Aviation Geeks unite?! Anybody else care about planes here?

[Marc]

Eviation's Alice, an all-electric aircraft, completed its maiden flight this morning from Moses Lake, Washington. Alice, a nine-seater commuter plane has a range of 250nm, is fly-by-wire with fully electronic flight control system. The 900kWh battery is expected to charged 1 hour of flight time in 30 minutes with anticipation of reducing charging time as technology improves. Replacement batteries are estimated to cost $250,000, which is still less than replacing or overhauling piston engines in similar aircraft.

Guess once challenge for electric aircraft is working out the reserve range. For conventional aircraft a certain amount of fuel is counted as reserve in case of diversion or landing delays.

 

[shapeshifter]

Always about recharging the onboard battery. Dumb.

Better would be swapping a dead one for a fully charged one. Open a battery bay and pull out the spent battery, put it on a charger for future use. Install a fully charged battery and away you go in 5 mins. Ok 10 if you include a restroom break.

This should be how the motorway infrastructure should be going as well. So long as long recharging layovers on long trips remain the only option, EV isn't an attractive alternative for me.

(cue video of Mustang lol>

 

[Non Sync]

Always about recharging the onboard battery. Dumb.

Better would be swapping a dead one for a fully charged one. Open a battery bay and pull out the spent battery, put it on a charger for future use. Install a fully charged battery and away you go in 5 mins. Ok 10 if you include a restroom break.

This should be how the motorway infrastructure should be going as well. So long as long recharging layovers on long trips remain the only option, EV isn't an attractive alternative for me.

(cue video of Mustang lol>

The battery pack in my Chevy Bolt provides 60kWh and weighs about 960 pounds. That's not something that can quickly be swapped out. The Alice's battery provides 900kWh and weighs 7,630 pounds. This is an aircraft and any work performed is meticulously documented. Quickly swapping it out is not an option. Initial purchasers are smaller, regional airlines and package delivery companies. Freight aircraft will sit around during the day and are mostly flown at night, giving them plenty of time for charging, espeically with solar power.

The 250nm range included an additional hour of flight time.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Why can't they have some small fuel powered engine onboard or something that keeps the batteries at charge when it drops?

 

[J.T.B.]

The battery pack in my Chevy Bolt provides 60kWh and weighs about 960 pounds. That's not something that can quickly be swapped out. The Alice's battery provides 900kWh and weighs 7,630 pounds. This is an aircraft and any work performed is meticulously documented. Quickly swapping it out is not an option. Initial purchasers are smaller, regional airlines and package delivery companies. Freight aircraft will sit around during the day and are mostly flown at night, giving them plenty of time for charging, espeically with solar power.

Yeah. It could be done, but it would take an infrastructure of extra batteries and heavy-duty handling equipment at hundreds, or thousands, of airports.

Why can't they have some small fuel powered engine onboard or something that keeps the batteries at charge when it drops?

Added weight of engine and fuel.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Yeah. It could be done, but it would take an infrastructure of extra batteries and heavy-duty handling equipment at hundreds of airports.

Added weight of engine and fuel.

Yeah of course, and being an aircraft weight is a precious thing. Isn't there any other alternative way to keep the batteries charged in flight, what about solar panels in the body panels of the plane?

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Yeah of course, and being an aircraft weight is a precious thing. Isn't there any other alternative way to keep the batteries charged in flight, what about solar panels in the body panels of the plane?

Unless your plane is a Unmanned Ultra Light, the Solar Panels will do very little compared to the cost of their weight & complexity along with maintenance costs.

 

[shapeshifter]

I didn't say it would be easy.

Yeah. It could be done, but it would take an infrastructure of extra batteries and heavy-duty handling equipment at hundreds, or thousands, of airports.

Big airliners are out of bounds here, but yeah, infrastructure to handle the associated big tasks.

I am talking about private and business sizes, they should be well on their way to having standardized infrastructure to support changing over recharging but they haven't even started. The charging industry has become the big oil co of the EV world, holding advancements back.

But I see the automotive sector should be leading this, not aviation. /

 

[Marc]

NASA SOFIA mission has been ended which will see the grounding of a modfified 747SP fitted with a 2.7m telescope.

The project began in 1998 thought the aircraft wasn't ready until 2010 and made it's first operation flight in 2014 and since then has flown hundreds of missions (the article mentions 145 missions based on flightradar.com reports, wiki says it was hundreds per year and disagrees with the article on the when the SOFIA program began flying).

NASA says the costs of running the program outweigh the benefit though a report linked in the article says that congress had said it would pony up $30mil to SOFIA flying.

No mention on the fate of the aircraft

End Of An Era: NASA's SOFIA Boeing 747 Has Taken Its Last Ever Flight (msn.com)

 

[Marc]

sorry for the double post but there's an update on SOFIA.

The aircraft is going to made to any other U.S govt that might have a use but that's unlikely so she's more than likely destined for a museum (a number have expressed interest) though which is unknown at this point in time.

What Will Happen To NASA’s SOFIA Boeing 747 Now? (msn.com)

 

[publiusr]

SOFIA’s home
https://twitter.com/pimaairfans/status/1598939686101479424

What almost shot down the Enterprise
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/nuclear-aim-54.2321/#post-380371

Hypersonics paper
https://www.icas.org/ICAS_ARCHIVE/ICAS2022/data/papers/ICAS2022_0596_paper.pdf

A retro resource
https://retromechanix.gumroad.com/

AN-225’s remains
https://twitter.com/TpyxaNews/status/1575519379311181826

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what could have been

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Some better news
https://aviationweek.com/defense-sp...tolaunch-set-first-talon-captive-carry-flight
https://www.spacedaily.com/m/report...provide_strategic_funding_for_growth_999.html

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/n...52h-will-look-after-engine-radar-replacement/

China’s TSTO research
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=41171.msg2413151#msg2413151

More ceramics breakthroughs:
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-latest-room-temperature-plasticity-ceramics.html
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-kind-shape-memory-material.html

--via "the discovery of a new category of shape-memory materials made of ceramic rather than of metal could open up a new range of applications, especially for high-temperature settings, such as actuators inside a jet engine or a deep borehole....Pang, who led the work, "took all of the modern tools of science, everything you can name—computational thermodynamics, phase transformation physics, crystallographic calculations, machine learning—and he put all these tools together in a totally new way" in order to solve the problem of creating such a material."

You have to have an interest in everything.

--and sometime--it is by accident..as in ceramic thermoforming:
"We blasted it with a blowtorch and, while we were loading it, it unexpectedly deformed and fell out of the fixture," Erb says. "We looked at the sample on the floor thinking that it was a failure. The ceramic can be formed into exquisite geometries and exhibits impressive mechanical strength and thermal conductivity at room temperature, says Erb, whose findings were recently published in Advanced Materials."
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-thermoformable-ceramics-frontier-materials.html

New strong alloy:
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-11-bulk-metal-alloy-large-elastic.html

Led by Sheng Xu, specially appointed assistant professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Engineering, the group developed a bulk copper-based alloy that demonstrated a tensile elastic strain of >4.3% at room temperature, thanks to the reversible lattice strain of the BCC single phase.

The elastic softening behavior exhibited by the material meant that the relationship between tensile stress and strain was not linear, meaning it did not follow traditional Hooke's law behavior...the new material uniquely displayed a low Young's modulus of <25GPa and a large Poisson's ratio of 0.47. In other words, the material is highly elastic, even when exposed to small amounts of stress, and is remarkably strong.

But this is the biggie!
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-heat-proof-chaotic-carbides-revolutionize-aerospace.html

The new materials are hard enough to stir molten steel and can withstand temperatures above 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit—about the same temperatures found just a few hundred miles above the surface of the sun. Coupled with their newly discovered plasmonic abilities, the carbides could achieve improved communications and thermal regulation in technologies including satellites and hypersonic aircraft.

 

[MANT!]

New B-52 rendering post re-engine, avionic and radar improvements..

Those are some ample nacelles....

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

New B-52 rendering post re-engine, avionic and radar improvements..

Those are some ample nacelles....

She's lovely

 

[MANT!]

And the new control panel is much sexier..

Old,

New,

A lot of steam gauges will go bye, bye...those gauges were a majority of my work on the B-52 G and H aircraft, 20+ years of wiring repairs made a mess of the engine
instrument harnesses. In fact, while I was stationed at Carswell AFB, the squadron took it on themselves to straighten and rewire the instrument harnesses of as many of the fleet as they possibly could.
We finished about 15 of them before the base closure was announced and completed an additional 5 before the base closed. We found the reliability of those aircraft we cleaned up the harnesses on took away 70% of our workload ! Hard work but a great thing for the shop overall..

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

And the new control panel is much sexier..

Old,

New,

A lot of steam gauges will go bye, bye...those gauges were a majority of my work on the B-52 G and H aircraft, 20+ years of wiring repairs made a mess of the engine
instrument harnesses. In fact, while I was stationed at Carswell AFB, the squadron took it on themselves to straighten and rewire the instrument harnesses of as many of the fleet as they possibly could.
We finished about 15 of them before the base closure was announced and completed an additional 5 before the base closed. We found the reliability of those aircraft we cleaned up the harnesses on took away 70% of our workload ! Hard work but a great thing for the shop overall..

The new panel looks a lot cleaner too with less mechanical clutter.

Hey question for you. When you worked on them did you have to rip parts of the console out to do wiring behind the panel or somehow get under all of that?

 

[Marc]

The new panel looks a lot cleaner too with less mechanical clutter.

Hey question for you. When you worked on them did you have to rip parts of the console out to do wiring behind the panel or somehow get under all of that?

again are youtube and google that hard to use?

And the new control panel is much sexier..

Old,

New,

A lot of steam gauges will go bye, bye...those gauges were a majority of my work on the B-52 G and H aircraft, 20+ years of wiring repairs made a mess of the engine
instrument harnesses. In fact, while I was stationed at Carswell AFB, the squadron took it on themselves to straighten and rewire the instrument harnesses of as many of the fleet as they possibly could.
We finished about 15 of them before the base closure was announced and completed an additional 5 before the base closed. We found the reliability of those aircraft we cleaned up the harnesses on took away 70% of our workload ! Hard work but a great thing for the shop overall..

Maybe the cockpit design doesn't allow it but I'm sort of surprised there's no Heads up display. Guess you could argue they aren't needed though Boeing is putting the in new civillian airliners.

Guess it could also have something to do with the underlying equipment. The C-17s have them but the C-5s which date back to the 60s and had analogue flight deck don't despite being updated to a largely glass cockpit.

 

[MANT!]

The new panel looks a lot cleaner too with less mechanical clutter.

Hey question for you. When you worked on them did you have to rip parts of the console out to do wiring behind the panel or somehow get under all of that?

No we took the Instrument Console Cover from the top of the panel and used pre-wired bundles (that we made in shop) for each horizontal row of engine instruments starting with the bottom and working up, hard-wiring each bundle into place, soldering every joint to ensure longevity. The Exhaust Gas Temp (EGT) wires were a special case as they were 2 wire thermo-couples and couldn't be altered in any way so they were simply cleaned up, tied-up and rerouted into proper bundles..took about 20 man- hours for each panel. We tried to make sure they would last throughout the remaining life of the airframe without devolving into the rats nest condition we found them in. We included plenty of slack for removal/replacement of broken gauges..but not so much there were curls in the wiring causing further issues.. We did this for every phase inspection of our B-52H aircraft. https://www.afgsc.af.mil/News/Artic...83850/phase-inspections-keep-the-b-52-flying/

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

No we took the Instrument Console Cover from the top of the panel and used pre-wired bundles (that we made in shop) for each horizontal row of engine instruments starting with the bottom and working up, hard-wiring each bundle into place, soldering every joint to ensure longevity. The Exhaust Gas Temp (EGT) wires were a special case as they were 2 wire thermo-couples and couldn't be altered in any way so they were simply cleaned up, tied-up and rerouted into proper bundles..took about 20 man- hours for each panel. We tried to make sure they would last throughout the remaining life of the airframe without devolving into the rats nest condition we found them in. We included plenty of slack for removal/replacement of broken gauges..but not so much there were curls in the wiring causing further issues.. We did this for every phase inspection of our B-52H aircraft. https://www.afgsc.af.mil/News/Artic...83850/phase-inspections-keep-the-b-52-flying/

That's a heck of al lot of work to keep those ladies in the air

 

[MANT!]

again are youtube and google that hard to use?


Maybe the cockpit design doesn't allow it but I'm sort of surprised there's no Heads up display. Guess you could argue they aren't needed though Boeing is putting the in new civillian airliners.

Guess it could also have something to do with the underlying equipment. The C-17s have them but the C-5s which date back to the 60s and had analogue flight deck don't despite being updated to a largely glass cockpit.

B-52s no longer fly low level to get under radar coverage, look down-shoot down airborne radars put paid to that tactic. They're mostly stand-off weapons platforms these days, unless there's total Air Supremacy then they are medium/high altitude bomb trucks so no need for HUDs. There's no low level tactic for C-5M insertions, unlike the C-130J or the C-17 so no HUD on C-5s either.
.

 

[Marc]

B-52s no longer fly low level to get under radar coverage, look down-shoot down airborne radars put paid to that tactic. They're mostly stand-off weapons platforms these days, unless there's total Air Supremacy then they are medium/high altitude bomb trucks so no need for HUDs. There's no low level tactic for C-5M insertions, unlike the C-130J or the C-17 so no HUD on C-5s either.
.

when you first posted the latest revamp on the -52’s I was wondering how in this day and age they were still a viable platform but I guess that answers it.

And speaking of modern technology there has be speculation about the successor to the B-2s and a timeframe for a public reveal not being too far off.