Model Airplanes

Amidst current Washington-Moscow tensions, Ural Boeing Manufacturing (UBM), a joint venture between Russian VSMPO-AVISMA and Boeing will launch production of aircraft components from its new plant in the Titanium Valley Special Economic Zone, Sverdlovsk Region of Russia.

The UBM facility will perform rough and final machining of titanium blanks, airplane fuselage components, wing and pylon structural elements, chassis parts for all models of the Boeing civil aviation programme, including the new 777X model, a Rostec statement said.

VSMPO-AVISMA is a subsidiary of Russian state-owned holding company Rostec which is included in a list of Russian entities facing economic sanctions. These sanctions prohibit US entities from doing business with the sanctioned Russian entities.

“The plant will be opened in September. The entire process chain of Boeing will depend on this facility’s operation,” told Artemy Kyzlasov, CEO of Titanium Valley, Rostec said in a press statement quoting from his recent interview to TASS.

VSMPO-AVISMA has been a partner and supplier of raw materials and titanium products for Boeing since 1997. The companies established a joint venture with equal ownership, Ural Boeing Manufacturing, located in VerkhnyayaSalda.

It specializes in machining of titanium blanks for Boeing 787-8 and 787-9 Dreamliner, and Boeing 777 aircraft.

Article source: http://www.defenseworld.net/news/22809/Boeing__Russian_Firm_to_Commence_Titanium_Components_Project_in_September

(Simon Galloway/EasyJet)

EasyJet is one of the biggest airlines in Europe, flying around 90 million passengers throughout the continent each year. Consequently, what it does in terms of IFC could have huge influence across the aviation world.

Via Satellite recently caught up with Gary Smith, director of engineering at easyJet, and Andrew Middleton, head of ancillary products at easyJet, to talk all things IFC from both a passenger experience as well as operations perspective.

Start of the Journey

Middleton admitted that the airline is “at the start of the journey” with a key trial going on as we speak. EasyJet kicked off the trial of its In-Flight Entertainment (IFE) portal and service by closed network server with five aircraft within its Swiss fleet. The trial started in November, and for all intents and purposes, it was easyJet’s first major foray into IFE.

“For the purposes of this trial, we wanted to answer three questions. Firstly, does the technology work reliably? Secondly, would customers engage with the content we curated and made available to them? Finally, could we generate a return on that in order to underpin a business case at a larger scale and a more sophisticated perspective?” said Middleton.

Slam Dunks and Gold Standard

The trial will likely go on until the end of the Summer.

Article source: http://www.aviationtoday.com/2018/06/26/easyjet-execs-upcoming-ifc-endeavors/

Without abstraction, advances in semiconductor design would have stalled decades ago and circuits would remain about the same size as analog blocks. No new abstractions have emerged since the 1990s that have found widespread adoption. The slack was taken up by IP and reuse, but IP blocks are becoming larger and more complex. Verification by isolation is no longer a viable strategy at the system level. Without abstraction, system-level verification becomes an increasingly daunting task.

As system become larger, they also are becoming more diversified. Verification of the digital logic for an automotive controller is necessary but insufficient. It has to be verified with software, with communication to other controllers, possibly with sensors, mechatronics and other components that cannot be modeled in the discrete time domain.

To make matters worse, existing abstractions are breaking down for the newer technology nodes, meaning that additional details must be included that were previously ignored. This is adding increasing pressure on verification tools at all levels in the design flow.

The EDA industry successfully introduced the gate level and then the Register Transfer Level (RTL) of abstraction in the ’80s, and that became universally accepted in the ’90s. RTL is the only level of abstraction, all the way from block design to system verification. Higher levels of abstraction have been defined, standardized and used for certain tasks, but there are costs associated with the development of those models. There also are limited amounts of analysis that can be done with them,

Article source: https://semiengineering.com/searching-for-a-system-abstraction/

This analysis gets complicated fast. There are five basic missions for fighter aircraft: air superiority (controlling the airspace over the combat zone), all-weather attack (bombing enemy infrastructure and military targets), all-weather intercept (aerial dog fighting with enemy fighters), close air support of ground troops (CAS: bombing and strafing enemy troops), and nuclear attack (yes, some of our fighter jets are rigged to carry nuclear weapons). Air-to-air missiles like the AIM-120, with a range of over 100 miles, raise questions about the need for dogfighting capabilities in fighter jets today.

Each mission listed above demands unique performance levels, flight characteristics, and ordinance loads for the aircraft. Yet, we can’t afford to design, build, and maintain five different aircraft types. Obviously, we have to make trade-offs and build one or two fighter jets to handle all five missions. What we get are multi-role fighters that are adequate, but not perfect, for each mission. The design phase of the F-16 used 78 variables and 1,272 hours of wind tunnel tests in the trade-off analysis. Fortunately for those reading this article, I only use five variables in the table below.

To read more Warfare Evolution Blogs by Ray Alderman, click here.

The left column of the table starts with U.S. fighter jets in service. Our first stealth plane, the F-117 Nighthawk, was officially retired in 2008. But there are a small number of them still flying at Nellis Air Force Base (AFB), Nevada,

Article source: http://mil-embedded.com/guest-blogs/fighter-jets-and-the-kill-web/

SEATTLE, June 27 (Reuters) – Three of the largest engine makers face a Wednesday deadline to provide Boeing Co with formal proposals for how they would power the planemaker’s possible new mid-market jet, an aviation magazine reported.

A Boeing spokesman declined to comment but said the Chicago-based planemaker continues “to make good progress” in developing the jetliner’s “business case.”

Boeing’s request for proposals would mark an important step toward bringing into service a jet with the potential to carve out new routes in 2025, though Boeing has stressed it would not be rushed into a decision on the plane.

CFM International – a joint venture between General Electric and Safran – Pratt Whitney, and Rolls-Royce were submitting proposals, the Air Current reported, citing unnamed sources.

Boeing is studying plans for what industry sources describe as a hybrid jet combining a wide cabin and a restricted cargo space, moulded to fly efficiently in a space between the industry’s single-aisle jets and wide-body long-haul aircraft.

Boeing aims to broadly replace its 757 model, a narrow-body jet with a single aisle. It envisions a mid-market jetliner with 220 to 270 seats and a range of up to 5,000 nautical miles, with global demand for 4,000 to 5,000 jets over 20 years, though rival Airbus disagrees with that forecast.

Boeing wants an engine that burns 25 percent less fuel for every pound of thrust it produces compared with the 757’s decades-old turbines, the Air Current reported. The timing for choosing either one or

Article source: https://uk.reuters.com/article/boeing-airplane/boeings-engine-proposal-deadline-looms-for-new-mid-market-jet-report-idUKL1N1TT15B