Crane Company

Crane Co., Hydro-Aire Division

Douglas M. Longyear

Stanley R. Bluhm

Douglas M Longyear

Edgar A Hirzel

Stanley R Bluhm

The brake valve control system for an aircraft wheel bracking system includes primary and backup brake valve control subsystems and isolates and switches between subsystems. Certain portions of the entire braking system are shared, and those portions which are not shared are isolated but interconnected for switching from a primary brake control mode to a backup subsystem upon failure of the primary subsystem. A unique metering spool valve, and the linking of metering spool valves and servocontrol valves with either a tandem selector valve or interlinked primary and secondary selector valves allows for significant reduction in weight and complexity for the backup or override system.

Brake valve control system

An apparatus and method for determining aircraft position and velocity is disclosed. The system includes two CCD sensors which take overlapping front and back radiant energy images of front and back overlapping areas of the earth's surface. A signal processing unit digitizers and deblurs the data that comprise each image. The overlapping first and second front images are then processed to determine the longitudinal and lateral relative image position shifts that produce the maximum degree of correlation between them. The signal processing unit then compares the first and second back overlapping images to find the longitudinal and lateral relative image position shifts necessary to maximize the degree of correlation between those two images. Various correlation techniques, including classical correlation, differencing correlation, zero-mean correction, normalization, windowing, and parallel processing are disclosed for determining the relative image position shift signals between the two overlapping images. The front longitudinal relative image position shift signal, the front lateral relative image position shift signal, the back longitudinal relative image position shift signal and the back lateral relative image position shift signal are then corrected by an altitude factor to respectively produce a front longitudinal ground distance signal, a front lateral ground distance signal, a back longitudinal ground distance signal, and a back lateral ground distance signal. These ground distance signals can be divided by the time delay between forming the first and second images to produce longitudinal and lateral ground velocity signals. The longitudinal and lateral ground distance signals can also be processed to produce other navigational measurements, such as the yaw, rotation, roll and ground track of the aircraft. The ground distance data and navigational measurements may be error checked against independent data and output to various displays.

Growing community of inventors

Pasadena, CA, United States of America

Douglas M Longyear