Model Airplanes

As Allegiant Air Flight 330 landed and taxied to the gate, its passengers grew worried. They could smell gas. They were afraid of an explosion. As fumes leaked into the cabin, some struggled to breathe.

“When the plane started descending, you could start smelling the (fuel),” Blanca Robles, of Caldwell, told the Idaho Statesman after the plane landed on a Friday evening in June 2015.

Robles was one of 163 passengers on the plane, which had a fuel leak from an auxiliary motor. As the cabin filled with fuel vapors, passengers sat waiting for instructions from the flight crew. None came.

“I didn’t see (any) flight attendants around,” said Robles’ brother, Martin Lopez. “Nothing was done. Nothing was said.”

So the passengers took control, pushing open an emergency exit to let in fresh air. Some passengers jumped out onto the wing.

I didn’t know how much longer I could stand there without getting sick. Kelly Graf, an Eagle resident who was on Allegiant Air Flight 330

Allegiant Air’s aircraft are four times as likely to fail during flight as those operated by other U.S. airlines, an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times has found.

In 2015, Allegiant jets were forced to make unexpected landings at least 77 times for serious mechanical failures, the Times’ first-of-its kind analysis of federal aviation records shows.

None prompted enforcement action from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Times reporters built a database of more than 65,000 records from the FAA. Working through the data, they connected a year’s worth of flight records with

Article source: http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/business/article114578543.html

If you thought supersonic passenger travel died with the retirement of the Concorde fleet in 2003, get ready for what one company—and Richard Branson—thinks could be the launch of a new age in which people fly from New York to London in three and a quarter hours for business class prices.

Today, Boom Supersonic, a Denver-based startup and Y Combinator alumni, unveiled the design of the XB1, a one-third-size version of the 45-seat plane it expects to put in the skies by the early 2020s. The so-called “Baby Boom” is built using most of the same principles and systems as Boom’s planned 165-foot production plane, and is expected to make its first flight by the end of next year.

While it would be tempting to dismiss any outfit’s attempt to restart the supersonic aviation industry, Boom CEO Blake Scholl is holding a hand with several aces.

First, the Spaceship Company, Virgin Galactic’s manufacturing arm, has an option on the first ten planes off Boom’s lines. That pact will also give Boom access to the Spaceship Company’s engineering, design, manufacturing, and flight test support services.

“Richard [Branson] has long expressed interest in developing high-speed flight and building high-speed flight RD through Virgin Galactic and our manufacturing organization, the Spaceship Company,” the Virgin Group said when the contract was signed. “It is still early days and just the start of what you’ll hear about our shared ambitions and efforts.

In a release, Branson said a bit more about why he wanted

Article source: https://www.fastcompany.com/3065190/bringing-back-the-supersonic-era-booms-planes-are-faster-cheaper-than-the-concorde

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The following excerpt is from Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood’s book Simplify. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes Noble | iTunes

With price-simplifying, price is the strategy. Everything else is tactics — the means to arrive at the target price. Price-simplifying rests on the observation that if you can halve the price, your market will more than double (and may well increase by 10 times or more). So everything you do from now on — in thinking, in planning and in execution — must be done with price in mind. It must become a burning obsession… but for a purpose.

Related: 2 Ways to Make Your Product More Useful or More Appealing to Customers

If you’re contemplating cutting prices in half, three fundamental changes must take place:

• The product must be redesigned to make it simpler and cheaper. Visualize your target customers — those whom you wish to create and reward.
• The business system must be redesigned to make the product simpler and cheaper to produce and deliver, and to provide protection for your firm against imitators.
• The business must be scaled — that is, its sales must multiply, and continue to multiply — as quickly and extensively as possible.

We’ve examined the most successful price-simplifiers’ strategies and have determined three steps that are related to product redesign.

Step One: Subtract features/performance and return to the product’s core function

With IKEA, buying a sofa or a

Article source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/283527

A skinny little airplane parked in a hangar of the Centennial Airport aims to revolutionize how people fly and reintroduce the world to supersonic flight.

Boom Technology has spent two years designing a supersonic passenger plane with the financial economics the defunct Concorde could never achieve. A full-size mockup of a smaller test plane will be unveiled publicly on Tuesday. If all goes well in flight tests next year, the company will move ahead and build a full-size 45-seat aircraft that can travel 2.2 times faster than the speed of sound at a price on par with business-class tickets: $5,000 round trip for a 3 hour and 15 minute flight from New York to London.

“This isn’t a private jet,” said Boom CEO Blake Scholl,  who co-founded the company in 2014 with chief engineer Joe Wilding and chief technology officer Josh Krall. “We want to build something that we can see our friends and family flying on. We’re starting with business-class prices because that’s what we have technology for. But our line of sight is we want to make the fastest ticket the cheapest ticket.”

On Tuesday, guests will see the exact design of “Baby Boom.” About one-third the size of the full-sized plane, this two-passenger plane measures 70 feet long and has all the curves you’d imagine a supersonic jet should have. It has a distinctive long skinny nose and streamlined wings that barely angle away from the fuselage. While this baby will never fly, parts for the real Baby Boom are being manufactured in North Carolina and

Article source: http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/14/supersonic-jet-boom-technology-centennial/