AircraftNews.Com » Speculation

Chinese Develop Space Drive

mgiles — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 13:06:52 +0000

SPR Emdive

Every so often there is a buzz that someone has made a stunning break through in the Physical Sciences and achieve something wondrous. Antigravity, a space warp, cold fusion, action at a distance or some such. There are persistent rumors that people who know better than us are seriously researching exotic physics and indeed physics is become so bizarre that it would take a really arrogant person (such as the English scientists who declared the end of Physics after Newton had enunciated his laws of motion) to say any of these things are really truly impossible. There is a sort of suspicion that if we can’t go through the problem maybe we can go round it.
The latest example of this is the so called Emdrive developed initially by a small English company SPR (Satellite Propulsion research) Ltd The developer Roger Shawyer has good credentials and does not seem a lunatic but that has not stopped a lot of people some of them very well qualified themselves responding to a recent article in New Scientist with a mixture of scorn outrage and the scientific version of frothing at the mouth. This is because the claim if true will transform space travel and given that the Chinese have taken up the idea ahead of the rest of the space faring world it will see the Chinese with a healthy lead in a radical new development.
The Chinese team has purchased rights to part of the process and claims to have verified the theory and made progress with its practical application since June 2007. The team headed by Professor Yuan at Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU) in Xi’an is building a thruster based on Shawyer’s theories scheduled to be completed by end of this year.
The device that has sparked their interest is an engine that generates thrust purely from electromagnetic radiation – microwaves to be precise – by exploiting the strange properties of relativity. It has no moving parts, and releases no exhaust or noxious emissions. Potentially, it could pack the punch of a rocket in a box the size of a suitcase. It could one day replace the engines on almost any spacecraft. More advanced versions might allow cars to lift from the ground and hover. It could even lead to aircraft that will not need wings at all. One can’t help thinking that it sounds too good to be true.

The developer Roger Shawyer, turns out to be reassuringly normal. His credentials are certainly impressive. He worked his way up through the aerospace industry, designing and building navigation and communications equipment for military and commercial satellites, before becoming a senior aerospace engineer at Matra Marconi Space (later part of EADS Astrium) in Portsmouth, near where he now lives. He was also a consultant to the Galileo project, Europe’s satellite navigation system, which engineers are now testing in orbit and for which he negotiated the use of the radio frequencies it needed.
With that pedigree, you’d imagine Shawyer would be someone the space industry would have listened to. Far from it. While at Astrium, Shawyer proposed that the company develop his idea. “I was told in no uncertain terms to drop it,” he says. “This came from the very top.”

What Shawyer had in mind was a replacement for the small thrusters conventional satellites use to stay in orbit. The fuel they need makes up about half their launch weight, and also limits a satellite’s life: once it runs out, the vehicle drifts out of position and must be replaced. Shawyer’s engine, by contrast, would be propelled by microwaves generated from solar energy. The photovoltaic cells would eliminate the fuel, and with the launch weight halved, satellite manufacturers could send up two craft for the price of one, so you would only need half as many launches.

So why the problem? Shawyer argues that for companies investing billions in rockets and launch sites, a new technology that leads to fewer launches and longer-lasting satellites has little commercial appeal. By the same token, a company that offers more for less usually wins in the end, so Shawyer’s idea may have been seen as too speculative. Whatever the reason, in 2000, he resigned to go it alone.

Surprisingly, Shawyer’s disruptive technology rests on an idea that goes back more than a century. In 1871 the physicist James Clerk Maxwell worked out that light should exert a force on any surface it hits, like the wind on a sail. This so-called radiation pressure is extremely weak, though. Last year, a group called The Planetary Society attempted to launch a solar sail called Cosmos 1 into orbit. The sail had a surface area of about 600 square metres. Despite this large area, about the size of two tennis courts, its developers calculated that sunlight striking it would produce a force of 3 millinewtons, barely enough to lift a feather on the surface of the Earth. Still, it would be enough to accelerate a craft in the weightlessness of space. Unfortunately the sail was lost after launch. NASA is also interested in solar sails, but has never launched one. Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise, as a few millinewtons isn’t enough for serious work in space.

For more go to http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125681.400 and also www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/09/chinese-buildin/

Blended body as Green saviour?

mgiles — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 12:41:33 +0000

Blended body with open rotor engines

Some time ago there was a flurry of interest in the blended body concept in which the wing and body of an aircraft are blended as a way of minimising drag and as a result maximising efficiency.
The concept is not new and there have been a number of pioneers who attempted to develop and put into service an aircraft which could take advantage of the theoretical gains available.
The Horten brothers in Germany designed and flew a number of flying wings aircraft but the end of WW II brought this program to a halt before it could be developed. Another concept which has also been seen to have promise is the lifting fuselage proposed by an American pioneer Burnelli who designed built and flew a lifting body aircraft. In addition to the reduction in drag postulated they had advantages of being crash worhty and having large cabin volumes. There were not surprisingly, problems of various sorts. Flying wings for instance were difficult to fly being unstable.The problems were never adequately solved until modern capabilities made the management of them possible and as a result conventional strategies have been progressively developed and given rise to the airliner as we know it. A long fragile pencil with thin and structurally demanding wings.
Some manufactures have talked of these advantages and have proposed and done detailed planning. One of them being Boeing. The advantages never seemed to outweigh the risks. Not the least of the problems might have been how unconventional they would look to eyes used to the current form. Money talks, however and the environmnt may soon be screaming.
The tide may be turning with a number of manufactures now talking of the blended body as having significant attraction as consumption of oil and production of CO2 become increasingly a problem. Engine and airframe development and aerodynamic refinement are reaching a point of diminishing returns with curent formats and to make further gains more radical solutions will be have to be explored.
It has been claimed that the Blended body, which combines the virtues of the flying wing and the lifting fuselage, used in conjunction with advanced engines such as the open rotor, may be as much as 25% lower in fuel burn compared with the best contemporary practice.
http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Evolution_of_Technology/flying_wing/Tech8.htm
http://www.meridian-int-res.com/Aeronautics/Burnelli.htm
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/improvingflight/skyray_48.html

Death by Computer

mgiles — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 02:15:55 +0000

There has been a deafening silence in the general press about the AF 447 tragedy of recent times. What with drones running round in various places bombing baddies with the occasional bit of collateral damage generally agreed to be regrettable by the responsible (what a way to use the word) parties and regular suicide bombings not to mention ferries turning over and NSW Cabinet Ministers being laid low by spurned lovers it does not take long for even such a monumental tragedy to fade into the background but those of us who fly are worried and will not rest until some sense can be made of it.
At present the official position is that we do not know the cause but suspect a perfect storm of events starting with a sensor failure led to a loss of control. The more time passes the more this seems pretty thin. If this could be the case then thousands are daily in danger. I expect that behind the scenes this is being taken very seriously and I also suspect that given the propensity for litigation currently prevailing loose lips sink financial ships is guiding the dissemination of information i.e. what you don’t know wont hurt you (or more accurately in some cases wont hurt the company).
It seems we have reached the point predicted frequently by experts where systems too complicated to be completely analyzed have been created and are in daily world wide service.
In the design philosophy of the Airbus et al a very serious effort has been made to build in protection by redundancy but as reports come in more and more evidence of startling failures emerges of the type which warrant drastic action.
I have collected reports of a total of 52 incidents in which malfunctions of automated flight systems with computers at their core have created situations where there was a serious risk of the loss of an aircraft and all aboard. As my research has not been exhaustive likely ther are many more. Two of these situations did lead to the loss of aircraft. In one case, the crash of a B2, the crew were able to eject but the bomber worth about $250 mil was lost while in the other case – AF 447, the aircraft and all on board were lost.
Why are we continuing to fly them? In the case of the Air force and B2s the failure was diagnosed and corrected but in the case of the AF447 it is clear that in actual fact the risks are regarded as acceptable in the face of the cost of the only rational action which is to stop using these aircraft till we understand what is going on. Or am I just just being alarmist?

Governments and Industry Ignored Warning Signs
Letter from John T Halliday
To: The Honorable Robert A. Sturgell, Acting FAA Administrator
Copy: European Aviation Safety Agency
Subject: NTSB Safety Recommendation
Date: July 22, 2008
On January 25, 2008, a United Airlines A320 lost three of six cockpit electronic flight displays after takeoff from Newark as the plane headed for downtown New York. The landing gear would not retract, all radios died, the overhead systems panel went blank. The emergency attitude indicator failed. The copilot testified, “If Newark had fog, and my attitude indicator had not recovered, we could have crashed.” Airbus reports 49 similar incidents — 17 when five or six displays blanked. 7 planes lost all flight displays. The UK Air Accidents Branch examined 14 display-blanking incidents. The NTSB believes these multiple losses create challenging situations. The United pilots reported multiple scrolling failure messages with corrective actions the computer removed so quickly, they were unable to interpret them. Blanking of flight displays coupled with systems failures is a significant safety risk because of increased pilot workload. Airlines have not informed their pilots, nor provided training. Crew attempts to troubleshoot these unusual problems may even lead to loss of aircraft control.
And as the London Times wrote on July 1 of this year:
The European Aviation Safety Agency is likely to be asked why it had never taken action to remedy the trouble well known within the Airbus 330 and 340 series. ‘EASA has a legal and moral obligation to get to the bottom of this problem. If there is a defective system and the aircraft is unsafe then it should be grounded,’ said James Healy- Pratt of Stewarts Law in London. Suspicion over the air data systems on the Airbus 330 and 340 series has increased after disclosure the aircraft experienced 36 episodes similar to the one that brought Flight 447 down. We mourn the loss of these souls. Our hearts go out to their famlies. We share their sorrow and we hope the tragic loss of their loved ones sparks long-overdue change.
There were snakes on this Airbus — snakes that left no trace evidence. Can pitot tube moisture turn computers rogue, leave pilots helpless to override, and crash a plane? The Air Force gets it. The pilots of this
$1.4 billion dollar B-2 couldn’t override their rogue computer:
Stars and Stripes Report Faults Computer in Guam B-2 Crash. The crash was caused by bad data sent to flight computers from three tiny wing sensors. General Floyd Carpenter: ‘The B-2 was on takeoff when the computer falsely told pilots it was moving along the runway at 140 knots, fast enough to fly. The computer then sensed the aircraft was going into a nosedive just as pilots tried to lift the craft off the ground. The (rogue) computer then ordered the B-2’s nose to pitch up to 30 degrees. The pilots desperately tried to override the computer, but it took the aircraft into a fatal stall. The aircraft performed as designed; all systems were functioning normally.’ Replacing Airbus pitot heaters is a good shot in the dark, but they have little to do with this tragedy. Maybe the heaters did it. Maybe a software bug did it. Maybe a rogue computer. Maybe a virus. Maybe the Tooth Fairy did it. Maybe the captain and copilot decided to commit mass murder, so flew into a thunderstorm. Maybe it was Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the knife. But if it waddles like a computer, quacks like a computer and crashes like a computer . . . We may never know what happened without those missing black boxes, but need to pay attention to the computer-generated elephant sitting on our chests. The captain that horrid night was the Little Dutch Boy, trying to jam his fingers into the leaking dike of crashing computers amid their scary screams. Only he couldn’t plug holes as fast as the computers drilled more and more. He couldn’t keep up with the runaway holes, then ran out of fingers. And the sea rushed in and consumed them — murder by computer. His computers should have been fail-safe. They were fail-deadly — more interested in saving themselves than human beings. Bottom line? Designers have built machines humans can’t control. Replacing the pitot heaters plugs just one of the dike holes that killed 228. At some point, you have to build a new dike. Dr. Jordan Grafman, Chief of Neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders, explains: “One of the big problems about multitasking is it’s impossible to gain a depth of knowledge of any task you’re doing; you only get surface-level knowledge.” Replacing those pitot heaters amounts to giving a cancer patient aspirin. The heaters are mere symptoms of the underlying fever. Air France 447 was a massive, beyond-human-control, China Syndome, chain-reaction computer system failure that rivals the Hindenberg tragedy that marked the end of hydrogen-filled airships. The question is: what about this computer system’s design allowed it to pinball out-of-control and why wasn’t there a way for the pilots to stop it?
Dr. Lisanne Bainbridge, Engineering Psychologist at the University College London, helps us understand in her “Ironies of Automation”: The classic aim of automation is to replace human manual control, planning and problem solving by automatic devices and computers. The automation designers’ view is that the pilot is unreliable and inefficient, so should be eliminated. The irony is that designer errors can be a major source of operational errors. Designers computerize the easy parts of the pilot’s job and make the hardest jobs even harder, leaving pilots the toughest tasks that designers can’t think how to computerize. Designers put computers in planes because computers remember more and make quicker decisions than humans. There is, therefore, no way pilots can check in real-time if the computer is following its rules correctly. Pilots have no way to check on if what the smarter machine is doing is acceptable. So if the computer is there because human judgement and intuitive reasoning are not adequate to keep up, which decisions is the human to accept? The pilot has been given an impossible task. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-t-halliday/government-and-industry-i_b_276367.html

Time for a Radical Change

mgiles — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:47:27 +0000

Blended body concept

Some years ago (maybe 30) I read in Flight that the time was coming when a latest generation Combat aircraft was going to take the entire GDP of a small nation. At the time I took it seriously and though it a bit of an exaggeration but as time has worn on it seems they were joking at the time using delightful British irony but that they had unwittingly hit the nail on the head. That day is here with the F22 that the US wont sell to any one because it cost them so dear and mega Airliners taking many Billions to create and 100s of millions to buy.

Blended body plan

As the financial crisis looms and doomsayers prattle away I wonder whether now is the time for a paradigm shift. Skip the A380 and A350 and B787 etc and go for a highly standardized no frills blended body well and truly subsonic alternatively powered (fuel cells and props?) solutions that will halve the cost per kg per kilometer (Note I use metric as I am talking of the future)
Anyone with the courage to do it should (?!) clean up.

Flight without fuel

mgiles — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 06:23:15 +0000

Phil Harris and concept

It might not happen just yet but people are working on it and it looks as as if it is only a matter of time. One of the more esoteric but nonetheless fascinating speculations around is elaborated in the posts of Phil Barns viewable on the www.esoaing.com website.
In these he details a quite rigorous analysis of what is to be gained using current technology to recover energy from the atmosphere while flying a modern high Tec aircraft which looks like a cross between a state of the art Glider and a solar powered UAV.
His conclusion- Its doable.
I hope this serves to lift the spirits of aviators somewhat flattened by an apparent recent spate of disasters