Innholdsfortegnelse for April/May 2019 i Air & Space

It was a farewell party to remember as more than 100 people gathered at the Royal Air Force’s Marham base this past January to witness a spectacular sortie commemorating the Tornado GR4 fast jet, which is being retired after 40 years of service. Three training variants of the aircraft each sported special markings: a retro-camouflage pattern, hearkening back to 1982; the gold star of the 31 Squadron; and a bat with extended wings, which is the badge of the IX(B) Squadron. The Tornado, described by the RAF as the “backbone of UK air-power,” was formally withdrawn from service on March 31.…

The Lockheed U-2C, above, is just one of more than 640 objects that have been moved from the National Mall galleries into storage at the Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center as of February 8, 2019. Although nine galleries on the west side of the Museum on the National Mall are closed, visitors can still see favorites such as the Spirit of St. Louis, the Bell X-1, and the 1903 Wright Flyer. In every issue of the magazine, updates on and news about the Museum’s Transformation will appear in this space.…

HERE ON THE NATIONAL MALL, at museums and theaters across the country, at most NASA centers, and in cities and towns around the world, people will celebrate that one small step taken 50 years ago when a man from Earth first walked on the moon. We’ve surveyed the plans and selected some of our favorite ways to remember and learn about the Apollo program. Our suggestions for activities leading up to the July 20 anniversary follow here and on airspacemag.com/apollo, where you’ll find links to these recommendations and to many more. 1 A rare opportunity to see the moon’s far side: The Museum of the Moon, an illuminated, 23-foot-diameter balloon, designed by British installation artist Luke Jerram from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images, will be in Providence, Rhode Island this July.…

Aerial Memories In the late 1950s I saved up enough allowance and lawn-mowing money for a roundtrip ticket from Stamford, Connecticut to several New York Airways heliports, including LaGuardia, Idlewild, and West 30th Street (“How Perry Young Broke the Color Barrier,” Feb./Mar. 2019). I snapped this photo of the Queen Elizabeth with my Kodak Brownie while we flew over the Hudson River. JOHN KIRCHER Washington, D.C. Name that Engine I read the outstanding article on the 707 (“The Flight That Changed Everything,” Feb./Mar. 2019), and would appreciate a little clarification on the JT3C-6 Turbojet. On page 33, you write that with the two-compressor arrangement, each engine would produce 13,500 pounds of thrust. But on page 34, it is stated the arrangement would only produce 11,000 pounds of thrust each. Are…

The business: Culver Props specializes in making custom, fixed-pitch, two-blade, wood propellers. Lewis makes about 120 propellers a year. The path: Lewis was taught by her grandfather, a mechanical engineer. “I worked here while I was going to college,” says Lewis, “doing the things nobody else wanted to do, like answering the phones. My grandpa taught me everything as we went along, and I’ve been doing this now for 10 years. He passed away in 2016, so I continued the business—me and my 84-year-old granny, who comes in every day and helps me. We specialize in the larger-diameter propellers, a lot of World War I replicas. That’s our sweet spot.” How long does it take to master the skill? “Around two years,” says Lewis. “The actual learning how to make…

The video looks like YouTube clickbait—Worst Drone Pilot Ever. A small, spindly rotorcraft darts maniacally around an enclosed chamber like a crazed winged insect until it finally, inevitably, goes splat! “The crash was phenomenal,” says MiMi Aung, laughing infectiously. “It’s a really fun video.” Entertaining but also enlightening. The video demonstrated that it is theoretically possible for a helicopter to stay aloft on Mars—in an atmosphere 100 times thinner than Earth’s—and helped convince NASA to greenlight development of the first aircraft to be dispatched to another planet. Eighteen months later, in the same 25-foot chamber at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, a larger autonomous model hovered, rotated, and moved from side to side without a glitch. The team behind the Mars Helicopter calls it their Wright brothers-at-Kitty…

I BECAME A MEMBER of the Lunar Module Crew Systems Group at Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation, in Bethpage, Long Island, in July 1966. During our weekly staff meeting, an engineer would occasionally identify a single point failure that could produce an event that neither the Lunar Module’s (LM’s) backup systems nor the astronauts could withstand and survive. These nightmare scenarios were met with stunned silence. After a discussion of all the ramifications, someone would say in a hushed voice, “OMIGOD, that really could happen!” We’d then form yet another team to develop a solution. I was called upon to help negate two such nightmares. The first one turned out to be quite simple. Suppose, someone said, after successfully landing on the moon, one of the astronauts was outside the LM…

IT TOOK JUST 60 SECONDS for Virgin Galactic’s RocketMotorTwo to secure its place in history. That’s how long VSS Unity pilots Mark “Forger” Stucky and Frederick “CJ” Sturckow fired the 15-foot, 1,500-pound engine on December 13, 2018, sending Virgin’s SpaceShipTwo into space. After being ferried to an altitude of around 45,000 feet by the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft, Unity propelled itself to an altitude of 51.4 miles and a speed of Mach 2.9. The flight earned the spaceship’s powerplant a certification from Guinness World Records as the “most powerful hybrid rocket to be used in [crewed] flight.” The hybrid design combines the stability of a solid-fuel motor with the quick-shutdown capability of a liquid-propellant engine, which will make it a key part of Virgin Galactic’s ambitions to become the world’s first commercial…

NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) is being designed to launch astronauts to a future moon-orbiting space station and perhaps one day to Mars. Its largest component, the core-stage fuel tank, is 70 feet tall and 28 feet in diameter—and poses some industrial-strength challenges in testing. Last January, a ground-test-only version of the tank was raised into a structural test stand, custom-built for the task at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. When the SLS is launched in 2020, NASA wants to be sure that the tank will be able to withstand the intense forces of liftoff. The space agency learned a long time ago that the best way to learn whether something could break is simply to build one and stress it, in this case by squeezing—hard. The…

Good news for those stuck in traffic: Boeing has successfully completed the first test of its prototype flying car in Manassas, Virginia. The autonomous passenger air vehicle—with a range of up to 50 miles—completed a controlled takeoff, hover, and landing. As Air & Space noted in its September 2018 issue (“So That’s What Flying Cars Are For”), companies are developing air taxis, confident that they can establish a practical flying business based on the Uber model.…

Architect Gyo Obata was confronted with a daunting number when he began to design the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, which opened on July 1, 1976: 50,000. That’s how many visitors were expected each day. To move crowds efficiently through the exhibits, Obata—of the St. Louis firm Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, or HOK—drew on his experience designing airports and shopping malls and divided the exhibition area into two levels. On both levels, visitors walk on a wide walkway bisecting the exhibit spaces; at any point they can turn into exhibits on either side. On opening day, there was a lot to see. The more than 200,000 square feet of exhibition space offered visitors everything that flies: Airplanes hung from steel trusses at vertical, horizontal, and 40-degree angles; rockets rose…

The seaplane rocked violently. Flak from a battleship below exploded all around it. “My God, what have I done?” Leonard Smith recalled thinking. Though not in strict compliance with the Neutrality Act of 1939, U.S. Navy Ensign Leonard Smith was at the controls of a Royal Air Force Consolidated PBY-5 flying boat that morning in May 1941, scouring the surface of the Atlantic for the notorious German battleship Bismarck. Surprised to suddenly spot the vessel, Smith steered the American-made seaplane—exported to Britain as part of the Lend-Lease program—into a cloud bank to safely shadow the battleship from afar. But after losing his bearings in the cloud, Smith swerved back into clear air—and got a nearly vertical view down the Bismarck’s smokestack. A barrage of anti-aircraft fire from the ship erupted.…

In my interviews with F-35 pilots, one word repeatedly came up: “survivability.” Surviving the Lockheed Martin F-35’s primary mission—to penetrate sophisticated enemy air defenses and find and disable threats—requires what the fifth-generation jet offers: stealth and a stunning array of passive and active sensors bringing information to the pilot. The F-35 can see trouble coming—ahead, behind, or below the aircraft—far enough in advance to avoid a threat or kill it. Faced with multiple threats, the sensor suite recommends the order in which they should be dispatched. U.S. forces first took these capabilities into combat last September, when Marine F-35Bs struck the Taliban in Afghanistan (five months after its combat debut with the Israeli air force). More than 360 of the multi-service aircraft—Air Force F-35As, Marine short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing Bs, and carrier-capable Cs—have…

Sometimes we hold history in our hands and don’t know it. As a five-year-old, Todd Ryan lived with his grandparents at their house in Queens, New York City. He often joined his grandfather, Gene Smyth, in his carpentry shop. “Instead of saying, ‘Don’t touch that,’ ” Ryan recalls, “he’d say, ‘Let me show you how to do that.’ ” He also recalls spending hours leafing through an airplane-spotting book in the house and then drawing pictures of images in the book. The day after Ryan turned six, his grandfather died. Ryan eventually inherited his tools, a gift he still treasures to this day. Ryan later became a photographer, graphic designer, private pilot, and skydiver, as well as an avid aviation history buff. “He set me on a path,” he says…