4 ms·
At NASA the standard seem to be SI units for anything in space and Freedom (English) units for anything inside the atmosphere. It is bizarre. The funny thing
by Ottolay 7y ago
At NASA the standard seem to be SI units for anything in space and Freedom (English) units for anything inside the atmosphere. It is bizarre.
The funny thing is looking back at Apollo documents from the 60s is that many of those were in SI, but for Shuttle they appeared to have switched the launch and land portion fully to English.
- drewwwwww 7y agolikely because aviation is still on ft and nautical miles worldwide, i would think
- skissane 7y agoThe choice of units to display to the pilot (feet vs metres, nautical miles vs kilometres, etc) doesn't have any necessary connection with the choice of units for engineering drawings, engineering calculations (e.g. calculating forces on various components during flight), etc. You could keep the former in non-metric and do the later in metric. Actually, many planes support displaying metres for altitude as well as feet. This is because, while most of the world uses feet for altitude, a handful of countries (China, North Korea, some ex-Soviet states) use metres instead. On an international flight, pilots can even change the units displayed on their instruments as they pass from non-metric airspace into metric airspace and vice-versa.