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Inside the Apollo “8-Ball” FDAI (Flight Director / Attitude Indicator)
During the Apollo flights to the Moon, the astronauts observed the spacecraft's orientation on a special instrument called the FDAI (Flight ...
9 Lear produced innovative aircraft instruments and flight control systems such as the automatic pilot for the F-5 supersonic fighter, which received a trophy as the "greatest aviation achievement in America" for 1950. Lear had been on the verge of bankruptcy in the 1960s; one of his VPs explained that "the great creative minds can't be bothered with withholding taxes and investment credits and all this crap". I assume that the Shuttle's ADI had integrated circuit electronics to implement this new functionality, considerably more modern than the germanium transistors in the Apollo FDAI.
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