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Aircraft instruments
At the beginning of World War II AGA focused on military electronics. In 1938 SAAB and AGA entered into cooperation and began manufacturing bomb magazines, bomb sights and bomb racks for aircraft. Once war had been in progress for some time and connections to the west were broken off, the Royal Swedish Airforce approached Aga-Baltic and requested that the company should start manufacturing air-driven gyro instruments for aircraft. AGA started the manufacture of aviation instruments which lasted until the 1970s and helped make Sweden self sufficient in terms of aircraft navigation systems.
The first aircraft instruments were a directional gyro and the gyroscopic horizon. Such instruments were made in the U.S. but technical information was hard to obtain. AGA's workshops were accustomed to precision work and precision-tools but now had to devote a lot of energy to finding suitable materials and processing methods. The instrument family was eventually increased with a purely AGA design, the so-called remote compass and the so-called directional horizon. The combination instrument directional horizon KH 29 combined the key qualities of the remote compass, the directional gyro and the directional horizon. Signals from the sensors are transmitted electronically to the indicator instrument.
Using AGA's aircraft radio location stations, the pilot received automatic assistance to fly in the direction of the runway. Since it was virtually impossible to take a manual bearing during flight, nearly all aircraft were fitted with automatic bearing equipment. AGA's unit was very advanced for its time, highly sensitive and selective and with highly automatic amplifier control.
AGA continued successfully with its military product development for many years. But defense cuts and reduced incoming orders resulted in AGA deciding to leave the market. Remaining military electronics production was transferred to AB Bofors in 1977. |
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