Industry
We have discussed the computer in business; perhaps it would be well to stress that this includes industry as well. The computer not only functions in the bank and brokerage house, insurance office, and supermart, but also is found increasingly in jobs with oil refineries, chemical plants, surveying teams, knitting mills (a likely application when we remember Jacquard), and steel mills. As automation takes over factories, it brings the computer with it to plan and operate the new production methods. Transportation too is making good use of the computer. Freight-handling in the United States, Canada, England, and the U.S.S.R. is using machine techniques.
Our high-speed airplanes are already more aimed than flown, and less and less seen and seen from. Mach-3 aircraft are on the drawing boards now, aircraft that will fly at three times the speed of sound or about 2,000 miles per hour. An airliner taking off from London must already be cleared to land in New York. So authorities on both sides of the ocean are concerned. In England, giant computers like the Ferranti Apollo and others are on order. There is talk in that country too of integrating military and commercial aviation into one traffic control system. In the next ten years the sky population may double again, in addition to flying faster, further crowding the airlanes and particularly the space adjacent to airports. The only solution to this aerial traffic jam lies in the electronic computer.
Not as spectacular as air traffic control, but important nonetheless, is the job of planning the route an airliner will fly. United Air Lines uses a Bendix G-15 to select flight plans for its big DC-8’s. In a manner similar to the NANWEP course-planning described for surface vessels, the computer examines a number of possible routes for the big transports, considering distance flown, wind, temperature, weight and fuel requirements, and time schedules.
This flight-planning was originally done by manual computation and required an hour to work out details for only one possible flight plan. The computer method was demanded because of the increased speed of the big jets and their sensitivities to weather conditions en route. The computer examines a number of tentative plans in minutes and selects the one which will make the optimum use of winds aloft, temperatures, weather, and so on. If weather changes en route require it, the pilot can call the planning center no matter where he is and request that the computer work out a new flight plan.
Once the optimum flight plan has been figured, an electronic computer in the aircraft itself may one day assure that the desired flight path is actually flown. The ASN-24 computer, developed by Librascope, Incorporated, and the Air Force, weighs only thirty-one pounds, yet performs more than 20 million computation steps in a six-hour flight. The electronic navigator, with information from Doppler equipment and other navigation aids, evaluates which is the best “fix,” weighing for example the relative accuracies of a Loran fix and a dead-reckoning fix. The computer even shoots celestial fixes and plots the results! Obviously faster than its human monitor, the electronic navigation computer solves navigation problems with an error as small as one part in 32 million.
A broader use of the computer in aircraft is proposed by the Convair Division of General Dynamics. Because today’s airplane is far more complicated than those ten years ago, and those ten years hence will extend this trend, the firm feels that checkout of the aircraft will require electronic computers. While adding about 3 per cent to the total cost of the plane, such equipment could perform a variety of functions including maintenance analysis and would add an hour a day to the profit-making flight time.
There would be no profit for the airlines with the best flight planning and in-flight control in the world if there were no passengers aboard; the “traffic problem” extends from the sky to the ticket counter. For this reason most airlines have already recruited the computer for another important job—that of ticket reservation clerk. An example, recently installed by United Airlines, is the “Instamatic,” a giant, far-flung system weighing 150 tons and requiring 12,000 miles of circuits. Instamatic cost $16 million and can handle 540,000 reservations in a single day. So complex is the computer system that it requires 40,000 printed-circuit boards, 500,000 transistors, and 2,000,000 ferrite memory cores. But it gets the job done, and any one of 3,000 agents all over the country can confirm space on any flight, anytime, within seconds!
There are other systems used by competing lines, systems called Sabre, Teleflite, and so on. But Remington Rand UNIVAC has proposed an over-all system that will make any of them look like a child’s do-it-yourself walkie-talkie. The UNIVAC plan is for a single interline reservation system, used by all twenty-four domestic airlines. Called AID, for Airline Interline Development, the new scheme would cost the airlines only 12 cents per message, and could be tied in with foreign carriers for international bookings.
Present methods of reservations among airlines require from less than a minute for easy bookings to several hours for the tough ones. The AID system uses a dial phone, with direct lines to a central computer in Chicago. The response to the dialed request is an immediate voice answer. If space is available, the computer also stores all the needed information for the reservation and transmits a teletype message to the boarding point of the proper airline.
To go back another step, the aircraft on which the computer confirms seat space was most likely built with the help of another computer. A typical production system is that used by Lockheed in its Marietta, Georgia, plant. There an IBM 305 RAMAC computer keeps track of 45,000 parts orders continuously. The result is better and faster operation, and a saving to Lockheed of $3,500 a month. In California, Lockheed is using a computerized data acquisition system called EDGE, for Electronic Data Gathering Equipment, that feeds production information directly into a computer memory for analysis and action orders. Remote reporting stations can be operated by production-line workers and will relay production data to the central computer. Although the Lockheed EDGE system will cost more than $600,000 a year, officials feel that it will save the company three times that at the outset, and perhaps more when wider use is made of its potential. An interesting feature is the tying together of Lockheed’s widely separated plants at Sunnyvale, Palmdale, and Van Nuys, California.
North American Aviation links its complex of plants in the Los Angeles area by microwave, even bouncing beams of data from reflectors atop Oat Mountain where there is no direct line-of-sight path between the different locations. Douglas Aircraft maintains a data link between California and Charlotte, North Carolina, to permit use of computers over a distance of 2,400 miles.
The airlines are also using computer inventory systems to control their stock of spare parts. Material costs represent 60 per cent of airline revenue and are rising; some larger carriers have investments of as much as $75 million in spare parts. It takes the computer to control the flow of repairable parts through the shop efficiently, schedule the removal of those requiring periodic checks, spot high-use items, and so on.
As an example of the complexity a large airline faces in its maintenance, TWA stocks 8,000 different replaceable items. When such parts are needed, they must be on hand where they are needed, but overstocking can lead to financial ruin. To match increasing competition, airlines find it necessary to resort to the laws of probability and other sophisticated statistical techniques in stocking parts. Fed such equations, the computer can match ten to twelve man-years of work in three hours, and mean the difference between an oversupply of parts in New York with outages in Los Angeles, and properly balanced stocks.
The ramifications of the computer in the airplane industry are far-reaching. For example, Boeing has recorded the lessons it learned on its Bomarc missile program in computers so that it can retain and apply them on its Minuteman and Dyna-Soar programs. The computer will thus keep track of men and their projects and warn them of previous mistakes. Modern management techniques such as PERT and PEP, favored by the government, make good use of the computer.
The McDonnell Aircraft Corporation is primarily a builder of planes and space vehicles, but it has found itself in the computer business too as a data-processing center. Installing computers for its own engineering and business uses, McDonnell soon began selling computer time in off hours to banks and other businesses. It now has a computer valuation of about $10 million and operates around the clock.