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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. Read more…

It is perhaps time to consider this topic. One of the problems with having weapons is that the time comes when there is an opportunity to use them and there is also a time when they should be used. The two may not be the same occasion. We have seen repeated episodes of tragedy arising out of this quandary. the British police in their shocking and tragic pursuit of an illegal immigrant whom they had erroneously concluded to be a terrorist was the victim in part of a genuine concern about a threat but in part a recently introduced doctrine. This was the doctrine of “rapid neutralization” or “CNS shut down” to use two of the euphemisms for filling someone’s head with as many bullets as one can so as to ensure their dying twitch does not allow them to set of a bomb. It is disturbingly likely that this horrible technique was so fascinating that whether they knew it or not the Police were waiting for a chance to demonstrate that they could do it.
There are regrettably lunatics who somehow think it is right to kill people they don’t know, who have never and never would, do harm to them and theirs in the name of one cause or another and authorities have a duty to protect the populace against them. It is an aweful responsibility that has to be faced.

The aviation community has its own version of this dilemma but so far has avoided the tragedy that is waiting, of a well meant and indeed commanded shoot down of an innocuous aircraft deemed to be a terrorist threat.
As time goes by without much public debate it seems possible that the time will come. It is now known that Cheney the VP approved the Military to shoot down civilian aircraft under certain circumstance in the wake of 911. There has been a sort of denial arising probably out of the unreality of the situation but the latest incident in the US where a Mooney pilot became unresponsive and eventually crashed raises this important question again. let us have a bit of a think about this
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Finally the capability to use mobile telephones is being offered by an increasing number of airlines. We, the passengers have been clamouring for this for years in despair. This was a fight with too many dogs.  National aviation and communication regulatory authorities,  Industry  governing bodies,  manufacturers, air crew associations, telecommunications providers, you name it, and of course us, the customers. Eventually an acceptable model emerged for the enabling technology to go forward.

Each aircraft is equipped with a picocell. This is a low power cell phone tower operating within the cabin . This interfaces with the on board satellite communications links to interoperate with  the terrestrial  telecommunications networks and so process the call normally with full functionality.  That is actually very elegant and many enhancements are in the works for Wi-Fi internet access for example raising issues about VOIP and firewalls and the rest of it.
The main providers at the moment are OnAir (http://www.onair.aero) and AeroMobile (http://www.aeromobile.net). The rush is on….

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On Oct. 1, 1969, the Concorde 001, a joint British-French venture, traveled faster than the speed of sound for the very first time. It was the aircraft’s 45th test flight and it held Mach 1.05 for 9 minutes at 36,000 feet and 75 miles from Toulouse, France.

It wasn’t the first commercial aircraft to break the sound barrier, that was the Russian Tu 144 which had beaten the Concord by a few months but it was the Concord which went on to provide many years of commercial supersonic passenger flight.

Supersonic flight was for long only a dream but in 1974 Chuck Yeager (whom I have shaken hands with and is a real man who likes hunt’n shoot’n n Fish’n) was credited with being the first man to fly faster than sound.

For many years supersonic flight was the realm of the military only but Concord changed all that.

Although Concord has now been retired as uneconomic it looks likely that either as a luxury for the very rich or a service for corporated princes Supersonic flight will soon return to civil aviation as more and more projects move to fruition. In the mean time we will have to leave it to the military to provide us with sights such as this F 22 with its striking cloud trail.
The phenomenon is called a vapor cone or a shock collar, and, if you want to get really technical, a Prandtl–Glauert singularity. It is beautiful demonstration of how quickly things happen at the molecular level

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It had to happen and now we see the first move along the feeding chain of aviation litigation for the AF 447 tragedy.

lawyers want EUR1 billion as a starting point for AF447 – victims

The Air France crash on June 1 was the result of a preventable mix of human and technical failures, according to Stewarts Law, a UK law firm representing 50 of the victims’ families

Stewarts Law presented arguments in Paris this week after experts used a simulator to replicate the conditions experienced by the crew of the Airbus A330 in a storm off the coast of Brazil.

The firm wants Air France and Airbus to put the EUR1 billion into a pot to be divided among the families.
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Gulfstream Aerospace has Rolled Out it’s new Flagship Aircraft, the All-new Gulfstream G650

Gulfstream Aerospace, now a wholly owned subsidiary of General Dynamics (NYSE: GD) and once upon a time a part of Grumman, today revealed its new flagship business jet, the all-new Gulfstream G650, at company headquarters in Savannah. The aircraft rolled out under its own power. First announced in March 2008, the ultra-large-cabin, ultra-long-range G650 remains on schedule for customer deliveries in 2012. Approximately 7,000 people gathered at the new G650 manufacturing building for the aircraft’s debut. The audience included state and local dignitaries, customers, certifying authorities, supplier representatives, members of the G650 development team and many other employees at the Savannah facility.
The aircraft raises the bar in every area including price and it is a great achivement that is has been developed on schedule and without developmen glitches Read more…

It was inevitable that there would be an engine incident in the A 380. Yesterday a Singapore airlines flight from France to Asia was returned to Paris after an engine warning lead to one of its four RR Trent 900 engines being shut down. The engine will be changed and the passengers put up in Hotels overnight. The Trent was the launch engine for the A380 and at present 52% of the A380 orders carry the RR engine. The other option is the GE, P&W Engine Alliance GP7000. The RR Trent 900 developed from an earlier version of the highly reliable Trent 500 has a number of advance features including light weight wide chord swept fan blades and Hamilton Sundstrand Fuel controllers.

Given there are four engines on each aircraft and the operators have been doing their best to fly the pants of them it is no surprise that there has been an in flight shut down and in fact one could even say it has been an eagerly awaited event for the voyeurs and pundits of aviation not to mention the industry in general. Read more…

For those with an interest in these things it has been entertaining to watch the various forces at work in the market as Sweden France Europe Russia and the US attempt to pedal influence rack up kudos and rake in Billions of Dollars while at the same time supporting world peace by selling shockingly capable systems of destructiveness in the form of fourth generation Jet Fighters.
Each has their own take on it. There is stealth, with the US being the masters, there is bang for the buck which is hard to evaluate given the horse trading, there is out right performance with the US proudly refusing to even consider selling the accepted top dog the F 22, there is economy with a very good case to be made for e.g. the excellent Gripen but so far very little action. South Africa have bought the Gripen, Oz the Super Hornet, numerous Asian nations the highly capable SU 30s no one but European nations (but they have bought quite a few) the Typhoon, numerous Asian nationas the highly capable Su 30s etc but the Raphale, apparently a very potent machine has been a bit short of support. It is now touted as being very likely that Brazil will buy the Raphale. If so it will be a highly significant break through for the French and a possible determining move in South America. Watch this space. Read more…

Randy Tinseth, vice president for marketing at Boeing’s commercial aircraft unit wrote in a blog post that workers at Boeing in Everett, Washington, have begun fixing a flaw on the first 787 Dreamliner test aircraft in preparation for its long-delayed first flight later this year.
Modifications to reinforce the areas where the plane’s wings join its body had recently begun, three months after the company again abruptly postponed the Dreamliner’s long-awaited test-flight program. Read more…

In the near term one stage to orbit is seeming progressively more likely as the low (relatively) cost option for space travel but for the student of speculation there are some really exciting prospects in the more distant future.
Some of the mooted projects are space towers in which orbiting stations suspend elevators to the surface and others include self suspending orbital rings, space fountains and maglev launching loops.

Current mega structures such as the Oresund bridge which connects Sweden to Denmark and is about 18 miles long, the Viaduc de Millau Bridge in the South of France 8000 ft and the Rion Antirion cable bridge in Greece is over 7000 ft long are dwarfed by the proposed structures. In the case of the orbital loop launcher, for optimal functioning the loop is to be 5000 km long and move at about 14 km/sec. It is hard to imaging that anything so immense could be planned and built but then there is also the tendency for whatever is possible to come to pass.

One of the hard to answer questions is why would any one bother? Two answers come to mind. Money and Prestige. If there is money in it the capitalists will do it. If there is prestige in it maybe as the century moves on some of the superpowers will see it as the war equivalent which will establish their premier place. Perhaps the first example of this is the plan announced by Shuichi Ono, chairman of the Japan Space Elevator Association in Sept 2008 to built an orbital tower.

More theoretically if humanity is tied to earth forever it is more or less certainly doomed by Asteroid impact or solar evolution and so if society is to survive and humanity is to persist such structures must sooner or later be built. There is also the fact that it would be such fun.