History of MITSA Lab
Background
The students, faculty, and staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been involved in glider flying, off and on, since 1910.
The first American glider pilot to compete internationally, Eddie Allen, brought an MIT glider to the 1922 meet in Clermont-Ferrand, France. In 1941, Walter Lob, flying the MIT Franklin PS-2, won the National Soaring Contest in Elmira, New York. Jimmy Doolittle and Charles Stark Draper flew gliders while at MIT. Other successful pilots with roots at MIT include Bertha Ryan, Sam Francis, John Hansman, Jim Nash-Webber, Rand Baldwin, Dave Nadler, and John Cochrane.
Of course, MIT is better known for its track record in aeronautical engineering than in glider racing. In the footsteps of Doolittle and Draper, MIT engineers and glider pilots Jim Nash-Webber, Ed Crawley, John Langford, Harold Youngren, Judah Milgram, and Mark Drela have made significant contributions in the fields of low-speed aerodynamics, rotors, propellers, and human-powered flight.
The MIT Aeronautical Engineering Society, which owned and operated the gliders, became dormant in the 1950s. The modern club, renamed the MIT Soaring Association, was re-established in 1968 by T. Guy Spencer and Art LaPointe. MITSA, a fully sanctioned off-campus activity, received annual financial support from the Institute.
In those days, most of the members of MITSA were students in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In addition to financial support, MIT provided MITSA with access to laboratory equipment and facilities, including the Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel. A small group of graduate student/glider pilots became interested in variometry, altimetry, and calibration of flight instruments.
“MITSA Lab” began in 1976 as a group of graduate students researching the behavior of total energy probes in the wind tunnel and in glider flight tests.
Formal Approval
MITSA Lab had been calibrating MITSA altimeters and barographs informally for at least a year when it decided to seek formal approval for this service from NAA/SSA.
In March 1978 the Lab was inspected in accordance with the SSA Membership Handbook by the SSA Region One Director, Sam Francis (SSA 240893), professional engineering consultant, competition pilot, designated pilot examiner, and future vice-president of SSA. The Lab met all of the criteria for a Category One calibration station except the requirement to be a federally approved facility. Notification of the Lab’s approval was mailed to SSA Headquarters in Santa Monica, California. MITSA Lab was included as an approved Category Two Barograph Calibration Station in the next publication of the SSA Membership Handbook (1980) and in subsequent editions of the Handbook.
Equipment
The original vacuum chamber and pump were donated by MIT’s Fluid Mechanics Laboratory. The Lab’s approval required the use of either a calibrated altimeter traceable to NBS, or a mercury manometer. Unable to fund the calibrated altimeter, the Lab built a manometer with a resolution of 0.5 mmHg. The manometer is still in existence.
Activities
MITSA Lab calibrated barographs for New England glider pilots for about ten years. The Lab moved from MIT to Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and then to Post Mills, Vermont.
Highlights in MITSA Lab’s history include calibrating Ed Replogle’s barograph at the 1981 Region One contest, calibrating the barograph used in one of Tom Knauff’s National O&R Records, and calibrating the flight recorder used in John Good’s World Distance Record.
In 1988 the fifth and most successful of MIT’s human-powered airplanes, Daedalus 88, flew 72 miles from Crete to Santorini, setting the current world distance record for this category of aircraft. The project, led by MITSA Lab founder Steven Bussolari, received support from many sources, including the glider instrument company, Cambridge Aero Instruments. (CAI has had a long relationship with MIT. MITSA member Raouf Ismael named his company after his dual relationships with Cambridge University and MIT, in Cambridge Massachusetts).
The human-powered airplane project also led to the employment of HPA pilot and MITSA Lab founder Rick Sheppe by Cambridge Aero Instruments. The Cambridge Aero team solved the problem of building calibratable electronic pressure transducers for glider flight computers, and later, flight recorders.
Cambridge Aero Instruments developed the standards for GPS flight recording and persuaded IGC to adopt those standards. Along the way, CAI received the first IGC approval for a FR in 1996.
As attention in the gliding community drifted away from barographs and toward flight recorders, MITSA Lab received fewer and fewer requests for calibrations. However, the new approval of CAI as a calibration station for flight recorders was based directly on the techniques, experience and expertise of MITSA Lab. Cambridge calibrated over 1100 flight recorders (and a few barographs) between 1996 and 2001. The engineers at Cambridge served as consultants to IGC in the development of the Technical Specifications for Flight Recorders document.
When CAI was sold in 2002, MITSA Lab resumed operations as an independent entity in Vermont. This was done mostly as a response to the demand for rapid-turnaround repairs and calibrations of Cambridge flight recorders for use in national and international competitions.
MITSA Lab has traditionally supported the US Team with free calibrations and has consequently become recognized around the world by contest organizers, and by IGC.
MITSA Lab provided all the needed calibrations for the US Team at the 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2006 World Gliding Championships. In 2008, the Lab traveled to the Senior Championships in Clermont, Florida where it calibrated a few dozen flight recorders. All proceeds (approximately $800) were donated to the US Team.
If you count the Cambridge years, MITSA Lab is the oldest continuously operated barograph calibration station in the United States.
Attachments follow.
The next page shows a copy of page 301 of the 1980 SSA Membership Handbook.
From the May, 2008 issue of Soaring: