Model Airplanes

It used to be that if you wanted to make a nice scale model of an airplane, you’d be building the frame out of thin balsa ribs and covering it all up with tissue paper. Which incidentally was more or less how they built most real airplanes prior to the 1930s, so it wasn’t completely unreasonable to do the same on a smaller scale. But once injection molded plastics caught on, wood and tissue model kits largely went the way of the dodo.

[Marius Taciuc] wanted to share that classic model building experience with his son, but rather than trying to hunt down balsa kits in 2019, he decided to recreate the concept with modern techniques. His model of the Supermarine Spitfire, the vanguard of the British RAF during the Second World War, recreates the look of those early model kits but substitutes 3D printed or laser cut components for the fragile balsa strips of yore. The materials might be high-tech, but as evidenced by the video after the break, building the thing is still just as time consuming as ever.

Using a laser cutter to produce the parts would be the fastest method to get your own kit put together (you could even cut the parts out of balsa in that case), but you’ll still need a 3D printer for some components such as the propeller and cowling. On the other hand, if you 3D print all the parts like [Marius] did, you can use a soldering

Article source: https://hackaday.com/2019/04/05/recreating-classic-model-kits-with-modern-tech/

‘+
‘

‘+__tnt.truncateStr(oAsset.title.replace(/(]+))/ig,””),iTextTrun,’…’)+’

‘+
‘

‘+__tnt.truncateStr(oAsset.summary.replace(/(]+))/ig,””),iTextTrun,’…’)+’

‘+
‘

Article source: https://www.ivpressonline.com/business/the-latest-india-grounding-boeing-max-aircraft/article_d2337064-40f4-52ac-9e04-19c9d4c1df26.html

Spike is betting everything on that scenario. The company flew an unmanned, small-scale demonstrator in October 2017 to prove its design could fly. It expects to begin testing a full-size version by the end of 2019 and, if everything works as expected, will start building its S-512 jet that should see test flights in 2021. Spike hopes its airplane will hit the market three years later, in 2024. Its aircraft is notable for having just two engines and no weight-adding windows; its 18 or so passengers will instead view the outside world through enormous, high-​­resolution digital displays. Aerion’s timeline is only slightly less ambitious: It plans to fly a prototype of its 8-to-12-passenger AS2 in 2023, get it certified by 2025, and ­deliver airplanes to its customers the year after that.

One impediment tobringing back supersonic air travel is solving the technological riddles. The bigger challenge is making it pay. Although the Concorde remains an engineering marvel, it was a commercial failure. British Airways and Air France couldn’t make it profitable.

Read Next: Planes of the future will feature virtual reality, yoga studios, and lots of cauliflower

Scholl is convinced he can. His pitch goes like this: Boom’s airliner will be smaller, lighter, and more fuel efficient than the Concorde, and therefore cheaper to operate. Flying from, say, London to New York in three hours would allow airlines to make twice as many flights each day and pack them with high-revenue business-class passengers. He sees even greater appeal in crossing the

Article source: https://www.popsci.com/supersonic-plane-next-generation

The first lawsuit stemming from the Ethiopian Airlines crash was filed in Chicago on Thursday by the family of a 24-year-old American woman killed in the disaster, who is the great niece of consumer advocate icon Ralph Nader.

The federal lawsuit was filed by the family of Samyo Stumo, who worked for the health systems development organization ThinkWell in Washington, D.C., and was among the 157 people who perished when the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed last month shortly after taking off from Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago names Chicago-based Boeing, the manufacturer of the aircraft and Ethiopian Airlines as defendants. The suit also names Rosemount Aerospace Inc., the Delaware company that made the airplane’s flight control system known as MCAS, which is now under scrutiny by investigators.

Nader phoned into a news conference Thursday morning that was held in Chicago by Stumo’s parents, her brother and their lawyers, and called for a global boycott of the Boeing 737 Max 8, noting that the cash came just months after another 737 Max 8 flown by Lion Air crashed in Indonesia on takeoff, killing everyone aboard.

“If we don’t get this right, if we don’t end the cozy relationship between the patsy FAA, the captured agency, which has been documented for years, and the Boeing company, 5,000 of these fatally flawed planes will be

Article source: https://abcnews.go.com/International/lawsuits-filed-ethiopian-airlines-crash-family-consumer-advocate/story?id=62166217