Fancy Free Friday

I've been off the grid this past week. Okay not really, but I have been sort of unplugged and sort of distracted with vacationing. It all started with some insect much smaller than me that's been feasting on my house for who knows how long. Due to financial uncertainties, this was the summer to get stuff done. The last hoorah to buy toys and fix up the place. So I paid a professional to shoot poison through my entire house and skipped off to a locale even warmer than my own to enjoy some time off from MegaCorp. I'm pretty sure I forgot how to be an engineer in the meantime, but oh well I'll worry about that later.

 

TechCat got to spend the week rooming with three dogs and while she got some love and attention she seems to be pretty happy to be home again. Or, I'm guessing that's why she woke us up multiple times during the night to make sure we were still there and she was still there and we weren't going to ship her off to the doghouse again.

 

In honor of my absent design fridays post today, I wrote about Lockheed's HALE-D unmanned airship over at EngineerBlogs. Hope you are all as well rested and even keeled as I feel today (even having to go back to earning my paycheck again). I raise a toast to you and your weekend so we can focus on alcoholic beverages or tasty non-alcoholic beverages and fondly remember days when insects are our worst enemies and having no financial ruin that lay ahead and politicians who we can't tent out of our house. Oh I ruined it already didn't I. Have another drink.

Pretty Fly

I just returned from my fabulous east coast tour of some of MegaCorp's suppliers. As an aviation enthusiastic, one of the highlights was a little hopper flight on a De Havilland -8 prop driven aircraft.

It was a nine row passenger aircraft with two seats on either side and much more limited space in overhead bins. In fact on one of the flights they asked for volunteers to take a later flight as with checked baggage included they were over the GTOW (that's gross take off weight) for this aircraft. It took me a few to realize the huge pods under the wings are entirely for stowing the landing gear in flight. All in all it was a fun flight.

Crazy Cat Lady

The US DoD finally announced a winner for the KC-X tanker contract. The $35 billion contract was hotly contested with two major bids: Boeing and a team of Northrop Grumman and EADS/Airbus. After the USAF initially awarded the contract to the NGC EADS/Airbus team in December 2007 Boeing of course protested this award. This sort of thing is pretty normal in the defense industry. Slightly less normal was the patriotic response initially from Congress but eventually backed up by the Secretary Defense and a reassigning of who would make the final decision. Some stuff about European government support came to light to possibly explain the new award but in the end it was probably congressional pressure and the desire to award an American contract to an American company: Boeing.

In other news, not only do defense contractors manipulate congressmen to get contracts but turns out your cat might be manipulating you.

Turns out the relationship between your cat and you, especially if you are a woman, might be more interesting than you think. Turns out our cats actually form social bonds with us. They control when and how they are fed as do human infants and many cats take the place of a dependent child in families. In other cases, the cats and the humans both exhibit controlling behavior on one another.

Women tend to interact with their cats more meaning cats are more likely to approach women. But the kinds of relationships tend to be the same both with men and women.

Cats could very well be man's -- and woman's -- best friend.

"A relationship between a cat and a human can involve mutual attraction, personality compatibility, ease of interaction, play, affection and social support," co-author Dorothy Gracey of the University of Vienna explained. "A human and a cat can mutually develop complex ritualized interactions that show substantial mutual understanding of each other's inclinations and preferences."

As a lady with several kitty friends in her lifetime I can definitely see this. Unfortunately for me, even my own cat came to prefer HerrTech over me so the preference for women doesn't hold true in personal experience, but I probably interact more with TechCat. And I'm sure we manipulate each other all the time. She's manipulating me right now by looking adorable in exchange for being petted. Tricky cats.

Design Fridays: That's a big prop

The small UAV market is smoking hot. Boeing has a high altitude long endurance (HALE) they'd like to sell to someone. And they're not exaggerating in taking on the HALE acronym, it can reach an impressive 65,000 ft altitude and supposedly stay aloft for up to four days. It's doing some final ground testing now before actual flight testing commences so we'll see the truth in their claims rather soon. Powered by two engines it will also have two really big propellers. 16 ft in diameter big. It dwarfs the not insignificant 2.3L engine that powers it. Here's a video of their ground testing with the prop:

I'd like to see the prop map on that. What's a prop map you ask? Well when designing a propeller the contour of the blade lends itself to a certain efficiency at certain airspeeds and altitudes. There is no one blade that will work for every aircraft so you take a known propeller and its efficiency curves and map it out into little efficiency islands.

Then you can take this information and figure out where your aircraft would perform and how efficiently the prop is doing at various airspeeds and altitudes (air density is what's important here) and compare how efficient your prop is at your max takeoff speed or at your high altitude cruise speed as in the table below.

Given Boeing's Phantom Ray has two engines and two props I wonder if the redundancy allows it to stay up in the air if one engine fails like many larger military or passenger aircraft. At the least I think this is the start of higher expectations for UAVs where once 20-30 hours was considered an endurance flight I expect that will be too short of flight time going forward.

Design Fridays: Mimicking Nature

Two researchers, from South Africa and California, have designed what they think will be a more aerodynamically efficient plane. Saving fuel might not be on the priority list for the military's fastest fighter jets, but it is important to long range, endurance vehicles and especially to commercial aviation. The designers, Huyssen and Spedding, believe the crooked wings and shortened tail will decrease the amount of drag the aircraft experiences thereby reducing its fuel consumption.

 

 These design changes make it look more like a bird than your typical fixed-wing aircraft. Just in time for a non-flying bird-centric holiday. Even the designers don't know yet how much of an effect this will have or how practical it will be. But we might see some elements incorporated into other designs rolling out in the next decade or so. I can't wait for the Turkey plane in a year from now. Gobble gobble.

Body Scanning=Body Shame

There's a whole lot of hullaballoo about the new airport body scanners. And now it's the holidays, plenty of people will be travelling and for those who say no to the new scanners there's an even more invasive pat down. Makes me glad I don't have to fly anywhere this season.

 

 

But I have to admit, maybe people should just suck it up and walk through the scanner. You see, recently I purchased an XBox 360 Kinect. It's a device that allows games much like the Wii, but with no controller. A series of cameras and infrared sensors pick up your body and use that image so you can use your body as the remote in many new games. It's pretty fun. And now instead of the Wii elbow, I'll have Kinect-omg-I-can't-move-my-body. One of the games I got was the Kinect Your Shape fitness game. It seems pretty effective, I like the Tai Chi routines, and the cardio is seriously kicking my ass so presumably that means it has the capacity to increase my fitness. The one weird thing is unlike many of the other Kinect games that show an avatar as "you" this shows just a single-color blob for you. And let me tell you, it's pretty accurate and leaves nothing to chance. It's like you wrapped me in blue saran wrap and then filmed me moving around in that. It looks exactly like me. And unfortunately so.

 

Every single roll of fat is there to see. What in "real life" might be not so obvious thanks to clothes and layers is there right in your face. And to top it off there's some slender trainer avatar right next to you on the screen to compare yourself with. Okay, it's a decent motivator for trying to get fit. Do I really look like that? And it's sort of embarrassing. So I can see why people walking through body scans would have some qualms about it. But you know what? We don't want people bringing dangerous items on our planes intending to do us harm. And there's plenty of stuff we tolerate that is embarrassing.

 

Going to IHop and wolfing down one of their huge sampler platters is pretty embarrassing. And people do it every day. Wearing tight jeans and showing off your muffin top is pretty embarrassing. Using a public restroom is pretty embarrassing. Watching the grocery store employee scan in your soda, ritz crackers, vodka and reeses cups while you're alone on a Friday night is pretty embarrassing.

 

When the waiter at a restaurant asks us what we want we don't chew them out for invading our privacy. We don't yell at the grocery store clerk for scanning all our items. We've come to expect there will be ways in which our privacy is violated all the time. I am constantly asked to pull out my driver's license as identification which quickly tells you my age, height and weight (although it's a little inaccurate). So if this technology works, and works well, and we can all get on plane knowing we're safe I think it's worth dealing with something that's a little uncomfortable. I don't feel like this is inhibiting my liberty. They aren't telling me what video games I can buy or taking away my firearms. I'm going through an ordeal for the convenience of flight. I mean, I could grow all my own food so the grocery store clerk doesn't see everything I buy, but most of us deal with that invasion of privacy for the convenience of shopping at a place where we can get the things we want.

Quality vs Speed

Some Qantas engineers are charging they're being asked to sign off on maintenance and inspections on aircraft they have not actually seen. I think this is the whole dichotomy of do you want it fast or do you want it right. Sometimes your maintenance staff is so competent you want to trust them to do the procedure without an engineer breathing down their necks. Other times you don't want to wait for the engineer. Still others it's not a flight critical component or is for a test. So I understand the need to push along production and maintenance procedures.

 

Still, it's disturbing a production-level passenger aircraft would be shooing asides the concerns of its engineers. I'm sure Qantas being publically listed on a half dozen European stock exchanges has something to do with the CEO, Alan Joyce, accusing the engineers' union of making false claims. He said/she said and maybe their stock prices won't take a dip. He then tried to back it up saying 92% of "heavy maintenance" operations are done domestically, which is not where the complaints are coming from (they are complaining about foreign sites). But heavy maintenance doesn't sound like some all encompassing description. I'm sure a great number of flight critical maintenance is occurring at these foreign locations.

 

I'm not saying don't fly Qantas or don't buy their stock right now, but it's extremely disheartening when one of these cases pop up. As an engineering staff member, it's not easy to make these kinds of allegations or claim due diligence was not done. Those kinds of complaints get you fired or transfered to the Siberian office. Or margianlized to where you can't make those complaints anymore. It's easy to dismiss unions as being useless or costly, but I hope people appreciate that in this case it was the engineer's union who had the clout to make sure these complaints were heard and no illegal backlash happened. I understand wanting faster turnaround times and lower costs but the CEO should know when management goes against engineering recommendations in favor of a quicker and cheaper product they are risking lives. I'd like to think an enlightened, scientific society will someday have criminal courts to deal with those kinds of managers.

 

For more along the lines of quality inspector in the photo above, see the History Channel's Women Factory Workers of WWII gallery.

I have seen the future, and it is unmanned

There seems to be a fair amount of buzz on unmanned military drones. Many soldiers love them and swear by them. Many US citizens couple them with their dislike of the war and cite the many civilian casualties associated with them. Whatever your opinion, they are mean fighting machines. Capable of long stakeouts, detailed video, and precise strikes. Perhaps that's why the civilian casualties are so alarming. We expect perfection from our robots even as the people giving the order to fire are only human.

 

Unmanned helicopters have been an interesting technology to watch. Some manufacturers have taken existing helicopters and retrofitted them to be remotely pilotable. Others have done the development from the ground up. Now NAVAIR has issued a request for proposals for cargo carrying unmanned helicopters and the Marines have done the same.

 

If anyone wondered what was going to happen to all these drones when the Afghanistan war eventually slows down I think we have our answer. We can expect to see them carrying things and doing reconaissance missions. Drones have been able to survey the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, sweep over the fire-prone areas out west looking for new outbreaks, and even fly over the gulf mapping the spread of the oil spill. Now those same drones might be able to drop much needed supplies to people in remote areas of disaster zones where weather or prep time for mobilization might have prevented a human pilot from flying. It is a hopeful thing I think.

You and the captain make it happen

Pilot Captain John Cox answers reader questions about commercial aviation: including, what happens when both your jet engines lose power? Why burn excess fuel via drag so the plane can be under "max landing weight"?

 

And what's this, GM going to get in on the US diesel car market? They'll probably bring over one of the diesel cars they're already selling in the European market. Seems like there's going to be a lot more diesel in our future.