Innholdsfortegnelse for February/March 2019 i Air & Space

SPLASHDOWN The Orion spacecraft bobs in the Pacific Ocean during a November 1 recovery test off the coast of San Diego, California. Behind the capsule, the USS John P. Murtha prepares to winch it into the ship’s well deck and return it to port. The recovery test comes four years after Orion’s first test flight (a four-hour, two-orbit trip) while NASA builds up toward the first operational mission. That flight—a three-week uncrewed trip around the moon—is not scheduled to launch until 2020, but NASA wants to be prepared for the delicate recovery. Before a gentle landing, the capsule will re-enter the atmosphere at around 24,000 mph and endure friction heat of up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit—faster and hotter than the space shuttle. A series of parachutes begins to deploy at…

SCOTT PARAZYNSKI doesn’t look back. The 10th anniversary of the five-shuttle-mission vet’s retirement from NASA coincides with the spring 2019 release of the FT Aviator, a one-handed drone controller he began designing after an epiphany during his work in the surgical robotics field: We need simpler tools to drive our increasingly complex machines. He says the intuitive grab-n-fly device he has perfected for use by cinematographers, building inspectors, and other professionals who rely on drones could be adapted to make helicopters easier to fly too.…

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Concorde’s March 1969 first flight, we are reprinting this account of its last transatlantic journey. This essay first appeared in Feb/Mar 2004. AS CURATOR of Air Transportation at the National Air and Space Museum, I oversee the Museum’s collection of 16 transports, which includes one of the most beautiful and impractical aircraft ever built: the Aérospatiale/ BAC Concorde. Before Air France and British Airways ended their Concorde service in 2003, the technological marvel had ferried their elite clientele across the Atlantic in a style the rest of us could only dream about. Created jointly by British and French engineers, the Concorde began service in 1976, flying passengers at twice the speed of sound. It guzzled jet fuel at the rate of one ton…

WHERE ARE ALL THE PING-PONG BALLS that aviation legend Dick Merrill stuffed in the wings of a Vultee V-1A on his historic 1936 transatlantic round-trip? Merrill and money man Harry Richman loaded the Vultee’s wings with 41,000 ping-pong balls hoping that if they had to ditch in the vast Atlantic, the balls would keep them afloat. National Air and Space Museum docent Bob Kovalchik has one, given to him by his friend Harry Appleton before Appleton died in 2013. Appleton was a 20-year-old aviation junkie living on Staten Island when Merrill and Richman advertised the ping-pong balls for sale, and he sent away for one. On the website rb-29.net, Wayland Mayo, a B-29 pilot in the Korean war, mentioned that he owned another. To a second obvious question—Would it have…

AMERICA’S YOUNGEST JET-SETTER was seven years old when he boarded a Pan American World Airways Boeing 707 in New York, headed to Paris. It was October 26, 1958 and along with his parents and two older sisters, Loren Hopkins was on an all-expenses-paid, two-week tour of European capitals. His mother won the trip after entering a contest printed on the back of a Kellogg’s cereal box. “She always had a desire to see other places,” said Hopkins, now 68 and a farmer in Kinsman, Ohio, of his mother, Vera. But she’d married a farmer, and their livelihood did not promise a life of travel. “For my mother to fly on a jet plane was the adventure of a lifetime,” Hopkins said. A U.S. Army band serenaded the flight’s 111 passengers…

THE SKY OVER LITHUANIA was pale blue, the forest surrounding the air field deep green, and the armed Spanish air force Eurofighter Typhoon light gray. When the jet reached the end of the runway, it turned and paused, its insect-sharp nose and stubby canards dipping slightly. Suddenly its two engines, afterburners lit, kicked it into the air. A wingman followed seconds later, and the two Spanish fighters quickly faded into distant dots, headed north. What I had witnessed that summer day in 2017—beginning only eight minutes earlier when a Klaxon alert flushed two pilots from the ready room—is a standing ritual in air forces around the world. When deployed to the Baltics, responsible for guarding NATO’s eastern flank, each scramble needs to be perfect. In NATO military parlance, it’s a…

IN SCI-FI MOVIES, flight propulsion is almost never based on noisy, messy devices like propellers or turbojets. Our heroes scoot around in warp-driven starships or Millennium Falcons propelled by a silent, serene blue glow. It was that vision of a future aircraft that drew Steven Barrett, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to the development of an electro-aerodynamic propulsion system that could sustain an aircraft in level flight. “It’s not surprising that I was interested in science fiction as a kid,” he says. He began studying the concept of a propulsion system based on ionic wind about nine years ago. Similar technologies were proposed in the 1920s and again in the ’60s, but discarded each time as impractical. That oft-revisited idea is to ionize,…

KARL HEINZEL IS FIDDLING with a C-clamp fastened to a wing of the 1912 Olmsted Pusher so he can mount the wings on what he calls “Frankenstand,” an adjustable support he designed to display the fragile pieces of a century-old aircraft. Designing the display mount is just the latest task in his year-long effort at stabilizing this unusual airplane, one of more than 40 he has worked on during his 34-year career at the National Air and Space Museum. That career was to have ended in 2008, when Heinzel, then deputy shop supervisor, retired at 57. But he has now become that rare person who can legitimately quote Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” Two years after…

BOEING PRESIDENT BILL ALLEN GAMBLED in the early 1950s, when he directed the company to invest $16 million in the Dash 80 jet prototype before a single customer had committed to buying the next-generation airplanes it would spawn: the KC-135 military tanker and the 707 airliner. When Pan Am placed an order for 20 707s in October 1955, Allen won the bet. Led by Maynard Pennell, a manager on the B-29 Superfortress, the 707 program made rapid transatlantic crossing available even to middle-class Americans while supplying an instantly recognizable symbol of American ingenuity. It had the largest passenger cabin in the sky, with 100 windows, enough that every row of seats would have one, no matter how the seats were arranged. Pan Am’s Juan Trippe offered to pay Boeing a…

CAPTAIN RICK VON BERCKEFELDT today flies Boeing 737s for Southwest, but he once flew USAF air defense interceptors during what turned out to be the twilight of the cold war before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. There were tense times in those last years. In 1988, von Berckefeldt’s F-15C made a record breaking 11 intercepts of Soviet military aircraft—10 Tupolev Tu-95 Bear bombers and one Illyushin Il-18 “Coot,” a turboprop similar to the Lockheed P-3 Orion. He was awarded an Air Medal, but von Berckefeldt says his record was a matter of Soviet operational priorities and sheer coincidence. For von Berckefeldt, flying F-15s against unknown “bogeys” was an exciting change from routine. “The phraseology was ‘unknown rider,’ he recalls. “So it’s ‘We have an unknown rider, bearing…

BEFORE THE OUTBREAK OF WORLD WAR II, relations between British and German aeronautical engineers were sufficiently cordial for Reginald Mitchell, chief designer of the Supermarine Spitfire, to write to his German counterpart, Ernst Heinkel, congratulating him on his He 70 Blitz. The Blitz (German for lightning), designed in 1932, was a fast five-seat mailplane. One of its noteworthy features was the elliptical planform of its wing; another was the extremely smooth surface finish of its flush-riveted airframe. “We have been unable to achieve such smooth lines in the aircraft that we entered for the Schneider Trophy Races,” Mitchell wrote to Heinkel, and he went on to report that a Blitz that Rolls-Royce had acquired and fitted with their 810-horsepower Kestrel engine was “appreciably faster than our fighters.” The British fighters…

AFTER YEARS of promises, Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity “suborbital spaceliner” has made good on its name, ascending to an altitude of 51.4 miles over the Mojave Desert on December 13. It has become a spaceliner if one accepts the U.S. Air Force policy of issuing astronaut wings to pilots who ascend to an altitude of 50 miles. Another widely-used boundary of where space begins, the Kármán Line, is still about 10.5 miles higher than Virgin’s spacecraft (or wannabe spacecraft, depending) has flown. This fourth carrier airplane-launched test flight of the Unity beat the altitude of the prior test by a margin of 19 miles, the biggest leap forward—that is, upward—since Virgin unveiled the craft in 2016.…

THE PHOTO ITSELF IS UNREMARKABLE, and tells us nothing about Mars we didn’t know already. Yet MarCO-B’s snapshot, taken a few days after Thanksgiving, is important—the first close-up of another planet taken by a CubeSat. Over the past 15 years, nearly a thousand of these small, cheap, modular satellites have been launched into Earth orbit to take pictures, test technology, and perform other simple tasks. The twin MarCOs, A and B, have the distinction of being the first CubeSats sent to interplanetary space. They survived the 300-million-mile journey to Mars, and half the battle was won right there. NASA wanted to know if the briefcase-size MarCOs could handle such a long journey, then play a significant role on arrival: relaying radio signals back to Earth from the Mars Insight lander…

SkyWorks Capital helps airlines buy, lease, and finance aircraft and acquires and manages aircraft on behalf of financial institutions. The job: Duchen studies historical trends in the airline industry and analyzes the products of airliner manufacturers in order to advise his clients about managing their fleets. Typical day: Duchen says there’s no such thing, and in fact, no two days are the same. “The joke around here is ‘What do you guys do in aircraft finance?’ and our answer is ‘What do you have?’ SkyWorks is unique in that we have a lot of different pieces of the business. We model the returns on a particular aircraft being leased—that’s one type of advice we provide. We work on aircraft order campaigns. An airline will come to us and say ‘We’re…

THE DETECTION OF INTELLIGENT BEINGS elsewhere in the universe would, by almost any measure, top the list of most dramatic discoveries ever. Yet the search for advanced extraterrestrial life has drawn relatively few scientists and almost no funding. While NASA and other space agencies actively hunt for biosignatures beyond Earth—signs of simple, microbial life—the little-green-men giggle factor has limited the seemingly more difficult search for evidence of civilizations residing, perhaps thriving, beyond our solar system. That quest has been left largely to the private sector, most significantly these days to the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in California. Recently, though, the field has been going through a period of soul-searching and even a name change, and has emerged with a certain amount of new respectability. Last September, at the…

WE WISH IT WOULD NEVER END—the mile-long coil of diving snap rolls that lead into the sledge hammer of opening acts—the Sean D. Tucker Centrifuge. Shoulder over tail, six, seven, eight times to the bone-pounding sound of whomp, whomp, whomp. His biplane beats the air as it winds tighter and tighter, faster and faster, violent as a tornado round its own right wingtip. Then suddenly it stops and flies straight, as if we were fools to think it should stumble after a dizzying spin like that. But a few maneuvers later, bam, bam, bam, at the top of a vertical line, it does flip forward, but flies off again, easy as a wink. This is no ordinary biplane. It is the Oracle Challenger III, with Sean D. Tucker flying his…