Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2018 i Air & Space

THE SECOND CENTURY of the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force (RAF) began with a roar as 100 airplanes thundered over central London, among them the latest additions to the RAF fleet, Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning IIs. Around 70,000 people gathered to witness the flyover, many of them surrounding the monument to Queen Victoria, which stands near the entrance to Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth and her grandsons Harry and William watched from the Palace. (Both certified helicopter pilots, William served with the RAF and Harry, with the Army Air Corps.) In the parade of aircraft were 22 Eurofighter Typhoons (in a formation that spelled out “100”), the Red Arrows aerobatic team, and examples of virtually every airplane model in current RAF service—as well as the World War II-era craft that fly…

ASTON MARTIN, in collaboration with Cranfield Aerospace and Rolls-Royce, unveiled its concept for a personal vertical take-off and landing vehicle, the Volante, at the Farnborough Airshow outside London last July. Boeing, meanwhile, announced a new division called Boeing NeXt, dedicated to urban air taxis and cargo drones. See “So That’s What Flying Cars Are For,” page 22.…

WHILE RIDING AS A PASSENGER in a willowy, wing-warping biplane piloted by Orville Wright, U.S. Army First Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge became the first person to die during powered flight. Even before the debris was cleared away, First Lieutenant Frank Lahm began investigating the wreck. Five months after the incident, Lahm issued the world’s first airplane accident report. Orville Wright had thrilled military officials by setting world records over Fort Myer, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. On September 17, 1908, more than 2,000 spectators flocked to watch Wright fly with Selfridge, who just four months earlier had become the first Army officer to fly an airplane. The Wright Model A was the most technologically advanced airplane in the world, and Wright had just replaced its two eight-foot, eight-inch diameter…

IT’S NOT HARD TO IMAGINE the near-future when crews undock from the International Space Station for the last time, leaving it to gradually fall from orbit until it burns up in the atmosphere. If anyone could evoke the feeling of what we’ll lose that day, it’s Roland Miller, who has been documenting the decommissioned sites of space history for decades. He published a book of his previous work in Abandoned in Space in 2016. Miller’s never been to space, so he teamed up with Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli, who was on his third flight for six months in 2017. In a call a few months before launch, Miller says the astronaut—a talented photographer in his own right—really got his vision: “Paolo spoke of the importance of connecting the humanities with…

A BLUE LIGHT FLASHED under the ice at the South Pole, and in 43 seconds, the world knew. A neutrino—a strange, almost massless particle created in a cataclysm in space—had hit the ice and created a subatomic particle that emitted the glow. Because neutrinos interact with matter only at the subatomic scale, the only way scientists can find them is by looking for radiation from a secondary particle created in a collision. A program that filters through thousands of these detections a second, looking for the unusually high energy that indicates a cosmic neutrino, recognized this glow and pinged a powerful Iridium satellite modem, set up specially to blast alerts from the bottom of the world. And on a Friday afternoon last September, Erik Blaufuss, in Maryland, got a text…

THE 325 ROCKETS that blasted off from Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 17 were no more impressive than the launchpad’s last blast. In July, the U.S. Air Force demolished 17’s towers and gantries, which for several decades had braced Delta rockets sending up spacecraft. The demolition makes room for Moon Express, a company that intends to launch the first commercial lunar mission as early as 2019.…

What does NASA have to do before Axiom can start building a space habitat? They have to grant access for somebody to use one of the space station’s berthing ports. There’s only one port located in a place where you could attach something big enough to call a space station—or the beginning of a space station. So we think NASA needs to get on with whatever competitive process they want in order to decide which company is worthy of putting their confidence in. What agreements do you have with NASA? Even before you attach your own module to the International Space Station, you want to send up paying customers, right? Yes, that’s right. We’re getting a lot of interest from investors in spite of the lack of a docking port,…

THERE’S A GENTLE IRONY about some of the oldest human-made flying objects in the National Air and Space Museum’s collection—they probably never flew and certainly never will. They’re Chinese kites that were displayed at the great 1876 Philadelphia exposition, which celebrated the nation’s first 100 years. Thirty-seven countries participated. China sent a grand pavilion to show itself off, and the kites were one of the attractions. “The kites were created for the exhibition. China had a huge space and they were representing the entire country,” says paper conservator Amanda Malkin, to whom the kites owe their future. “They sent the best things they had.” “Kites were the first flying objects crafted by human hands,” writes National Air and Space curator Tom Crouch in his 2004 book Wings: A History of…

SPACE TRAVEL IS ABOUT TO CHANGE. Ever since Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering flight in 1961, only spacecraft built by nation states have carried humans into orbit. But sometime soon, as early as next year, the world’s first private, crewed spaceship will take off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida and head for the International Space Station. For many, the most important aspect of that first flight will be the long-awaited resumption of human spaceflight from U.S. soil. It will mark the end of a painful hiatus since the last space shuttle mission in 2011, during which American astronauts have had to hitch rides aboard Russian spacecraft. But independence from Russian launch schedules is not the only thing Americans will have to celebrate. With the first launch in its Commercial Crew Program,…

BEFORE IT WAS DEMOLISHED, Manhattan’s Rivoli Theatre sat on Broadway between 49th and 50th streets. With an ornate, Greek-temple façade and seating for 2,300 patrons, it wasn’t a movie theater; it was a movie palace. On November 10, 1918, the day before World War I ended, the film A Romance of the Air premiered at the Rivoli. It starred Lieutenant Bert Hall, an American soldier of fortune, and was loosely based on his dodgy 1918 memoir, En l’air! The book and movie cashed in on Hall’s World War I exploits with the famed French Air Service squadron, the Lafayette Escadrille. Two months earlier and 200 miles from the Rivoli, there was another debut. On September 29, a single-seat, advanced pursuit trainer, the Thomas-Morse Scout S-4B, lifted into the air. It…

RARE VINTAGE AIRCRAFT are coming back to the National Championship Air Races in Reno, Nevada September 12–18. This year’s exhibit heralds the return of the National Aviation Heritage Invitational, which for 16 years awarded trophies to a stunning collection of restored aircraft judged by restoration experts. Past winners have included a Blériot XI, P-51 Mustang, Grumman Mallard, and Spartan Executive. Each year, one airplane wins a trophy by being elected the people’s favorite. Next year, Air & Space/Smithsonian will extend the voting for this award to an international, online audience. Watch airspacemag.com for stories of the competitors and to vote for the one you think should be the Air & Space magazine 2019 Airplane of the Year.…

HELEN JAMES was carrying a special delivery—her 60-year-old photo album—on an equally special trip. She arrived in Washington, D.C. last April on an Honor Flight, reserved for U.S. veterans to visit the memorials in the nation’s capital. Veterans who were honorably discharged, that is, and the 90-year-old former Airman Second Class could start claiming that only a few months earlier. James enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1952, serving for three years as a radio operator and then as a crew chief, until she was arrested and discharged as “undesirable” during the “Lavender Scare,” a campaign to remove gays and lesbians from service. After being stripped of her benefits and severance, she moved to California and had a successful career as a physical therapist. But in January, she wanted…

YOU CAN FIND THE FUTURE OF AVIATION inside an unremarkable building in Woburn, Massachusetts, tucked behind an Irish pub and a Dunkin’ Donuts. This is where Terrafugia is working on the Transition, the most mature and probably the best known of a 21st century crop of aviation’s perennially just-around-the-corner technology: flying cars. With a pusher-propeller and wings that fold, the Transition is a light aircraft that seats two, boasts a flight range of 400 miles, and meets all the Federal Motor Vehicle safety standards. The airplane can run on automotive gasoline and fold its wings in less than a minute, a trick that converts it from an airplane into something that will easily fit in a garage. Terrafugia founder Carl Dietrich says the Transition is designed to mitigate the reasons…

AIRPLANES ARE TO WICHITA what cars are to Detroit. Ask just about any of the 390,000 residents of this Kansas town. They either build airplanes for a living or know someone who does or did. From economic boom to bust and back again, few industries have helped shape an American city more than aviation has in this self-proclaimed Air Capital of the World. Nearly a century ago, American commercial aviation manufacturing was born here. It is where legends like Walter and Olive Ann Beech and a Kansas farm boy named Clyde Cessna launched aviation empires and where, during World War II, Boeing constructed a plant to mass produce B-29 Superfortresses bound for the Pacific. That history envelops today’s Wichita like air, touching public programs as well as corporate goals and…

THE CONTROVERSY SWIRLING AROUND THE F-35 JOINT STRIKE FIGHTER echoes previous battles fought over aircraft tasked with serving more than one master. Perhaps the central question in today’s debate is whether a single airplane designed to perform many missions adequately is a better and truly more affordable choice than several airplanes, each designed to perform a single mission flawlessly. In 1968, the Navy had an unequivocal answer: No. But were they right? In the early 1960s both the Navy and the Air Force were shopping for new combat aircraft. The Navy needed a carrier-based interceptor capable of engaging Soviet bombers hundreds of miles away, before they could launch long-range anti-ship missiles; the Air Force required a supersonic, ground-hugging penetrator that could duck in under enemy radar and dodge surface-to-air missiles.…