Model Airplanes

An update to the cockpit software that could have contributed to the deadly Ethiopian Airlines crash last week was delayed partially because of the 35-day government shutdown earlier this year.

Federal Aviation Administration officials told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that a software problem with the Boeing 737 Max’s MCAS flight-control feature was expected in January, but that the shutdown “halted work on the fix for five weeks.” The agency did not label the software fix an imminent concern, according to the Journal, and thus deemed the delay acceptable. Boeing promised a fix by April to the software and said it is working “closely with the FAA” on certification of the software “enhancement.”

The FAA released a statement on Tuesday–with news of the aircraft’s grounding by Canada, China, Indonesia, Singapore, the European Union and more than 30 other national aviation authorities–saying that the plane is safe to fly. “Our review shows no systemic performance issues and provides no basis to order grounding the aircraft,” the release from acting FAA Administrator Daniel K. Elwell reads. But on Wednesday afternoon, the Trump administration announced it would ground the planes in the United States as well. 

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The FAA has been operating under an acting administrator for 14 months and the budget for the Transportation Department has decreased during President Donald Trump’s administration.

All 157 passengers and crew members on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 died when the plane went

Article source: https://www.govexec.com/oversight/2019/03/report-boeing-and-faa-say-shutdown-delayed-737-max-software-fix/155520/

The diamond-studded airplane may have been a hoax, but this crystal-covered Lamborghini isn’t. Russian Instagram model Daria Radionova has gone viral online for covering her luxury supercar in crystals. According to her Instagram posts, it took over 2 million Swarovski crystals to cover most of the Lamborghini Aventador. A team at London-based Cars in Cloaks worked for 700 hours over a course of two months to complete the task.

A post shared by Daria Radionova (@dradionova) on Apr 6, 2019 at 9:26am PDT

Daily Mail reports that Daria unveiled her updated car in London on Sunday, taking it to Knightsbridge to show off. The Lamborghini, which costs about 2.7 lakh pounds (or approximately Rs 2 crore), made quite a splash in the city. Posts on Daria’s Instagram account show people clicking pictures and making videos of the shiny car.

A post shared by Daria Radionova (@dradionova) on Apr 6, 2019 at 10:01am PDT

A post shared by Daria Radionova (@dradionova) on Apr 7, 2019 at 8:20am PDT

While most of the Aventador is covered in crystals, some parts the side air intakes and huge rear wing have been left untouched, reports Fox News. The crystals will likely affect the car’s performance.

Article source: https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/bling-it-on-instagram-model-cover-lamborghini-in-2-million-crystals-2020952

A team of engineers has built and tested a radically new kind of airplane wing, assembled from hundreds of tiny identical pieces. The wing can change shape to control the plane’s flight, and could provide a significant boost in aircraft production, flight, and maintenance efficiency, the researchers say.

The new approach to wing construction could afford greater flexibility in the design and manufacturing of future aircraft. The new wing design was tested in a NASA wind tunnel and is described today in a paper in the journal Smart Materials and Structures, co-authored by research engineer Nicholas Cramer at NASA Ames in California; MIT alumnus Kenneth Cheung SM ’07 PhD ’12, now at NASA Ames; Benjamin Jenett, a graduate student in MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms; and eight others.

Instead of requiring separate movable surfaces such as ailerons to control the roll and pitch of the plane, as conventional wings do, the new assembly system makes it possible to deform the whole wing, or parts of it, by incorporating a mix of stiff and flexible components in its structure. The tiny subassemblies, which are bolted together to form an open, lightweight lattice framework, are then covered with a thin layer of similar polymer material as the framework.

The result is a wing that is much lighter, and thus much more energy efficient, than those with conventional designs, whether made from metal or composites, the researchers say. Because the structure, comprising thousands of tiny triangles of matchstick-like struts, is composed mostly of empty space,

Article source: http://news.mit.edu/2019/engineers-demonstrate-lighter-flexible-airplane-wing-0401