget for research and could use it to solve an alternative problem.

What Wilkins considered was that if radio waves could be echoed and echoed, the location of the oncoming plane could be detected long before it was seen. Watson Watts came up with the idea. The Air Force was very interested in that.

What Scop Wilkins suggested was radar. The Germans, Japanese, and Americans worked on it separately, but in 1940 the British succeeded. It was a resonant cavity magnetron. Radar transmitter that was much more powerful than its predecessors. But Britain had a problem. The bombing of German planes destroyed British factories.

In this case, it was not possible to set up a new production facility for this new device. This work could have been done in American factories. There have been talks with the United States on what to get from the United States in return. But the situation in Britain became so bad that Churchill finally adopted a new strategy. He made it clear to the United States that he had it and should help.

In August 1940, Eddie Brown, a physicist from Wales, took a large black metal box and sat in a taxi in London. The box was placed on the roof. It contained about a dozen magnetrons. He then took the train to Liverpool. Took the ship from here. Will the German U-boat sink it? In that case, will the magnets fall into the hands of the Germans? To avoid this, holes were drilled in the box so that it would sink to the bottom of the sea. But that did not happen and the ship reached the United States.

It surprised the Americans. He was years behind in this research. MIT received funding to build a new laboratory. Industrialists took part in it.

This laboratory was very successful. The work of ten researchers won the Nobel Prize. This led to the development of radar that could accurately track airplanes and submarines. He helped a lot in the war. The war ended in 1945. With the end of the war, work on it also slowed down.

The number of passenger planes in the sky increased. Radar could have been used to prevent accidents, but it was slow. It has been installed at some airports. Not at all. The pilots would tell us in advance what their flight route would be, which would indicate that it was someone else's. And the protocol to prevent a collision in the air was simply "look and show yourself."

On June 30, 1956, two passenger planes took off from Los Angeles Airport with a three-minute break. One was to go to Chicago, one to Kansas. The two had the same route on the Grand Canyon. The only difference was the height. Storm clouds came. A pilot radioed to get permission to change altitude. They were allowed to go a thousand feet above the storm ...

No one knows exactly what happened. At that time there were no black boxes in the ships and neither of the two ships survived that day. From the debris scattered for miles, it was estimated that when the two collided with each other, their angle would be twenty-five degrees. The death toll was 128.

Accidents happen. The accident prompted an early action. Within two years, air safety laws began to be enacted. Radar began to be installed in the world. Air traffic in the world today is much higher than it was then. At major airports, planes take off and land every thirty seconds. But air collisions are extremely rare, regardless of weather conditions. There are many factors behind them but the biggest of them is radar.

The question of airborne accidents is being raised again today. There is also the arrival of drones in the busy sky. These drones are being used for many tasks, from filming to spraying crops. Companies like Amazon believe that they can also help deliver goods to people's homes. Drones have sensor evasion technology and it's great. But is that enough? Will new innovations be needed for safe air travel? New innovations, new needs, new technologies, it all goes hand in hand.

Deadline radar is an important tool for saving air travel and saving lives.