Category: Flying

Destination Moon at the Museum of Flight in Seattle is on through September 2, 2019. The exhibit is a great experience, made better by the retired engineers who serve as docents.

Feel better about your achievements at the entrance…

Ignore the awesome permanent collection:

You will be reminded that the Lunar Roving Vehicle (Moon Buggy) was built by Boeing…

There is a lot of great explanation of the Saturn V engines, some of whose core features were carried over from the German V-2.

Some of the advanced technology that each person in Mission Control had on the desktop custom-made consoles…

(For younger readers: You turn the dial to make a phone call.)

The Museum of Flight is not infected by an Oshkosh-style blind patriotism and reminds visitors that JFK may have launched the Apollo project to distract Americans from the “disastrous failure” at the Bay of Pigs (Eisenhower made the same point).

The museum’s compliance with current political orthodoxy is incomplete. On the one hand, the folks who designed and built Apollo are described as “A Diverse Workforce” because they had “many backgrounds and educational levels”. But on the other hand, Margaret Hamilton is not credited with writing the code for the Apollo Guidance Computer. Consistent with histories written in the pre-woke age, the software was written by programmers who identified as men prior to her joining the project. She “verified and installed programs,” according to the museum, which makes sense from a historical timeline point of view if not from a social justice one.

Want to be famous? Don’t be Russian. Here’s the first woman in space. Compare her fame to that of Sally Ride, an American who followed her into space 20 years later.

Want to be famous? Don’t be part of the sixth mission to land humans (some identifying as “men”?) on the moon:

How many of the above names were familiar to you?

Don’t like physics homework? There is an easier path to becoming a rocket scientist at NASA:

One of the most poignant and confusing parts of the museum is near the front entrance. A statue depicts Michael Anderson, mission specialist and then payload commander on two Shuttle flights. The plaque says “Dreams really do come true.” Yet Col. Anderson died on that second flight, of the shuttle Columbia. Surely that was not his or anyone else’s dream.

My advice: Hop a flight to Seattle, stay at the new Hyatt Regency, chow down at Din Tai Fung (I picked out some food to order there and asked a Chinese-American friend to critique: “That’s like going to Pat’s or Geno’s and ordering a hot dog”), and spend a day (before Sept 2) at the Museum of Flight.

One interesting panel at Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture) this year was regarding civilian supersonic aircraft (see the Supersonic Renaissance clip on YouTube).

As with most innovations in aviation, the big enabler is an innovation in engine technology. GE Aviation, currently celebrating its 100th anniversary, has a new engine that is mostly based on the latest subsonic civilian technology and three of these will drive a the Aerion AS2 plane forward at Mach 1.4 while burning roughly 2X the fuel per passenger-mile as a Gulfstream G650. The second enabler is cash and the Bass brothers are supposedly kicking in $4 billion.

So far so good if the goal is 4,200 nm over water (Gulfstream G650 range is closer to 7,000 nm).

What about going over land? After a five-year regulatory process, the U.S. effectively banned supersonic flight over land in 1973. The ban relates to speed, not to noise over the ground. An aircraft whose sonic boom was quieter than a Honda Accord driving by on the street would be banned, for example.

In a rare example of a NASA project that might have an effect on someone’s day-to-day life, NASA is currently hoping to test fly an X-59 “quiet supersonic” plane in 2021. This will supplement testing done in 2018 with a a modified F/A 18. The shape of the plane is designed to prevent shockwaves from different parts of the aircraft meeting and reinforcing each other. This may reduce the boom by 30 dBA and produce a sound like distant thunder.

NASA is currently planning do to 2-3 years of testing to gather civilian reaction and then turn numbers over to the FAA for the beginning of a regulatory process whose result will presumably be a decibel-time limit. If the regulatory process takes the same 5 years that it did from 1968-1973, that will be 7-8 years after 2021 before manufacturers such as Aerion can have any idea whether what they’re designing will be legal to operate from NY to LA (and thus ready for climate change activist Leonardo DiCaprio!). In other words, it will take longer than World War II and all of the innovation that happened in aviation during those 6 years!

(Two nights earlier, Burt Rutan had given a crusty old guy’s talk about how pathetic young Americans were with their anemic pace of innovation. The government, including today’s NASA was singled out as particularly sluggish and unambitious, thus leading to “some homebuilders in the Mojave Desert” running Americans’ only space flights with humans on board.)

One interesting thing is that an airplane can potentially fly at Mach 1.2 at 60,000′ without a sonic boom ever reaching the ground. The speed of sound is slower where the air is colder and apparently the wave will dissipate as it goes through warmer air (but what if Hillary Clinton and DiCaprio are at FL510 in a Gulfstream G650 just below? Will their Champagne glasses be rattled?)

Aerion is planning to be in service in 2026 and to meet all Stage 5 takeoff and landing noise restrictions. To keep the rabble from rioting, the company is claiming to be “carbon neutral”. Yes they will spend $4 billion (enough to plant 400 million trees?) and burn 2X the fuel of the biggest Gulfstream per seat-mile. But the fuel burned can be 100 percent biofuel (i.e., corn!).

More: watch the Supersonic Renaissance clip on YouTube.

An aviation medical examiner recently contacted me regarding a college student interested in learning to fly, but who lacked the use of his legs. I responded with what I thought was the standard advice for this situation: train in a classic Ercoupe, which didn’t have any rudder pedals.

The August 2019 issue of Flying Magazine (print edition) carries what might be an interesting update. Grant Korgan, subject of the recent Netflix movie The Push (to the South Pole), recently earned a Private certificate in a Cirrus SR20 that he adapted for use with only his hands (i.e., the rudder and brakes had to be operated without feet/legs).

Sidenote: Despite having lost the use of his legs in a snowmobiling accident, Korgan was able to earn a Class 1 medical certificate (required to be captain of an airliner).

An inspiring story for those of us who fly older Cirruses and complain about the lack of A/C…

From Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture 2019):

For years, especially during night flights, I have been wondering “Why can’t a Robinson R44 have a ballistic parachute like in the Cirrus, stuck on top like the pod for the Apache.”

Now it has been done! Zefhir from an Italian aerospace parts manufacturer, Curti. And it is turbine-powered! (via an APU engine, as per usual for jet-powered aircraft of this weight)

Experimental for now. Certified one day?

(An Apache crew visited Oshkosh…

)

Oshkosh is winding up today and that means a bunch of young people have been inspired to pursue aviation careers, which generally means airline flying. Americans generally assume that anyone who wants to fly airliners must sacrifice home life to become a hotel-based nomad for 10-22 days per month.

[And, like military personnel stationed overseas, be guaranteed losers in any state that comes a winner-take-all custody and child support system and awarding winner status to the parent who can claim to be the “historical primary caregiver.” See Real World Divorce for how this works.]

This is not how it works for everyone!

While in Ireland, I met a Ryanair captain who’d been with the airline for 8 years. He had spent only 2 nights in hotels during that time period. How is that possible? “All trips return to the home base in the evening,” he said. “You might have two out-and-backs or one long flight and a long return.” This is not to say that one can stay in one’s original city. There are Ryanair bases all over Europe and it is the pilot’s responsibility to move to the new base city, rent an apartment, pay for the apartment, etc. This guy had been moved to Rome at one point.

How does maintenance work if the planes are this dispersed? “They have three Learjets and if there is a tech problem the mechanics rush in to wherever the plane is.”

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/06/08/flight-school-and-airline-careers-starting-in-ireland/
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2016/01/17/wall-street-journal-on-airline-labor-costs/

AirVenture is almost over and one thing that I haven’t seen is one of my old wishlist items; integrated cameras in new aircraft, e.g., built-in mounts for GoPro cameras (a long-lived mechanical standard, right?) with power supply from the ship. The buyer of a $1 million Cirrus should be able to share the scenic/fun/cool parts of his or her experience with the plane with minimal effort. Maybe this would draw more people into flying light aircraft too, e.g., if there were a “press a button to share an auto-generated video of this flight to Facebook” option.

(It shouldn’t be tough to make a watchable flying video automatically. Speed up taxi by 10X. Cut any portions where the aircraft is on the ground and not moving for more than 5 seconds. Do takeoff at 1X, gradually increasing to 10X as the aircraft climbs to cruising altitude, then slowing back down to 1X for landing. A one-hour start-to-shutdown trip to the beach thus turns into a 7-minute video.)

Related:

• Tesla lets drivers save clips from the car’s forward-facing camera (but won’t automatically produce a “my sanctimonious and scenic drive” video to share)