N O $_{ }$P I T C H I NF O R M A T I O N L R  TURN COORDINATOR  2 MIN.  PWR  ST HD  TRK  LO  HI  RDY  ALT  TRIM  UP  DN  20 20  I0 I0 2 0  I 0  Flight Management Systems (F MS) Figure 3-43.  Figure 5-43. diagram layout of an autopilot by S-Tec. In the mid-1970s, visionaries in the avionic s industry such  as Hubert Naimer of Universal, and followed by others such  as Ed King, Jr., were looking to advance  the technology of  aircraft navigation. As early as 1976,  Naimer had a vision  of a “Master Navigation System” that would accept inputs  from a variety of different types of sensors on an aircraft  and automatically provide guidance  throughout all phases  of flight. At that time aircraft navigated over relatively  short distances  with radio systems, principally VOR or ADF.  For long-range  flight inertial navigation systems (INS),  Omega, Doppler,  and Loran were in common use. Short-range radio systems  usually did not provide area navigation  (RNAV) capability.  Long-range systems were only capable of  en route point- to-point navigation between manually ente red waypoints  described as longitude and latitude coordinates, with typical  systems containing a limited number of waypoints.  The laborious process of manually entering cryptic latitude  and longitude data for each flight waypoint created high  crew workloads and frequently resulted in incorrect data  entry. The requirement of a separate control panel for each  long-range system consumed precious flight deck space and  increased the complexity of interfacing the systems with  display instruments, flight directors, and autopilots.  The concept employed a master computer interfaced with all  of the navigation sensors on the aircraft. A common control  display unit (CDU) interfaced with the master computer  would provide the pilot with a single control point for all  navigation systems, thereby reducing the number of required  flight deck panels. Management of the various individual  sensors would be transferred from the pilot to the new  computer. Since navigation sensors rarely agree exactly about position,  Naimer believed that blending all available sensor position  data through a highly sophisticated, mathematical filtering  system would produce a more accurate aircraft position. He  called the process output the “Best Computed Position.”  By using all available sensors to keep track of position, the  system could readily provide area navigation capability.  The master computer, not the individual sensors, would  be integrated into the airplane, greatly reducing wiring  complexity.  To solve the problems of manual waypoint entry, a pre- loaded database of global navigation information would  be readily accessible by the pilot through the CDU. Using  such a system a pilot could quickly and accurately construct  a flight plan consisting of dozens of waypoints, avoiding  the tedious typing of data and the error potential of latitude/ longitude coordinates. Rather than simply navigating point- 5-26