Model Airplanes

While most planes look much the same to harried air travellers, early in 2019 Boeing’s newest jet may manage to catch and arrest even the casual eye.

Passengers about to board will see its long, long carbon-fibre wings arc up and away from low on the fuselage, gull-like, then curve downward to the tips. There the wings will end in what will surely be the iconic image of this plane: scythelike wingtips painted with a 777X and folded upward so the jet fits at the airport gate.

Hanging from the wings will be the most gigantic jet engines anyone has ever seen.

Behind the big doors of Boeing’s Everett assembly plant, Jason Clark, vice president of operations for the 777, gestured toward the all-but-complete 777X flight-test plane, the first of its two engines newly hung on the left wing, the tips folded up so as not to hit the factory walls.

READ MORE:
* World’s strangest-looking airplane? New Airbus Beluga takes flight
* Emirates windowless planes concept unveiled and new premium economy class
* How an aircraft seat is made: Take a top-secret tour

“That’s the first airplane we’ll take into the sky,” said Clark. “In the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing the airplane to life.”

Engineers and mechanics are preparing to roll out this majestic jet for its public debut as

Article source: https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/news/109706805/boeing-777x-the-new-flagship-plane-is-nearly-ready-to-fly

When you think of MSI laptops, you probably think of the company’s gaming rigs, with its mobile workstations a distant second. The new P65 Creator ($2,099 as tested) is neither of those—it’s aimed at professionals in 2D design, 3D animation, and photo and video editing who might otherwise exercise their creativity on a machine like the 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro or Dell XPS 15. The P65 is a good-looking, good-performing laptop, though it doesn’t quite have the refinement of those two Editors’ Choice winners. It’s also basically a white rather than black version of MSI’s GS65 Stealth Thin gamer, or a WS65 workstation with Nvidia GeForce rather than Quadro graphics.

Multiple SKUs, One CPU

MSI offers several P65 Creator models, all featuring Intel’s six-core, 2.2GHz Core i7-8750H processor and a full HD (1,920 by 1,080) screen. The Core i9 offered on the Dell and Apple flagships isn’t available, nor is an equivalent to the Dell’s 4K or the Apple’s Retina display.

Prices start at $1,499 for a silver unit with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics and a screen with the usual refresh rate of 60Hz. My $2,099 white test model (code 8RF-442US) touts a panel with 144Hz refresh and “close to 100 percent” of the sRGB color gamut. That’s along with the Max-Q version of Nvidia’s 8GB GeForce GTX 1070 GPU, 16GB of system memory, and a 256GB NVMe solid-state drive (SSD).

https://www.pcmag.com/review/365502/msi-p65-creator

President Roosevelt stunned millions of listeners when he announced during a May 26, 1940, fireside chat that government must “harness the efficient machinery of America’s manufacturers” to produce 50,000 combat aircraft over the next 12 months to confront the “approaching storm” of global war. FDR’s goal exceeded the total of all planes built in the U.S. since the Wright brothers’ 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk, NC, and he challenged the aviation industry to match that number in succeeding years. As he spoke, the country had fewer than 3,000 warplanes in its arsenal, most obsolete.

The president and his advisers were convinced that long-range, high-altitude heavy bombers would be the decisive weapon in a war dominated by air power and industrial muscle. Their shopping list included 12,000 of these aerial battleships to attack Germany’s heartland, hammering military installations, bridges, factories, rail yards, fuel storage tanks and communications centers. The “heavies” of choice were the B-17 Flying Fortress from Boeing Airplane Co. and the B-24 Liberator from Consolidated Aircraft.

Article source: https://www.assemblymag.com/articles/94614-how-fords-willow-run-assembly-plant-helped-win-world-war-ii

Wreckage recovered from Lion Air flight JT610, that crashed into the sea, lies at Tanjung Priok port in Jakarta, Indonesia, October 29, 2018.

Wreckage recovered from Lion Air flight JT610, that crashed into the sea, lies at Tanjung Priok port in Jakarta, Indonesia, October 29, 2018.

The number of people killed in plane crashes jumped in 2018 compared with the previous year, with more than 500 deaths recorded, new figures show.

Nonetheless, 2018 was still one of the safest years for commercial aviation on record, according to reports from Dutch aviation consultancy To70 and the Netherlands-based Aviation Safety Network (ASN).

The ASN recorded a total of 15 fatal airliner accidents in 2018, leading to 556 deaths, compared with 10 accidents and 44 lives lost in 2017, the safest year in aviation history.

Of those accidents, 12 involved passenger flights and three were cargo flights, the ASN report said. Three of the 15 planes were operated by airlines on the European Union “blacklist,” it said.

Despite the jump in the number of deaths last year, ASN Chief Executive Harro Ranter said the level of aviation safety had increased significantly overall.

“If the accident rate had remained the same as 10 years ago, there would have been 39 fatal accidents last year,” he said. The rate of the year 2000 would have seen 64 fatal accidents. “This shows the enormous progress in terms of safety in the past two decades,” Ranter added.

The figures for 2018 represent a rate of one fatal accident for every 3

Article source: https://kplr11.com/2019/01/03/plane-crash-deaths-rise-in-2018-but-accidents-are-still-rare-2/