Delco Carousel
The Delco Carousel was a popular INS-based navigation automation system for aircraft developed by Delco Electronics. Before the advent of sophisticated flight management systems, the Carousel allowed pilots to automate navigation of an aircraft along a series of waypoints that they entered via a control console in the cockpit. The Carousel used an INS as its position reference for navigation. Many aircraft were equipped with dual or triple Carousels for redundancy. Operation was relatively simple for its day, a pilot or flight engineer would have to enter the individual waypoints by their latitude and longitude points, next the pilot or engineer would have to enter the starting location in latitude and longitude. The system used a series of gyroscopes as accelerometers to measure movement from the start point.
The Delco Carousel derives its name from the fact that the inertial reference platform is in constant rotation as a technique to reduce drift and increase accuracy.
