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Comment by ccostes | Hacker News Reader

Is anybody else amazed that this was able to do a completely automated flight in 1972? Compared to our reliance on modern computing, it's astonishing what people were able to accomplish figuring everything out manually.

Granted, it blows my mind that we went to the moon in an era where a calculator weighed 20lbs and was the size of a briefcase, so maybe growing up with computers makes it hard to imagine life without them.

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I think it's more a symptom of how out of touch people are with the age of many of the things we think of as "advanced" tech. The first aircraft autopilot system was developed in 1912; instrument landings have been around since the 1920s; and fully operational autoland predates the TriStar by almost a decade.

Granted, early instrument landing systems weren't as precise or as convenient as their modern-day equivalents, but you can implement basic ILS with a few carefully-placed radio antennas (and in fact that's how it was done back in the day), and the modern systems work on exactly the same principles.

It is an amazing feat, but given the calibre of the avionics expertise that Lockheed had then, I would expect nothing less.

Many of the TriStar autoland engineers came from the British company Smiths, which had developed operational autolanding systems for the Trident and Belfast.

Here's a proud Smiths ad from 1965

https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1965/1965%20-%2...

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