Autopilot reducing the pilot's workload. Lawrence Sperry (the son of famous inventor Elmer Sperry) demonstrated it in 1914 at an aviation safety contest held in Paris. At the contest, Sperry demonstrated the credibility of the invention by flying the aircraft with his hands away from the controls and visible to onlookers of the contest. Elmer Sperry Jr., the son of Lawrence Sperry, and Capt Shiras continued work after the war on the same autopilot, and in 1930 they tested a more compact and reliable autopilot which kept a US Army Air Corps aircraft on a true heading and altitude for three
Sperry UFO case fell eastward from the zenith, but which then appeared to move horizontally for several seconds. Comparing times and the relative position of his aircraft with that of Myers, Sperry felt that this was possibly the same phenomenon or object as he saw. Both he and Gates, the copilot, had however "emphatically discounted" the possibility of the phenomenon being a meteor, due to its movements. Sperry UFO case The Sperry UFO case was a sighting of an Unidentified Flying Object by the captain, Willis Sperry, and other crew of an American Airlines DC-6 airborne near Mount Vernon, Maryland on 29 May