Navigation/Inertial The Collection

The measurement of the aircraft’s attitude with respect to the horizontal plane in respect of the pitch and bank angles and its heading, that is the direction in which it is pointing in the horizontal plane with respect to North is essential for both control and guidance.

For civil aircraft the density of traffic requires the aircraft to fly in a specific corridor as defined by Air Traffic Control. For military operations very accurate navigation systems are essential to enable the aircraft to fly low and take advantage of terrain screening. Both civil and military aircraft follow this defined three dimensional path but also both require to know the precise time for their objective.

The Collection holds a number of Inertial Platforms mainly for aircraft but some for Torpedo use. The INS derives the aircraft’s velocity components by integrating the horizontal components of the aircraft’s acceleration with respect to time. These components are computed from the outputs of very high accuracy gyroscopes and accelerometers which measure the aircraft’s angular and linear motion.