When it was working, it apparently had your typical six-pack of steam gauges.
The one that the Youtuber was looking at had all the gauges removed because they had radium paint; honestly, without the gauges it's really only a good demonstrator of how it's completely futile to try to fly a plane without visual cues or instruments due to somatogyral and somatogravic illusions of the vestibular system.
Silly question, but is radium paint that bad? Like you wouldn't want to eat it obviously, or wear it on your arm your whole life, but would occasional exposure be an issue compared to other sources?
I could only find this [0], but I'm not sure how to find information about radium paint.
Amateur watchmaker here. Its half life is ~1600 years, so it's still plenty hot. Hot enough, in fact, to burn out the phosphor in the radium paint, so it stops glowing, but flakes off as radium dust as the binders in the paint break down. Radium produces mostly alpha radiation, which is blocked by glass or your skin, but if you inhale or ingest the particles, it's not good for you, as the alpha particles will go directly into the surrounding tissue. The people exposed to the worst of it would be the ones stripping the radium paint off the dials and refinishing them, as that generates a lot of dust that you might inhale.
> The factory manufactured glow-in-the-dark watch dials that used radium to make them luminous.
> The women would dip their brushes into radium, lick the tip of the brushes to give them a precise point, and paint the numbers onto the dial. That direct contact and exposure led to many women dying from radium poisoning.
I don't think sealed radium dials would be a big deal as long as they remained intact, but I can see how you wouldn't necessarily want to have them in a publicly accessible place where the glass might accidentally be broken etc.
Yes, this kind of training is for flying by instrument, which is quite hard. That's why they needed simulators.
When I was taking flying lessons, for one session the instructor had me wear a visor so I could only see the instrument panel for a while, and then try holding a course. I believe it's mostly just to demonstrate that you shouldn't try it until you're trained for it.
