Brent VanFossen, Engineer with a View

Israel’s Globes Online announces that MI-Elta’s “Flight Guard” airline protection system has been approved for use on Boeing 767 airplanes.

The Israel Civil Aviation Authority (ICAA) has approved the Flight Guard commercial airliner protection system, built by Israel Military Industries Ltd. (IMI) and Israel Aircraft Industries Ltd.’s (IAI) Elta Systems Group. Approval followed test flights of the system and certification. Flight Guard has been approved for installation of Boeing 767 passenger jets.

…ICAA director general Udi Zohar…said the fact that the military system that had been adapted for civilian use in cooperation with the ICAA was a very significant achievement, as it was the first system of its kind in the world.

IMI developed Flight Guard’s diversion flares. IMI chairman Ovadia Eli said IMI’s countermeasure dispenser system launched flares at instructions from the radar radar-based missile approach warning system (MAWS). He said the flares were suitable for civilian use, after their safety was improved and adapted to meet the threat from terrorist missile attacks on civilian airliners.

Elta developed and adapted Flight Guard to protect civilian airliners on the basis of a cabinet decision in 2002 that the system would be the first to be installed on Israeli airliners. Elta’s systems are currently installed in over 200 aircraft in 15 countries, mostly in military aircraft, but also in executive jets.

Business Week reports that “Boeing’s Plastic Dream Machine” could revolutionize the use of plastic around the world.

Inside Boeing Co.’s (BA ) cavernous development center in Seattle, the future of its commercial jet business is taking shape. That future is plastic — and lots of it. At center stage in the tightly guarded building are three huge fuselage sections, dubbed barrels, made entirely of composites known as carbon fiber-reinforced plastic…

… Nothing on this scale has ever been attempted with composites, which are used in everything from golf-club shafts and tennis rackets to giant underground storage tanks. But even the latter can’t measure up to what Boeing is creating — namely, the entire airframe of its upcoming 787 Dreamliner jet.

In a very open article about the issue of airline safety, the International Herald Tribute looks at the “Great leaps in safety beyond bounds of media”, pointing out that the media tends to report on the sensational first assumptions of an airplane crash and rarely report on the more accurate findings that come later.

Aviation safety is often covered breathlessly by the news media, sometimes to the point that the aviation industry just shakes its head and rolls its eyes. Too often, the industry cringes at coverage that is also inaccurate.

In fact, many in the industry assume that aviation safety coverage will be inaccurate.

There is another assumption that aviation professionals subscribe to with even more enthusiasm - that the solution to a safety problem will almost always be ignored by the news media. At a minimum, it will be given tiny coverage compared with that of the original crash.

If ever there was a disaster that proves the point, it is the crash of Trans World Airways Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island on July 30, 1996. For those who may have forgotten, the TWA Boeing 747 was climbing after takeoff from Kennedy International Airport on a flight to Paris when a massive explosion ripped off the front half of the plane and the huge aircraft broke into pieces and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing 230 people.

The crash of Flight 800 almost a decade ago still ranks as one of the most inaccurately reported of all aviation crashes, and not just by the news media. The FBI made a number of blunders that it leaked to the news media in an effort to “prove” that terrorists had brought down the plane, something the agency believed for many weeks. That belief persisted although less than two weeks after the crash, professional investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board had discovered evidence that an accidental fuel tank explosion had caused the disaster.

Many months later, everyone except a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists understood that no one had deliberately blown Flight 800 out of the sky.

If you are thinking of taking your camera on the road into space, you better thing again as bureaucracy raises its ugly head. The FAA has gotten into the space tourism race and here are some references on new rules and regulations the FAA is setting up for space travel.

• Contra Coasta Times - FAA Proposes Space Tourism Rules
• Yahoo News - Government Issues Space Tourism Rules
• FAA Human Space Flight Proposed Guidelines and Rules (PDF)
• Fact Sheet on Commercial Human Space Flight
• Space.com - FAA Issues Guidelines and Rules for Space Travel

Don’t like the rules, let the FAA know. After all, space travel might be in your future. All it takes is a “little” money.

With the recent news of a bird damaging Oprah Winfrey’s airplane bringing to light the common incidences of airplane meets bird, Airport Business reports “In Jet-Bird Collisions, Planes Rarely Losers”.

Two airliners were forced to make emergency landings at Bradley International Airport recently after hitting some birds on takeoff, but the problem of bird strikes in aviation didn’t start with the jet age.

It began a century ago with Orville Wright.

It was September 1905, two years after the Wright Brothers first achieved powered flight at Kitty Hawk. Orville was cruising over a cornfield near the family home in Dayton, Ohio, when he reported hitting a bird, said Richard Dolbeer, a federal official who heads a bird strike advisory committee for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Wright was doing circles, chasing the birds, and whacked one, according to his diary. It landed dead on the upper wing.

Cut and Paste Aviation announces that the European Space Agency has launched the first of its satellite network designed to compete with the US GPS system.

The European Space Agency launched their first test satellite for the Galileo project, which will comprise a constellation of 30 satellites to rival the U.S. GPS system. Galileo is expected to be complete by 2010, with some services starting as soon as 2008. Its global positioning capabilities will be more accurate than the current GPS system, which is controlled by the U.S. military, and will even work indoors. Its signals should be compatible with current GPS hardware. It will have a basic signal that will be available free to everyone, and a more precise signal which will be encrypted.

According to ATW Online, Boeing is bullish on 787-10, Dreamliner production.

After what it called “a blockbuster year for the 787,” Boeing revealed it has outstanding offers to airlines for more than 500 Dreamliners and 787 Program VP and GM Mike Bair said the airframer hopes to turn many of those offers into firm orders.Following up on yesterday’s announcement that Boeing is looking at going ahead with the 787-10, Bair was even more bullish on the dash 10, saying, “a go-ahead is highly likely.” He told ATWOnline that the company is finalizing studies on the range/payload tradeoff and that “the business case looks very attractive.”

The dash 10 essentially would have the same capacity as the 777-200 but not the performance of the 777-200LR. Deliveries would commence in 2012. Boeing also is more optimistic about a production rate increase for the 787 after exceeding production milestones and conducting structural tests that verified the pressurization level of 6,000 ft. and the aircraft’s large window size.

Setting an inspirational example, the Dallas Star-Telegram reports on how old timers are restoring the history of aircraft.

At age 82, Ray Neal still goes to work at Vought Aircraft Industries twice a week.

Only now it’s a labor of love that motivates Neal to get out of the house instead of a paycheck.

Neal is one of a group of retired Vought employees who still trek to their former workplace on most Tuesdays and Thursdays to do what they love to do — work on old airplanes.

Most of the retirees worked for two decades or more for the Chance Vought Aircraft Co. or one of its later incarnations, including LTV Corp. Many were pilots, navigators or engineers, often with military experience and a love of all things aviation in their blood.

“The things that really keep us involved has more to do with aviation in general than just being Vought employees,” says Neal, one of nearly 100 members of the Vought Retirees Club who work on planes. “We would like future generations to know what we did in our generation.”

The object of Neal’s affection is the one-of-a-kind V-173 — known as the Flying Pancake — an experimental short-takeoff airplane once flown by Charles Lindbergh.

Piece by painstaking piece, Neal and other retirees have spent most of the last two years rebuilding the aircraft for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. They have several more months of work left to restore the aircraft to its original appearance for museum display. They hope to show it off in Texas before returning it to the Smithsonian.

The team of old timers are sharing their passion for planes by helping not only restore the airplane’s history, but also it’s paperwork by finding or recreating drawings, manuals, and documentation about how the plane works and flies. In a way, they are recreating how it was done originally, helping to preserve the process as well as the plane. Well done!

The process of determining how a plane crashed is a complex and fascinating one. You think CSI and Law and Order are riveting, think about ALL the information that has to be gone through to determine what happened to an airplane to cause it crash. Today’s planes are built with so much redundancy, and for the most part, over maintenance and monitoring within FAA regulations make most planes exceptionally safe. Safer than your car, that’s for sure.

Still, tracking the paper trail of a crashed airplane takes on a new perspective for challenge when the paper trail is gone due to a company being out of business, so explains James Bernstein of NewsDay in the article, “Plane’s old paper trail impedes probe”:

When an airplane crashes, investigators have a host of duties to perform, including one that has to be done immediately: getting a hold of the plane’s original design and specifications from the manufacturer.

But what if the manufacturer no longer exists?

Federal investigators found themselves confronted with just such a situation last week, when an amphibian - capable of operating from water as well as land-based airports - crashed off Miami Beach, killing the two pilots and 18 passengers aboard.

The 58-year-old plane - dubbed the Mallard - was built by the former Grumman Corp. in Bethpage. Fifty-nine were built, all in the late 1940s.

The plane that crashed was operated by Chalk’s Ocean Airways, which since the accident has grounded the remaining four Mallards in its fleet.

The problem for the Federal Aviation Administration is that there is no Grumman anymore, or at least, not in any form that helps the investigation. In 1994 Long Island’s largest private employer was acquired by Northrop Corp. of Los Angeles, and the combined company is now known as Northrop Grumman Corp. Since then, the Bethpage operation has all but ceased working on airframes, and its engineers, expertise and archives have all dispersed.

Eventually, they are able to track down some of the paperwork, but it is a lot of work to cover 58 years of maintenance records to help determine the cause.