Collins Aerospace Museum

Name		Title	Text…	Contributed
Terald Lamb	read	Flying in the 1980	Before the late 1980's there was very little forma…	March '15
Terald Lamb	read	The Doppler Naviagton System	In the late 1950's and early 1960's Bendix and Col…	March '15
Terald Lamb	read	Equipment On Art's Boat in Miami	Collins hired summer engineers to allow individual…	March '15
Terald Lamb	read	Development of Flilght Control Guidance	Art Collins owned the patent on the Horizontal Sit…	March '15
Terald Lamb	read	Flight Testing the Kineplex Modem System	One of our flight test and transportation aircraft…	March '15
Russ Colton	read	Memorable Events Working with Art Collins and Dr. Lippisch	Dr. Lippisch was a German scientist who came to th…	September '12
Terald Lamb	read	The First and Last Time I Met Arthur Collins	Arthur Collins was a genius and scientist who had …	June '12

· · Equipment On Art's Boat in Miami · ·
By: Terald Lamb

Collins hired summer engineers to allow individuals to get experience in the workplace. Typically, these "interns" were enrolled in an engineering school. Since I didn't need to take any courses the summer of 1960, I applied for and got the job. It was interesting work. My boss was Adrian Glandon who had a project of determining the cause and fixing noise problems on Arthur Collins' boat power system.

Art had many Collins aircraft communication and navigation equipment installed on the boat. This required a lot of direct current (DC) power to operate all of these systems that was not available from the boat power systems. A special power supply was developed to generate the needed DC power. It was installed on the boat. The problem was that when the system was turned on, all of the navigation radios bearing needles pointed to the boat's power supply instead of the navigation transmitters.

This boat was in Miami, Florida and we had to do most of the engineering in Cedar Rapids before modifying the boat power supply. After much testing we found out that the rectifiers on the power supply generated lots of white noise. We successfully simulated the problem in the Cedar Rapids labs. The solution was to slow the turn off time of the DC power when the AC power value went through zero. The approach we came up with was to install some inductance in the DC output line. To find a practical solution, we needed to conduct some tests with low impedance inductors to see if we could remove the noise being transmitted out of the power supply and produce a part to be installed in the boat.

For one experiment we wound a long length of resistance wire around the legs of a lab bench. This resulted in fairly high current through the wire. The wire was varnished on the outside. When I turned it on, smoke rolled out from under the lab benches as the varnish was burned off the wire. The experiment worked, but it sure woke everyone up in the lab. We used this data to fabricate inductors that were installed in the boat power supply.

—March 16, 2015

Terald retired in April 1996 after working 35 years in Certification.

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