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Water Bomber Politics for fire Season?

mgiles — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:06:43 +0000

Elvis drops 9500 L of water

Students of bush fires will know that various authorities claim the Australian Bush fires are as bad as any in the world and the Chauvinists would say they are without parallel. The season has now started and the ghoulish and gleeful but macabre voyeurs are on a countdown to another season of excellence or should it be infamy. It is now clear from the Royal Commission that there was severe mismanagement at very senior levels. This must include the State Government which bears ultimate responsibility. The current Victorian Government has been there for a long time and still seems to think that it can blame previous administrations. It used to be called the mirror government (I’ll look into it) and now seems more and more to be a righteous initiative free area which looks for a scapegoat when pressed and fines them massively while it continues the grand old tradition of Victorian State governments of either stripe, of infra structure inaction. Only the buzz words change: Fiscal responsibility , responsible leadership and so on. A recent little gem surfaced which would seem to bear a bit of closer examination. After a particularly bad summer a number of ultra large helicopters know locally as Elvises (after the name of the first to come to public awareness) have been engaged for fire fighting work. These are the Erickson S 64 (9500 kg of water) of US Military origins and have done a very good job. The first time they came in mass they did not have a lot of wok but subsequently have been veryvaluable. The need is hard to predict and it is a lot of money to spend if they are not needed but still what is the price of insurance? Until that year of disaster, requests for such capability had been steadfastly refused with the usual official smokescreen of reasons.
Even more recently another gem surfaced. During the 2009 prior to the Feb 7th Black Saturday disaster the Russian Government offered the Victorian Government the use of IL 76 very large water bombers (able to drop 11,000 gallons of water). They were turned down for reasons which range from garbage to plausible (Too long to arrange certification, not suitable for the mission, we have enough, time for transit too long etc).

IL 76 Water tanker

The US fire fighting services have had the same offers and made the same response. Some critics of this decision are very scathing about the reasons. The US at least do have some very heavy metal available but the Vic Government has only Elvises and smaller.
American and some Australian experts have seen the Russian aircraft in action and are very impressed. They put the refusal of the Russian offer by the US Fire Authorities down to Politics. One of the reasons for refusal which seemed implausable was that the water could not be placed where it was needed. At the Kinglake fire this seems very unlikely.
There also seems to have been a lot of politics in the Australian situation. A sort of “don’t question us we are the experts” and “don’t get in the way we know what we are doing”. It would be very interesting to see a detailed account of why the Russian offer was refused and to compare the cost of the Russian offer with the over all cost of fire fighting. More fiddling while civilisation burns?

Evergreen B 747 drops 22,000 Gals

Stealthy Windmills

mgiles — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:05:31 +0000

Stealth windmill

‘Stealth’ blades take wind turbines off the radar. It seems nothing is ever simple in these days of environmental concern, technological complexity and growing populations and standards of living. A recent example is the innocent windmill. Some see them as a major answers to major problems. Others see them as bird killers, infra noise generators and a con job that will cost too much and deliver too little. Most likely they will find their place but one problem that snuck up on a lot of us is that they can screw with Domestic aviation radars.
The big, fast-moving blades of modern wind turbines interfere with radar for both planes and ships. But ’stealth’ technology could solve the problem. Nothing is ever simple when building large renewable energy projects. For wind energy – which it is hoped could supply a fifth of the UK’s electricity by 2050 – there are logistical challenges and local aesthetic objections, but also a big technical issue. Any time a developer proposes a wind farm near a flight path, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) or the Ministry of Defence (MoD) gets jumpy, because windmills do strange things to radar. The British Wind Energy Association reckons that aviation objections are holding back 6GW of wind energy capacity, or enough to power 3.4m homes. About half of all proposed wind projects in the UK have some sort of aviation issue. But this problem may soon be consigned to history: inspired by stealth warplanes, the windmill manufacturer Vestas has come up with a way to make its turbines and blades almost invisible to radar. Modern windmills are massive structures that
are far better at reflecting radar signals than many of the other objects that a radar might encounter and wish to ignore. In addition, the blade tips of a large wind turbine can reach speeds of up to 200mph, comparable to the speed of a light aircraft. “They appear on a radar display as a radar track and this, from an air traffic controller’s perspective, they think it could be an aircraft and, from an air defence perspective, it means there is unwanted clutter,” says the BWEA’s head of aviation, Nicola Vaughan, who describes radar interference as “the biggest technical barrier for wind farms, without a doubt”. Marine radar operators have problems, too – waves bouncing between windmills and ships can create “ghost images”. Couldn’t planes and boats simply be informed where wind farms are, and give them a wide berth? “It might just work for civil
aircraft,” says Mark Roberts of the defence research company Qinetiq. “But I imagine the CAA wouldn’t be too happy because it would cut across their airspace. And from a defence perspective, the bad guys aren’t
going to play ball.” So the best solution is to make the windmills partly invisible to the radar, by reducing the degree to which they reflect radio waves. Then radar software could filter them out. “Radars have filters in
them that can be set to mask out returns from things like electricity pylons and buildings,” says Steve Appleton of Vestas. “The problem is, if you raise that filter level so you couldn’t see turbines, you wouldn’t see anything else.” Last week, Vestas announced that it had been working on a way to fix this, using radar-
absorbing materials developed by Qinetiq that can be inserted into the blades during manufacture.
He adds: “Vestas gave us a number of criteria when we embarked on this project,” says Qinetiq’s Roberts. “Minimal cost increase, it had to be incorporated as part of their existing manufacturing process, and it had to be of minimal weight impact.” The radar-absorbing material is similar to the composites used in stealth aircraft and, since it is inserted inside the blade, does not change the aerodynamic profile or efficiency of the windmill. In its trial, Vestas replaced one blade of a standard windmill with Qinetiq’s “stealth” blade and
found its radar cross-section was significantly reduced. Vestas plans to carry out a full-scale demonstration next year – with all three blades replaced, and the rest of the structure painted in radar-absorbing material. Appleton insists that the extra costs to a developer should be marginal enough not to put them off buying a
“stealth” turbine. Neither Vestas nor Qinetiq would reveal just how much effect the technology currently has, but Appleton said that, as it gets better, he hopes that a wind farm’s radar footprint could be
reduced by an order of magnitude. Bringing the stealth turbine to market will still require much development work and, mindful of that, the rest of the industry is not sitting in wait. At last week’s BWEA annual meeting, the Department for Energy and Climate Change announced that, along with the wind industry and the Crown Estate, it had awarded £5m to the defence company Raytheon for a project that will examine how to improve radar software. “We’d like to make the radar more intelligent so it can differentiate between a radar return from a turbine and one from an aircraft,” says Vaughan.
Step by step, tackling the radar problem from both ends, that 20% target for wind by 2050 doesn’t look so hard after all.

Green Airliners a must

mgiles — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:24:12 +0000

Today the Bow Bells will chime 350 times to mark an International Day of Concern about Global warming. Might take quite some time. And hopefully give many pause to think. Many are left more than a little bemused by the various claims made about the climate and who is doing what to whom. The press in an allegedly high minded attempt to achieve balance seems to print back to back articles by doom sayers and climate skeptic which serves to confuse rather than inform. Some actually seem more bent on inflaming the debate than informing or analyzing. An example is the local Australian Provocateur Andrew Bolte in the Sun Herald.
For what it is worth I have been running thru the literature with a view to reaching some sort of understanding. My qualifications are: an interest and a rather stale PhD from a good university in an unrelated field of Science so make of this what you will.
Once one start trolling thru the literature it emerges that there is a consensus that is truly impressive. The globe is warming and man has contributed to this. The closer the area of expertise of the sources is to climate the more there is the agreement. When the arguments of the skeptics are examined they seem to all be readily shot down. The longer it goes on the more the persistent skeptics seem to be willfully blind and self serving (IMHO).
This being so what are we to think? Well one thing is that we better nudge the political apparatus into a much more vigorous form of action and another is that those with an interest in any particular area should get into the action and start consciousness raising. For Aviation this means getting on the green bandwagon and pushing for more rational ways of achieving our goals.
Aviation is here to stay. It is hard to imagine that the world will relapse back into surface only transport but maybe we need to be more thoughtful about how it is done and what travels by air and when. For a variety of reasons expert propulsion engineers see Hydrocarbons as the drug of choice for large and fast passenger aeroplanes and see that it will be so for some time. Considerations like energy density and the problems of alternative suggest that if hydrocarbons are to be used at all applications such as air transport are the appropriate ones. For many applications however some lateral thinking is going to be necessary. Maybe we should resurrect sail power for freight. Maybe the age of the airship is here again? Maybe many things but for sure one of them is we should think long and hard and also act decisively and early. Mutually contradictory but that is life. My expert friends tell me that capitalism will solve it all. The market will ensure all the necessary trade offs will take place. I fear not. The market seems not to be able to see very far into the future and increasingly the Scientists tell us that the longer we wait the worse it will be. Certainly the market will respond eventually but it could be a tragedy for much of humanity if we wait for that sort of regulation by catastrophe to take place.