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Metric
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mm. per second would be about as good as you could want to state. |
884,800,000,000,000,000,000 Angstroms per Aeon????
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MPH or Knots
Here in Canada where I trained in 1981 it was done in MPH for me and I have always had an ASI that indicated MPH and knots were in small letters.
I have noticed the switch in the newer model planes I rent especially the ASI and struggle sometime with the :"conversion". Similar to our late PM sending us into "metric" chaos this does make for some trouble sometimes in the pattern; "have i trimmed for 70 MPH or have i trimmed for 70 knots?" That is where the fun of this issue ENDS! I hate that momentary confusion on final and twinge of non confidence. So I fly er by the feel and use the ASI as a guide the way we were meant to. I always just add 10 to the new plane ASI(knots) and hope it is "close enough". Great thread here! Us old guys always need training eh? |
At my Engineering school the problems on assignments and exams mixed up the units. The questions defined the desired units for the answer and you had to convert. Distance could be feet, meters, inches etc. Temps could be C or F, speeds in mph, kph or knots, and the worst, mass, could be kg or slugs. Slugs were my arch nemesis. Try to explain to a layperson why you buy hamburger at the grocery store in units of force (lbs) in America and units of mass (kg) in Canada. Try to explain that a model airplane servo torque rating in g/cm (not even g-cm) is wrong.
Interestingly, after that space probe slammed into Mars a bunch of years back, NASA has gone all metric to avoid a similar screw up. But at the aircraft company where I work, which is in Canada, which is officially metric, we work in imperial units. We will kick out the afm in metric for European customers if they ask for it. The problem with establishing standards is that it requires humans to agree on something. Humans don't like agreeing on stuff in my experience and I think this thread illustrates that very well :D Now about that primer.... |
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All there are now used (EU based) to buying stuff in kilos and feeling C temperatures, but they still drive in miles and mph, buy petrol in litres but still use MPG for fuel economy...:) |
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NASA had been specifying SI units for many years prior to that, but the lower-level software was incorrectly coded (did not adhere to interface spec for SI units, and not caught during V&V). |
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When doing maneuvers, I mostly wanted to make sure I wasn't off by a factor of three (meters per second versus feet per second). And we changed from fps on orbit to knots on the way downhill.....:rolleyes: |
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I like knowing everything is a factor of 10 and that prefixing it with "milli_ centi_ kilo_ etc" all means something consistent. It's consistent with the entire decimal numbering system. Dividing something up into quarters, eighths, sixty-fourths to get smaller but multiplying by 12, then 3, then 1760 to get bigger.......who the heck thought that system up? :) But, as I said earlier, ya gotta be at least bilingual to get by these days! :D |
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When I want to impress my non-pilot Canadian friends, I tell them cruise speed is 280 klicks, with top speed of 340 ;) Jay |
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