In article ,
"Todd W. Deckard" wrote:

It *is* interesting to me that consumer electronics provide this capability.

I dunno. Single accelerometers with no integration logic are pretty
cheap. Macbooks have had them for some time now. They are used to park
the hard drive head if you drop the machine. There's also a dashboard
widget you can install that displays the accelerometer reading as a
bubble level, which is kinda cool, and much more appropriate IMO than an
aviation-style display.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashb...carpentersleve
l.html in case you're interested.


Between the camera, and the more expensive R/C helicopters which have a
stability augmentation system like a yaw damper (which uses an actual
spinning gyro)
this stuff is coming into reach of a cockpit mountable capability.

Yes. I already noted that such devices are already on the market:

http://www.icarusinstruments.com/microEFIS.html

It costs about $1500 (which, interestingly, is about the same as a
middle-of-the-line Macbook).

A bigger crime to be debated is the "psuedo" panel display afforded by some
of the handheld GPS units.
It derives bearing and attitude information from the apparant change in
flight path. I have heard folks speculate
that this could be used in instrument flight after failure of the AI/HI?

I actually tried this a while back in a 182 and a handheld GPS. It
works actually much better than a single accelerometer (which is pretty
much guaranteed to kill you). If you are very, very careful you can
keep the plane kinda sorta level for quite a while. But it's mentally
exhausting, and I certainly would not want to rely on it in IMC.

rg