Editor's note: This post was released May 23, 2003, in NASA Armstrong's X-Press newsletter. NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, was redesignated Armstrong Flight Research Center on March 1, 2014. Ken Iliff was inducted into the National Hall of Fame for Persons with Disabilities in 1987. He passed away Jan. 4, 2016.
As an Iowa State University engineering trainee in the early 1960s, Ken Iliff was hard at work on a glider flight simulation.
Upon analyzing the results– which, in those early days of the computer system transformation, were seen on a long paper hard copy– he discovered one glaring flaw: the method he had actually configured it, his doomed glider would determinedly speed up as it headed for the ground.
The offender was a single keystroke. At the time, shows was based upon information that had actually been fastidiously participated in the computer system by hand, on punch cards and piece by piece. Someplace, Iliff had actually gone into a plus indication rather of a minus indication.
The apparently small occurrence was to foreshadow terrific things to come in Iliff's profession.
Not long after graduation, the West Union, Iowa, native discovered himself at what was then called merely the NASA Flight Research Center situated on Edwards Air Force Base.
“I simply understood I didn't desire to be sitting someplace in a huge space complete of engineers who were all doing the very same thing,” Iliff stated of selecting Dryden over other tasks and other NASA. “It was a little center doing essential things, and it remained in California. I understood I wished to exist.”
When at Dryden, the problem of information bits was main to the brand-new hire's workday. Iliff's post required him and a lot of his coworkers to invest much of their time “studying” information– a tiresome procedure of determining information from movie utilizing a single referral line and a ruler. Measurements were made every tenth of a 2nd; for a ten-second maneuver, an overall of one hundred “traces” were considered every amount being tape-recorded.
“I viewed gifted individuals investing whole days examining information,” he remembered. “And then, possibly 2 individuals would come to 2 totally various conclusions” from the very same information sets.
As has actually taken place so frequently at the birth of advanced concepts, then, one day Iliff had a single, basic idea about the time-intensive and maddeningly inexact information analysis procedure:
“There simply needs to be a much better method to do this.”
The solution he designed was to lead to a total change at Dryden, and would resound throughout the world of computer-based clinical research study.
Iliff's work covered the years that included a few of Dryden's biggest accomplishments, from the X-15 through the XB-70 and the tentative starts of the shuttle bus program. The option he developed to the issue of error in information analysis concentrated on aerodynamic efficiency– how to create concerns about an airplane's efficiency when addresses about it are currently understood,
