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Pilot-Proofing Cockpits Takes Center Stage
Pilot-Proofing Cockpits Takes Center Stage
John Croft
Aviation Week & Space Technology
The Germanwings crash could spur a revival of technology solutions to scuttle deliberate pilot, passenger actions to down an aircraft.
FULL ARTICLE
Germanwings Crash Spurs Debate About Cockpit Procedures
Jens Flottau
Aviation Week & Space Technology
The industry could be facing a debate as to whether introduction of secure cockpit doors, initiated after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S., has created a safety issue in and of itself.
FULL ARTICLE
Monday, March 23, 2015
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Tuesday, March 03, 2015
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Monday, February 02, 2015
FAA's Proposed Drone Rules May Address Toy Drones
WASHINGTON 1/29/2015 @ 11:26AM 10,068 views
FAA's Proposed Drone Rules May Address Toy Drones
The FAA’s proposed rules to govern the use of drones (technically referred to as small unmanned aircraft systems) will may include rules for model aircraft and toys. According to the Office of Management and Budget’s most recent update regarding the status of the proposed rule:
The NPRM also proposes regulations for all sUAS, including operating standards for model aircraft and low performance (e.g., toy) operations, to increase the safety and efficiency of the NAS. The FAA and sUAS community lack sufficient formal safety data regarding unmanned operations to support granting traditional, routine access to the NAS. This proposed rule would result in the regular collection of safety data from the user community and help the FAA develop new regulations and expand sUAS access to the NAS.
That’s right, according to the White House, the FAA through their NPRM is now seeking to regulate the operation of toys. It is unclear whether the rule will regulate just the operation of drones, or as the second bolded clause indicates, will also mandate certain information reporting standards for toy/hobbyist drones.
UPDATE: Some bloggers have incorrectly tied the information in this post and the reported rule change to the crash of a hobbyist/toy drone onto White House grounds earlier this week. If only the government worked that quickly! In fact, while the changes to the website are recent, the change to the NPRM has been in the Federal Register since December 22, 2014. See image below for evidence. [END UPDATE]
The image on the left shows the old sUAS proposed rule, the image on the right shows the updated description of the proposed sUAS rule. The change predated the crash of a drone into the White House lawn.
Either way, this is a significant development — the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 made an explicit carve out for model aircraft usage, in that law Congress wrote:
Notwithstanding any other provision of law relating to the incorporation of unmanned aircraft systems into Federal Aviation Administration plans and policies, including this subtitle, the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration may not promulgate any rule or regulation regarding a model aircraft, or an aircraft being developed as a model aircraft…
The FAA seems to believe that the “Notwithstanding any other provision…” clause does all of the heavy lifting in this statute, relegating the “may not promulgate any rule” provision to mere surplusage. The FAA pins their argument to the other language in the statute which states “nothing in this section shall be construed to limit the authority of the Administrator to pursue enforcement action against persons operating model aircraft who endanger the safety of the national airspace system.” (That’s part of the reasoning they’ve relied on to enforce FAA rules against reckless operators).
UPDATE 2: The folks over at the law firm, McKenna Long and Aldridge (who work on aviation law related issues) got a comment from the FAA. While their post suggests that the FAA won’t be regulating toys, the FAA statement doesn’t seem to squarely address the issue. Here is their post with the FAA statement excerpted below:
It has come to our attention that in December 2014, the www.reginfo.gov site was updated with incorrect information stemming from the 2014 Fall Unified Agenda and Regulatory Plan regarding the scope of the FAA’s small unmanned aircraft systems rulemaking action. The FAA is working to correct these errors. For up to date information regarding the scope and timing of this rulemaking, please refer to the DOT Significant Rulemaking Report available at www.dot.gov/regulations/report-on-significant-rulemakings. All model aircraft operators are required to operate in accordance with the statutory requirements for model aircraft operations set forth in section 336 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012. For more information on these requirements, please review the do’s and don’ts for model aircraft operations.
The FAA statement is careful to segment the notion of “model aircraft” operations from the “toy” operations that were referenced in the Federal Register. We can take this new statement at face value and assume the FAA has no plans to regulate small toy/hobbyist drones (at least through the NPRM). Or, if we read the statement like a lawyer, concerned about overly restrictive regulations, we can read it to suggest that any toy flights that are not within the model aircraft guidelines would be subject to the sUAS NPRM (in the past, FAA officials have said that the only allowable recreational operation of unmanned aircraft are those that take place at a model aircraft field associated with an officially recognized group). While the FAA refers readers to the DOT’s January 2015 Report on Significant Rulemaking, the record reveals that the FAA was considering regulating model aircraft and toys as recently December of 2014. In any case, while the FAA may claim that the information on the OIRA website is “incorrect” at best it is merely out of date. [END UPDATE 2]
WHAT TO EXPECT
As I pointed out on November 30, 2014, the rule has been under executive review at the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (a subordinate department within the Office of Management and Budget). This review is the last opportunity for individuals outside of the FAA to correct the FAA’s proposed rule. (Full disclosure, I offered my thoughts on what I believed to be appropriate regulation in a meeting with the White House held in December 2014). The FAA cannot publish the NPRM until the White House review is complete, and that review is supposed to focus on costs vs. benefits. Under the White House’s standard procedures, the rule will be under review for 90 days, which means we should expect the rule before the end of January. However if significant changes are mandated by the White House, an additional 30 days can be tacked onto the deadline, which would push the rule’s publication date back to the end of February.
With that said, I’ve been arguing that we will likely see the NPRM by the end of January (so today or tomorrow), but so many deadlines have been missed in this process that predicting when the rule will be published is becoming a losing game. When the NPRM is published, we should also expect the President’s Executive Order on privacy.
As I mentioned in previous posts, the Executive Order will segment the privacy issues related to drones into two categories — public and private. For public drones (that is, drones purchased with federal dollars), the President’s order will establish a series of privacy and transparency guidelines. The order will include some operational guidelines, and will require that agencies operating drones reveal information about their use and surveillance capabilities. (For some possible guidelines regarding drones and privacy, see this white paper “Drones and Aerial Surveillance: Considerations for Legislators“).
Gregory S. McNeal is a professor specializing in law and public policy. You can follow him on Twitter @GregoryMcNeal or on Facebook.
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Sunday, February 01, 2015
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Thursday, January 29, 2015
THE PENTAGON IMAGINES A POST-F35 FUTURE
THE PENTAGON IMAGINES A POST-F35 FUTURE
By Kelsey D. Atherton Posted 4 hours ago
Boeing Concept For 6th Generation Fighter
Boeing Image
Since the dawn of the jet age, military planners and industrialists have grouped the fighters borne forth from their iron loins into generations. Borrowing the term from biology, each generation is grouped by a series of improvements that make the successor distinct from the predecessor. Now, as the fifth generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter slowly eases its way into American military service, and the fourth generation A-10s and F-16s that preceded it are phased out, the Pentagon is looking further into the future, ready to start the long and pricey conception of a sixth generation.
The gestational period of a fighter is sometimes decades. The F-35, which is expected to enter service in 2019, first started development in 1997. Airplane generations don’t always take as long as human ones. The F-18, a major success by Pentagon acquisition standards, took just a decade to go from an existing prototype in the 1970s to a working fighter in the 1980s, but that’s an outlier. For the sixth generation, the Department of Defense hopes to split the difference and get them flying and ready to go by the 2030s.
DARPA is already working on this future. Sixth-generation fighters could include the planned hunting packs of drones that may very well fight alongside manned fighters. But in their “Air Dominance Initiative,” the agency notes that it's looking not just at specific technologies, like stealth or vectored engines, but at systems that work together to make a better fighter. "Systems", of course, is a super vague term. Here's how DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar described it in 2013:
We're seeking, as well, ideas that can invert the cost equation, ways to use innovation not just to nibble at the cost of systems, but really to fundamentally change the cost equation and to inflict much more costs on our adversaries to respond to the solutions that we come up with.
Here's something more concrete: One of those systems might be onboardartificial intelligence.
America is hardly alone in deciding the shape of future warplanes. For decades, Russian and American innovation competed, first in the skies above Korea and then later Vietnam. Straight-wing first-generation fighters were outmaneuvered by swept-wing competitors. The early gunfighting second-generation jets manufactured right after the Korean war found themselves in missile fights against the more advanced third generation. While air-to-air combat is increasingly rare, the same cycle of design and competition continues. In future aerial battlefields, America’s F-22s and F-35s might have to contend with China’s own fifth-generation J31 fighter or Russia’s T-50. These planes are all expected to serve for decades until the sixth generation arrives, screaming and kicking afterburner, to dominate the skies.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
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Pan Am: The Golden Age of Aviation
The Ghetto Flyers Store
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Pan Am: The Golden Age of Aviation
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The name, Pan American Clipper, conjures up exotic, far-away places in every corner of the world, including Istanbul, Caracas, London, Paris, The South Pacific, South America and the Far East. By viewing these ten half-hour restored Pan Am films, you will discover the exciting world of air travel on-board the Pan Am Clipper fleet. So pack your bags, and join us on a journey back to a time when air travel was new and exciting. All aboard the Clipper Ships of Pan Am!
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #93815 in DVD
Brand: PBS
Released on: 2008-01-29
Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Number of discs: 2
Formats: Multiple Formats, Color, NTSC
Original language: English
Number of discs: 2
Dimensions: .53" h x 5.75" w x 7.75" l, .45 pounds
Running time: 293 minutes
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Wednesday, January 07, 2015
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The Sexy Dream of the 747
AP Photo
Clive Irving
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MILE HIGH CLUB
10.26.14
The Sexy Dream of the 747
Joe Sutter, 93, fathered one of the most important planes—and it would’ve been one of the most hedonistic if not for Boeing bean counters.
They might have played the Miss America anthem, “There She Is!” There was a line of gorgeous women lined up beside the world’s largest airplane and there, indeed, she was—it was she, the airplane that stole the show, the first Boeing 747 about to roll out from the plant. Boeing wanted nothing as racy as a Miss America pageant. Instead, there was a high school band striking up the Elgar march “Pomp and Circumstance.”
It was September 1968 at Paine Field, near Seattle. There were speeches, but not from Joe Sutter, who held back from the limelight. The 747 was his greatest work, but it would take time before people acknowledged that, but for him, the 747, eventually to become iconic as the Jumbo, might never have become the phenomenon it did, one of the world’s most incredible machines.
Joe Sutter is 93 now, silver-haired and moving a tad more slowly than he would like, but still pugnacious and sharp of tongue. Still little known outside the world of aviation, within it he is revered. Joe fathered the 747 when he was in his forties.
“Fathered” is a carefully considered term because no single person can ever take the credit for something as complex as this, with several million separate parts that are required to work flawlessly together. But in the way that people sometimes do, Joe rose above the tests of a nightmare schedule and incessant technical challenges to impose coherence, order and, eventually, success on what to many at the time seemed a reckless gamble that might well have destroyed a great company. (At one point in the program Joe was personally responsible for spending $5 million a day, the equivalent of $34 million today.)
I was with Joe, an old friend, last week in Seattle to celebrate the restoration of that very first 747. Like houses, airplanes rapidly deteriorate if they are not well maintained, especially in a place like Seattle with long, wet winters. Well after this 747 completed its work with test pilots it was used by Boeing as a kind of flying laboratory for any new stuff that needed to be proven in operational use, from cabin layouts to new generations of engines.
Finally, looking tired and very worn, it was donated to the magnificent Museum of Flight that sits alongside legendary Boeing Field in Seattle. This summer a team of museum volunteers, many of them current and past Boeing employees, gave the old ship a new coat of paint and painstakingly got its interior back to very near the raw shell it was, furnished only with technical work stations and consoles, when on February 9, 1969 it first left the ground.
It may be a cliché but it’s not an exaggeration to say that that was a day that changed the world. The 747 launched a new generation of global travel. It was 30 percent cheaper to operate than previous jets, and it carried twice as many people.
More than that, it was ultimate proof of a surpassing American technical achievement, the creation of the Jet Age. It was not just a machine but a universal phenomenon, the enabling of many millions of people to move around the globe with an ease and an economy that was quite new in the human experience.
That’s all easy to say now, but on that February day in 1969 nobody was fully confident that the 747 would perform as required. Brien Wygle, co-pilot on the first flight, was one of them. He joined Joe and me for the reunion with the airplane. And he confirmed that he was all too aware of what rode on that flight: not just the future of the company but the whole idea of a huge, wide-body airplane.
“In those days we had no simulators to learn how she would fly months ahead of a first flight,” he told me.
There had been continuous problems with the Pratt & Whitney engines. The test crew worked through 40 engines before finding four they thought were reliable enough to fit on the airplane for the maiden flight.
“We were on the edge with the engines,” Brien said. “Remember, like the airplane, the engines had never flown before, and we were not sure how they would respond as soon as we had the nose up.”
It was not just a machine but a universal phenomenon, the enabling of many millions of people to move around the globe with an ease and an economy that was quite new in the human experience.
But she surprised the test pilots—there were three, the chief test pilot Jack Waddell, Wygle and Jess Wallick. Wygle recalls: “From the beginning, the 747 was a very easy airplane to fly. On that first flight people worried when they saw us coming into land, we seemed to be flying far too slowly. But that was an effect of the size. It just looked that way but she was very steady and stable on approach, no problems at all.”
Once it was clear that the 747 was ready for passengers there was a frenzy of ideas about how to make the cabin as dramatic as its size promised—more than 19 feet wide it was nearly twice as broad as any previous jet, and the curvature was so much less at seat height that there was no longer any sense of it being a tube. Why not treat it like a luxurious hotel?
The cabin styling was in the hands of Frank Del Giudice, a designer based in New York at a company called Walter Dorwin Teague. This was, remember, New York in the sixties. Mad Men time. The new Manhattan aesthetic. Over-ornate, WASPish bars like the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel were giving way to cool modern like the restaurant at the Four Seasons designed by Philip Johnson with its “Picasso Alley” where hung the largest Picasso in the United States, a stage curtain painted for Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, insurrectionist art to go with an insurrectionist decade. Narrow ties, sideburns, and three-martini lunches.
To echo these tastes, the 747 ought to be the final, soaring avatar of the Jet Age, its cabins lifting the spirits of all who boarded, Del Giudice thought. He produced for the airlines awaiting delivery of 747 fleets sketches of the possibilities.
There was a first-class lounge with a sunken well and cocktail bar. The sofas were upholstered in a pattern that seemed drawn directly from Timothy Leary’s Magic Bus, a mash-up of psychedelic colors as intricate as Islamic calligraphy, giving a new dimension to the idea of an airplane trip. He added a touch of class with a library and a reading room and then, finally, he suggested the harbinger of all in-flight entertainment, a small cinema with a raked floor.
It was not to be. Where Del Giudice saw new space for sixties flash, the airline bean counters saw space for a lot more seats. Even in first class their preference was for clunky, La-Z-Boy like club seats with, at most, a cocktail bar that looked more like a hole in the wall dive. There were, to be sure, some flourishes of the politically-incorrect libido of the time. When the first 747 (the one now in the Museum of Flight) rolled out, it was photographed with 24 stewardesses (not called flight attendants then) lined up beneath it, each from an airline that had ordered 747s. Among the outfits was a sari and a kimono but most of the women had skirts ending just above the knee and some had the little pill-box hats similar to those Stanley Kubrick chose for the stewardesses on the Pan Am shuttle in his space masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It’s fascinating that an exercise in futurism like 2001 should influence and converge with a wholly tangible piece of futurism like the 747 really was when it went into service in 1970. In fact, the airplane and the movie were more or less simultaneous in conception (the movie opened in 1968).
Technically Kubrick’s imagination outpaced Boeing’s: the 747 was an analog machine. Sutter and his team designed it using slide rules, not computers, and on paper; the author of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke, foresaw not just the future physics of space travel but computer-flown spaceships (and a malevolent computer called HAL that takes over.)
But it was harder to guess at the future of a flight attendant’s wardrobe when besotted with the sassy, cheeky mini skirts and hot pants of the sixties. (Last year’s blockbuster space epic Gravity had no flirtations with boutique designers. Sandra Bullock did have a subtly feminized space suit, less bulky than the real thing, and she was allowed to strip down to a sexy T-shirt, but her gear retained the unisex reality of NASA’s wardrobes. Definitely no pill-box hats.)
It’s easier to see now that the 747’s cabins could never have had the level of luxury (or decadence) that Del Giudice had scoped out. His was a dream that ended up being executed where space was not at such a high premium, on cruise ships.
It took the vision of an Asian airline chief to finally prove that the 747’s potential for bringing a new level of passenger pampering could be successfully matched with making big profits—and it was done by unashamedly touting the attractions of flight attendants in a way that no Western airline dared to.
In the course more than two decades as chairman beginning in 1972, a former civil servant called J. Y. “Joe” Pillay took Singapore Airlines from an obscure regional carrier with 12 airplanes to become an international benchmark for long-haul service. At the heart of that service were the Singapore Girls on the 747s—flight attendants in a slinky version of a sarong styled by the Paris designer Pierre Balmain. Sometimes the effect of the Girls was equated with Viagra, although their allure was carefully disciplined by strict guidelines of behavior.
Pillay used the 747 to deliver creature comforts, particularly for business travelers, that were previously unheard of. He ordered 747s with an extended top deck that were branded as “Big Tops” and Singapore Airlines more or less single-handedly forced competitors to up their game in every cabin. The airline was voted the world’s best by readers of Conde Nast Traveler for a record 22 years.
In 2012 Singapore flew its last 747 flight. The 747 has been replaced by the Airbus A380 superjumbo, more profitable to operate but singularly lacking the distinctive personality that the first jumbo gradually acquired. The airline’s executives paid tribute to the 747’s role as their flagship for more than 20 years—and the Singapore Girls, inextricable from the brand, remain as seductive as ever.
When I climbed a spiral staircase into the upper deck of the restored 747 in Seattle, there was a vestigial whiff of the original 1970s vibe. These first 747s had a short upper deck with only three windows on each side. In 1968, when Joe Sutter showed Juan Trippe, the visionary but acerbic creator of Pan Am, around the world’s first wide-body airplane, they went up the stairs so that Trippe could see the cockpit layout.
Turning away, Trippe saw the free space in the hump behind the flight deck and asked what it was for. Someone told him it was a crew rest area. “Rest area?” barked Trippe. “This is going to be reserved for passengers.”
The restoration crew researched and found that some of the early Pan Am 747s had used the space as a small cocktail lounge for first class passengers. They even found a pattern for the upholstery of the sofas. And there it was before my eyes—a real trip in those brain-buzzing LSD colors. Up, up and away!
Monday, September 22, 2014
Monday, September 01, 2014
Is this whale-shaped plane the future of airliners?
HyperDrive | 17 February 2014
IN ASSOCIATION WITH
Is this whale-shaped plane the future of airliners?
Jack Stewart
How air travel shrank the globe
Up and away: Ten flight firsts
Ten titans of transport
Will hybrid planes take off?
Golden rules of plane design
Spotting an Airbus A380 at an airport can still create great excitement. The giant, double-decker plane can seat between 500 and 850 people, depending on how much space is given to space-saving economy class, and how much goes to higher-paying passengers with all that extra leg room. It’s an aviation giant, the biggest passenger-carrying aircraft ever to fly the skies.
But the A380 could be become small fry if another, even more outsized design takes to the skies.
The AWWA Sky Whale is a concept aircraft from Spanish designer Oscar Vinals. With three decks for passengers, it looks like a cross between a tropical fish and a sci-fi space shuttle. Does this huge design herald the future of air travel?
Bigger means better in the world of airliners; the dawn of the jet age brought in the likes of the Boeing 707, an aircraft capable of carrying more passengers quicker and faster than any propeller-driven design. In the ensuing decades, airliners have grown larger and larger. The advent of “jumbo” designs, characterised by Boeing’s 747, meant more passengers per flight, and therefore cheaper seats.
The plane would have swivelling engines for shorter take offs
“Travelling in the Sky Whale could be like a travelling in your private ‘theatre seat’, enjoying what happens around you; hearing some air flow noise, but feeling safe inside a big and intelligent structure,” Vinals says.
The design would use advanced technologies such as self-repairing wings, swiveling engines to enable a near vertical take-off, and hybrid propulsion.
“The engines and batteries are fed by a turbine inside the wings, like a high-speed and powerful dynamo,” says Vinals.
The design also calls for a system to redirect air flow to intake engines and to control laminar flow – in other words, to reduce turbulence around the plane and reduce drag.
None of these technologies are feasible on a large scale at the moment, but all are possible, says Vinals.
“I did this because I am an aerospace and aviation enthusiast – the technology, development and evolution,” he explains. “I would like to contribute, with my vision, about these.”
Perhaps that vision from someone outside the aerospace industry, without preconceptions, is what is needed to revolutionise plane design. Vinals told me he did “years” and “terabytes” of research. It’s an approach that some in the field appreciate.
“I think that’s where these concepts come in,” says Dr Michael Jump, lecturer in aerospace engineering at the University of Liverpool. “It’s people challenging through their imaginations. It’s the engineering community’s opportunity to either say ‘that’s a good idea, let’s try and make it happen’, or ‘it’s less of a good idea, and this is the reason why’”.
He says there are three factors to consider when evaluating the design of an aircraft, collectively known as the Breguet Range equation. This can be used as an estimate of efficiency.
The design would limit turbulence around the wings, thus decreasing drag
They are: propulsive efficiency (how efficient are your engines?); aerodynamic efficiency (is lift maximised and drag minimised?); and structural efficiency (how much payload can you carry?).
Generally airlines want to fly as far as possible, with the biggest load (or largest combined weight of passengers) possible, while using as little fuel as possible. If you can maximise all three, you technically have a better aircraft design. The major airliner manufacturers have made tweaks to this equation, but have largely stayed faithful to a tried-and-trusted design.
“The likes of Boeing and Airbus have a lot of experience of building aircraft that look like a tube and two wings,” says Jump.
“When it comes to a new airframe that they want to design, it makes sense to evolve rather than revolutionise.”
A cylinder is also a structurally efficient way to contain pressure, which aircraft must do to maintain the right air pressure for passengers when flying at high altitude.
The Airbus A380 (left) is currently the biggest airliner in the world
Mark Drela, professor in the department of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, agrees. “The airplane fuselage is a pressure vessel,” he says. “It really needs a circular cross section for that. You don’t see scuba diving tanks that are rectangular. If it’s round, then it’s light.” On a plane, of course, weight is everything.
“Airplanes look the way they do, not because of some stylistic decision, but almost entirely for technical reasons,” he says. “Form follows function.”
For that reason, Drela doubts the usefulness of design exercises like this one. “It’s more of a stylistic concept,” he says.
What’s more, for a manufacturer to be able to sell a new aircraft, it has to demonstrate that it is safe. The safety regulations have evolved over a century of manned flight, but with a radical design it would be much harder to demonstrate safety.
“The optimised airplane is like a grand set of compromises, and it’s a colossal exercise to balance everything,” says Drela.
“Airbus went with the huge A380, Boeing put its money on the smaller airplane with 787. And it is not obvious which is the better approach yet.”
But, Vinals says, Albert Einstein might have the last word on this: “Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions”.
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Monday, July 21, 2014
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Train Derails In Montana, Dumps Boeing Fuselages Into River
Train Derails In Montana, Dumps Boeing Fuselages Into River
Until now, whenever Warren Buffett's preferred mode of industrial transportation - that would be trains - derailed, it would usually involve spilling generous amounts of oil into the surrounding area, far more than any hypothetical pipeline disaster to date would have resulted in. Then, in an apparent first, overnight a train derailed in Montana and spilled fuselages of Boeing 737 airplanes into the Clark Fork River. One wonder if all of these airplane orders had been funded by the Ex-Im bank.
The investigation continues into the derailment of a train near the town of Superior, Montana Thursday night.
Some of the cars carried aircraft components.
Nineteen cars on the westbound train derailed. Three of the cars contained aircraft parts and ended up in the Clark Fork River. Sources tell KING5 the parts were heading to Boeing in Renton.
Crews spent the night and into this morning cleaning up.
Photos from the derailment site:
In any event, since the capital order will have to go through twice, expect a bumper month when it comes to July Durable Goods, and thus Q3 GDP. In retrospect, the "derailed airplane fuselage" theory of economic growth may soon replace the "broken window" falacy as a means to "boost" the US economy.
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Tuesday, June 03, 2014
The Rise of Radical New Rotorcraft
The Rise of Radical New Rotorcraft
At a secret facility, aerospace engineers are plotting to end the helicopter as we know it, and devising new rotorcraft to replace it.
By Jeff Wise
Sikorsky technicians at a hangar in Florida work on the S-97 Raider, the first production-ready prototype of a compound-coaxial helicopter.
Nathaniel Welch
June 3, 2014 6:30 AMTEXT SIZE: A . A . A
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The building doesn't look like much—one of several nondescript hangars alongside an airstrip on the edge of the Everglades, baking in the eternal monotony of the central Florida sun.
This is the home of Sikorsky Aircraft's Area 31, where the company works on its most advanced rotorcraft projects. Like Area 51, the famously clandestine Air Force base in the Nevada desert, this airfield is home to experimental aircraft being built and tested. The mystery projects here need to be kept not only from other nations but from other aviation companies too. Millions, possibly billions, of dollars are at stake. For that reason, Sikorsky is hesitant to let journalists onto the grounds and does so only if the tour is restricted and the photography limited.
Inside the hangar, bathed in fluorescent light from banks of industrial lamps, is a molasses-dark fuselage with unusual twin fins jutting vertically from its tail. The fin structures are vertical stabilizers with rudders built in. Even at a glimpse, the half-finished airframe is something new.
This is the S-97 Raider. When it takes to the air in 2015, it will be the first production-ready prototype for a new kind of rotorcraft, the compound-coaxial helicopter. The Raider has two rotors that turn in opposite directions on a central mast, enabling it to fly up to 275 mph. That's more than 100 mph faster than a conventional helicopter, giving it twice the range.
The S-97 is among an emerging generation of advanced craft that could redefine the meaning of vertical-lift aviation. In 2011 the Army funded the Joint MultiRole Rotorcraft Technology Demonstrator (JMR-TD) program. This is the first step in an effort to replace the military's entire inventory of helicopters. Retired first will be the UH-60 Black Hawk, to be replaced with the Future Vertical Lift Medium, at the earliest in 2030.
The FVL Medium will have big shoes to fill. The Black Hawk provides the bulk of vertical-lift capability for the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines, Special Operations Command, and Coast Guard. It first entered service with the Army in 1979; over the next 30 years, more than 2300 aircraft saw service at home and abroad. The Black Hawk and its variants have proven track records but are limited by a maximum speed of 183 mph.
Aside from the FVL Medium, the Pentagon envisages three other classes of future flying machines that will have roots in this program: the FVL Light, to replace the Kiowa scout helicopter; the FVL Heavy, to replace the brawny twin-rotor Chinook; and the FVL Ultra, a brand-new class of aircraft that would combine the hauling capacity of a C-130 cargo plane with the ability to take off vertically. If the Pentagon plan comes together, these machines will replace every U.S. military helicopter.
Changes on the battlefield are posing dangers for traditional helicopters. Longer range missiles can target bases and ships, putting helicopter staging areas at risk. Aircraft that can fly faster and travel farther can complete their missions with less risk. And, since more capable rotorcraft can cover more ground, the Pentagon can buy fewer of them.
Today's most advanced vertical-lift aircraft is the V-22 Osprey, used by the Marine Corps and U.S. Special Operations Command. The Osprey tilts its rotors 90 degrees to fly like an airplane and land like a helicopter. But the Army is looking for a smaller combat rotorcraft instead of an Osprey-size heavy lifter. The JMR Technology Demonstrator will be designed to carry 11 troops, compared with the Osprey's carry capacity of 24.
The other type of vertical aircraft is the jump jet, which can vector its engines toward the ground to hover. Examples include the AV-8B Harrier and F-35B Lightning II, both carrier-capable fighter airplanes. These are not well-suited as Army utility lifters and attack helos because they burn too much fuel and are not light or maneuverable enough to fly missions close to the ground.
The goal of the JMR-TD program is to create an aircraft that is as nimble as today's Black Hawk while hovering, but with a ferry range of 2100 miles and a cruise speed of more than 265 mph. Industry engineers declare that it's possible, but the Pentagon launched the JMR-TD program to be convinced. "It's an investment to inform ourselves about the technology that's available," Dan Bailey, the Army program's director, says. "What we are looking at is a leap ahead in capability."
Last year the Army narrowed the field to four JMR-TD competitors, including two giants—Sikorsky of Stratford, Conn., and Bell Helicopter of Hurst, Texas—and two tiny firms, AVX Aircraft Company of Benbrook, Texas, and Karem Aircraft of Lake Forest, Calif. Each was awarded $6 million to produce a design. This summer two of the four will be selected to turn that design into hardware, with flight tests from 2017 to 2019.
The Army has made it clear that whoever survives the downselect will not necessarily be the winner of a $100 billion production contract for building as many as 4000 aircraft. But even losing companies stand to gain by flying demonstration aircraft, since the JMR-TD designs will inspire versions suitable for civilian markets.
In a few decades these futuristic rotorcraft could be as common in the skies as conventional helicopters are today. "This is a step change," says Steve Weiner, Sikorsky's director of engineering sciences. "It's going to be similar to when fixed-wing airplanes went from piston to jet engines."
If next-generation rotorcraft will be more capable than today's fleet, they are also going to be considerably more expensive. It takes a lot of power to go fast, and bigger engines add both weight and cost. "If you want to go above 150 knots [173 mph], you're going to have to pay a premium of 50 to 100 percent," says Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst with the Teal Group. Pentagon-funded demonstrator programs allow manufacturers to work out the kinks of new designs and bring down prices.
"Looking downstream, it's obvious that there's certain commercial applications of this technology," Bell's Keith Flail says. Some niches will be easier to exploit than others. "Offshore oil rigs could be a market," Aboulafia says. With exploration moving into ever-deeper waters, a vehicle that can make twice as many trips ferrying rig workers in the same amount of time will be worth the steep price tag to the big energy companies.
Another potential market, Aboulafia says, is the VIP market. Corporate executives and other wealthy individuals already take helicopters on short-hop trips, but more advanced rotorcraft could ferry passengers as far as 500 miles, avoiding airport hassles.
In a more critical application, medevac, speed can mean the difference between life and death. "There's a thing called golden hour," AVX's Troy Gaffey says. "If you can get someone to a hospital within that time, they're a lot more likely to live."
If these early markets pan out for tilt-rotors or compound-coaxial helicopters, there's no telling how many other uses they'll have. Right now vertical lift means a conventional helicopter, with niches occupied by the jump jet and the tilt rotor. Some day that relationship could reverse, if this new generation of vertical-lift aircraft becomes the norm, relegating conventional helicopters to the fringe. "You'll see the ratio change in that direction," Flail predicts confidently. "The evolution is coming."
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Beginning in the 1920s, enormous concrete arrows were set in the landscape to point the way across the country for pioneering air mail pilots
What are These Giant Concrete Arrows Across the American Landscape?
Posted by hipstomp / Rain Noe | 18 Jul 2013 | Comments (45)
Backpacking through Europe in my 20s, my sense of direction served me well—until I hit the cities with the truly medieval street plans. So in Florence, after renting a motorcycle, I devised a clever way to find the garage again: Next to the garage was an impressive, obviously important brick building, with a large arrow and some Italian words pointing to it. I observed these same signs along the street pointing back towards this building, so I knew that if I got close enough, the signs would lead me back to the building and the garage.
Attempting to return at the end of the day, I located the signs, began following them—and was soon hopelessly lost. It was only after going in a complete circle that I realized what was written on the sign—Senso Unico—was Italian for "One Way."
To follow arrows is human-behavior-meets-graphic-design 101. So it may not surprise you to learn that these gigantic concrete arrows dotting America, from east to west, are for wayfinding.
In the 1920s, America began coast-to-coast Airmail service, but the pioneer pilots had trouble navigating the route, since navigation charts of the day were fugazi and you couldn't exactly pull over to ask a farmer for directions. And traveling at night, when it would have been most efficient, or in bad weather was impossible. To solve this Congress then funded these gi-normous arrow-shaped Airmail Beacons, some up to 70 feet long, to trace a route across the country.
The arrows were painted bright yellow and each was accompanied by a tower up to 50 feet in height. At the top of each tower was a powerful gas-powered light, and at the bottom of the tower, a shed to hold the gas.
The easily-discernible design made the arrows visible from a distance of ten miles, and each arrow pointed the way towards the next, some three miles distant. That's according to the Postal Museum; however, this blog claims the towers were 10 miles apart with a 40-mile visibility. It's possible the former is describing the earlier towers and the latter is describing updated versions.
What's not in dispute is that the beacon towers are all gone, the steel having been broken up and recycled for America's World War II effort. But the no-longer-used arrows remain, their paint long since worn off by the elements, the arrows themselves too difficult to make breaking them up worthwhile. And unless Omer Haciomeroglu sends his Concrete Recycling Robots into the American hinterlands, they'll likely be there forever.
©2014 Core77, Inc. All rights reserved
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Likely Ran Out of Fuel, Report Says
May 27, 2014, 12:11 a.m. ET
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Likely Ran Out of Fuel, Report Says
By Daniel Stacey
SYDNEY--Analysis of the final ping transmission between Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and an Inmarsat PLC satellite found the missing jetliner was likely descending after running out of fuel, according to Australian air-accident investigators.
Investigators remain confident Flight 370 crashed into a remote stretch of the southern Indian Ocean within around 25 nautical miles of the final ping transmission, despite an initial underwater search and lengthy air-and-sea hunt for floating debris failing to find any trace of the plane.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau said its conclusion about the plane's likely location relied on calculations of how long it took the plane to descend plus a five nautical mile margin for error in the analysis of the satellite data. The bureau's conclusions--outlined in a series of reports on its website--come as authorities prepare to open up the hunt for the plane to private contractors through a public tender next week.
Flight 370's final digital handshake with the satellite didn't coincide with previous regular hourly transmissions. That is likely due to its electrical systems resetting when the plane ran out of fuel, the ATSB summary said, confirming earlier reports in The Wall Street Journal.
Modeling of fuel burn at various flight paths and aircraft speeds support the idea that Flight 370 ran out of fuel near the final ping arc, it said.
The ATSB also said for the first time that the search area intersects the only air route that passes down through the southeastern Indian Ocean, route M641, which travels from Cocos Island to Perth through four way points.
The overlap of the Cocos-Perth air route and search area may be a coincidence, with investigators still unsure about the plane's navigation during its final hours. Air routes are preprogrammed into flight computers and can be navigated without human intervention, raising the possibility that none of the crew were conscious when the plane crashed.
Authorities are also trying a new approach to help refine the search area: listening to audio captured by special underwater microphones spread across the ocean, which are typically used to monitor signs of illegal nuclear explosions. The microphones have long been deployed as part of the United Nations Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
The Australian naval vessel Ocean Shield is due to give up the search on Wednesday, having scoured a narrow area close to where it detected electronic signals on four occasions in early April. Authorities believed those transmissions were consistent with locator beacons on an aircraft's black box flight recorders, raising hopes of a breakthrough in the hunt for Flight 370, which went missing en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur on March 8 with 239 people on board.
The Ocean Shield's departure will leave the Chinese survey vessel Zhu Kezhen alone in the search area, carrying out early work to map the seabed. The ATSB said it would take up to three months to map the entire area some 1,000 miles northwest of Perth, with an additional ship from a private contractor being deployed in early June to scan the ocean floor at depths of up to 6,000 meters.
The results will enable towed sonar equipment to be deployed without the risk of it banging into undersea ridges and mountains.
Write to Daniel Stacey at daniel.stacey@wsj.com
Copyright ©2014 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Drone Almost Hit Airliner Over Florida in March, FAA Says
Drone Almost Hit Airliner Over Florida in March, FAA Says
By Alan Levin May 10, 2014 12:00 AM ET
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An unmanned aircraft almost struck a US Airways plane over Florida in March, a pilot told theFederal Aviation Administration, highlighting safety concerns as U.S. regulators develop rules for civilian drone use.
The Bombardier Inc. CRJ2 regional jet was about 5 miles from Tallahassee Regional Airport at an altitude of 2,300 feet (701 meters) when it passed by what appeared to be a remote-controlled aircraft, the FAA said in a statement yesterday.
American Airlines Group Inc. (AAL), which includes US Airways, is aware of media reports about the incident and is investigating, Casey Norton, a spokesman, said in an e-mail.
There have been at at least six other incidents since September 2011 in which pilots have reported close calls with what they believed were small unmanned aircraft, according to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System, which logs safety issues. The FAA doesn’t allow drone flights, other than by hobbyists, unless it has granted a special permit.
The drone in March came so close to the airliner that the pilot “was sure he had collided with it,” saidJames Williams, chief of the FAA’s unmanned aircraft office, said in a speech May 8 at the Small Unmanned Systems Business Exposition in San Francisco. “Thankfully inspection to the airliner after landing found no damage, but this may not always be the case.”
The pilot said it appeared the drone was a high-end model built to look like a fighter jet and powered with a small turbine engine, according to the FAA. Such model planes are capable of reaching higher altitudes than drone copters and may cost thousands of dollars.
Hudson Miracle
The FAA investigated the Tallahassee incident and couldn’t locate the unmanned aircraft or the pilot, according to the statement.
The FAA has said it plans to propose rules by the end of the year governing civilian drones weighing less than 55 pounds (25 kilograms), which have grown in popularity as prices fall and the aircraft become more widely available.
An industry committee assisting the FAA on the rule has proposed these small drones be kept away from airports and populated areas and limited to no higher than 400 feet.
Williams, whose speech was posted to YouTube.com, compared the Florida incident to the Jan. 15, 2009, water landing in the Hudson River of a US Airways Group Inc. aircraft that struck a flock of geese. No one died in the accident known as the “Miracle on the Hudson.”
“Imagine a metal and plastic object, especially that big lithium battery, going into a high-speed turbine engine,” he said. “The results could be catastrophic.”
FBI Investigation
Williams also cited drone accidents, including a small helicopter that struck a woman participating in a triathlon in Australia this year.
The March incident highlights the need for the FAA to move slowly as it develops rules to ensure the safety of unmanned flight, he said. The current rules for pilots and air-traffic controllers preventing mid-air collisions become more difficult when the person flying the plane is on the ground, he said.
The FAA and law enforcement have investigated other cases in which drones got too close to traditional aircraft.
Pilots on an Alitalia SpA Boeing Co. (BA) 777 nearing New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport reported a drone helicopter came within about 200 feet on March 4, 2013. The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an investigation.
An unidentified airline flight into LaGuardia Airport in New York flew about 500 feet (152 meters) above a small black drone in July 2013, according to an Aviation Safety Reporting Systemreport. The plane’s mid-air collision warning system didn’t alert them to the danger, the pilot reported. The other five incidents reported to NASA involved private aircraft.
To contact the reporter on this story: Alan Levin in Washington at alevin24@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bernard Kohn at bkohn2@bloomberg.netRomaine Bostick
©2014 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved
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