Model Airplanes

Over the course of 75 Saturdays, a group of teens will build an airplane at Hillsboro Airport.

Not a remote-controlled model — an actual aircraft that will take each of them up in the air.

Teen Flight is a program of Airway Science for Kids. The nonprofit was founded in 1993 to introduce elementary and middle school students to aviation concepts. Young students build radio-controlled model planes and use computer flight simulators to get hands-on experience in science, technology, engineering and math.

About ten years ago, Dick VanGrunsven, founder of Van’s Aircraft, wanted to take the concept even further. For high school age students, he proposed a “Teen Flight” program to actually build one of his company’s kit planes, the two-seater RV-12.

VanGrunsven grew up on a small farm near Forest Grove and had been fascinated with aviation since childhood.

“Some people, you’re interested in being a fireman or policeman or various things,” he said. “My brother and I, we were both interested in model airplanes. It was just always an obsession.”

He founded Van’s Aircraft in 1973. Today, VanGrunsven is partly retired. The employee-owned company, based out of the Aurora airport, is one of the largest kit plane manufacturers in the world.

With Teen Flight, VanGrunsven said he wanted to offer teens an experience he would have loved himself as a high school student.

“We know it’s a big job. Even a good, well-developed kit plane is still a big job,” he said. “But with proper

Article source: https://www.oregonlive.com/washingtoncounty/2019/03/oregon-teens-are-building-airplanes-on-the-weekend-through-teen-flight-video.html

Jeff Wise:

Right.

So the context of all this happening is that Boeing gets a big chunk of its profits from the most popular airplane that it builds, the 737. It’s been building them since 1967. It’s a whole different era. Over half-a-century, they have been building these planes. And it’s really a creature of that age.

It’s aluminum. It’s got hydraulics, instead of fly-by-wire, like modern planes have. And so what they have been doing is progressively trying to improve it to kind of stretch out its lifespan. And the argument that many are making is, look, they have just tried to stretch this out too long.

They basically tried to add these new fuel-efficient engines onto an aging airframe. The plane wasn’t designed for this kind of engine. They had to sacrifice some flight characteristics in order to get it to work.

Because it had these aerodynamic problems, it had sort of disturbing tendency to pitch up in certain circumstances. They kind of kludged it with this patch, this automation software that would kick in. When the flight — corner of the flight envelope got really bad, they would sort of paste this thing on, and this thing would take over.

But as I was talking about, automation can act in sometimes surprising ways. And as part of its effort to keep this 737 fleet going, they wanted to be able to tell to customers, hey, listen, you can buy this, it’s going to have the same commonality of parts with the rest of

Article source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/this-aviation-expert-says-boeing-made-disastrously-bad-decision-on-training-for-737-max

The Texas Department of Public Safety identified the pilot as William Robert Kendrick, 51, of Huffman, His three passengers were identified as his Kendrick’s wife, Rebecca Marsh Kendrick, 51, of Huffman, daughter, Kaycee Ann Kendrick, of Farmer’s Branch, and her boyfriend, Coty Ray Shrum, of Farmer’s Branch.

Article source: http://www.ksla.com/2019/03/19/ntsb-pilot-fatal-harrison-county-plane-crash-not-certified-fly-that-type-aircraft/

WASHINGTON — In 2014, Lufthansa Flight 1829 took off from Bilbao, Spain, and was ascending normally when the plane’s nose unexpectedly dropped. The plane — an Airbus A321 with 109 passengers on board — began to fall. The co-pilot tried to raise the nose with his controls. The plane pointed down even further. He tried again. Nothing, according to a report by German investigators.

As the Lufthansa plane fell from 31,000 feet, the captain pulled back on his stick as hard as he could. The nose finally responded. But he struggled to hold the plane level.

A call to a ground crew determined that the plane’s angle-of-attack sensors — which detect whether the wings have enough lift to keep flying – must have been malfunctioning, causing the Airbus’s anti-stall software to force the plane’s nose down. The pilots turned off the problematic unit and continued the flight. Aviation authorities in Europe and the United States eventually ordered the replacement of angle-of-attack sensors on many Airbus models.

Today, aviation experts say the angle-of-attack sensor on Boeing jets will get fresh scrutiny after two Boeing 737 Max airplanes crashed, in Ethiopia last week and in Indonesia in October.

Crash investigators have raised concerns about the role of the sensor — a device used on virtually every commercial flight — in the October crash of Lion Air Flight 610. There are concerns it may have sent the wrong signals to new software on the flight that automatically dips the plane’s nose to prevent a stall.

It is not

Article source: https://www.twincities.com/2019/03/18/airplane-sensors-manufactured-by-rosemount-company-get-fresh-scrutiny-after-crashes/