[Milsurplus] knots and "The High and The Mighty"

[Dave Merrill]

Happened again in 1999 on the Mars Polar Lander where they mixed up
the English/metric units for navigation commands.

On 3/16/06, D C *Mac* Macdonald <k2gkk at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Sorta like the doofi (plural of doofus) who used English
> instead of metric (or vice versa) measurements and
> goofed up the Hubble mirror!!!
>
> Mac - K2GKK/5
>
>
>
> ----Original Message Follows----
> From: "B. Smith" <smithab11 at comcast.net>
> To: "milsurplus" <milsurplus at mailman.qth.net>
> Subject: [Milsurplus] knots and "The High and The Mighty"
> Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 13:21:03 -0500
>
> Knots is those little thingies that the "navigator" got confused with on the
> "The High and The Mighty". He said he "made a 11 minute error" because of
> the conversion of miles to knots.
>
> However assuming an airspeed of 200 knots with possible tail wind of 10
> knots this would
> give a Ground Speed of 210 knots.
>
> Assuming that  they were a considerable distance past the Point of No Return
> and were say 500 miles from San Francisco. (BTW the span between SF and HNL
> is the longest  over water span in the world without an alternate 2084 NM,
> and you always hear strange noises from the engines at the 1000 mile point)
>
> Anway--
>
> 500  statues miles at a ground speed of 210 MPH would be a total time
> enroute  of  two hours and twenty three minutes,  2+23 minutes total time to
> SFO.
>
> 500  statue miles at a ground speed of 210 Knots would be a total time
> enroute of two hours and four minutes , 2+04 or an error of 19 minutes.   So
> for an error of 11 minutes they must have been quite a bit closer than 500
> miles say 400 which would give an error of 13 minutes.
>
> All the above is assuming that they do a straight in approach without any
> vectors.
>
> However I forgot about the engine and parasite drag so will have to use a
> ground speed of 165 and redue the problem.
>
> Anyone confused yet?   :-)
> breck k4che
>
>
>
>
>
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