Emulating the “pucker factor”: Faith, fidelity and flight simulation in Australia, 1936–58
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the two decades after 1936, the assessment and instruction of aviators was transformed by adopting synthetic training aids. These devices were typified by the Link Trainer, an ersatz aeroplane that taught basic piloting skills and instrument flying. Purchased both by Australian civil operators and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), Link Trainer use proliferated from 1939. After 1945, an escalating accident rate led the RAAF to consider an emergent technology: flight simulators. Developed in the UK and USA, Dehmel-style flight simulators were powered by analogue computers to emulate specific aircraft types. Drawing upon Korean War experience and Canadian precedents, in 1956 the RAAF took delivery of Australia's first flight simulator, Redifon's model C.773 for the Avon Sabre fighter. Integrating both military and civilian experience, this article argues that western faith in flight simulators often ran ahead of their capabilities and fidelity to ‘seat of the pants’ flying.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".