Sign up today for an air-conditioned room for Oshkosh 2020

AirVenture 2020 (“Oshkosh”) is July 20-26, 2020. The reservation form for the dormitories at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh went live today. The A/C rooms sleep two for $125/night. The A/C suites sleep four for $325/night. There is a shuttle bus from the dorms direct to the show.

The fee to reserve is fairly small, so if your plans change it is not a catastrophe to forfeit. They don’t ask for a full payment until about 1.5 months prior. You can also tweak the arrival/departure dates after reserving.

(I reserved a suite, which comes with a full kitchen, so I can host reader morning coffees!)

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Helicopter instructor job: lots of hours; all R44

Our flight school here in the Boston area is looking for a full-time Robinson R44 helicopter instructor: full ad.

This is an opportunity to fly 500-600 hours per year in a helicopter that is much safer and more forgiving than the more common R22.

Maintenance is our school‘s biggest strength, the owner being a retired USAF officer who was responsible for maintenance of the C-5 cargo jets.

Please contact Mark (the owner), through the ad on justhelicopters.com.

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New Englanders: Father’s Day weekend at the tank museum

New England’s latest museum to open is the American Heritage Museum in Hudson/Stow, Massachusetts. It is run by the long-established Collings Foundation, which owns priceless warbirds and classic cars, but shows off a new collection of armored vehicles.

It is a great museum any time (passionate and knowledgeable volunteer guides bring the machines alive), but especially great this coming weekend when they’re having the “Tanks, Wings, and Wheels” event.

[It is currently not simple to buy a membership at the front desk, so if you want to get an annual membership, sign up via the web site.]

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Lifting body airliner

One of the topics that we cover in the Aerodynamics lecture within our MIT Private Pilot Ground School (link to all of the slides and videos) is the industry inertia that results in all airliners looking more or less the same: tube plus wings.

It turns out that this is not an efficient way to build an airplane. The most fuel-efficient approach is a “lifting body” in which the fuselage is optimized to produce lift. With aluminum-and-rivet construction these probably haven’t made sense commercially, but now that airliners (e.g., Airbus A350 and Boeing 787) are made from composites, the complex shapes of a lifting body airliner might not be dramatically more expensive to fabricate.

Who is crazy enough to try to turn the academic dream into a commercial reality? KLM:

The Dutch national airline announced that it is helping fund the development of the Flying-V, a lifting-body-esque flying wing aircraft designed by Delft University of Technology student Justus Benad.

The designers say the Flying-V will use 20% less fuel than an Airbus A350 while carrying about the same number of passengers, 314. Roelof Vos, project leader at TU Delft, highlights the Flying-V’s efficiency as an important component of an industry eventually headed toward electric propulsion. According to CNN, Vos claims that ”aviation is contributing about 2.5% of global CO2 emissions, and the industry is still growing, so we really need to look at more sustainable airplanes. We cannot simply electrify the whole fleet, as electrified airplanes become way too heavy and you can’t fly people across the Atlantic on electric airplanes—not now, not in 30 years. So we have to come up with new technologies that reduce fuel burn in a different way.”

These folks are taking the long view:

A flying prototype is promised by October 2019, but the design isn’t expected to enter service until 2040.

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Regulation of aviation in Europe

One thing that isn’t unionized in the European Union is regulation of aviation. All of the member nations belong to the ICAO and there is an EU agency (EASA) that does most of the same stuff as our FAA. However, there is yet another layer of regulation on a per-country basis. “They can’t be less restrictive than ICAO, but they can add restrictions,” said a local pilot. “Every time a plane takes off, the Irish Aviation Authority considers that it has failed.”

It sounds reasonable for a country to have its own FAA-style agency. But Ireland’s population is 4.7 million. Should Metro Atlanta or South Carolina have its own FAA? Estonia, with a population of 1.3 million, also has its own aviation regulatory authority (can there be more than a handful of airplanes based in Estonia?).

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Flight school and airline careers starting in Ireland

On a recent trip to Ireland I visited National Flight Centre, one of the country’s two full-scale flight schools.

Lufthansa decided to abandon cloud-plagued Germany and train all of its ab initio pilots in Arizona. How can it work to learn to fly in Ireland, famous for rain?

One part of the answer is simulator time. The school has several sophisticated non-motion sims, one of which has a full 737-800 cockpit (Ryanair uses this plane). Of the 220 required hours of training for a “frozen ATPL“, 80 may be accomplished in a simulator. (On reaching 1,500 hours of flying experience, presumably gained in the right seat of a B737 or A320, the ATP becomes “unfrozen”.)

Students start as young as 17, though roughly half already have college degrees. They pay 82,000 euros for an 18-month program and, upon graduation, can work for any airline within the EASA umbrella (all of Europe, Turkey, etc.; does not include Qatar, Dubai, or China, all of which would require a license conversion). Starting salary at Ryanair for these 140-hour heroes is roughly 70,000 euros per year (depends on the base). Other European airlines pay in the same ballpark.

(What about Americans who want to escape the cruel dictatorship of Donald Trump? The American ATP can convert by doing 650 hours of home study through National Flight Centre, taking 14 exams (on site), and getting an Irish Class 1 medical. Budget for two trips to Ireland, a couple of weeks on the ground there total, and less than $10,000 out of pocket.)

Job prospects currently are awesome, with Ryanair alone hiring nearly 1,000 pilots per year.

The school is very well-organized, comparable to the best university-run U.S. schools. Instructors are a mixture of young enthusiasts and retired airline captains. Airplanes are dispatched with a GPS tracker and a flat-screen TV next to the front desk shows all aircraft positions. A web-based system keeps track of every lesson and the instructor’s evaluation. There is a nice restaurant overlooking the runway for relaxing between classes.

(It is vastly more difficult to start an airline career in the U.S. due to the 1,000/1,500-hour minimum. Also, the first job for a white or Asian male U.S. pilot will be in a regional jet, not a Boeing or Airbus (opportunities are better for members of victim groups, but there is no relief from the statutory minimum hours requirement).)

More: nfc.ie

Related:

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Does it make sense for Boeing to rebrand Embraer?

“Boeing drops Embraer name from Brazil commercial jet division” (Reuters):

Boeing Co on Thursday said that after taking over Brazilian planemaker Embraer SA’s passenger jet unit, it will call the division Boeing Brasil – Commercial, dropping one of Brazil’s most iconic company names.

The name change comes after Boeing agreed to pay $4.2 billion to buy 80% of Embraer’s operation making passenger jets with fewer than 150 seats. Embraer will retain a 20% stake. That division is still Embraer’s most profitable and considered a gold standard of Brazilian engineering.

Boeing has not made a decision yet about whether to rebrand the small and mid-sized planes, which currently carry the Embraer name followed by a model code.

Given the recent 737 MAX debacle, a far worse failure of engineering design than anything Embraer has ever done, does this rebranding make sense?

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Navy pilots see UFOs that commercial airline pilots don’t

“‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects” (nyt):

The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

Commercial airliners operate in the same general areas and far more hours per year, yet their pilots don’t report similar stuff.

Could it be the curved canopy of the fighter jets?

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Storm King, Donald Trump, and DC-3s

An afternoon in the Northeast, occasioned by a friend needing a ride from KBED to KSWF.

Over Bradley Field in the Cirrus SR20

Parked in the family airplane area…

After a 13-minute ride in the crew car (Thanks, Signature!), the Storm King Art Center. (Note curved wall by Andy Goldsworthy and the all-glass ice cream sundae “folly” by Mark Dion.)

Learned something new about one of my favorite artists. Louise Nevelson sometimes used gold instead of black!

For the kids, another Mark Dion:

On to KOXC where a squadron of DC-3s are preparing to leave for Europe to commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

Then an easy flight home over Hartford, Connecticut:

Fuel burned: About 25 gallons (on the trip home, with a bit of a tailwind and the mixture set for lean of peak operation, the Cirrus was getting roughly 20 mpg).

On returning home, I found that Mindy the Crippler was #Concerned about the trade war with China:

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