Model Airplanes

If you fly one of today’s small piston-powered planes, you will burn many gallons of fuel per hour and suffer through the noise equivalent of a ride on a power mower. But unlike what you face while cutting your grass, if the engine quits, it means an immediate emergency landing at best and a crash at worst. Fortunately, it’s now possible to envision replacing those noisy gas guzzlers of the sky with electric airplanes, which would be considerably quieter, cleaner, safer, and more efficient than today’s aircraft. Indeed, electrification could transform the current small-airplane experience into something vastly more attractive to both pilots and the communities over which they fly.

Recognizing the possibilities—and hoping to spur innovation—NASA recently challenged students to design a four-seat, all-electric aircraft capable of entering service by 2020. After I read an announcement describing the contest, I came up with a design that ultimately won first place in the graduate division of NASA’s competition. My design relies on fuel cells for propulsion and uses an unusual motor placement to maximize efficiency. For me, working on its design was a window into the possibilities and also a vivid lesson about the significant challenges ahead for electric flight.

When NASA issued this challenge in 2014, I was a graduate student in aerospace engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta. But this contest wasn’t my first foray into electric flight. In 2008, when I was 17 years old, about six months after the first Article source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/how-i-designed-a-practical-electric-plane-for-nasa

WISCONSIN — The world’s largest collection of 1929 and 1930 Nash Motors automobiles exists not in a museum, but rather entombed in the frigid depths of Lake Michigan.

The cars, 268 of them, are lashed in rows inside and crumpled in a heap next to the wreck of the SS Senator, a Great Lakes steamship that rests for eternity in an uncharted sinkhole about 15 miles east of Port Washington, Wis.

The Senator, which sank during the final days of the Roaring Twenties as the country was plunging into the Great Depression, sits upright nearly 450 feet down; so deep that few, if any, divers will ever see her in person. Her collection of vintage autos once bound for Detroit join the pantheon of ships, airplanes, submarines, train cars and other vehicles of yesteryear that populate the bottom of Lake Michigan.

“Those cars on the inside are in pretty good condition,” said Tamara Thomsen, a maritime archeologist and shipwreck diver with the Wisconsin Historical Society who surveyed the Senator wreck in November.

In April, the wreck was added to the National Register of Historic Places; one of nearly 150 U.S. shipwrecks on the historic list. Coincidentally, the Senator sits within the boundary of a pending National Marine Sanctuary that will become the second such protected area of shipwrecks within the Great Lakes.

Great Lakes leading National Marine Sanctuary development

The ship sank on Halloween, Oct. 31, 1929; mere days after the infamous Black Thursday stock market crash that threw the country into an

Article source: http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/05/senator_shipwreck_nash_motors.html