feihua wrote:Nice thread.
My dad made FLIR possible for flight. Some will find the claim hard to believe but it is the case.
He is the man responsible for mounting it on an aircraft when it was said it couldn't be done. He was able to get the thing to track properly from the air.
I wasn't even ten years old at the time, and Texas Instruments gave him an Aero Commander to work with.
The PhDs (he called them Poor Hound Dogs) claimed it was much too large to mount on a plane, but him being a logistics engineer, he showed them the logic of how to connect A to B to create the level jump.
He would take me up with that odd ball shoved beneath the nose and we would fly around Dallas. My family still has the original 16mm test footage as the aircraft flew about Dallas seeking out heat signals in normal items like factory smoke stacks.
I can remember the funky television sitting in the makeshift navigator seat on the relatively small plane.
Hello,
I am an aviation historian, specialising in the history of each Aero Commander built.
Currently, my database comprises over 102,500 records for the 3,170 examples built.
I have a photograph of an Aero Commander, possibly a Model 680 or 680E, that has "Texas Instruments" and "Experimental" titles and with the FLIR turret mounted on the nose.
The "Tail Number" or "N" number is not visible, so I have not been able to identify the Commander that Texas Instruments used to test the equipment.
This is because, although I have the FAA Registration (ownership etc) and Airworthiness files, I have not found any that have a Bill of Sale to Texas Instruments. Presumably then it was perhaps leased or rented to them.
I would therefore like to ask if you have any evidence of the Commander's identity.
For instance, is the "Tail number" visible in the 16mm film footage?
Any help will, of course, be very much appreciated.
More so, if it solves a long-standing question!
Kind Regards,
Barry Collman
Air-Britain (Historians)