ERAU Tech

iPod Flight Data Recorder

2007-03-02T06:33:00.000-05:00

LoPresti wants to use the iPod for a flight data recorder in the Fury. Story here at Flight Global. Link via Slashdot.

Virgin Atlantic A-320 Decked Out with Personal Entertainment System

2007-02-10T10:10:00.000-05:00

Let the Raptor Speak (Digital)

2007-01-28T10:14:00.000-05:00

David Axe, over at Defense Tech (where else?), has this report on re-engineering the F-22A Raptor to transmit digital data as well as gather and receive it.

Seems under the current design, the pilot has to send information about what they're seeing that was gathered electronically using voice comm. The redesign will transmit that information digitally to other planes (and command, too?).

Restart

2007-01-15T11:27:00.000-05:00

It's a new semester, so a new start for this blog.

But don't get your hopes up!

If you're interested in contributing -- please be interested in contributing -- let me know. wilsonti atthingee erau dotthingee edu.

Self-Organizing UAV Squadron

2006-11-30T07:21:00.000-05:00

Article here at Engadget.

Just One of the Many Things We Wish We Were Doing

2006-10-28T18:45:00.000-05:00

Here.

We = ERAU.

Cool Image

2006-10-08T08:40:00.000-05:00

Found here, at the Image of the Day site, but originally published here at airliners.net. Check it out.

"We were promised flying cars..."

2006-09-10T12:12:00.000-05:00

Alas, we are several generation too late. Images of the Aerocar, here, via the Cellar Image of the Day.

Quick Links, SUN 10 SEP

2006-09-10T09:00:00.000-05:00

Some items to share but am too ~~lazy~~otherwise occupied to write about. From local favorite Defense Tech.

Hypersonic cruise missile, here.
Israeli UAVs in the recent fight with Hezbollah, here.

A personal goal is to update here more often.

AUVSI Pics

2006-09-10T08:57:00.000-05:00

BSCE (December '04, as I was corrected. Time flies, etc.) grad Todd Sherman also attended AUVSI. He put a mess of pics up at his Flickr site, here.

AUVSI

2006-08-31T04:14:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Tropical Event Ernesto's having ERAU shut down early yesterday, I spent more of the afternoon than I thought I was going to be able to at the AUVSI conference in Orlando. Didn't get to take in the paper presentation part of the conference, but did get to wander through the exhibits and talk to vendors about a couple of projects involving UAV propulsion and heavy fuels (i.e., diesel) that I'm going to be working on.

Stay tuned.

Quick Links, THU 24 AUG 06

2006-08-24T08:28:00.000-05:00

Busy with the folks who pay for my research, but have been wanting to get these in and have a brief breather...

Lockheed-Martin turns F-35 into a UAV, here. [Lockheed-Martin].
Kill FCS now! Here [Defense Tech].
J-UCAS in the crosshairs, here. [Defense Tech]

Software Development Explained

2006-08-19T22:24:00.000-05:00

Here.

Jet Powered Scooter

2006-08-18T07:51:00.000-05:00

The guy who brought us the jet-powered New Beatle is modding his wife's scooter. Story at Jalopnik.

David Axe's Bottom Line on the Raptor

2006-08-18T07:38:00.000-05:00

The bottom line on David Axe's five posts at Defense Tech on the F-22?

...[S]ome critics ask, why can't we cut the expensive Raptor in favor of the cheaper Lightning? While a fine bomb-hauler and (one hopes) a good multi-service airframe, the F-35 is a mediocre performer. Said 1st Fighter Wing commander Brigadier General Burton Field, "The problem with the F-35 ... is speed. It doesn't have the capability to supercruise. Speed lets us get inside the decision cycle of the bad guy."

For the most dangerous air battles and attack missions, F-35 squadrons will rely on F-22s for support. That's an unavoidable state of affairs when you design an airframe to replace slow- and low-flying Lockheed Martin A-10 Warthogs and Boeing AV-8B Harriers as well as light and flexible F-16s and Boeing F/A-18 Hornets. The F-35 is a compromise. Potentially a very successful compromise, but still ...

We've already sunk $25 billion into Raptor development. That money is irrecoverable. Further jets cost only around $115 million (perhaps twice as much as a new F-16) and will get even cheaper. We should get a good return on our investment. A good return, in my estimation, means a full fleet of at least 381 Raptors in 10 or more full-strength squadrons. That should guarantee air dominance for another 30 years or more.

{Best, Worst}. Software. Ever.

2006-08-18T05:19:00.000-05:00

Information Week has this article up with a list of "Greatest Software Ever Written." I won't give away the winner of the number one slot, but it starts with "Berkeley" and ends with "4.3".

On the other end of the spectrum, today's Washington Post has this article (registration or workaround required) about the FBI's Virtual Case File system, one of the larger software-development screw ups in history. Why? According to this September 2005 article in IEEE Spectrum, because they wouldn't get the requirements right, that's why.

Boeing Gives Up on In-Flight Internet

2006-08-17T18:52:00.000-05:00

After what could best be classified as a half-hearted attempt to offer in-flight internet service, Boeing has wimped out and given up on the idea. The story's in the International Herald Tribune (link from Drudge).

In announcing the project in 2000, Boeing predicted that the market for inflight Internet access would be worth $70 billion over 10 years. But the company said Thursday that the number of passengers using the service on the 156 aircraft with 12 airlines amounted to little more than "low single digits" a flight. Boeing declined to say how much it costs to run the service.

The cost to airline passengers is $9.95 an hour or $26.95 for an entire flight, and revenue is shared between Boeing and the airlines.

Lufthansa, which operates 62 aircraft using the system, said that the maximum number of passengers ever connected at one time is around 40 a flight, usually on routes to North America and Asia.

"Given the usage level, we just didn't see the kind of numbers that add up to a business," said John Dern, a Boeing spokesman. "You could say it flew well technically, but it didn't fly so well as a business."

The upside: Like terrestial-based bandwidth, the technology is likely to be available at el-cheapo prices, giving someone else with a better business plan -- like, oh, getting a US business carrier like Delta to offer it domestically in the USA on the northeast shuttle routes and cross-country flights -- a chance to keep the idea alive.

F-22A Raptor

2006-08-15T07:29:00.000-05:00

Defense Tech (where else) has ~~twothree~~five -- count 'em, ~~twothree~~five -- posts on whether the Lockheed-Martin F-22A Raptor is everything it's made out to be.

Also, check out David Axe's photo set of the F-22A at Langley on Flickr.

"[I]t's either like playing a video game, flying a remote-controlled plane, or doing data entry"

2006-08-09T15:58:00.000-05:00

Slate explains how to fly a UAV (current term in the MSM: "drone"), here.

The U.S. Army's drone of choice, the Raven, is a 3-foot-long, camera-equipped miniplane that's "launched" when a soldier winds up and throws it. Once in the air, the Raven is controlled by a book-sized console that looks something like a 1980s-era Coleco football game. The screen at the top displays one of the drone's three video feeds, and the joysticks and buttons at the bottom pilot the craft. Operators can use the sticks to pilot the Raven like a model plane or just preprogram GPS coordinates for the drone to follow. There's even a button that automatically returns the Raven to its launch site.

And more on Predator and Global Hawk sized planes.

Quick Links, TUE 08 AUG 06

2006-08-08T07:00:00.000-05:00

Too buzy/lazy/perterbed to write these up, but want to share. Most of these are overview posts with links to more details.

Joint Air-Ground Operations Group 360-degree dome simulator here [Defense Tech].
UAV swarms, killer swarms, ultra swarms here [Defense Tech].
18th Reconaissance Squad and the Global Hawk here [Defense Tech].
Air Line Pilots Association and/or Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association planted story on UAV safety concerns here [USA Today].
Israeli airforce downed a Hezbollah drone here [Jerusalem Post].
Robot kayaks here [BoingBoing]
Kick ass Mac Pro 1K USD cheaper than comparably equipped Dell box and other Apple WWDC news here and here [Engadget].

Eclipse 500 Gets Provisional Type Certificate

2006-07-28T04:06:00.000-05:00

The FAA will issue the full TC on 30 August.

Enboarding with Help from Einstein

2006-07-27T20:34:00.000-05:00

The current issue of New Scientist has a story on of how Einstein's theory of relativity can be applied to the problem of how do you get all those people onto that airliner in that amount of time. Einstein's theory coupled with a fair amount of modeling and simulation (CS 350) activity, that is.

Enter Eitan Bachmat and his colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Bachmat wasn't initially aiming to solve the problem of "enplaning", as airlines rather grandly call it. He was studying the performance of digital storage systems such as PC hard drives, looking at how to read and write data most efficiently. Say you send your hard drive a big bunch of read/write requests. What you want to know is the quickest way to carry out those tasks. How do you find the fewest drive rotations needed to do the job?

One day a colleague who saw this work said, "Hey, that looks a lot like airplane boarding," and so Bachmat and his colleagues decided to explore this parallel route. "We thought we could do this and take stuff back to the hard drive problem," he says.

[...]

Fortunately, physics has something to say about problems like this. Odd as it may seem, it occurred to Bachmat and his colleagues that the way passengers fill up a plane looks like relativity's description of how things move through the four dimensions of space-time under the influence of gravity.

According to relativity, an object in "freefall" follows the trajectory that ages it the most. Throw a stone into the air: it will trace out an arc and return to the ground. Attach a stopwatch to the stone and you would see that, out of all the trajectories through space-time the stone might have taken under the influence of gravity, the arc of its flight is the one in which the most time passes. In other words, the stone maximises the amount of time (in its own reference frame) that passes as it flies up and then falls back to Earth.

[...]

Bachmat and his colleagues chose their metric so that the past-future relationship between passenger "space-time" points is precisely the same as the blocking relationship on a real aircraft: in passenger "space-time", if someone is blocking you, they are in your future.

"You can determine whether passengers are in each other's future or past"
Having called their virtual passengers to this mathematical boarding gate, Bachmat and his colleagues can calculate the overall boarding time by finding the equivalent of a free-fall trajectory through that passenger "space-time". The maths [sic -- damned Brits] isn't simple but it gives you formulae for calculating boarding time under different boarding policies. Crucially, it also lets you see the effect of varying parameters such as legroom and luggage-stowing time (Journal of Physics A, DOI: 10.1088/0305-4470/39/29/L01).

So what did they discover? "What turns out to be critical is the notion of congestion," says Bachmat. The team incorporated this into their model as a variable k, which depends on legroom, passenger width and number of people per row. "It tells you how crammed passengers are."

The team found that policies that work well for small k - the rarefied world of first class - become terrible for the high-k crush back in economy. Where congestion is low, furthest-row-first works well, but this becomes progressively worse as congestion increases. The people destined for seats 68A and 68B, for example, could be standing alongside row 67, waiting for the woman in 68C to stuff her bag into the overhead locker. While they wait, they block the people heading for row 67 from reaching their locker, and so on. So even with a furthest-row-first policy, high congestion means that the queue will be all the way out of the plane door within minutes, with not one other person able to get to their own row.

For really high congestion, random boarding soon becomes the better option. For the moderate-squeeze conditions that are the reality for most of us, the best balance is a high level of row randomness combined with a touch of back-to-front.

"For moderate-squeeze conditions the best balance is a high level of row randomness combined with a touch of back-to-front"

[...]

What also emerged is that boarding time is proportional to the square root of the number of passengers. Considering how complex things become as the numbers increase, that's actually not bad, but it still has significant implications for today's ever-bigger airplanes, like Airbus's 555-seat superjumbo, the A380.

There's more: Window seats in the back first helps. Who'd've thunk it?!

The online version of the article itself remains in a subscriber-only zone for a while, but it's in the current print edition.

(Hat tip to Todd S.)

Small Biz Jets in the News

2006-07-26T05:48:00.000-05:00

There are two stories in today's New York Times on small business jets.

The first is that Honda announced yesterday at Oshkosh that it's going to build its 6-passenger jet.

The twin-engine, 6-passenger HondaJet will go on sale by 2010. It will be built in the United States, at a yet-to-be-determined location. Honda, which announced the jet at an air show in Oshkosh, Wis., said it would begin taking orders this fall.
To market the jet, Honda will form an alliance with Piper Aircraft, the 69-year-old manufacturer of a line of small planes starting with the Piper Cub, a pioneer in general aviation aircraft.
[...]

Honda officials estimated that the very light jet market would total about 200 planes a year and said it hoped it could capture a good chunk of those sales by stressing the plane’s unique features.

The HondaJet’s engines will be mounted over the wings, not over the tail as on many private jets. The plane will also make extensive use of composite materials instead of aluminum, which will make it lighter and permit it to use less fuel.

The HondaJet is expected to be 5 percent more efficient at cruising speed, said Michimasa Fujino, a vice president of Honda Research and Development Americas, who has led the jet’s development.

The second story is on the air taxi business model in which companies sell seats on planes like the forthcoming Eclipse 500 to get business travelers to and from quicker and more directly than by using the big carriers, but at a price premium.

For years, questions about the size of an air taxi market have been largely theoretical. But that will change this year, as Eclipse Aviation of Albuquerque begins building the Eclipse 500, a six-seat plane. The company expects the plane will receive its long-awaited certification from the Federal Aviation Administration as soon as this week.
With the Eclipse, two start-up airlines, Linear Air and DayJet, say they can ferry business travelers to hard-to-reach outposts with fewer frustrations — and get them home in time for dinner with their families.
“One of the first things they teach you in sales is to look for the pain,” said William E. Herp, chief executive of Linear Air, an air charter company that has ordered 30 Eclipse planes at a total cost of $50 million. “And there is a lot of pain out there among business travelers who are flying on commercial jets.”
[...]
The 33-foot Eclipse plane, which will cost $1.5 million, can carry two pilots and four passengers and fly at speeds of over 400 miles an hour. By comparison, a twin-engine Cessna CJ-1, a jet that also carries four passengers, costs about $4.3 million and can fly 448 miles an hour. Categorized as a very light jet at less than 10,000 pounds, the Eclipse offers comfort more akin to flying in a leather-appointed sport utility vehicle than a bigger corporate jet with a wet bar. There is also no bathroom — a fact that has caused some aviation industry veterans to pass up the plane for an air taxi service.
“The absence of a lavatory is going to be a problem,” said Robert L. Crandall, the retired chairman of American Airlines who is now chief executive of Pogo Jet, a start-up airline looking to get into the air taxi business in the Northeast.
[...]
Among the first to put the Eclipse into service will be Linear Air, founded in 2004 by Mr. Herp, an entrepreneur. His airline started as a charter service, flying wealthy travelers to Martha’s Vineyard from Boston and New York in Cessna turboprop planes. The company now also markets its services to small teams from consulting firms and other businesses who need to travel together to see clients or visit remote offices or factories. Because of the Eclipse’s faster speed, Mr. Herp said it made sense for him to expand his airline to Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
“Eclipse is the game in town right now,” said Mr. Herp, speaking from the Albuquerque airport last week after visiting Eclipse’s production plant, where the company is assembling the first 10 Eclipse 500’s. Mr. Herp was enthusiastic about how Eclipse’s production was automated, unlike the more time-consuming construction methods used to make other private jets, and about how Eclipse, for the moment, had three production shifts running around the clock, seven days a week.

Both stories require registration or some workaround.

Dodging (Silver) Bullets

2006-07-26T05:35:00.000-05:00

In this article at ACM Queue, Alex Bell, a software architect at Boeing, pans the latest palatives in software development -- XML, UML, etc. -- and recommends what might be called reality-based software construction:

The challenges of software development are difficult enough without also having to endure the ricochet of silver bullets strafing supporting organizations. For example, many systems engineers have discovered that using the UML greatly simplifies the efforts that their predecessors unnecessarily struggled with in pre-UML days. As opposed to having to devote significant efforts to the consideration of constraints such as network bandwidth, processor speeds, and the speed of light when developing system architectures, such annoyances are now overcome by creating reams of UML diagrams containing very vague entities and equally vague navigation between them. Unfortunately for software engineers, the UML silver bullets whizzing through the systems engineering space translate into much more work for them.

[...]

It is ironic that a reverence for silver bullets usually brings more pain to software organizations than if they had simply rolled up their sleeves, focused on traditional engineering activities, and accepted that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Postponement of effort, production of useless artifacts, and illusion of progress are just a few of the factors that result in big price tags when reality eventually trumps denial. Even in the absence of Fred Brooks's well-known admonitions [there are no silver bullets that solve everything], it is startling that the failure of past silver bullets to hit their targets is not enough to make us very wary of them today.

Link via Slashdot, where comments will, with near certainty, turn into one or more flame wars.

Lockheed Martin "Polecat"

2006-07-25T06:14:00.000-05:00

A little late on this -- just getting this blog resurrected here -- but check this out:

It's the high-altitude almost-all-composite no-tail Lockheed Martin "Polecat" UAV. (Click the image for the full-resolution version.)

With a 90-foot wingspan and a tailless design, the "Polecat" UAV looks like a smaller version of the B-2 stealth bomber. And like the B-2, the drone has been built to be stealthy and sneaky. But the twin-engine Polecat is "90 percent composite materials, rather than metal," the L.A. Daily News notes. "The vehicle is also made from less than 200 parts," adds Aviation Week. "Adhesives are used rather than rivets, decreasing the amount of labor needed to construct it -- that approach also contributed to a lower radar cross section inherent in the design."

The Polecat has taken two subsonic flights, around 15,000 ft. But, eventually, the idea is to fly it 60,000 and higher -- and break the sound barrier. Up there, contrails don't form, Jane's observes, so the plane can stay hidden even better. Plus, Lockheed wants to see how its composites hold up at high altitudes.

Text from Defense Tech. Also, check out the following from New Scientist:

The Skunk Works thinks a technique called 3D rapid prototyping, or "3D printing", is the best way to lower costs.

In rapid prototyping, a three-dimensional design for a part - a wing strut, say - is fed from a computer-aided design (CAD) system to a microwave-oven-sized chamber dubbed a 3D printer. Inside the chamber, a computer steers two finely focussed, powerful laser beams at a polymer or metal powder, sintering it and fusing it layer by layer to form complex, solid 3D shapes.

The technique is widely used in industry to make prototype parts - to see if, for instance, they are the right shape and thickness for the job in hand. Now the strength of parts printed this way has improved so much that they can be used as working components.

About 90 per cent of Polecat is made of composite materials with much of that material made by rapid prototyping.