Model Airplanes

The Navy’s major investments in the Block III Super Hornet also make Boeing “optimistic” about future foreign sales. The planned American purchases have “certainly given a lot of confidence to international customers,” Gillian said.

Kuwait, which has 22 F/A-18Es and six F/A-18Fs on order already, has actually helped fund a number of parts of the Block III program. The Kuwaiti jets will be in a sort of hybrid configuration between Block II and III, receiving some of the upgrades, such as the wide-area cockpit displays. The first of this batch of aircraft is set to fly for the first time in the coming months.

Super Hornets, with various Block III features, are also on offer for current and upcoming fighter competitions in Canada, Finland, Germany, India, Poland, and Switzerland, among others. In many cases, these deals might potentially end up tied together with sales of Growlers, too.  Growlers would offer any new operator a quantum leap in electronic warfare capabilities. 

Finland is in the process of looking for a replacement for its aging F-18C/D Hornets. Gillian specifically highlighted that the U.S. government had recently approved the sale of EA-18Gs to Finland, along with F/A-18E/Fs, which he felt made the company’s offer to that country particularly strong. “We think that’s a great combination for Finland given the threat environment they operate in,” he said, a nod to the Scandinavian country’s increasingly tense relationship with Russia.

Article source: http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27272/heres-where-boeing-aims-to-take-the-super-hornet-in-the-decades-to-come

As mentioned in two previous reports—a long one, and a short one—some things are known, and many are not, about the horrific crash this past weekend outside Addis Ababa, in which all 157 people aboard a new-model Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max were killed.

• One thing that’s known: This is the second crash of this kind of plane within the past five months, following the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last year.
• One thing that’s not known: whether the two crashes are related, which would suggest a disastrous system flaw with the 737 Max and its software.

Just this afternoon—minutes ago as I type, four days after the Ethiopian crash— aviation authorities in the United States and Canada joined their counterparts in Europe and Asia in grounding the 737 Max fleet. This is until more is known about whether the crashes are connected and whether there is something systematically wrong with the plane.

The FAA has grounded airliners before: for instance, the 787 Dreamliner soon after its introduction, in 2013, because of onboard lithium-battery fires, and the DC-10 in 1979, after a crash that killed 273 people and that remains the deadliest aviation accident in U.S. history. Both types of airliners were cleared relatively soon to fly again. (In the 787’s case, with a redesigned battery compartment, and for the DC-10, after an investigation found that the crash was not caused by any basic design flaws. The 787 is an ongoing commercial success, and the DC-10 remained in production until the late 1980s.)  

What

Article source: https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2019/03/heres-what-was-on-the-record-about-problems-with-the-737-max/584791/

New way of fabricating aircraft wings could enable radical new designs, such as this concept, which could be more efficient for some applications. Image: Eli Gershenfeld, NASA Ames Research Center

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.

Wing assembly is seen under construction, assembled from hundreds

Article source: https://scitechdaily.com/mit-engineers-demonstrate-a-new-kind-of-airplane-wing/