Model Airplanes

1547 Hrs. December 20, 2009. In the Back Storage Yard of the Pima Air Space Museum Outside Tucson, Arizona.

Most of what is lying around in the dusty expanse of the aircraft graveyards around Tucson, Arizona is readily identifiable and not entirely remarkable.

Ejection seats from old F-4 Phantoms. An old CH-53 helicopter hulk. An interesting find over there is a fuselage section of a Soviet-era MiG-23 Flogger. No idea how it got here. Other than that, it’s just long rows of old, broken, silent airplanes inside high fences surrounded by cactus, dust, sand and more sand. An errant aileron on a dead wing clunks quietly against the hot afternoon breeze as if willing itself back into the air. But like everything here, its days of flying are over.

But there… What is that strange, manta-ray shaped, dusty black thing lying at an angle just on the other side of that fence? It may be an old airfield wind vane or radar test model. But it also may be…

Once I found an opening in the fence I could walk right up to the D-21. It had been recovered by the museum from the AMARG Boneyard at Davis-Monthan AFB and was awaiting restoration. (Photo: Tom Demerly/TheAviationist)

I had only read about it and seen grainy photos of it. I know it’s impossible. The project was so secret not much information exists about the details even today. But I stand there gawking through the chain link fence as the ruins of the other

Article source: https://theaviationist.com/2018/06/08/the-time-i-found-a-formerly-top-secret-d-21-supersonic-drone-in-the-arizona-desert/

Southwest ticket sales drop

The horrific fatal accident on a Southwest Airlines flight in April is taking a toll on sales.

You may remember a passenger was killed when a fan blade broke off of an engine and shrapnel shattered the window where she was sitting. The woman died after being partly sucked out of the plane.

The company says it pulled advertising after the incident, as is standard practice, and customers started buying fewer tickets. The airline knew as early as April that the accident was affecting sales, but now says it’s worse than originally thought:

Southwest now expects revenue per mile to drop roughly three percent.

Customers want Model 3 refunds

When Tesla announced its lower priced Model 3, hundreds of thousands of pre-orders flooded in. Now many consumers are asking for their money back.

A third party look at the pre-orders shows 23 percent have been refunded. The company told the website Recode that number is incorrect, but doesn’t say by how much.

Telsa has experienced many delays in rolling out the Model 3, but still has more than 400,000 pre-orders at $1,000 each.

Computer prices car parts

How do car makers price their car parts? With help from a computer program.

Reuters reports carmakers including Renault, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Peugeot have made more than $1 billion with the help of pricing software.

Paperwork field in a European court case suggests costs are, in part, based on consumer perception of what the items should cost.

The software company told Reuters the practice is legal and keeps

Article source: http://abc7news.com/business/consumer-catch-up-southwest-ticket-sales-tesla-refunds/3561479/

What does flying in a commercial airliner have in common with working at the office or relaxing at home?

According to a new study, the answer is the microbiome – the community of bacteria found in homes, offices and aircraft cabins. Believed to be the first to comprehensively assess the microbiome of aircraft, the study found that the bacterial communities accompanying airline passengers at 30,000 feet have much in common with the bacterial communities surrounding people in their homes and offices.

Using advanced sequencing technology, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University studied the bacteria found on three components of an airliner cabin that are commonly touched by passengers: tray tables, seat belt buckles and the handles of lavatory doors. They swabbed those items before and after 10 transcontinental flights and also sampled air in the rear of the cabin during flight.

What they found was surprisingly unexciting.

“Airline passengers should not be frightened by sensational stories about germs on a plane,” said Vicki Stover Hertzberg, a professor in Emory University’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and a co-author of the study. “They should recognize that microbes are everywhere and that an airplane is no better and no worse than an office building, a subway car, home or a classroom. These environments all have microbiomes that look like places occupied by people.”

The results of the FlyHealthy^™ study are reported June 6, 2018, in the journal Microbial Ecology. In March, the researchers reported on a separate part of the study that

Article source: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20180608/Study-Aircraft-microbiomes-have-much-in-common-with-those-at-homes-and-offices.aspx