The Ferret King posted:

You adjust your seat until the red ball lines up with the white balls in your perspective.

Platystemon posted:

My cyberpunk nightmare isn’t garage rocketry.

It’s garage virology, and that was true before December thirty‐first of last year.

Acid Reflux posted:

Well well, what do we have here?



Big Boi inbound! Supposed to be on the ground in ~15 minutes, I'll try to grab some pictures if it parks on my end of the field.

Platystemon posted:

https://i.imgur.com/aCwIEgx.mp4

e.pilot posted:

The sunset and weather tonight was really something

hobbesmaster posted:

Seems like desperation.

Taoyuan's international area at least was basically a high end shopping mall, those airports must be hurting badly.

MrYenko posted:

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/celera-500l-plane/index.html

Goofy looking? Fast? Long ranged? 700hp diesel V12?

Sign me the gently caress up.

BIG HEADLINE posted:

The article says it'll have windows in the production model and that they'll be completely flush and not mess with laminar flow.

eggyolk posted:

The windows are all wrong. Needs to be centered on the nose like this.

PainterofCrap posted:

What’s the wheelbarrow for

Plinkey posted:

https://i.imgur.com/vTWcSTE.mp4

Ambihelical Hexnut posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm9ETs1j6AA

Did we all get this one already

quote:

Some aircraft were never captured or found, but were in fact outright gifts from individuals making bad career decisions, such as this P-38 Lightning. Actually an F-5E, a reconnaissance version of the P-38. This particular aircraft, sporting Luftwaffe markings, was stolen by USAAF pilot Martin James Monti (Italian-Swiss father and German mother) when he defected to the Axis side. Monti hitched a flight aboard a C-46 from his base in Pakistan, to Cairo, and then to Italy via Tripoli. He stole the plane from the 354th Air Service Squadron and landed this Lightning at Pomigliano Airfield near Milan in Italy. The Italians had captured the aircraft and handed it over to the Germans. He defected and became a member of the SS, gained the rank of Leutnant, and participated in radio propaganda broadcasts to the United States and to American troops in Europe under the nom-de-plume of Captain Martin Wiethaupt. After the end of the war, he returned to Italy and turned himself in at the Fifth Army Headquarters, still wearing his SS uniform. Monti was court-martialled and sentenced to 15 years for desertion, but was pardoned after less than a year on the condition that he join the Army as a private. In 1948, having achieved the rank of sergeant, he was given a general discharge under honourable conditions, but was promptly arrested by the FBI, as his activities in Germany had become known. Ultimately, Monti was tried for treason and sentenced to 25 years in prison and a $10,000 fine. He was paroled in 1960, and died in 2000. Now that’s a good story! The Lightning was overall bare metal but the Luftwaffe painted the entire underside bright yellow from mid-fuselage down with T9+MK Luftwaffe serials. Source: http://oppositelock.jalopnik.com

Humphreys posted:

Right, gonna need some context here.

Also as per earlier in the thread, the Kitbashing begins:

ImplicitAssembler posted:

From that link

"Thus, assuming that the trend of the past 10 years continues in the coming years, and assuming
that all the wire strike accidents occur in conditions when it is most effective, equipping
helicopters with WSPS can reduce about 44% of the fatalities. However, this is an overestimate
because most of the accidents occurred during the climb and descent phases of flight and
involved wire strikes of the main rotor system, the tail boom, or the vertical tail."

I did have my numbers somewhat crossed...Wire-strikes has some of the highest number of fatalities, not necessarily highest number of accidents.
The 2 main things that are getting beaten into us at flight school are:
- LTE
-Wires

A lot of our flying here in BC is in a mountain environment which is also a wire environment.

BalloonFish posted:

quote:

The Roma crashed in Norfolk, Virginia during test flights on February 21, 1922. The crash was caused by failure of the airship's box rudder system, which allowed it to maneuver over tight areas. Just before striking the ground, the airship contacted high voltage power lines, and burst into flames. A total of 34 were killed, 8 were injured, and 3 escaped unharmed. Among the dead was the airship's pilot, Captain Dale Mabry. The event marked the greatest disaster in American aeronautics history at the time.

Ardeem posted:

This made me look up Nebakenezzer's effort posts again, and photobucket has eaten most of the images.

BalloonFish posted:

After finding that pic of the Roma I ended up reading the wiki article on the R101 again (nearly the 90th anniversary!). Even though I know the story already, the sheer amount of political interference, 'suck it and see', whitewashing and weak leadership in the whole saga is incredible.

BalloonFish posted:

Less politically, the R101 is dogged by the same factors that I outlined in my effortpost in this thread about how British industry (aviation and otherwise) spent most of the 20th century trying to do brilliant things with a fraction of the resources necessary to do them properly. Why build two prototype airships at once? Why decide to put All The New Ideas into one airship all at once to launch your globe-spanning air transport network rather than just applying yourself to getting each idea working at a time (see also: almost every British aircraft built after 1945). To nudge back to the political, it's important to note that the R101 was a project of Britain's first ever Labour (and so first ever vaguely socialist) government, so a lot of those in charge of it at a political level had no direct experience of governance, had a lot of well-intentioned but over-optimistic ideas about how capable government was at doing things like building airships and a very strong desire to prove that their system worked better than that which had gone before. Combine that with the cultural admiration for bumbling amateurs, plugging on against the odds, making the best out of a bad situation and complete deferrence to your social betters and it's a dangerous mixture.

BalloonFish posted:

Edit: A quick mental survey suggests you can draw endless parallels between almost any of the great British industrial/political failures. R101. The Groundnuts Scheme. The bungling of the transition from steam to diesel by British Railways (sensibly decide to order a range of loco designs in small numbers to see which features work best so you can standardize them for the mass-produced versions, then before the first of these 'test' designs is even delivered decide that the railways need to improve their public image so just expand the existing pilot orders to hundreds of locos per design, most of which haven't even left the drawing board and some of which are being produced by companies that have never built a diesel locomotive before, with predictably bad results), the collapse of the car and motorcycle industries, the failure of the Hawker-Siddeley Trident. The Millenium Dome. And so on. It would be interesting to see if other similar project failures have happened for similar reasons in other countries, or if it's a uniquely British problem, and if so if it's cultural/social or just baked in due to our economic circumstances.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

Isn't there awfully big assumption in Schute's argument that the nobles actually DO know "the right way" to do something? It's not like Canadian procurement was somehow Good when the aristos were running the show.

BalloonFish posted:

As was badly exposed last year when it turned out that the Prime Minister can suspend democracy at will and there's no political or legal mechanism to stop him, beyond the implicit assumption that no British PM would be inclined to do so. And that, in the absence of a written constitution, the UK's only protections are conventions, politicians not wanting to look bad and 'it's tradition'. When you have a PM and a party who don't give a drat about any of those things they can do pretty much whatever they want.

BalloonFish posted:

I have read Shute's autobiography, and virtually all his novels - I'd count him as one of my favourite authors and I'd recommend them (especially his aviation-themed ones*) to everyone ITT. But his social/political views were...weird. He was a social (small c)onservative, verging on a sort of proto-Randian libertarian. His experience at Vickers with the R100/101 mess and his tribulations trying to found and run Airspeed made him absolutely detest any sort of government interference and gave him the firm belief that 'men who do' - especially engineers - were best left to their own devices when it came to business and enterprise, which would always shake out as being for the greater good even if it seemed morally dubious.

Xakura posted:

That seems ..unnecessary? Can't you just biofuel a regular jet?

slidebite posted:

To me, the whole hydrogen economy/hydrogen as a power source is just a non-starter for so many big reasons, I have no idea why it's even still seriously discussed. I know I'm an idiot, but I must be missing something because like a zombie it refuses to die and keeps coming up.

The only way I even see the slightest bit of potential is like ^^ says, if Nuclear becomes the primary way to make electricity.. but so many of the "CLEAN HYDROGEN FUEL" supporters are irrationally rabid anti-nuclear it just makes me

Elviscat posted:

But it's NET zero carbon emissions, because the plants you plant to replace the ones you made into biofuel and burned will absorb an equal quantity of carbon as emitted by the first plants, or the plants already absorbed the carbon they will later emit from the atmosphere.

I also don't know why people keep pushing hydrogen, it's loving impossible to store, since it will not only diffuse through the pressure vessel it's stored in, but embrittle it in the process, and it has to be stored at pressures that make it explodey as gently caress if the pressure vessel fails.

That, plus it's normally produced either directly from fossil fuels, or from fossil fueled electric plants, and if you're producing it with 30% efficient electricity, then burning it in a 30% efficient hydrogen turbine, giving you a net 9% overall thermal efficiency from the initial energy source.

Platystemon posted:

guys

guys what if

guys what if we took that hydrogen and chained it to something else? Carbon makes some god-tier bonds with itself and I bet we could get those cats to stick together and liquify at reasonable temperatures and pressures. Such molecules would also be large and not leak through every seal we manufacture.

Sagebrush posted:

goddamn, imagine the energy density if you could bind up hydrogen and liquefy it like that! and i mean the chemistry suggests that it'll be a little poisonous, but nothing you couldn't take care of with gloves and a respirator, and you could just carry all that energy around in a fuckin bucket, man

Warbird posted:

That's a bunch of weird lookin' buzzards friend

Phanatic posted:

2. The union plant hasn't exactly been covering itself with glory, either. The KC-46s have had tons of FOD and QC gripes.

Godholio posted:

It takes 25+ years of gross mismanagement to end up in a situation like this.