Phil, After WWII, all the US manufacturers tried to market private aircraft as "an extra car, only faster". If you have a look at, say, a Cessna 172, you will notice that all accessories like door handles, windows retainers, etc. are car stuff from the 1950's, and this is not by chance! Aircraft had to look as familiar as possible to the average driver. American people relate to mph better, so they started making dual dials (because any serious navigation demands kts, they could not get rid of kts).
Trouble with a dual dial is when you have huge markings in mph and small markings in kts, it's kind of difficult to work with kts. I have a dual dial, so although I hate working with mph, I use them for speed control... but not for navigation. Another thing I hate about it is the setting window, which is graduated in inches of mercury, when no control tower will give you anything else than milibars. So, I have a to stick conversion table on my instrument panel. I guess one day I will bite the bullet and buy another one. Russian aircraft are a lot of fun. The Russians comply with the International Standard System (SI), so absolutely everything is metric. Speeds are in kilometers per hour, altitudes in meters (with altimeter setting in kpa), pressures in KPa, and so on. While flying a Russian built aircraft, I once made a very bad mistake on approach, having established my descent rate at 500 per minute. On short final, I finally realized that that was awfully wrong. I had forgotten the dial was in METERS per minute, so the descent rate was about 1500' per minute! The aircraft probably still remembers the bounce that followed! Serge Vidal KR2 "Kilimanjaro Cloud" Paris, France "Phillip Matheson" <mathe...@dodo.com.au> Envoyé par : krnet-boun...@mylist.net 2005-05-13 01:39 Veuillez répondre à KRnet Remis le : 2005-05-13 01:40 Pour : "KRnet" <kr...@mylist.net> cc : (ccc : Serge VIDAL/DNSA/SAGEM) Objet : Re: KR> KR speeds MPH ? I have asked this before, and still not sure as to why in the US you use MPH. Are all ASI's in the US calibrated in MPH, or you convert from knots. I know the conversion is not difficult, but why?. For some reason I thought all aircraft use Knots as the ASI calibration?? Just a question. Phillip Matheson mathe...@dodo.com.au Australia VH PKR See our engines and kits at. http://www.vw-engines.com/ http://www.homebuilt-aviation.com/ See my KR Construction web page at http://mywebpage.netscape.com/FlyingKRPhil/VHPKR.html Search the KRnet Archives at http://www.maddyhome.com/krsrch/index.jsp to UNsubscribe from KRnet, send a message to krnet-le...@mylist.net please see other KRnet info at http://www.krnet.org/info.html _______________________________________ Search the KRnet Archives at http://www.maddyhome.com/krsrch/index.jsp to UNsubscribe from KRnet, send a message to krnet-le...@mylist.net please see other KRnet info at http://www.krnet.org/info.html