Cut and Paste Aviation Honors National Women’s History Week

My wife and I are fans of Cut and Paste Aviation and she was really excited to find that they are honoring National Women’s History Month with highlights of amazing and outrageous women in aviation history. Some highlights include:

Katherine Stinson (1893-1977): Katherine Stinson won a balloon trip in a raffle at age 16 and decided to become a stunt pilot soon after as a way to make money. She became the fourth woman to receive a pilots license soon after, and became one of the most daring female stunt fliers of her time. In 1913, she and her mother founded Stinson Aviation Company and a couple years later started a flying school in Texas. She went on to become the first woman to carry the mail by air and is often credited as the first woman to perform the loop the loop.

In November 1915 she made eighty consecutive loops flying upside down for thirty seconds and executing a series of spins. In December, determined to out-do a male pilot, Art Smith, who had looped the loop at night, she added magnesium flares to her aircraft and traced the letters CAL in the night sky, then looped, flew upside down, and spiralled to 100 feet of the ground, trailing showers of sparks. For the first six months of 1917, she toured China and Japan, where no woman had flown before.

Marga von Etzdorf (1907-1933): Marga von Etzdorfwas born into an aristocratic military family and decided at 19 that flying would be her life. She got a job as a copilot of a “Junkers F-13 with Lufthansa” flying a commercial route regularly from Berlin to Basel, Switzerland, via Stuttgart. Eventually, she bought her own plane and learned aerobatics, flying throughout Europe, then further including a famous 11-day solo flight from Berlin to Tokyo in 1931.

Juanita Pritchard Bailey: Called “The Flying Beautician”, Juanita Pritchard Bailey was the owner of a beauty salon in Clairton, Pennsylvania, and an active pilot, including flying coastal and patrol missions with the Civil Air Patrol during World War II. She was the first woman to solo from the US to Panama and became a ferry pilot for aircraft companies, flying all over North America from Alaska to Central and South America. Still alive and kicking, according to Cut and Paste Aviation, “she has logged over 6000 hours during her distinguished flying career.” Wow!

Helen Richey: Helen Richey has a long record of firsts. First soloed in 1930, followed two years later as a record holder for women as she and Frances Marsalis stayed in the air for almost ten days. First to win the first National Air Meet for Women in Dayton in 1934. First commercial pilot for Greensburg, PA’s Dick Coulter’s Central Airlines in 1934 winning out over 8 men. She set two world records for light planes in 1936. She was the first woman to be licensed as a flight instructor by the CAA.

Ruth Rowland Nichols (1901-1960): Ruth Rowland Nichols began flying in 1919 and became the first woman to licensed for a “flying boat” or sea plane. She was rated to fly just about anything including “the dirigible, glider, autogiro, landplane, seaplane, amphibian, monoplanes, biplanes, tri-planes, twin and four engine transports and supersonic jets.” She was the first three women “to earn an Air Transport Pilot rating in 1929 and the only woman to hold three different world records simultaneously: women’s altitude (28,748 feet), speed (210.5 mph), and non-stop, Oakland to Louisville (19 hrs. 16 min.) between 1931 and 1932.” After injuring her back in an attempt to fly across the Atlantic and crashing, she flew the rest of her life with a steel back brace, and the injury inspired her to start the “Relief Wings, a flying ambulance for mercy missions” which became part of the Civil Air Patrol.

Women, be inspired by these great representatives of the fairer sex who even inspired men to fly better and changed the face of aviation today.

 

Media Coverage of Airplane Crashes Focus on Sensationalism Not Truth

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.

 

Airplane Versus Bird - Who Wins?

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.

 

European Space Agency to Compete with US GPS Satellite System

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.

 

Alaska Airlines Salmon Thirty Salmon Airplane

Working on the first Boeing 777, painted colorful cartoon designs from the child who won the award to paint the first 777, I have long been a fan of dolled up airplanes. So it was fun to see pictures of the Alaska Airlines “Salmon Thirty Salmon”, a delightful play on 737.

The “Salmon-Thirty-Salmon,” sporting the glimmering image of a wild Alaska king salmon, is among the world’s most intricately painted commercial airplanes. Complete with shiny scales, a dorsal fin and gills, the livery on the Alaska Airlines 737-400 passenger aircraft is the result of a dedicated team of 30 painters working nearly nonstop for 24 days.

The airplane symbolizes the critical role Alaska Airlines plays in transporting fresh Alaska seafood to the continental United States and beyond. The paint scheme was produced in partnership with the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board (AFMB), which promotes the export of Alaska seafood.

“This airplane celebrates Alaska Airlines’ unique relationship with the people and communities of Alaska and underscores our air transport commitment to the state’s seafood industry,” said Gregg Saretsky, Alaska Airlines’ executive vice president of marketing and planning. “Alaska seafood is more popular than ever, and Alaska Airlines is proud to play a role in getting much of it from the waters of Alaska to dinner tables across the country in record time.”

The fishy aircraft features an original design by Mark Boyle, Seattle-based wildlife artist who has gained quite a reputation as a designer of commercial aircraft art. According to the article, the project required “three times as many hours to paint as the normal livery, using Mylar paint to create an iridescent look and airbrushing techniques to make the fish painting appear three dimensional.”

 

Building Aircraft and Transportation with Reusability in Mind

Kenneth Gomez’s We Don’t Know As Much As We Think We Do discusses the fact that many of our aircraft, including the Space Shuttle, are based on a world and economy of high maintenance, and whether or not we know as much as we think we do when it comes to efficiency, durability, and standards.

One of the issues with building reusable space transports are those of maintenance and inspection…

…How applicable is this cautionary tale to the design of space transports? Well somewhat, but not quite as much as one might think. Fatigue is (usually) a phenomenon that occurs as a result of a large number of cycles (assuming that the stress is reasonable–obviously, one can fatigue a paper clip to failure in just a few extreme twists back and forth with a pair of pliers). It’s a real concern for aircraft that are in the air a lot, with many takeoffs and landings, and continuous buffeting from the air.

A space transport has two things going for it. First of all, it spends little time in the atmosphere, which is where most of the structural stress occurs, at least that due to aerodynamics. In space, it’s actually a quite benign environment, from a structural standpoint. Second, if we ever get to the number of flights of a single space transport that even start to approach the cycle life of an air transport, we’ll have clearly solved the problem of space access, even if we occasionally (as in the aircraft industry) lose a vehicle to structural fatigue.

But regardless of what this means for spaceship design, I think that Airbus has some big problems, until they understand this issue better. And now that Boeing is also using composites for primary structure, they need to get on top of it as well.

 

Accident Creates New Light Bulbs of the Future

Live Science reports on the “Accidental Invention Points to End of Light Bulbs”.

Michael Bowers, a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, was just trying to make really small quantum dots, which are crystals generally only a few nanometers big. That’s less than 1/1000th the width of a human hair…When you shine a light on quantum dots or apply electricity to them, they react by producing their own light, normally a bright, vibrant color. But when Bowers shined a laser on his batch of dots, something unexpected happened.

“I was surprised when a white glow covered the table,” Bowers said. “The quantum dots were supposed to emit blue light, but instead they were giving off a beautiful white glow.”

Then Bowers and another student got the idea to stir the dots into polyurethane and coat a blue LED light bulb with the mix. The lumpy bulb wasn’t pretty, but it produced white light similar to a regular light bulb. The new device gives off a warm, yellowish-white light that shines twice as bright and lasts 50 times longer than the standard 60 watt light bulb.

LED lights have been limited to green, red, blue, and yellow light, and the capability to produce a white light may revolutionize lighting in the future. LEDs produce twice as much light as a regular 60 watt bulb, and according to the Department of Energy, can burn for over 50,000 hours, reducing energy consumption in the US by 29 percent by 2025.

If these new white LED lights pay off, expect to see white LED lights in airplanes, offices, and even inside the home very soon.

 

Stennis Space Center Resumes Business After Hurricane Katrina

In a sign of recovery from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, NASA and got a boost, literally, with a test firing shuttle engines at Stennis Space Center in Louisiana, almost directly northeast of New Orleans.

Engineers successfully test-fired an engine for 520 seconds; the time it takes a shuttle to reach orbit. Today’s engine test is an indication that Stennis and the region are working toward recovering from the storm.

Today’s test was a continuation of a certification series on the Advanced Health Management System, which monitors the engine’s performance. It enables the engine to shut down if unusual vibrations are detected in the turbopump. It’s an upgrade that provides a significant improvement for lower risk for shuttle main engines. Other engine parts were tested and certified, such as a fast-response temperature sensor.

Congrats, Stennis!

 

Milestones of Flight

42 Years Ago Alan Arnold Griffith died.

He was a British aeronautical engineer, born June 13, 1893. During the late 1920s, A.A. Griffith and F. Whittle independently made the first practical proposals for the use of gas turbine engines in aircraft. Griffith concentrated on developing an axial flow compressor, and in 1929 he proposed a gas turbine engine driving a propeller, the so called turbo-prop engine. At Rolls Royce (1939-60) he designed turbojet engines, and in the 1950s, vertical take-off aircraft. He developed the remarkable flying bedstead which first flew in 1954.

92 years ago, M. Seguin and Farman of France fly 634 miles (1,021 km), establishing the last international distance record before the First World War.

37 years ago, 1968 - 11-12 The first Apollo test mission is made, lasting for 10 days, 20 hours, and 9 inutes. Called “Apollo 7″, it was launched by a Saturn 1B and carrying astronauts Walter Schirra, Don Eisele and Walter Cunningham.

47 years ago, the USAF makes a second attempt to put a research probe in orbit around the Moon. This is Pioneer 1B which, because its thrid stage cuts out fractionally too soon, travels about 70,700 miles (113,780km) before falling back toward Earth.

86 years ago, Handley Page Transport offers the first meals on board airliners, at a cost of 3 shillings per basket, on its London-Brussels service.

95 years ago, President Teddy Roosevelt becomes the first US president to fly when he is taken up in St. Louis.

46 years ago, the Pan American Boeing 707-321 Clipper Windward inaugurates the first round-the-world pasenger service by turbojet-powered airliners.

I believe you can’t know where you’re going until you know where you have been. Cut and Paste Aviation - Milestones of Flight puts a reality check on how far behind or ahead of ourselves we have become when it comes to aviation milestones.

 

Air Travel - Cellphones out, WIFI in

Want to talk on your cell phone during the flight? Well, you can’t. Cell phone users on airplanes are considered annoying. So how do you stay in touch while in flight? You’ll have to let your fingers do your communicating.

I’m currently working on development and installation of wireless broadband Internet on international airplances while watching the United States, FAA, and other organizations battle this issue out. It seems that cell phones are bad, WIFI is great.

Opposition to a federal proposal to allow wireless phone calls on U.S. airline flights has air carriers and federal regulators considering a less controversial alternative that could still help busy executives turn idle travel time into productive work time: wireless internet connections, reports Washington Watch.

In December, the Federal Communications Commission proposed relaxing its nearly 15-year ban on wireless phone use during U.S. flights. Since then, the agency has received thousands of messages opposing the idea. Travelers, as well as flight attendant groups, claim cell phone use on airplanes would cause fights between passengers talking on the phone and those annoyed by the conversations. Members of Congress have also objected.

As a result, airlines and wireless carriers are testing Wi-Fi networks. In June, the Federal Aviation Administration gave Verizon Airfone and UnitedAirlines approval to test Wi-Fi equipment for use in flight after demonstrating that it would not interfere with airline instrumentation. Meanwhile, Cingular Wireless wrote to the FAA saying passengers should be encouraged to “tap, not talk” during flights.
U.S. Airlines to Allow In-flight Internet Connections