Flight Test of the Exploratory Gimballed Airborne ESG System

William G. Miller and Palmer O. Hanson

Abstract:	There are many well recognized milestones in the history of inertial navigation for aircraft. Examples include the early work by such pioneers as Schuler and Boykow, the first flight of the MIT SPIRE system from Massachusetts to California in 1953, the application of inertial navigation for the commercial airlines in the late 196Os, the application of ring laser gyro (RLG)-based strapdown inertial navigation systems in commercial aircraft in the early 198Os, and the application of RLG-based systems in military aircraft in the late 1980s. Other important milestones are not so well recognized. One such milestone was the flight testing of the U.S. Air Force’s exploratory gimballed airborne inertial navigation system using electrically suspended gyros (ESGs), completed just 2.5 years ago. For 12 test flights the system demonstrated 0.15 nmi/hr performance, at a time when the accepted state-of-the-art performance for airborne inertial navigation systems was at the 1.0 nmi/hr level and the emphasis in further development was on cost reduction, not performance improvement. The actual test results for this milestone in inertial system development lay buried for many years due to military security considerations. Other significant achievements at the flight test site included demonstration of powerful performance analysis techniques which relied on the absence of physical gyro compensation (torquing) such that the accelerometer outputs were independent of computer software. This permitted the simultaneous, on-line operation of multiple independent navigation solutions from a single inertial platform. An extension of the concept involved the recording of the accelerometer outputs for later playback into a navigation computer. The resulting navigation solutions are as valid a measure of system performance as if the solution had been obtained on-line.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1992) June 29 - 1, 1992 ANA Westin Hotel Dayton, OH
Pages:	81 - 90
Cite this article:	Miller, William G., Hanson, Palmer O., "Flight Test of the Exploratory Gimballed Airborne ESG System," Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (1992), Dayton, OH, June 1992, pp. 81-90.
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