On Tue, 2003-09-02 at 11:53, David Megginson wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > > > Why don't we use SI Units in flightgear? > > > > Why unknown feets when meter is the international standard in this > > world? > > Ah, this is a long-standing thread. Personally, I'd love to use SI > internally, but for the user interface, we still need to use Imperial, > because that's what most of the aviation world uses. As far as I > know, even countries that use SI for some things (such as runway > length or altimeter setting) still use a lot of Imperial for flying, > including altitude and airspeed.
This is a safety issue ... it's much more important to avoid confusion in ATC commands than it is to use a system that makes more sense. Changing everyone's altimeter and airspeed indicator now (or even back when countries were switching to SI) is a herculean task bordering on impossible. > > One exception is temperature -- nearly everyone is using degC now for > aviation weather. > > By the way, I live in Canada, which is also a Metric country, so I > have to convert constantly between the liters I buy fuel in and the > U.S. gallons in my aircraft's published performance data. Even though > Canada switched to SI in the 1970's, however, we still give runway > length and altitude in feet, visibility in statute miles, and distance > in nautical miles. > We give the altimeter setting primarily in inHg, > but the METAR includes the hPa setting in comments. > > > All the best, > > > David > > _______________________________________________ > Flightgear-devel mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel -- Tony Peden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
