Model Airplanes

Robert G. Harold

November 22, 1932 – April 21, 2019

Robert G. Harold
WEST SALEM — Robert G. Harold, 86, of West Salem passed away Sunday, April 21, 2019, at Mulder Health Care Facility, West Salem.
He was born Nov. 22, 1932, in San Mateo, Calif., to Glen and Marion (Weber) Harold. As a young child, the family moved to Atlanta, Ga., where he graduated from North Fulton High School in 1949. The family then moved to Minneapolis, where he graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor of mechanical engineering degree in 1955. On June 30, 1956, he married Helen Pearson at the Ogilvie United Methodist Church in Ogilvie, Minn.
Bob worked at Trane Company for 39 years, his latest position as an acoustical engineer. He was a member of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers, where he received the Best Paper Award in 1991. He helped develop standards for testing and rating air conditioning products. He had two patents.
In 1969, Bob won the National Civilian Pistol Championship. He was active in Boy Scouts, serving as Cub Master and Scout Master. Bob was a hunter education instructor for 20 years. As a member of the Presbyterian Church of West Salem, he served as ruling Elder and chairman of the church building committee. From an early age, his main hobby was building and flying model airplanes. He was featured in

Article source: https://obituaries.lacrossetribune.com/obituary/robert-harold-1932-2019-1074162309

LYONS – The Coronado Quivira Museum is now hosting two temporary exhibits for the public by two Lyons men.

Airplanes

Five radio-controlled airplanes built by Dean Nixon, some hanging from the ceiling, are displayed in the main room, while paintings by Mike Young can be viewed in an adjoining room.

Nixon’s planes feature Snoopy fighting the enemy Red Baron in “Snoopy’s Plane,” the Sopwith Camel “Pup” (a World War I plane); the 1909 French Santos-Dumont Demoiselle; a Bucker Jungmann aerobatic plane that can reach 90 mph; a crop-duster model, the Piper Pawnee D; and a Piper Cub with a 12-foot wingspan. Building airplanes is a hobby he began in earnest after a tour of duty in Korea.

However, long before that, as a senior at Lyons High School, Nixon flew planes attached to a wire — in circles. They never flew away from the hand that held the wire.

With radio controlled planes, it was a little more risky with wind currents at play and adjustments needed to follow the aircraft wherever it might travel. “There are a lot of learning curves; you crash some quite a few times and then you have to rebuild,” Nixon told the Museum’s Vince Hancock, who designed the exhibit.

Of his current 11 planes, he began the Piper Cub in 1991, as he approached retirement. When it arrived at his Lyons home, he opened the box and started studying instructions. It took nine months to build and will fly 50 mph. He has taken it to Charlotte,

Article source: https://www.hutchnews.com/news/20190428/art-and-airplanes-showing-at-coronado-quivira-museum

In 1996, the March/April issue of Russian military periodical Air Fleet Bulletin published an innocuous-seeming photo of a meeting between Russian military chiefs and aviation industry counterparts. Sitting on the table before them were two model airplanes. One was an advanced variant of the by-then well known Flanker multi-role fighter.

The other was a strange black jet with forward swept wings—that is, the wings seemed to be swept the “wrong way.”

Whether the image amounted to an accidental leak or an intentional plant, it set off a firestorm of excited speculation in Western and Russian press forecasting a new cutting-edge jet that could outperform the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, the production model of which made its first flight the same year.

In fact, the model represented an advanced tech demonstrator—the Sukhoi Su-47 Berkut (“Golden Eagle”).

Early in the 1980s, as the Soviet Union introduced the fourth-generation Su-27 and MiG-29 jets to oppose the American F-15 and F-16, it thought ahead to developing a fifth-generation fighter to defeat the U.S.’s Advanced Tactical Fighter program which would eventually spawn the F-22 Raptor.

Mikoyan i Gurevich worked on the MiG 1.44, which arrived nine years late after the fall of the Soviet Union only to be canceled. Concurrently, the Soviet Navy sought a new fighter with good low-speed handling characteristics to fly off the steam-catapult equipped supercarrier Ulyanovsk, laid down in Ukraine in 1988.

Manufacturer Sukhoi chose to explore the concept of Forward Swept Wings (FSW) which in theory would enable greatly increase maneuverability, particularly

Article source: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-russia%E2%80%99s-super-maneuverable-su-47-%E2%80%98golden-eagle%E2%80%99-fighter-jet-failed-54497

The future of driving is supposed to feel like flying. The names some car companies give their newest technology—Autopilot, Pilot Assist, Super Cruise, Pro Pilot—are all aviation-inspired terms being used by automotive companies for their semi-autonomous systems. Just like with an airplane’s autopilot, the thinking goes, the driver pushes a button and the thing flies itself. Except even that interpretation is wildly wrong.

Airplane autopilot systems, and what pilots must do while activated, are much more complicated than that. Until the automotive industry and regulators reconcile a cartoonish version of semi-autonomous features with the reality of how to use them safely, the future may not be nearly as safe as one might hope.

And time is running out. More automated safety features than ever will be standard equipment on lower-priced models this year, bringing what were once expensive luxury features to the masses.

In the next few years, it seems plausible, or even likely, that many humans and machines will be partners in driving. And like any relationship, these partnerships can get complicated.

“What we’re going to see in the future is a general decrease in crashes, we’ll see improvements in safety across the board,” predicted Michael Manser, a researcher at the Human Factors Program at Texas AM University with almost two decades of experience studying how human driver behavior changes with new technology. “But you’re going to start to see a secondary layer of problems start to crop

Article source: https://jalopnik.com/automation-transformed-how-pilots-fly-planes-now-the-s-1834176244