Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2018 i Air & Space

ORBITAL ATK EMPLOYEES ensure that nothing will disrupt their Antares rocket stage during its mile-long journey from integration facility to Launchpad-0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, on NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia. Late last May, four days after its nighttime crawl, the two NPO Energomash RD-181 engines (which in the photo look like the eyes of a cartoon face) successfully launched an uncrewed Cygnus capsule filled with nearly 7,400 pounds of supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). The capsule included scientific experiments, encompassing both advanced technology (the Cold Atom Lab, which uses lasers to enable researchers to examine atoms at temperatures near absolute zero) and ancient arts (a hand-held mechanical sextant, a tool with centuries of history, to test back-up navigation methods). The core stage powered Orbital…

“WE BOUGHT THAT AT Walmart. They had a special on them,” jokes Tom Reilly on a video posted in May about the custom-made and beautifully shiny outboard gear doors he just received. Reilly is one of the most experienced restorers alive today, and he’s at the tail-end of a massive project to bring a rare aircraft back to the sky. In 2008, he acquired an XP-82 Twin Mustang. The prototype was based on the P-51 Mustang, although the two types actually have few parts in common. F-82s mostly served in the Korean War as long-range escorts and, equipped with early versions of airborne radar, as night fighters. Reilly’s team, based in Douglas, Georgia, was able to make good progress because of some staggering good luck, like stumbling upon a left-hand…

Reddersen and colleagues are currently working on a Lincoln-Standard H.S., a three-place version of the World War I trainer, the Standard J-1. The job: Reddersen has helped restore some of the most famous aircraft in the National Air and Space Museum collection: the Spirit of St. Louis , the Bell X-1, and the Martin B-26 Flak-Bait , the medium bomber that flew more missions over Europe—207—than any other U.S. airplane. Typical day: Although there is no typical day in the restoration hangar at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Reddersen says, his days have recently begun the same way: “I walk in nice and clean and within three to five minutes of working on the airplane, I’m coated head to toe in sawdust. For the past couple of weeks, I had…

THE ROAR AND CONCUSSION WERE STARTLING. Clocked at 554.69 mph, the ultra-modified P-51 racer Voodoo shot by and was gone. Its first pass over the three-kilometer straightaway took 12 seconds. I was watching air racing superstar Steven Hinton attempt to do what his father had done 38 years before: set the three-kilometer speed record for piston-engine, propeller-driven aircraft. For raceplane pilots, the three-kilometer record (1.86 miles) is an Olympian goal, captured by the greatest pilots in history. “This record has been around since the beginning of aviation,” says the younger Hinton, pointing out that the fastest jet record wasn’t established until almost 1950. “It connects the generations.” He mentions Jimmy Doolittle, who set the record in 1925 flying a Curtiss seaplane, one day after he won the Schneider Trophy for…

PILOTS WHO FOUGHT in the last years of World War II were flying airplanes refined by years of combat experience and engineering, the most advanced piston-engine aircraft ever built. Post-war, they were subjected to something entirely new: jet-powered fighters. The basics of flying were the same, but the propulsion was revolutionary. Few two-seat trainers existed. “Besides, since you’re all experienced fighter pilots,” one squadron leader told his cadre of jet aviation novices, “you don’t need any dual instruction before flying jets.” But the transition from propeller-driven airplanes was daunting—23 military jets crashed between 1945 and 1950, killing 36 (including victims on the ground). Among the dead was the highest-scoring U.S. ace of the war, Richard Bong, killed during a Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star test flight. The following accounts of early…

IT TOOK MORE THAN 100 iterations for Israeli physicist Omer Bar-Yohay to declare his company’s V-tailed swan of an electric jet ready for the world to see. When his company, Eviation, premiered its drone, the Orca, at the 2017 Paris Air Show, it was a literal glimpse of the shape of things to come. While Eviation intends to market the remote-piloted Orca, it is also using the drone as a one-third-scale demonstrator for the Alice—the nine-passenger crewed electric commuter airplane the Tel Aviv-based firm says will fly next year. One cent per seat per mile in direct operating costs is the promise Eviation is making with the Alice, designed to soar above cityscapes at 10,000 feet. As with its drone sibling, the Alice sports electric wingtip and tail-fin propeller housings…

IN SEPTEMBER 1991, when Patty Wagstaff became the first female National Aerobatic Champion since the men’s and women’s categories were merged in 1972, the airplane she won (and then defended) the title in was hand-built and one of a kind. Its designer, Walter Extra, had flown a Pitts biplane in the World Aerobatic Championships nine years earlier. He had grown frustrated at the limitations of that design while marveling at the performance of new variations on the Stephens Akro monoplane. The Extra 260 was his elegant blend of classical and high-tech materials, boasting a steel-tube fuselage and wings made of Polish pine box spar and solid ribs, covered first in birch plywood, then in Ceconite fabric. The wing is equipped with an almost full-length, carbon fiber aileron. While most aircraft…

DAN GRAY DIDN’T NEED a whole 15 minutes of fame—100 seconds was plenty. That’s how long it took Gray to pilot a highly-modified kitplane—an experimental Vans RV called a Harmon Rocket—from zero to 10,000 feet and straight into the record books. Gray’s company, Aviation F/X, was approached by Australian Harmon Rocket owner Russ MacFarlane, who, with help from his son Eric, was preparing the aircraft for an attempt on the time-to-climb record (for airplanes weighing about 1,100 to 2,200 pounds). Gray and the MacFarlanes started with the basics: Reducing weight by ripping out everything not critical to flight, including the wingtips, wheel pants, and passenger seat. They even replaced the stock tailwheel with a skateboard wheel. But the real magic was from the firewall forward: The traditional Lycoming engine was…

THE ONLY THING STRANGER than the sight of a Boeing B-17G parked above a Milwaukie, Oregon gas station is the story of how it got there. In February 1947, gas station owner Art Lacey announced that he planned to buy a mothballed bomber to attract—and shade—customers. A friend bet him five bucks that it would never happen. “If you told my dad he couldn’t do something,” his daughter Punky Scott says, “then he was going to do it.” The story of how he did it has been Lacey family lore for 70 years. Lacey borrowed $15,000 and hightailed it to the airport that very night. At Altus Army Airfield, Oklahoma, he bought a well-used B-17 for $13,750. Although Lacey was an experienced pilot, he had never flown anything with more…

THE NEXT GENERATION of humans will see the night sky entirely differently from the way we see it today. Even in cities, where the glare of lights drowns out all but the brightest stars, people will be able to look up, locate a distant sun, and describe the alien worlds that orbit it. Giant telescopes on frigid mountaintops will have scrutinized those worlds, helping astronomers discern their sizes and basic compositions. A telescope orbiting Earth will have peered into their atmospheres, and may have found signs of life. By staring at star glint—the bright reflection of light off an ocean—astronomers should be able to map planetary continents and discover many of their alien Everests and Grand Canyons. No longer a sea of nearly identical stars, the night sky will be…

THE BONEYARD MIGHT BE a place airplanes go when they die, but these photographers have a talent for bringing them back to life. The annual meeting of the International Society for Aviation Photographers took place last March at the Pima Air & Space Museum, known for its massive boneyard housing more than 4,000 retired aircraft on the Arizona desert sands. ISAP member Rod Reilly saw this Sikorsky CH-37B Mojave helicopter (below) from a distance as the sun was setting. He broke into a run to get there in time to capture “the warm light falling on the Army olive drab paint scheme, the darkened abstract shadows of other helicopters cast on the Mojave’s bulky fuselage, and most importantly the iconic Saguaro cactus”—the only one he could find on the grounds…

THE ONLY ARTIST to walk on the moon died in May at 86. Alan Bean brought his extraordinary experiences as Apollo 12’s lunar module pilot and as commander of the second Skylab mission back with him, sharing them through a large collection of paintings. Bean was an aerospace engineer and a highly skilled Navy test pilot before he joined NASA. After eight hours on the moon, 59 days orbiting in Skylab, and 18 years as an astronaut , he resigned to become a full-time artist. In 2009, more than 50 of his paintings were exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. See a selection at airspacemag.com/bean.…

IN 2012, DANISH DIVERS pulled the badly corroded wreckage of a Heinkel He 219 from the waters off the Jutland peninsula, where it had been submerged since World War II. It was a remarkable find: No more than 294 of the night fighters were built for the Luftwaffe, and before this discovery, there was only one known survivor, which is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The Museum’s He 219 was one of dozens of enemy aircraft presented to the United States after World War II by U.S. Army Air Forces commander Henry “Hap” Arnold. In 1945, three He 219s—along with other captured German aircraft—were shipped from Europe to the United States aboard the HMS Reaper and then flown to Freeman Army Airfield in Indiana…

AFTER GETTING REPORTS FROM SURFERS of sharks in the vicinity of Seal Beach, California in 2015, chief lifeguard Joe Bailey became the first lifeguard on the West Coast to use drones for shark patrols. When he and his crew flew a DJI Phantom quadcopter with built-in video camera over the ocean, Bailey told a local news station that within 10 minutes, “We knew there were 10 to 12 sharks all in the Surfside [Beach] area.” Other lifeguards soon followed his lead, and so did Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at California State University, Long Beach. Lowe began using Phantoms to survey great white newborns and yearlings, born in nurseries off SoCal beaches. But there’s also a problem with using drones as shark spotters: From an altitude of about…

IT’S NOT EVERY DAY that a telescope gets a birthday cake. But this telescope was special. It had recently traveled 400 miles to start a new life showing visitors the sky above the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and on March 1, 2017, it was turning 50 years old. Half a century ago, its story began with a pianist. Chester Sheldon Cook earned money for his family in two ways: He gave piano lessons, and he made high-quality optical devices during World War II. A lover of harmony and math, he was naturally drawn to astronomy. So great were his contributions to the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston that his friends memorialized him when he died by purchasing a large telescope and naming it for him. The…