Today pilots who have an inertial navigation system coupled with an advanced GPS aboard their airplanes are considered to be at the upper end of the profession, while the rest of us bumble along with just a plain vanilla GPS–maybe with a WAAS upgrade–and a couple of VORs plus one, maybe two, DMEs. But tomorrow might be different. Engineers at BEI Systron Donner have developed a combined, fully integrated INS/GPS unit that you could almost conceal in your hand, weighs less than 12 ounces, uses fewer than five watts of power from a 12-volt power supply and could one day give operators of small aircraft the capabilities of a business jet at a very small fraction of the price.
Introduced at the Institute of Navigation’s annual Conference in Long Beach, Calif. last fall, the company’s MMQ-G unit is based on micro-electro-mechanical systems technology–a new “black art” of the electronics industry that combines complex, tightly integrated circuits with mechanical sensors formed by micromachine etching of overlapping layers of silicon wafers to produce very small, but very precise, low-cost devices.
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