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My mother was a flight attendant for USAir / American - One of her friends who is still working sent her this video of the parking lot formerly known as the Pittsburgh International Airport https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUZMl6KtfL4
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Apr 8, 2020 18:52
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Zoodpipe posted:My mother was a flight attendant for USAir / American - One of her friends who is still working sent her this video of the parking lot formerly known as the Pittsburgh International Airport I think pretty much everywhere looks like that. What's nuts is that security checkpoint traffic at Denver is down like 94% but operations are only down 50 something percent. That seems pretty standard across the country. Just empty planes burning gas and complaining about chop.
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Apr 8, 2020 18:57
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HookedOnChthonics posted:In cruise, you run one engine at a time, alternating every hour so the engine times stay roughly equivalent. you can't convince me British carrier bombers weren't a long-term comedy bit This is the Short Seamew:  This is post war. Post the second war. This was designed in 1951 and has fixed landing gear. Here's the Fairey Barracuda. When you are Very Good at Flying:  quote:During the earlier part of its service life, the Barracuda suffered a fairly high rate of unexplained fatal crashes, often involving experienced pilots.[15][16] During 1945 the cause was traced to small leaks developing in the hydraulic system; the most common point for such a leak to happen was at the point of entry to the pilot's pressure gauge and was situated such that the resulting spray was directed straight into the pilot's face. The chosen hydraulic fluid contained ether and, as the aircraft were only rarely equipped with oxygen masks and few aircrew wore them below 10,000 ft/3,000 m anyway, the pilot quickly became unconscious during such a leak oh
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Apr 8, 2020 19:37
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Haha that's just amazing. Yeah it flies just lovely Colin, but it has a rather odd habit of spraying lethal doses of a strong sedative right into the pilot's face. British aviation of this era is sort of like a very dark Thomas the Tank Engine reboot. The planes are as characterful as the trains, only they are dastardly murderers.
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Apr 8, 2020 19:51
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A civilian defense manufacturer employee got a demo flight on a Rafale, wasn't sufficiently strapped in, and then accidentally grabbed the ejection seat handle during a negative G maneuver and ejected. The pilot's seat should have been automatically triggered immediately after the backseater's seat, but due to a technical malfunction the pilot's seat didn't activate, which allowed the pilot to land the plane, saving it from crashing. https://www.aerotime.aero/clement.charpentreau/24788-fighter-jet-crash-averted-by-defect-in-civil-ejection-incident
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Apr 8, 2020 20:53
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More of a UAS question, but there’s enough overlap here that it may play ball. Do any of you all do aerial mapping? If so, are there any open source mapping projects that I could share my maps with? I’ve been piddling around with ODM and would love to actually do something with the output besides go “well that’s neat”.
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Apr 8, 2020 21:05
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That was a while ago, what's new is that the report on the investigation is now released. The largest cause of the issue were human factors: it was a retirement surprise for the hapless guy. So he had no prior flight experience (passenger in an airliner doesn't count). The uniform he was provided with for his tour had the badges of an experienced pilot, however, so the actual pilot and the technicians on the ground did not think to brief him (or to adopt a gentler flight profile; the pilot went to follow a regular training mission profile). It's fortunate there was also a technical problem with the pilot's ejection seat, it allowed to find out two major issues (one technical, one of procedure) without it costing an aircraft.
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Apr 8, 2020 21:05
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Craptacular posted:A civilian defense manufacturer employee got a demo flight on a Rafale, wasn't sufficiently strapped in, and then accidentally grabbed the ejection seat handle during a negative G maneuver and ejected. The pilot's seat should have been automatically triggered immediately after the backseater's seat, but due to a technical malfunction the pilot's seat didn't activate, which allowed the pilot to land the plane, saving it from crashing. Also the passenger has never expressed a desire to go on such a flight, and due to social pressure, felt he didn't really have the opportunity to refuse it.
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Apr 8, 2020 22:04
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At least he was able to figure out a way to end the flight early.
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Apr 9, 2020 01:44
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goatsestretchgoals posted:At least he was able to figure out a way to end the flight early. Her second worst tinder date
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Apr 9, 2020 02:15
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I wonder how much yelling there was over that. Seems like there would have been a lot of yelling and shouting.
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Apr 9, 2020 08:40
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Man if I was a pilot and learned about that Barracuda thing I would seriously grab whatever horrid, misshapen thing the Brits were issuing as a service revolver at the time and (try to) shoot the guy who designed that system. That is just murder. e: the Seamew apparently was supposed to do ASW, which makes it look a bit more reasonable, but it still apparently wasn't great quote:The handling characteristics of the Seamew were poor. The prototypes were heavily modified with fixed leading-edge slats, slots added in the trailing-edge flaps, alterations to the ailerons and slats added to the tailplane roots. Although something of an improvement over the initial models, the handling was never wholly satisfactory. Arthur Pearcy wrote "only Short Brothers' test pilot Wally Runciman seemed able to outwit its vicious tendencies and exploit its latent manoeuvrability to the limit."[2][10] Runciman was subsequently killed while flying a Seamew as part of an air display at Belfast's Sydenham Airport on 9 June 1956, when attempting a loop. [11] I can't tell if Runciman is the world champion in positive thinking or he's just trying very hard to rationalize his continuing to fly that plane. aphid_licker fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 9, 2020 10:22
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Dr_Strangelove posted:The stuff the British didn't build is beyond crazy. Their unused designs make the drawing-board stuff from the U.S. look downright boring. I suppose it was an effort to seek novel methods to achieve performance gains to maintain status as a super power. Similar, in some respects, to Nazi Germany pursuing more and more exotic 'home run' solutions but without the frantic life-and-death struggle for existence.
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Apr 9, 2020 16:08
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Murgos posted:I suppose it was an effort to seek novel methods to achieve performance gains to maintain status as a super power. Similar, in some respects, to Nazi Germany pursuing more and more exotic 'home run' solutions but without the frantic life-and-death struggle for existence. I think more generally the industry was stuck in the wartime mentality of making technological advances as quickly as possible. If it's a less-than-elegant solution then it doesn't really matter because this is WAR and, anyway, it'll be obsolete in the few years anyway. Except that doesn't work in a slower-paced, peacetime world with free (increasingly global) competition and more commercial considerations. I think that also led to a hang-over of a very dangerous 'we'll figure it out as we go' approach which led to a number of lethally under-tested and dangerous aircraft. IIRC it was the Supermarine Scimitar which was, statistically, more likely to crash during a 12-year service life than not. On top of that you have the perennial British industrial problem of too many firms competing amongst themselves, each of them massively under-capitalised and not really having the resources to develop, test and refine all the clever ideas they were coming up (which applied to all the supply chain as well - British industry couldn't properly supply the materials, the electronics, the computing power etc. to back up all these notions and schemes. Then there was the problem of not quite having enough vision - Saunders-Roe had enough foresight to design a massive flying boat with a 300-ft wingspan and 24 jet engines to carry 1000 passengers to Australia but not enough vision to see that flying boats were already obsolete. Vickers put a lot of effort into making the VC10 a jetliner that could, very successfully, operate from short, poor-surface 'hot and high' airfields in Africa and the Middle East, but they never noticed that airports would rather modernise to take 707s and DC-8s than operate specially-tailored 'bush' jetliners. And there was the seemingly endemic problem of post-war British industry of just being allergic to doing sensible, conventional, attractive, proven designs. Dozens of designs were drawn up for aircraft that would be Fokker F27 or Douglas DC-9 clones, or which foresaw the Airbus A300 by several years, but they were all shunted to one side because BAC was focussed on making the Bristol 300/Concorde and Hawker Siddeley was obsessed with making a 737-sized VTOL regional airliner. Occasionally you'd get a straightforward design slip through the cracks, like the BAC 1-11, the DH-125, the HS-748, the Folland Gnat, the BAe-146 and so on. But no-one ever seemed to take stock and realise "Huh, so you're saying that it's the ordinary boring stuff that sells well? People don't want a delta-wing rocket-powered amphibious STOL airliner?" I think in general British machines of the 1940s-1980s were just designed by a lot of clever people who each designed one part and never talked to each other. My 1960s Austin Mini has an engine with a thermostat housing held on by three bolts. Two of the bolts are 7/16" BSF, the other is 1/2" because it also has to secure a little support bracket for a vacuum line. So someone was clearly given the task of making up this bracket and decided to secure it to the thermostat housing with an arbitary 1/2" bolt, and this went all the way through to production because no-one took stock and realised this was ridiculous. And that's how you end up with things like the Fairey Gannet.
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Apr 9, 2020 17:57
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BalloonFish posted:and Hawker Siddeley was obsessed with making a 737-sized VTOL regional airliner. You can't just leave this here.
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Apr 9, 2020 18:07
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hobbesmaster posted:You can't just leave this here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Siddeley_HS.141
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Apr 9, 2020 18:14
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aphid_licker posted:Man if I was a pilot and learned about that Barracuda thing I would seriously grab whatever horrid, misshapen thing the Brits were issuing as a service revolver at the time and (try to) shoot the guy who designed that system. wtf, why do you hate the webley.
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Apr 9, 2020 19:55
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 Though to be fair, before it was the Dash-7, De Havilland Canada was trying to make it as an almost VTOL airliner BalloonFish posted:And that's how you end up with things like the Fairey Gannet.  Question: is there a good book on how British industrial development went wrong? Or how the British aircraft industry got the second World War right? I actually see more than a few parallels with how industry works in Canada, especially the undercaptialization. Just from reading about the Nazi aviation industry, I think I recognize two things with the Brits. One is maybe they assumed "competent and conventional" wouldn't get them far, because that was what the Americans were doing? Maybe just the idea of "we have an industry and we compete in a global market" was too much of a stepdown for the globe's formerly dominant industrial power, so BREAKTHROUGH aviation ideas were taken to be the step back up? My other thought is: the most durable, easy to protect part of an aviation industry is the designers and engineers. God knows all the Axis powers kept designing all sorts of plauseable aircraft long after they lost any realistic ability to field them. It's pretty much the *everything else* that you need to actually field them: skilled workers, factory space, materials, the supply chain, training and manpower for squadrons, etc. PS> I'm doing lots of stuff right now so pretend I posted pictures of the Short Sturgeon Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 9, 2020 20:16
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Nebakenezzer posted:
Never heard of it, let's see...  That prototype doesn't look half bad. quote:Later, the basic Sturgeon design was reworked as a prototype anti-submarine aircraft. The many modifications that resulted turned the promising design into a "hapless and grotesque-looking hybrid."[1]  oh no
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Apr 9, 2020 20:51
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Nebakenezzer posted:Just from reading about the Nazi aviation industry, I think I recognize two things with the Brits. One is maybe they assumed "competent and conventional" wouldn't get them far, because that was what the Americans were doing? Maybe just the idea of "we have an industry and we compete in a global market" was too much of a stepdown for the globe's formerly dominant industrial power, so BREAKTHROUGH aviation ideas were taken to be the step back up? I think one of the issues for the British is that the war showed definitively that they were pretty far behind American manufacturing capabilities in general, and British manufacturing was harmed by the war in ways that the US was not. I think the thought process went something like this. Since we don't have a manufacturing and operational edge, you have to design a superior product because you can't compete on cost and quality of manufacture. If you design a competent and conventional product, you might have a marginal edge through a superior product, but you'll lose that rapidly to the operational factors. Therefore, you have to create a generation-leaping product such that pure operational advantages cannot close the gap between product capabilities. Now the kind of obvious flaw is if you can't do competent and conventional it's really, really hard to do crazy generational leaps. You take a bunch of moonshots, but they all fail because you need to be really operationally competent to build those moonshots successfully, assuming that any of the ideas are theoretically feasible and useful.
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Apr 9, 2020 21:24
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Nebakenezzer posted:Question: is there a good book on how British industrial development went wrong? Or how the British aircraft industry got the second World War right? I actually see more than a few parallels with how industry works in Canada, especially the undercaptialization. A good book? Not that I know of. There's 'Empire of the Clouds: When Britain's Aircraft Ruled the World' by James Hamilton-Paterson which isn't bad, and provides a good overview of the events and failures of the industry in the post-war era, but relies too heavily on his reminisces and nostalgia as a plane-mad kid at the time and, while it has a lot of jaw-dropping anecdotes that certainly paint the picture (like how the entire staff and workforce of the Bristol Aeroplane Company would stop for a full three-course lunch every day, during which nothing else could happen - designing, drawing, manufacturing, admin, maintenance, flight testing, nada) it doesn't properly go into the reasons or causes. For my degree I had to slog through some really dry but ultimately revealing academic papers which basically charted the decline of British industry back to to the mid-19th century, which then stacked up lots of systemic issues which built up and then slow-motion unravelled in the 20th century, which the world wars managed to both stave off (by masking the decline) and worsen (by deepening the underlying problems). The papers varied by how they allocated the blame but it always came down to a mix of: 1) Being the first to industrialise. So Britain built up a massive head start that allowed it to coast on that headway and complacency for the next century or so. It also meant that all our infrastructure was really old-fashioned and relatively small-scale (even by the end of the 19th century) and had to be expanded and modernised piece-meal. 2) The double-whammy of the collapse of the Railway Mania in the 1840s and the Panic of 1866 brought about by the failure of the Overend & Gurney bank. This put a massive brake on the British industrial economy in the middle of the 19th century just when the other major industrial nations of the world were really getting up momentum. The bursting of the railway bubble especially wiped out the savings of huge numbers of middle-class families who had invested all they had in supposedly ironclad railway stocks. That made the middle classes and investment banks - the two primary sources of capital - incredibly reluctant to invest in industrial and manufacturing businesses. It was a massive cultural shock which cast a very, very long shadow. 3) The Empire. This gave British industry a captive market covering a quarter of the globe. Which is good, but ultimately made British industry quite lazy (although that's more of a 20th-century thing). In the 19th century it manifested itself in the capitalisation problem by building on point 2) as a much faster and lucrative investment than industry. Building a shipyard, a steel works, a railway or textile mill takes a huge amount of money, carries a risk of commercial failure and even the most successful industries won't earn you much more than 3-5% return. By contrast you can stick your money in an African bauxite mine or an Indian cotton plantation and get twice the return twice as fast. 4) The paucity of technical education. This is a problem that the UK has failed to grapple with for about 300 years. By contrast France, Germany and the USA (and others) quickly developed a very good national system of technical education right up to university level. While there was (and is) no shortage of clever people to come up with new ideas in Britain, there aren't enough trained and skilled people in the workforce to take advantage of any of these new ideas. Look at any political manifesto or industrial strategy from the past 100 years and you'll see that skills and education for industry is an ever-present problem that never gets addressed. This means that, while British scientists and engineers make many of the individual technological advances that lead to the Second Industrial Revolution (late 19th century - based on precision engineering, mass production, chemicals and electricity), it's the USA and Germany which can really exploit these advances and become world leaders in all these areas. And all this in place about 50 years before the British aircraft industry was even a thing, but it's setting up the dominos to come crashing down, as they would for the car industry, the shipbuilding industry, the locomotive industry, the textile industry, the chemical industry, the electrical industry, the machine tool industry etc. etc. You can see the evidence even before WW2. Britain didn't produce a single all-metal monoplane airliner (that wasn't a flying boat) along the lines of the B247, DC-2 or Electra during the 1930s. De Havilland built the Albatross, which was a beautiful high-speed streamlined monoplane airliner with retractable undercarriage and everything. But it had a fuselage made of wood because British industry couldn't design and build an duralumin or aluminium fuselage. The Mosquito's wooden fuselage wasn't a wartime expediency or a brainwave so that cabinet-makers could build them, it was DH's existing state-of-the-art fuselage technology. And look at the issues with building the Spitfire, which was a true all-metal aircraft, versus the Hurricane which was still canvas over tubing. In more recent history, the big missed chance was in the late 1940s. Britain was, by a huge margin, the biggest recipient of Marshall Aid - $3.2 billion in the currency of the time, which was twice what (West) Germany received. But instead of using it to build modern factories, new railways, new power infrastructure, new ports, new roads, new airports, the latest research facilities and huge injections of cash into the educational system, Britain spunked it all on military and colonial spending trying to be a world superpower. The post-war Labour government did an immense amount of good but, in retrospect, that policy was hugely detrimental to the UK's economy in the long term (an economy already beset by long-term problems). That was a golden chance to put right about a century of under-investment and it was completely missed. Nebakenezzer posted:Just from reading about the Nazi aviation industry, I think I recognize two things with the Brits. One is maybe they assumed "competent and conventional" wouldn't get them far, because that was what the Americans were doing? Maybe just the idea of "we have an industry and we compete in a global market" was too much of a stepdown for the globe's formerly dominant industrial power, so BREAKTHROUGH aviation ideas were taken to be the step back up? Sort of. It made sense to try and find niches if the UK couldn't go toe-to-toe with the Americans in making 'ordinary' aircraft, but that was only the case because the industry was so weak after years of under-capitalisation and mismanagement. The industry wasn't forcibly rationalised until 1960 and the proper course of action - merging all the manufacturers into one single one big enough to act on the world stage - wasn't taken until 1977 by which time it was far too late. Had BAC been formed in 1950 and been properly managed (which, granted, are Saro Queen-sized 'ifs') then you could have had the likes of the Handley Page Herald, the Avro 771, the Bristol 200 and the VC10 given the resources and market space they deserved - there's a sensible lineup of prop-feederliner, short-range twin-jet, medium-range tri-jet and long-range quad-jet that would have been eminently sensible and viable if properly resourced. Good old British hubris  also plays a big part, not being able to accept that we're a small island surrounded by equals, that 'being British' isn't enough of a reason for people to buy something and that we don't have a quarter of the world in an economic headlock anymore took a while to adjust to (with plenty of scope to say that, as a nation, we still haven't!). Take the original Airbus project. Both BAC (government-owned at the time) and Hawker-Siddeley were involved in that from the start and BAC was considered a primary partner on a level with Sud Aviation. Then the British government came over all, well, British and decided "We can make our own, better, Airbus, only with blackjack and hookers!", quit the project and went off to design the BAC 3-11 which was like a giant MD-88 - a rear-engined T-tailed jet only a widebody with high-bypass turbofans. Predictably that didn't go anywhere because (surprise!) BAC didn't have the money, and then they hilariously went around the Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Yugoslavian and Romanian aircraft industries trying to stitch together a multinational project of their own but now with Britain at the head. When that didn't work, and when Rolls-Royce went bust taking the 3-11's intended engines with it, the project was dropped. So now the only British involvement in Airbus was Hawker-Siddeley designing and making the wings for the A300, while if we hadn't been so arrogant there's every chance that completed narrow-body Airbuses would be flying out of Filton now rather than Frankfurt.KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I think one of the issues for the British is that the war showed definitively that they were pretty far behind American manufacturing capabilities in general, and British manufacturing was harmed by the war in ways that the US was not. I think the thought process went something like this. Since we don't have a manufacturing and operational edge, you have to design a superior product because you can't compete on cost and quality of manufacture. If you design a competent and conventional product, you might have a marginal edge through a superior product, but you'll lose that rapidly to the operational factors. Therefore, you have to create a generation-leaping product such that pure operational advantages cannot close the gap between product capabilities. Now the kind of obvious flaw is if you can't do competent and conventional it's really, really hard to do crazy generational leaps. You take a bunch of moonshots, but they all fail because you need to be really operationally competent to build those moonshots successfully, assuming that any of the ideas are theoretically feasible and useful. What they said. That's basically what happened to the BAC 1-11 - a perfectly good, conventional short-range jetliner and only the second of its type in the world. It racked up very good sales even in the tough American market but the moment the DC-9 and the 737 came along then the economies of scale and the ability of the big American firms to out-build and out-develop their platforms took over, while development of the 1-11 was stifled by both a lack of resources at BAC, some inherent problems with the design (it simply couldn't be 'stretched' as easy as the DC-9 or 737) and a lack of suitably updated engines. You can see the logic in decided that "the next big thing must be SSTs/VTOSL jetliners, let's try and get ahead of the game on those", especially since you can gamble that the niche will be too small for Boeing or McD-Douglas to bother with and they'll leave you alone. But they half-assed that too. The only real successes for the British commercial aircraft industry post-1970 were the Handley Page Jetstream (which was entirely conventional but was designed to perfectly exploit a market niche) and the BAe 146, which was fairly unconventional and also tailor-made to have USPs over other small jetliners (and which made use of some of the knowledge gained from the HS141 nonsense).
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Apr 9, 2020 21:48
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FuturePastNow posted:
kilroy was here
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Apr 9, 2020 21:59
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I'm putting together a little aircraft design contest and I thought the AI goons might be interested. There are three categories, each one set in a different alternate history scenario. Category 1: 1944 Emergency Interceptor By August 1944, the Second World War has become a bloody stalemate. The Allied invasion of Normandy has been repulsed with high losses on both sides. Soviet operations on the Eastern Front have fared little better, leaving battered Soviet and German forces to lick their wounds. In the Pacific, Saipan and Tinian have fallen at enormous cost to American soldiers, Marines, and airmen. American bombers can now reach Japan, but plans to invade the Japanese Home Islands are put on hold indefinitely. With the ground war stalled, Allied and Axis leaders look to airpower to break the stalemate and win the war. Round-the-clock bombing raids rock cities and paint the skies with fires. As the Luftwaffe's Amerikabomber becomes operational, not even American cities are spared from devastation. To make matters worse intelligence services pick up ominous rumblings about plans for gas warfare, bombs packed with disease-carrying fleas, and new "atom weapons." Air defense has become a matter of national survival for the Axis and the Allied powers. Air forces desperately ask designers for the next generation of interceptor aircraft. Design a land-based interceptor which can:
Reach at least 450 mph (725 km/h). Destroy a four-engine bomber in 1-2 attack passes. Successfully evade and/or engage enemy long-range escort fighters. SPECIAL: Strategic materials and skilled workers are in short supply. If possible, the airframe and powerplant should be built quickly with common materials. SPECIAL: Trained fighter pilots are being lost quicker than they can be replaced. If possible, the aircraft should be flyable by pilots with limited flight training. This design must make its first flight by the middle of 1945. You may design an aircraft for any Allied, Axis, or neutral nation of the period. Keep in mind the limitations of your chosen nation (ex. German material shortages, limited American experience with jets, etc). Category 2: 1950 Floating Fighter It seems like more and more countries are getting their hands on The Bomb every day. The Americans, British, and Soviets have all tested weapons and other nations are working on their own weapons. Even Sweden is a just a year or two away from getting its own nukes. Worried that an Atomic Pearl Harbor could devastate traditional airbases, planners conclude that the next generation of warplanes must operate from a new base: the sea. Design a sea-based fighter-bomber which can:
Reach at least Mach 1 at 10,000 feet. Successfully intercept and destroy contemporary jet and prop-powered bombers. Successfully dogfight contemporary jet fighters. Carry two cannon or guns, with a minimum of 150 rounds per gun. Carry two air-to-air missiles. Carry up to 2,000 pounds (910 kg) of ordnance. Tactical nuclear weapons capability desirable. SPECIAL: Seawater doesn't react well with temperamental 1950s electronics and engines. Seawater must not damage critical components when the aircraft is floating, taxiing, taking off or landing. SPECIAL: This aircraft may have to operate from remote island bases with limited support. Ease of maintenance in rough conditions is desirable. This design must make its first flight by the end of 1955. You may design an aircraft for any aircraft-producing nation of the period. Category 3: 1960 Nuclear Bomber After catastrophic rocket accidents in the US and the USSR killed some of the greatest minds in rocket science, Cold Warriors lost faith in nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. Air forces around the world now hope The Bomber Will Get Through.
Evade, avoid, defeat, and/or destroy contemporary SAMs and interceptors. Bomb targets located at least 1,300 miles (2,100 km) into enemy territory. Round-trip mission preferred, but not required. Accurately deliver at least one 6,500 pound (2,9500 kg) nuclear bomb and/or missile and escape the blast. Seat a crew of three. SPECIAL: Can conduct tactical and/or strategic reconnaissance missions during peacetime and wartime. SPECIAL: Can carry and launch smaller aircraft like X-Planes and spy drones. This design must make its first flight by the end of 1965. You may design an aircraft for any aircraft-producing nation of the period. How is this thing going to be judged? There are six criteria. A design can earn up to 50 points.
Originality (10 points): How much creativity and innovation does the design show? Is it a simply a carbon copy of a historical design? Effectiveness (10 points): How well does this design meet the basic requirements? Does it have the performance and other key qualities needed to get the job done? Appearance (10 points): Does the design fit the adage that "if it looks right, it flies right"? Is it the kind of thing people will put on t-shirts and posters 50 years later? Special (5 points): How well does this design meet the special requirements? Judge's Choice (5 points): Does the design have charm, charisma, quirkiness, or some other ineffable quality our judges like? btw, if anyone has an flying, aeronautical engineering, or aviation history background and would like to help judge this thing (or knows someone who would be a good judge), shoot me an email. I'm still looking for more judges. What
Judge's Choice: a book or eBook of your choice (up to $30 in value) and an aviation-themed hat or t-shirt of your choice. Best Artwork: an aviation-themed hat or t-shirt of your choice (up to $25 in value). How do I enter this thing? Please send entries to flashbackcontest at gmail The deadline for design entries is June 30, 2020. Probably gonna announce winners in September-November. Please share this contest with anyone who might be interested! What does my entry need to include? Illustration(s) of your aircraft. Three-view drawings, 3D models, design blueprints, cross-sections/cutaways, profile views, and the like are all acceptable. Remember, there will be a prize for the entry with the best artwork! No more than three images, please A short description of your aircraft's key performance stats, development history, design philosophy, design features, and/or service history. No more than 250 words, please. You cannot send in multiple entries for the same category, but you can send in one design for each category. Good luck, goons! Bacarruda fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Apr 11, 2020 |
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Apr 10, 2020 09:03
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"So the Doctor has examined the ultrasound of your new plane....I'm afraid the news isn't good".
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Apr 10, 2020 09:33
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BalloonFish posted:A good book? Mate. You should write that book.
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Apr 10, 2020 16:49
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BalloonFish posted:... Wikipedia posted:The Scimitar stemmed from a number of designs from Supermarine for a naval jet aircraft, initially to a requirement for an undercarriage-less fighter aircraft to land on flexible "sprung" rubber decks,[1] which would allow for a lighter and simpler structure. 
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Apr 10, 2020 22:41
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That 1968 book about the Boeing 2707 SST ends on a helluva statement. 
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Apr 10, 2020 23:04
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Bacarruda posted:I'm putting together a little aircraft design contest and I thought the AI goons might be interested. I'm in! Where else are you sharing this?
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Apr 10, 2020 23:13
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bloops posted:That 1968 book about the Boeing 2707 SST ends on a helluva statement. 2020: "I have decided to eliminate Boeing from further award consideration." -- NASA's chief of human spaceflight
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Apr 10, 2020 23:27
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bloops posted:That 1968 book about the Boeing 2707 SST ends on a helluva statement. At least it's partly right on distances not mattering that much.
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Apr 10, 2020 23:44
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meltie posted:2020: "I have decided to eliminate Boeing from further award consideration." -- NASA's chief of human spaceflight lmao
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Apr 10, 2020 23:46
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meltie posted:2020: "I have decided to eliminate Boeing from further award consideration." -- NASA's chief of human spaceflight I'm really glad I scrolled down before posting that.
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Apr 11, 2020 04:00
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eggyolk posted:I'm in! Where else are you sharing this? The AIRPOWER thread, a few different Discords, Twitter, and that kind of thing. It's very much an "open to the public" kind of thing. (If anyone with an engineering/flying/history background is interested in helping judge, let me know!) Bacarruda fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Apr 11, 2020 |
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Apr 11, 2020 04:54
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Bacarruda posted:The AIRPOWER thread, a few different Discords, Twitter, and that kind of thing. It's very much an "open to the public" kind of thing. Ill send you a PM EDIT: NVM you cant get PMs. I'd be interested in judging but I dont know enough to make a decent entrant. I might not be a good judge for it because most of the core requirements are aero performance related (e.g. ROC @ weight) are well outside my area of knowledge but I was a CNC machinist through college, ugrad Mech E, MS Sys E from an aerospace focused program. Manufacturing engineer in machining/surface finishing at a SV tech giant, systems engineer on aircraft electronics and radar at major defense cos for 5 years after that. (Now I do something totally unrelated.) "Can this be made reliably in X year" is something I can probably answer. CarForumPoster fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Apr 11, 2020 |
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Apr 11, 2020 16:04
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Bacarruda posted:I'm putting together a little aircraft design contest and I thought the AI goons might be interested. This is an interesting challenge, but I've found a couple things to take issue with: Bacarruda posted:Category 1: 1944 Emergency Interceptor Interesting, but there are some issues with performance here, especially with the "no strategic materials" restriction. The kind of climb performance you are asking for is basically only possible - just - with a jet or rocket-powered aircraft in this vintage. Even then, aircraft like the P-80 - which is sort of contemporary with this - could only make 30,000 feet in 10 minutes without the tip tanks installed. The very best piston-powered aircraft of the time could, if they were aerodynamically clean and pushed to the maximum of their performance with no regard for engine longevity, reach 30,000 feet in about 15 minutes. http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/p-80/P-80.html Bacarruda posted:Category 2: 1950 Floating Fighter I get that this is alternate history, but at the same time, nobody in the real world designing a fighter aircraft in 1950 would have imagined them being able to carry nuclear weapons; at the time they weren't that far removed from Fat Man in terms of their design, size and shape, and it wouldn't be until the very end of the 1950s and early 1960s that a fighter-sized weapon would be deployed in reality. MrChips fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Apr 11, 2020 |
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Apr 11, 2020 23:36
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Welp, now that Mr. Chips is doing it, I can't resist. Criticism of the interceptor: a stalemate in europe, yet the luftwaffe is deploying Amerika bombers in 1945. (I mean the whole point is to create drawings of sick aircraft and everything, I get that. But Amerika bombers are one of those things that the Nazis would have had to win ww2 before they'd be in a position to make them.) You have to assume quite a bit of black gay hitler and a lot of unfuckery to the Nazi aircraft industry just to get to the point where the Nazis fielded modest effective numbers of a strategic bomber, let alone something as complex as an Amerika bomber, which imo would take everybody not America till around 1950, and even America didn't start deploying the B-36 until the late 1940s. I know, I know. But I bring it up since if you start taking historical and engineering accuracy seriously, then you have to consider things like this. My suggestion: We know what we want: awesome mid 1940s giant bomber killers. So why don't we just assume the world has the tech progression it had in 1945, and assume that for (reasons) somehow this conflict has developed inter-continental bombers that need blowing up? This is fun as a tech challenge, too IMO. The B-36 is a good real world example of what the Japanese Amerika bomber would have looked like, and also gives you a conventional attack profile: massive amounts of conventional ordnance, delivered at a very high altitude, like 40K ft. These aircraft would be as big or bigger than the turbine strategic bombers that came after them, and likely would have at least six engines, if not more. (The size comes from no aerial refueling, plus the need to carry all that fuel, plus you need to scale up for efficiency: one thing the B-36 got right was its stoink-ingly large payload. To make it was going to be so much more expensive than even a strategic bomber, with each loss correspondingly harder to replace. So: each airframe was *really* gonna have to pay off in destructiveness if the cost-benifit was going to make any kinda sense.) They'd also have extremely heavy defensive guns, like the B-36. An interceptor would have to be able to manuver well at 40 k ft, like the Ta 152, and have pretty heavy firepower to tear apart such a big airframe. (You don't need to go Hs 129 B-3 or anything, because the defender should be able to field many aircraft per attacking bomber.) Still, lots of big machine guns or cannons. Two alternative modes for intercontinental bombers: aerial refueling (which would allow something B-29-esque to attack) or for truely mad designs, mothership carrier aircraft and smaller, faster aircraft for launch and recovery by the mothership. The "economize resources" thing. That cashes out way differently depending on the nation. In Germany that's some asymetrical BnV fighter made from wood and steel assembled by slaves; in America, that doesn't mean much. Also, if defending against these aircraft is a big priority (IE the Nazis are not just trying to freak people out by having four airplanes bomb stuff at random) they you're going to be able to find the fancy metals for turbines and aircraft grade aluminum. Maybe you're trying to limit turbines? I can dig it (I mean, the world *needs* aircraft powered by super-sized napier deltics and wasp majors) though the time period, and especially the new challenges of these sorts of bombers really lends itself to new power-plants, especially as the Starfighter was advanced enough to be deployed to Europe before the end of the war. If you want to limit something, my advice is just wave your hands and just do it. Like "nobody thought of turbines." As I said before, historical accuracy is hard to hew to when your scenerio doesn't really need it.
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Apr 12, 2020 02:26
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Hey y'all I found it, the worst METAR KDLF 120122Z COR 05015G35KT 3SM FC TSRAGR BKN030 25/21 A2955 RMK AO2A TORNADO OHD TS OHD GR 1 1/2 RAB17 TSB02E22 PRESRR SLP996 $ COR 0147
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Apr 12, 2020 04:27
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Spaced God posted:Hey y'all I found it, the worst METAR Minus the FC I’d shoot an approach into it. 
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Apr 12, 2020 04:29
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Spaced God posted:Hey y'all I found it, the worst METAR Translation for those fond of the ground?
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Apr 12, 2020 05:01
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| # ? Jun 7, 2024 21:43 |
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Warbird posted:Translation for those fond of the ground? I see the word TORNADO in there This website can be useful though http://www.wx-now.com/weather/metardecode
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Apr 12, 2020 05:03
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