When he was 10, he witnessed famed Army aviator Benny Foulois fly from a field near Fort Sam Houston he went on to have a lifelong career in aviation with an intense interest in “blind” flight-on instruments, with no visual contact with the ground. This, the first known successful demonstration of an automatic landing, won Crane and Holloman the Mackay Trophy for 1937, along with a Distinguished Flying Cross pinned on them by none other than Major General Hap Arnold.Ĭrane was a tall, cerebral, and quite formal gentleman who was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1900. Surrounding nearby Patterson Field were five radio beacons, and as receivers aboard the Fokker were turned on, the airplane began a descent and landing unaided by the crew. Holloman (for whom Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico was named), along with a civilian named Raymond Stout, took off in a C-14B that carried instruments and radios that Crane developed. On August 23, 1937, at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, two Army aviators, Captains Carl Crane and G.V. Army airmen needed a testbed to develop the first automatic landing system, they could not have found a more appropriate aircraft. But slow can be good it’s certainly safer if you’re testing something and things go bad. Other C-14 variants were powered by engines of higher power.
![history of automation in aviation history of automation in aviation](https://d3lcr32v2pp4l1.cloudfront.net/Pictures/480xany/9/6/8/83968_a350fcairbus_914224.jpg)
The lumbering speed may have been partially due to the C-14B having a single 525-horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-1690 on its nose. The Army’s Fokker C-14B was a big, lumbering hulk of an open-cockpit transport with one huge parasol wing-mounted above the fuselage and not joined to it-and the beast could haul six passengers at a blistering maximum velocity of 137 mph. The pioneers: Captain Carl Crane, who invented the autoland system, Captain George Holloman, and engineer Raymond Stout (left to right).