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Pilots Of Single-Place And Experimental Jets Given A Reprieve From Proficiency Check Requirements

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Pilots Of Single-Place And Experimental Jets Given A Reprieve From Proficiency Check Requirements

The FAA has listened to those commenting on its proposed changes to FAR Section 61.85 and has proposed an amendment to the new rule pushing back the implementation of proficiency check requirements for pilots of single-place and experimental turbojets for a year.

In a final rule published on August 31, 2011 (76 FR 54095). In that rule, the FAA amended its regulations to revise the pilot, flight instructor, and pilot school certification requirements. In particular, the FAA expanded the obligation for a pilot-in-command (PIC) proficiency check to pilots of all turbojet-powered aircraft. This expansion included single-pilot turbojet-powered aircraft and, with some exceptions, also included turbojet-powered experimental aircraft. The FAA intended, and those that commented on the proposed rule expected, a period that would allow pilots of these aircraft sufficient time to come into compliance with the new PIC requirement.

As part of the final rule, the FAA revised Sec. 61.58 to extend the requirements for PIC proficiency checks. Prior to the final rule, this section only required PIC proficiency checks for pilots acting as PIC in aircraft that were type certificated for more than one pilot flight crewmember. In the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) published on August 31, 2009 (74 FR 44779), the FAA proposed to extend the Sec. 61.58 PIC proficiency check requirements to pilots acting as PIC of any turbojet powered aircraft. The FAA received a significant amount of comments opposing the proposed rule as written due to the impact it would have on pilots operating experimental jets. Based on the comments, the FAA intentionally included the Sec.  61.58 PIC proficiency check requirements for pilots operating experimental turbojet-powered aircraft. However, pilots operating experimental aircraft that possessed only one seat through original design or through modification were excepted from these requirements, and pilots of other experimental turbo-jet powered aircraft were given several alternative means of compliance with the Sec. 61.58 proficiency check requirements.

READ MORE: AeroNews

Last Updated on Saturday, 15 October 2011 07:26
 

Ipad's Give Pilots Cheap Synthetic Vision

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Ipad's Give Pilots Cheap Synthetic Vision

Ipad Gives Pilot Synthetic Vision

 

OSHKOSH, Wisconsin – The iPad has been a huge hit with pilots who use it for everything from flight planning to navigation. Now synthetic vision can be added to the list of capabilities available to pilots using the device in the cockpit.

Synthetic vision has been around for a few years, using glass panel cockpit displays costing tens of thousands of dollars. The technology renders a three-dimensional digital representation of what a pilot sees out the window. It looks similar to a flight simulator. Everything from mountains to buildings can be shown, providing pilots with a picture of their surroundings at night or when flying in the clouds.

Now the technology is available in a 99-cent app (with additional subscription fees).

 

WingX Pro7 from Hilton Software has been a best selling navigation app on the iPad, providing aeronautical charts, weather and terrain capabilities. Today the company announced it has added synthetic vision.

 

READ MORE:    Wired.com

 

Last Updated on Tuesday, 23 August 2011 13:50
 

HTC-2 Hypersonic Vehicle Fails Test

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HTC-2 Hypersonic Vehicle Fails Test

For the second time in a row, the Pentagon has lost contact with an experimental hypersonic vehicle over the Pacific, just minutes after it was launched from space.

The flight of the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 was hotly anticipated in military and aerospace circles. The HTV-2 was supposed to ride on the back of a rocket to the edge of space, where it would separate and scream through the atmosphere at 13,000 mph before splashing into the Pacific Ocean, about 4,100 miles and 30 minutes later.

If the flight worked, it’d show how missiles of this shape and flight pattern could strike targets halfway around the world almost instantly. And that would be a major step forward in the Pentagon’s “Prompt Global Strike” plan to attack foes anywhere on the globe in less than an hour. For now, however, those hopes have been dashed.

READ MORE:   Wired.com

Last Updated on Thursday, 11 August 2011 15:32
 

The Last Space Shuttle - STS-135

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The Last Space Shuttle - STS-135

Last Space Shuttle STS-135

Space shuttle Atlantis is off to one of the smoothest starts of a mission in the 30-year history of NASA's shuttle program, which ends with this same voyage, agency officials said.

Atlantis launched into space Friday (July 8) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on what is the final flight of NASA's shuttle program before the fleet is retired this year. The shuttle and its crew of four are headed for the International Space Station to deliver vital supplies.

 

Tuscaloosa Tornado 7 mins of Terror!

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Tuscaloosa Tornado 7 mins of Terror!

 

Engineer Behind Iranian Saucer Technology Comes Forward

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Engineer Behind Iranian Saucer Technology Comes Forward

Nuclear Engineer, Mehran Tavakoli Keshe, has came forward as being the developer of the technology being used in Iran's new "flying saucer." His technology is claimed to harness magnetism and gravity to allow travel throughout the solar system and beyond.

by Hank Mills
Pure Energy Systems News

 

If, the Iranians have this technology, what kind of technology does the USA have under it's control

Read about this amazing stuff using the Read More link below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

READ MORE: http://pesn.com/2011/04/06/9501804_Engineer_Behind_Iranian_Saucer_Technology_Comes_Forward/#Powerful_and_Affordable_Propulsion

Last Updated on Thursday, 14 April 2011 02:31
 

Jumbo Problems Dreamliner Becomes a Nightmare for Boeing

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Jumbo Problems Dreamliner Becomes a Nightmare for Boeing

By Dinah Deckstein

Boeing 787 Dreamliner CockpitAP

 

According to Boeing's plans, final assembly of the new jet would take just three days. To achieve that aim, the company even tossed out traditional industry rules which hold that production of complex airplanes is best entrusted to experienced teams and that important components should be constructed at the main production facility. Instead, Boeing outsourced the production of the aircraft's components, including important parts such as the plane's wings and enormous fuselage, to around 50 subcontractors around the world. Boeing CEO James McNerney stated that the company would retain responsibility only for design, development, assembly and customer care. "The R&D investment level and risk-sharing model with suppliers was deemed appropriate at the time," a Boeing spokesperson says today, in justifying the decision. But revolutions always require sacrifices. It was a lesson Boeing learned the hard way.

Nearly 60 customers worldwide are waiting for the 787, with first delivery now postponed for the seventh time. Even if the first of the 843 jets ordered so far is delivered to All Nippon Airways late this summer as planned, it will prove difficult to make up a delay that now amounts to three years. Victim of a Cultural Shift The delay is due to a series of problems. First, there were the bubbles that appeared during the process of baking the huge plastic fuselage components, which are made from sheets of carbon fiber soaked in polymers. Then there was a shortage of the necessary rivets and bolts. The horizontal stabilizers and the joint between the wing and fuselage also required improvements. Then, as if those issues weren't enough, last November a control box ignited during a test flight, setting off a chain reaction that caused essential onboard systems to fail. That meant overhauling the power supply and installing new control software. Other new airplane models -- the Airbus A380 for example -- have also had their share of mishaps and malfunctions in recent years. Most of the time, these were the results of the manufacturers setting themselves overly ambitious deadlines and cramming their planes full of new technology. Still, those factors alone are not enough to explain Boeing's run of bad luck.

The company's managers have fallen victim to a cultural shift they themselves helped to create before the decision to build the 787, and which is now threatening to overwhelm them. It started with Boeing's merger with competitor McDonnell Douglas in the late 1990s. Harry Stonecipher, former CEO of McDonnell Douglas and later of Boeing, felt airplane construction, measured against the high investment and risk involved, yielded only modest returns. He and his colleagues began looking for a way to build the 787 using as little of the company's own resources as possible. The solution they settled on was large-scale outsourcing. Attractive Options The newly merged corporation certainly would have had the necessary funds to carry out production itself, but company higher-ups apparently preferred to use the cash to buy back the firm's own stock, which had the agreeable side effect of increasing its share price. This not only benefitted the board of directors, with their attractive stock options, but also Stonecipher himself, who was one of the company's largest single stockholders.

"Boeing pursues a balanced cash deployment strategy to ensure it meets its goals in funding its existing operations, investing in future growth and for ensuring an appropriate return to shareholders through dividends and share repurchase," says a company spokesperson today. Meanwhile, some of Boeing's subcontractors grew overwhelmed by the tasks assigned to them. Some even outsourced parts of their contracts to other outside companies, further muddling communications and coordination. The parts that trickled into Boeing's final assembly plant in Seattle were often unfinished blanks instead of completed subassemblies. The original idea of simply putting together finished components, Lego-style, was out of the question. Another problem was that the dimensions of the enormous fuselage sections also sometimes exceeded specified tolerance levels, which in the case of the 787 are often measured in mere millimeters. 'Overly Ambitious' In its desperation, Boeing had no choice but to take over some of the subcontracting companies itself. "We went too much with outsourcing," Jim Albaugh, CEO of Boeing's commercial airplane division, said in a recent interview with the Seattle Times. "Now we need to bring it back to a more prudent level." Albaugh's boss, Boeing CEO McNerney, recently admitted the production schedule for the 787 may have been "overly ambitious." That insight comes a bit too late. As early as February 2001, former McDonnell Douglas manager John Hart-Smith, an experienced engineer, warned against too much outsourcing at a Boeing symposium. "Excessive downsizing can lead to an increase in costs," he told his colleagues. "It can also reduce a company below the critical mass of technology needed to develop future product to stay in business." But his warning fell on deaf ears.

Boeing won't put an exact number on the additional costs for technical adjustments, aid to contractors and penalty fees for disgruntled customers, but industry experts put it at well over $10 billion (€7 billion). So far, this amount has had only a limited effect on the company's balance sheet. Unlike Airbus, for example, Boeing is able to distribute these costs across a longer time period and among a very large number of airplanes that either have been sold or are still to be ordered. Still, the company admitted in late January that its profits this year could shrink by up to 15 percent, due to delayed delivery of the 787. Re-Drawing the Lines The next few months should reveal whether or not the ambitious project will still manage to prove a success.

Boeing hopes to finally receive authorization for its showcase jet from American and European agencies -- and start moving planes off the lot in Everett. "Boeing is making good progress on the 787 program," says a company spokesperson. "We are re-drawing the lines and adjusting where necessary." If everything goes according to plan, Boeing will deliver around a dozen or more of the planes this year.

By 2013 -- just two years from now -- plans are to roll out 10 planes per month, instead of the current two, from the production facility near Seattle and another final assembly line in South Carolina. But Boeing's managers may once again have bitten off more than they can chew. "It's a mystery to me how they plan to pull this off," says one high-ranking Airbus manager. "Normally in our industry, you would need twice as much time for such an ambitious ramping-up of production."

Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein

Original Source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,753891,00.html

Last Updated on Thursday, 31 March 2011 08:01
 

Voyager 1 Approaches Interstellar Space

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Voyager 1 Approaches Interstellar Space

Sun, 26 Dec '10

Commands Take 16 Hours To Reach The Spacecraft

NASA recently said that Voyager 1 has reached a point at the edge of our solar system where there is no outward motion of solar wind. Now approximately 10.8 billion miles from the sun, Voyager 1's passage through the heliosheath, the turbulent outer shell of the sun's sphere of influence, and the spacecraft's upcoming departure from our solar system, mark a major milestone as it will become mankind's first interstellar probe. In about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will drift within 1.6 light years (9.3 trillion miles) of AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis. Signals to command the thrusters now take more than 16 hours to reach the spacecraft.


Voyager 1 Artist's Rendering

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977, and are the oldest operational spacecraft. At launch, each spacecraft carried two propulsion systems, a Delta-V system, including four 100 lbf and four 5 lbf monopropellant hydrazine thrusters made by Aerojet, and an attitude control system including 16 0.2 lbf monopropellant hydrazine thrusters. The Delta-V systems have long since been jettisoned, but the attitude control systems remain operational today. The 100 lbf thrusters are the original version of the thrusters intended for Orion's crew module and the 0.2 lbf thrusters are the original version of the thrusters currently in use for the Global Positioning System Block IIR, and are similar to those newly in service for GPS Block IIF.

"Voyager has transformed our understanding of the solar system," said Aerojet Program Manager Jon Schierberl. "Aerojet is proud to have been a part of the mission every step of the way." Schierberl is one of a handful of people at Aerojet who has worked programs (including Voyager) that have explored or will explore every planet in the solar system.

http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?contentBlockId=2ff8d7ab-4290-44f9-b378-70026e01cc31

 


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