NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2019 Jan 25, 16:03 -0800
Paul Brewer you wrote
It is a fairly heavy rotor so maybe that is what keeps it going long enough to climb a ladder. As someone mentioned, what happens if the rotor hits the casing? I only spun mine up a few times and then it was sitting on a stand. It would take a sturdy Matelot to hold one of thos things.
That reminds me of when I was teaching at Cranwell. A student asked the flight instruments instructor why the rate gyro in the turn and slip indicator spun towards the nose of the aircraft. The instructor came back quick as a flash “Well lad, if it turned the other way, and it fell out of its bearings, it’d jump out and hit you in the face”
The Admiralty Research Laboratory estimated that their Plath started off at about 1200rpm, got down to about 800rpm by the time they started taking observations, and became unusable below 300rpm. The useable time was about 12 minutes. DaveP
