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## Flight Management Systems (F MS) 

In the mid-1970s, visionaries in the avionic s industry such as Hubert Naimer of Universal, and followed by others such as Ed King, Jr., were looking to advance the technology of aircraft navigation. As early as 1976, Naimer had a vision of a “Master Navigation System” that would accept inputs from a variety of different types of sensors on an aircraft and automatically provide guidance throughout all phases of flight. 

At that time aircraft navigated over relatively  short distances with radio systems, principally VOR or ADF.  For long-range flight inertial navigation systems (INS), Omega, Doppler, and Loran were in common use. Short-range radio systems usually did not provide area navigation (RNAV) capability. Long-range systems were only capable of en route point- to-point navigation between manually ente red waypoints described as longitude and latitude coordinates, with typical systems containing a limited number of waypoints. 

The laborious process of manually entering cryptic latitude and longitude data for each flight waypoint created high crew workloads and frequently resulted in incorrect data entry. The requirement of a separate control panel for each long-range system consumed precious flight deck space and increased the complexity of interfacing the systems with display instruments, flight directors, and autopilots. 

The concept employed a master computer interfaced with all of the navigation sensors on the aircraft. A common control display unit (CDU) interfaced with the master computer would provide the pilot with a single control point for all navigation systems, thereby reducing the number of required flight deck panels. Management of the various individual sensors would be transferred from the pilot to the new computer. 

Since navigation sensors rarely agree exactly about position, Naimer believed that blending all available sensor position data through a highly sophisticated, mathematical filtering system would produce a more accurate aircraft position. He called the process output the “Best Computed Position.” By using all available sensors to keep track of position, the system could readily provide area navigation capability. The master computer, not the individual sensors, would be integrated into the airplane, greatly reducing wiring complexity. 

To solve the problems of manual waypoint entry, a pre- loaded database of global navigation information would be readily accessible by the pilot through the CDU. Using such a system a pilot could quickly and accurately construct a flight plan consisting of dozens of waypoints, avoiding the tedious typing of data and the error potential of latitude/ longitude coordinates. Rather than simply navigating point- 

