Innholdsfortegnelse for February/March 2020 i Air & Space

One of the challenges, but much of the fun, of being a geologist is getting to the remote places where the features and rocks you want to study are found. When those places are hundreds of thousands or even millions of miles away out in the solar system, “challenge” becomes an understatement. As our technologies advanced, we progressed from using telescopes to observe planets and other celestial bodies to sending spacecraft to study them, and, 50 years ago, we brought back the first samples. Having the moon rocks in hand gave us new and unprecedented insights into how planets work and how our own planet formed. While our rovers continue to explore Mars, and other robotic missions continue to use incredible instruments to provide data that changes our understanding of…

Last November, the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth —the largest and most powerful ship ever to sail in the British navy—dropped anchor at Annapolis to host a transatlantic naval conference. But the $4.5 billion ship wasn’t the only remarkable spectacle that day: An unconventional pilot wearing a jet engine-powered suit launched himself into the air for a celebratory flyover. The pilot was Richard Browning, a former Royal Marines reservist and oil trader, who founded a tech startup called Gravity Industries after spending several months developing the jet suit “for no reason initially other than just the sheer joy of the challenge,” he says. While jet packs, rocketbelts, and their variants have been around for decades, Browning’s design stands apart in that its primary means of control is the human body…

Relying on data gathered by NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn, researchers have created the first geologic map of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, revealing a dynamic landscape of dunes, plains, craters, and hydrocarbon lakes. The Cassini spacecraft conducted more than 120 flybys of the Mercury-size moon during its 13-year mission, which ended in 2017. The mapmakers used data from Cassini’s radar imager, which peered through Titan’s atmosphere of nitrogen and methane. Cassini’s visible and infrared instruments were able to capture some of Titan’s larger geologic features through the opaque haze. The map will likely prove useful to NASA planners who are preparing to launch a mission to Titan in 2026, which will deploy a multi-rotor vehicle named Dragonfly to explore the moon. As the only other known world in the solar…

THE CALL CAME OUT OF THE BLUE. About a year ago, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum curator Matt Shindell was contacted by a representative of ispace, the private Japanese aerospace company that was one of five finalists in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. Founder Takeshi Hakamada wanted to donate the company’s entry, the Sorato lunar rover. Was the Museum interested? “It was really exciting,” says Shindell. “It wasn’t something that I had been expecting. Because we’re a national museum, most of our artifacts dealing with planetary exploration come from NASA. It’s great that around the world people think of the Air and Space Museum as a place that can inspire future technologies and activity in space. We’re the national museum, but in a way we’re also a…

As I walked into a hangar belonging to the Valiant Air Command Warbird Museum in Titusville, Florida last March, I ran into a familiar sight: a B-25 Mitchell bomber named Panchito . By some stroke of kismet, it was the same B-25 I had seen five years earlier as a reporter in Georgetown, Delaware, where I wrote about the bomber’s role as a mascot for a local boys’ baseball team. The restored bomber was in Titusville to participate in the Space Coast Warbird Airshow. Sitting next to the B-25 was the man who had restored it, Tom Reilly. For the last 48 years, Reilly has restored 34 aircraft, including nine B-25s (counting Panchito ). “There are two types of people—bomber pilots and fighter pilots,” Reilly told me. “The fighter pilots…

DRONES EQUIPPED WITH CAMERAS and sensors offer an efficient method today to inspect the vast oil fields of the Middle East. “It’s pretty useful if you are operating in the Middle East to know what is going on before you go out into the field,” British Petroleum technology director Curt Smith told Hart Energy in 2015. His words echo the thoughts of Charles Ritchie, a manager for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the forerunner of British Petroleum. In 1911, tired of inspecting oil pipelines on horseback, Ritchie decided to import the first airplane into Persia (today’s Iran). At the time, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was in the process of testing a new pipeline running from its oilfield at Maidan-i-Naftun to the site of a new refinery at Abadan. The project had…

Big Aircraft, Big Crowd I enjoyed this photograph [right] in your article “XXL” (Dec. 2019/Jan. 2020): Six inches of freeboard on that little overloaded boat in the foreground, and not a life jacket to be seen. This was probably the reason the Coast Guard was founded. KEITH LUCE via Facebook Something’s Loose Regarding your article about changing a C-5’s tire (“Milestone,” Dec. 2019/Jan. 2020): First, the procedure, described in your article as “changing a tire,” is really the procedure for changing a wheel (with a tire installed on it). Changing a tire takes more equipment and more time. Second, the tool described (and shown in the photo) is not a “spanner” (an archaic British term for wrench). It is called a “torque wrench.” WILLIAM MANLEY Altadena, California Sentimental Journey The…

U.S. military dogs trained to sniff out explosives or drugs can’t always get to where they are needed in a land vehicle. And so this past November, members of the Military Working Dog section of the 92nd Security Forces Squadron—and their four-legged partners—participated in UH-1N Huey training at the Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington state. The training introduced the dogs to the distractions and noise they might experience when boarding and flying in a helicopter. “We don’t want them to ever come across anything that’s new to them. It just kind of throws them off,” says Staff Sergeant James Wilson, whose partner, Fanni, is a Belgian Malinois. A key to helicopter training is to “make it a fun situation,” he says, “whether it’s taking out a toy or just…

Every now and then, we all deal with the frustration of getting stuck on a muddy road—but for U.S. Army personnel, it could be a matter of life and death. That’s why the U.S. Air Force HQ 557th Weather Wing is now using soil moisture data from a NASA satellite in the weather advisories that it issues for the Army and the Air Force. Launched in 2015, NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) orbiting observatory measures the amount of water in the top two inches of soil everywhere on Earth’s surface. That data helps scientists monitor droughts, predict floods, and develop more accurate climate models. This Air Force initiative will be the first instance of assimilating SMAP data in an operational, near-real-time environment. In addition to assessing how muddy the…

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall is undergoing a complete renovation, and half of the Museum is now closed to visitors. But not to worry; there are plenty of “first” and “only” iconic artifacts for you to see, including the Bell X-1 (above), the first airplane to fly faster than the speed of sound, piloted by Chuck Yeager on October 14, 1947. Also on display are the 1903 Wright Flyer, the heavier-than-air flying machine that started it all; the Spirit of St. Louis, in which Charles Lindbergh made the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927; and Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit, which commemorates humanity’s very first steps on the moon. To get the most recent updates on what to see, visit airandspace.si.edu.…

I’M STANDING IN PARKING LOT 5 of the Scott Campus of the University of Nebraska Omaha. It’s a cold, gray evening, with low ceilings and spitting rain. I look around at the towering buildings on all sides, and it’s hard to imagine that this was once the site of an airfield. If I had been flying the Omaha-to-Cheyenne route back in the glory days of airmail, this would have been my starting point. Now you need a permit to park your car here. All that’s left to show that an airport once existed is a forlorn metal plaque erected by the Nebraska State Historical Society. It faces a busy street. In the morning I’ll use modern GPS to arrive in the air above this very spot, but after that, I’m…

UFOs ARE BACK. Or perhaps better put, interest in UFOs is again on the rise. For most of a generation—from 1987 to 2015—media coverage of unidentified flying objects measurably declined. In the past couple of years, though, television, newspapers, and social media have made mysterious aerial sightings and the possibility of visitors from outer space big news again. Why the sudden resurgence? A handful of events helped drive the new interest. Although unrelated, these events have been mutually reinforcing; that is, stories written about any one of them typically mention the others, leaving the impression that they add up to a single, developing narrative. The first event, and the spark that ignited today’s UFO revival, came in December 2017, when the New York Times, the Washington Post , and Politico…

Last November 24, Mansfield Lahm Regional Airport, the home of the Ohio Air National Guard’s 179th Airlift Wing, welcomed a special guest: NASA’s Aero Spacelines Super Guppy. At sunrise the next morning, the nose of the cargo aircraft swung open on its 110-degree hinges to reveal the package inside, the Artemis I Orion space capsule. The Super Guppy, built from a heavily modified KC-97 Stratotanker, features a massive cavity, 19 feet in diameter, which was originally designed to carry the second stage of a Saturn rocket for the Apollo program. Today, it is serving a new generation of astronauts, who will eventually fly the Orion spacecraft to the moon. The space capsule was delivered to the John H. Glenn Research Center’s Plum Brook Station in Sandusky to test the capsule…

LAST MARCH, Vancouver-based Harbour Air—the largest seaplane airline in North America—announced plans to convert its aircraft, including DHC-2 Beavers and DHC-3 Otters, into an all-electric fleet (see “Up to Speed,” Jun./Jul. 2019). In December, that goal came closer to reality with the successful test flight of an “eBeaver” over the Fraser River in Richmond, British Columbia. The aircraft, piloted by Harbour Air CEO Greg McDougall, was retrofitted with a 750-horsepower electric motor designed by MagniX, an electric-propulsion start-up in Redmond, Washington. With the test flight completed, Harbour Air and MagniX are applying for certification and approval of the electric airplane, and they expect to begin commercial flights in 2022.…

What is clear air turbulence? When we talk about clear air turbulence—so called because pilots can’t see it—airplanes are typically at 30,000 to 35,000 feet, and the turbulence at that altitude is caused by weather patterns colliding with each other. Wind shear at that level also causes turbulence to form. Is clear air turbulence the most threatening type for commercial airliners? Yeah, it’s most dangerous because you can’t see it. There is as strong—or stronger—turbulence around thunderstorms, but there are restrictions on how close you can fly to severe storms. What service does your company offer the airlines? A given airline will upload, say, all of their planned trips for tomorrow, and we’ll tell them which ones have potential turbulence along that route—typically long routes between continents. If we say,…

From a test-stand catwalk almost 300 feet above the ground at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi, Maury Vander and I take in a view of the 14,000-acre rocket propulsion test complex, its 200-square-mile acoustical buffer zone, and distant New Orleans. Vander, who started at Stennis in 1989 after graduating from the University of New Orleans with a degree in mechanical engineering, is the chief of test operations for the approaching Green Run, a long-awaited test that will certify for flight the core of a rocket that has been in development for a decade. “I spent my first 23 years in the best job on this site, a test engineer,” he says. “We made the ground shake and the weather change.” That was during the space shuttle era. The…

THIS PATCH OF ENGLISH WOODLAND near the village of Bromley Green, about eight miles from the Channel shore, was once a smoking crater. A V-1 flying bomb—fired by Germany’s Luftwaffe at London but shot down minutes before getting there—crashed and exploded here around eight o’clock in the morning on August 27, 1944, gouging a hole in the earth 10 feet deep and 20 feet across. The blast of its warhead and fuel lifted the nearest house, more than 600 feet away, off its foundations. Seventy-five years later, to the exact day, the old crater is the site of an archaeological investigation led by two brothers who grew up hearing stories of the terror wrought by Germany’s V-1s. Colin and Sean Welch have searched for fragments of the flying bombs over…

COMPACT, LIGHTWEIGHT, powerful, and equipped with ailerons on both its upper and lower wings, the Bücker Bü-133 Jungmeister was an aerobatic pilot’s dream, dominating the sport in Europe and the United States in the 1930s and ’40s. Today it remains a favorite of airshow pilots like David Martin, whose repertoire has included a daring inverted, no-hands flight of his Jungmeister since 2010. Built in Germany before World War II and, during the war, in Spain, this single-seat variant of the Bü-131A Jungmann had a steel-tube fabric-covered fuselage and wings of wood spars and ribs. Most Jungmeisters used a 160-horsepower, seven-cylinder radial air-cooled Siemens Sh-14A. The Museum’s Jungmeister was imported to the United States by aerobatic champion Alex Papana aboard the airship Hindenburg in 1936. Both Papana and Count Hagenburg flew…