Model Airplanes

To call Joe Barnard an “amateur” rocketeer is something of a misnomer.

As the founder of Barnard Propulsion Systems (BPS), a small business making flight hardware for other amateur rocketeers, the 25-year-old Nashville resident is working on cracking propulsive landings for model rockets. This is the same principle that allows SpaceX to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rockets after boosting a payload to orbit, but it has never been demonstrated in hobby rocketry before.

The key to propulsive landings is thrust vectoring, which enables control over the direction of a rocket’s engines during flight to change its trajectory and stabilize the vehicle. Barnard is a pioneer in DIY thrust vectoring, and in the last few months he’s harnessed the technique to test self-landing model-scale rockets. As some of the most recent videos on his YouTube channel demonstrate, there are still a few kinks left to work out, but it’s pretty impressive what he’s managed to accomplish so far.

Although thrust vectoring has been used in the aerospace industry for nearly a century, it was a technology generally considered to be too complex and expensive for amateur use. Barnard wants to change that.

“There have been maybe five independent projects in the last ten years trying to incorporate thrust vectoring in their rockets,” Barnard told me on the phone. “Generally speaking it doesn’t go so well or it never gets to the point of flying. No one else has carried it through to the point where I’m at

Article source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvakmw/meet-the-amateur-rocketeer-building-self-landing-replicas-of-spacex-rockets

Foxtrot AlphaTech and news from the world of modern defense.  

The F-35 Lightning II is one of the most complicated, controversial, and expensive defense projects in history. But it may finally be turning a corner. Like a container ship that takes miles to change direction, the F-35 program is gradually improving, and closing in on a final round of tests to determine the plane’s viability. Although the fighter still has a ways to go before being truly ready for battle, the F-35 is no longer in any serious danger of being canceled—if it ever truly was.

First, a quick refresher. The F-35 Lightning II (while in development, it was known as the Joint Strike Fighter is a common aircraft design built for the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Marine Corps. The “A” version will replace the F-16 Fighting Falcon and A-10 Thunderbolt in Air Force service, “C “version will replace the F/A-18 Hornet on Navy carriers, and the “B” version will replace AV-8B Harriers and Hornets in Marine Corps inventories. Each version is a little different from the baseline A version, with the C version having a slightly larger wing and strengthened landing gear for carrier operations, and the B version capable of vertical takeoffs and landings, just like the old Harrier “jump jet.”

Article source: https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/were-stuck-with-the-f-35-and-that-might-not-be-a-bad-th-1828869804

You can find the future of aviation inside an unremarkable building in Woburn, Massachusetts, tucked behind an Irish pub and a Dunkin’ Donuts. This is where Terrafugia is working on the Transition, the most mature and probably the best known of a 21st century crop of aviation’s perennially just-around-the-corner technology: flying cars. With a pusher-propeller and wings that fold, the Transition is a light aircraft that seats two, boasts a flight range of 400 miles, and meets all the Federal Motor Vehicle safety standards. The airplane can run on automotive gasoline and fold its wings in less than a minute, a trick that converts it from an airplane into something that will easily fit in a garage.

Terrafugia founder Carl Dietrich says the Transition is designed to mitigate the reasons general aviation pilots choose not to fly—fear of getting stuck somewhere due to bad weather, being marooned on the tarmac after landing, getting stuck with excessive parking and fueling fees—and to attract new fliers. It’s designed to make flying easy, with only a 20-hour sport-pilot license required to get behind the stick. “The vision is to make personal flight useful for everyone, not just for the niche community that finds general aviation fun today,” Dietrich says. “We would like people who never thought of becoming a pilot before to consider it because, hey, it’s a flying car.”

When Dietrich launched Terrafugia in 2006 from the basement of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “people thought we were crazy,” he says. Now he seems

Article source: https://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/13_sep2018-so-s-what-flying-cars-are-180969917/