A Washington-state based aerospace company has exited stealth mode by announcing plans to develop one of the holy grails of spaceflight—a single-stage-to-orbit space plane. Radian Aerospace said it is deep into the design of an airplane-like vehicle that could take off from a runway, ignite its rocket engines, spend time in orbit, and then return to Earth and land on a runway. //

The current design of Radian One calls for taking up to five people and 5,000 pounds of cargo into orbit. The vehicle would have a down-mass capability of about 10,000 pounds and be powered by three liquid-fueled engines. The idea would be to get as close to airline operations as possible, by flying, landing, re-fueling, and flying again. //

If Radian can succeed technologically, large markets would likely open. A vehicle like Radian One would be well suited to fly people to commercial space stations in low Earth orbit, which NASA seeks to foster development of by 2030. These planes could also perform Earth observation work and play a role in bringing back space-manufactured goods. There is also the potential for point-to-point travel on Earth.

There can be no question that this is a hugely challenging endeavor that many people have tried before. Will Radian find the right stuff, at the right moment in time? We'd like to think so.

When we read about airplane accidents, the persons involved may appear as two-dimensional beings defined by one or more characteristics—impatience, laziness, ignorance—or as faceless figures with no characteristics at all. But real people, and the situations in which they find themselves, possess many complexities. All the more when the cast consists not of a single pilot but of a whole group of pilots and their passengers, many of whom are pilots themselves. Many accidents have demonstrated that the presence of multiple pilots, when they are not operating as a disciplined crew, does not increase the safety of a flight.

Emirates appears to have repeated an advertising stunt undertaken in late 2021. Once again, the Dubai-based carrier filmed a stunt actor standing on top of the Burj Khalifa. However, this time she has the company of her “friends”, an Airbus A380 wearing the “marmite” Expo 2020 livery. //

After the stunt-woman is seen at the top of the world’s tallest building, she holds a card saying, “Finally, here come my friends”. The shot then turns to show one of Emirates’ Airbus A380s flying towards the tower before it passes behind our fearless main character with an impressive bank angle. //

It would appear that the advert was filmed on October 13th and 14th (the original advert aired in August 2021 before the first Expo livery was even applied to an aircraft). Ahead of these days, Emirates issued an advisory that it would be flying the Expo liveried jet low over the city of Dubai to promote the Expo 2020 festival.

Tracon and Tracon II are two classic ATC games from Wesson, years before their efforts culminated in Tower. The description at MobyGames says it all about this pair of pioneers in aviation software: //

This game has been set up to work on modern Windows (10/8/7/Vista/XP 64/32-bit) computers without problems. Please choose Download - Easy Setup (1.82 MB).

How SAGE jumpstarted today’s technology and built IBM into a powerhouse. //

IBM had recently entered the computing realm in the early 1950s, and it was already dominant in punch-card tabulating. With its emphasis on research and development and customer support, IBM was chosen by the Air Force in 1953 to design and construct the AN/FSQ-7 systems. While the project contributed about 10 percent to IBM’s bottom line for several years, the real benefit to IBM was access to the advanced designs at MIT and to revolutionary technologies such as core memory. As the SAGE project wound down, IBM engineers used their accumulated skills and applied them to the newer commercial offerings for years afterward.

While flying on airlines today has its own unique set of hassles, actually booking a flight is (relatively) painless. This wasn’t so in the 1950s, when schedulers went through racks of index cards, each with a particular flight’s info, all stored in what resembled a library card catalog. Only a few schedulers could fit around the card catalogs, and making a flight reservation could take an hour or two. Through a chance encounter, an IBM executive met the president of American Airlines, and they discussed how the airline needs paralleled the capabilities of SAGE. Recognizing the competitive advantages of a computerized reservation system, American contracted with IBM to develop SABRE. SABRE quickly became a huge success and through multiple corporate reorganizations now operates now as Travelocity and Expedia.

On Dec 21, a U.S.-bound Emirates flight came within 175 feet of impacting a neighborhood in Dubai.

This time, a US freight forwarding company is swinging into action and using three Boeing 747s to fly potatoes into Japan amid a critical shortage of french fries in Japanese McDonald’s outlets. //

Normally, McDonald’s brings its potatoes in via ship from Vancouver. But flood damage and the impact of coronavirus on global supply networks have caused delays there.

“The fries shortage is primarily due to the supply side of McDonald’s global supply chain,” Hiroshi Ohashi, an economics professor from the University of Tokyo, told NBC. “They procure potatoes from the US, where port shipping has been a bottleneck.”

Step in Ryan Petersen, Chief Executive Officer at Flexport, a US-based freight forwarder company. On Wednesday, he confirmed via Twitter the company had contracted to fly three planeloads of potatoes to Japan to alleviate the french fries shortage.

When news of the potato shortage broke in Japan, there was a scramble to get the last serves lest a person be forced to live without french fries for a week or two. This only caused a further shortage. //

How many potatoes can a 747 freighter fly? One person online did the maths. A Boeing 747 freighter can fly about 112,760 kilograms of freight. A large serve of McDonald’s french fries weighs about 154 grams. That’s about 2.2 million large serves of french fries per plane.

This seems like a lot, but one person pointed out there are 2,975 McDonald’s outlets in Japan. McDonald’s 34,000 worldwide stores go through just over four million kilograms of potatoes per day. On a pro-rata basis, Japanese McDonald’s customers eat 375,000 kilograms of french fries a day. On these numbers, Ryan Petersen might have to back up for some further flying.

Radio spectrum, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, is divided into different frequency bands that have been allocated for data, voice, and wireless communications used by a variety of different industries. Aircraft radar altimeters operate within 4.2–4.4 GHz, the lower half of which falls within the C-Band—a frequency range from 3.7–4.2 GHz where the combination of the range of signal transmissions and capacity are optimum.

A graphic shown by AVSI's Andrew Roy during a Dec. 7 NBAA webinar shows power levels of the previous satellite emissions that were occurring in the 3.7–3.98 GHz band that 5G stations in the U.S. will start using next year.

The 5G wireless networks scheduled to be switched on by AT&T and Verizon next month will occur within the 3.7–3.98 GHz frequency range, close to the altimeters. As the FAA indicated in its Dec. 7 AD, while it has heard concerns from airlines, the FAA, and aircraft OEMs over the potential interference issues posed by the deployment of 5G in the C-Band, it has not yet been presented with data or information that shows altimeters are not susceptible to interference.

Where is Santa now?

The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. "And then there was a small voice that just asked, 'Is this Santa Claus?' "

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

"And Dad realized that it wasn't a joke," her sister says. "So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho'd and asked if he had been a good boy and, 'May I talk to your mother?' And the mother got on and said, 'You haven't seen the paper yet? There's a phone number to call Santa. It's in the Sears ad.' Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus."

"It got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, 'The old man's really flipped his lid this time. We're answering Santa calls,' " Terri says.

Andrew P. @apoure25
I did three domestic 767 flight plans last night, and also this one.

Around 14.5 hours enroute.

Any guesses as to how much payload that 747-400F is carrying that far?
10:23 AM · Dec 8, 2021

Josh @BlainPlanes
67 pounds

Andrew P. @apoure25
No that’s just the catering

Ethan Manchester @pilotmanchee
126k?

Andrew P. @apoure25
I wish. Only 101 w/PER today.

Greenie @aviationhead747
Replying to @apoure25
One time I had 8 fuel truck tickets for a atlas -400. Jfk- ICN. 326,000 lbs of fuel. About 28,000 gals fuel. 10 pallets main deck. Not sure ttl load..... wing's and gear hanging loww

Robert W. Mann, Jr. @RWMann
Sounds about right. 20,000 gallons, two trucks and tickets, classic JFK-TLV 747-200, very near max gross w/pax, bags, catering, cargo, planned 11:20 with international reserves

Instead of trying to make the aircraft long and mostly cylindrical like most commercial and business jets, the 500L comes in an unusual teardrop form. With a fairly fat and blunt nose and a pointy tail, the fuselage comes out to a nearly perfect aerodynamic shape. With sharp wings and tail, landing gear that folds away cleanly inside the plane’s shape, and even the engine tucked neatly away, the plane cuts through the sky a lot more easily than other planes.

While not mentioned on Otto’s website, it appears that even the propeller is helping minimize drag. By pulling air from where the teardrop shape comes together in the rear, the propeller may even be sucking on the boundary layer like an experimental NASA design I’ve written about before, helping further reduce drag.

The air intakes for the engine, on the other hand, are spaced out from the skin of the teardrop a bit, likely because boundary layers are very unpredictable sources of air for a combustion engine, whether it’s a turbine or a piston engine. //

To take better advantage of this aerodynamically clean design, Otto Aviation chose to use RED Aircraft GmbH’s AO3 engine. Like a jet engine, it runs on Jet-A fuel (basically kerosene), but it’s a turbocharged 12-cylinder piston engine. This helps reduce operation costs, as Jet-A’s economics of scale makes it cheaper to purchase and it’s more widely available. Like a jet, it’s also capable of operating at up to Flight Level 500, or 50,000 feet above sea level. But, despite similar performance, it’s designed to use only 50% of the fuel of a comparable jet engine.

The story begins on an Evergreen International Airlines Boeing 747-100, registered N475EV. The aircraft had recently been converted to a freighter for the use of charter operator Evergreen. On 12th December 1991, the plane was flying from Newark to Tokyo, with a stop in Anchorage, when the crew noticed a failure warning on the inertial navigation system (INS).

The flight was carrying six crew and cruising at 31,000ft over the province of Ontario. Upon noticing the INS warning, the crew rechecked their instruments and noticed a shocking change. The 747 had banked 90 degrees to the right and was descending at an angle of 30-35 degrees.

This uncontrolled descent caused the aircraft to accelerate rapidly and fall over 10,000 feet before the pilots could regain control. The 747 stabilized at 22,500ft before the crew landed safely in Duluth, Minnesota.

All eyes were on what caused the 747 to act this way. The answer was a 3x15ft hole in the forward section of the right-wing. The panels from the gaping hole caused damage to the flaps and the horizontal tail sections. However, it was unclear if the hole was a result of, or cause of, the 747s rapid descent.

The result of this rapid descent was the 747-100 exceeding its maximum speed limit of Mach 0.92. Official reports suggest the aircraft reached at least 0.98 Mach during its descent. However, some reports indicate the plane reached speeds as high as Mach 1.25, well beyond the supersonic limit.

While the NTSB initially did not confirm speeds higher than 0.92, Boeing has made statements to the effect in the past. In the Chicago Times in 1992, a spokesperson said,

“Original flight tests of 747s conducted in 1969 and 1970 took 747-100 models to speeds of Mach 0.99. In addition, Boeing knows one case in which a 747 operated by Evergreen International made an emergency descent at speeds that exceeded Mach 1.”

Clive Irving highlights in an article on HistoryNet that Brown, head of the program’s configuration group, solved both of these issues seamlessly for Sutter. He looked at dozens of configurations before placing two standard cargo pallets side by side and drew a circle around them. This move created a vast cargo hold and a main deck just under 20 feet in width. Additionally, to solve the evacuation issue, he drew two aisles. These simple but effective moves pushed the direction of the cabin in the right direction, assisting the birth of the commercial widebody.

I recently asked Shaesta Waiz what the most effective thing an instructor did for her was. In 2017, Waiz piloted a Beechcraft Bonanza A36 around the world by herself, earning the title of the youngest woman ever to complete that feat. I was caught off guard by what she offered in response, because it wasn’t anything technical.

Instead, she said that leading up to her record-breaking flight, the instructor who helped her prepare the best “treated her like a professional.”

Waiz explained that it was clear that it was her vision to complete that arduous task, so instead of the instructor being the one to dominate the tone of training, he empowered her by letting her have a say in the priorities of training each day, which he followed with objective feedback after each flight.

They agreed that he wouldn’t try to hand-hold her during the training, because, ultimately, he wouldn’t be present as she embarked on her trip. So, it was especially important that he allowed her to figure things out when she made some errors in flight.

“You’re the pilot in command. If you make an error, I’m going to wait a bit to let you figure it out, because I know you know what to do,” Waiz said her instructor told her.

So, therein lies the universal truth to take away, regardless of the learner’s status or the lesson’s flight profile. //

To make it all cohesive, I provided students with the necessary notes and training aids for the entire course in the first lesson. It allowed me to hold them accountable for our goals. The ultimate principle I shared with each student was that the course was a gradual transfer of flight controls. I’d say, “At the start, I’ll be doing all the talking; at the end, you’ll be doing all the talking.”

Instructors can cultivate trust and a safe learning environment by setting the tone from the start. If students are aware of what is expected of them, they will more likely meet expectations, and complete training efficiently. Direction on what to study is a bonus too. At the end of the day, the main job instructors have is to cultivate decision-makers.

Not all airlines follow this sequential pattern. Some are more scattered – and of course, it is not as easy when fleets keep changing. And some airlines have taken a more light-hearted approach. Icelandic airline WOW Air, for example, chose a lovely family series for some of its A320s and A321s – with registrations TF-SIS. TF-BRO. TF-MOM, TF-DAD, TF-KID, and TF-SON (TF is, of course, the prefix code for Iceland).

great circle route, ETOPS 160min

PATH: ROB-IAD
RANGE: 160min@(GLRB,KIAD,KBOS,LPLA,CYQX,DSS)

ETOPS 140min for ROB - IAD

Thirty years ago, Pan Am ceased operations. The US airline put its stamp on civil aviation like no other and will always be remembered, especially by people in Berlin.
It's been three decades since Pan Am closed up shop. Its last flight, PA436, from Bridgetown, Barbados to Miami took place on December 4, 1991, ending the global aviation icon's 64-year saga.

It's a saga that is still remembered today all over the world, but especially in the once-divided city of Berlin, where the blue Pan Am globe on the tail of the airline's Clipper aircraft was always seen as a symbol of hope and freedom during the Cold War.

"No other airline has influenced aviation nearly as much, and no other carrier understood it so well the importance of letting the public participate in these achievements," said Berlin-based real estate developer Matthias Hühne, Pan Am expert and author of an extensive homage to the airline. "That's how a myth formed: the freedom to be transported to almost any place on Earth within just a few hours."

Thanks to its huge network reaching even remote corners of the globe, Pan Am was able to do just that; no other airline had the same reach.

Today, twin-engine airliners routinely fly routes that were once reserved for the jumbos, and those routes take them from one so-called “feeder” airport to another—“point-to-point” flights—bypassing the congested hubs, shortening travel time for passengers, saving money for the airlines, and—increasingly importantly to regulators and the flying public—reducing carbon emissions. Moreover, those smaller airliners are easier to fill with paying customers than the enormous A380. When the giant flew with only 70 percent of its seats occupied, it cost almost the same to operate as a full flight did.

Foreseeing the shift in the air travel industry, Boeing lost faith in the market for a superjumbo and in 1995 withdrew from discussions it had been having with Airbus about a partnership to produce a mega-airliner. Boeing eventually turned to the much smaller but enormously successful 787. Airbus continued alone.

Frank Vermeire defends the decision. “Every 15 years traffic doubles,” he says. “The problem is the biggest growth is at the major global hubs—London, Los Angeles, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore—which were already getting more and more congested. They were also unable to expand, so the only way to grow was to have larger aircraft delivering more people with each flight. The question was how to use the existing infrastructure more efficiently, and the only way to do that was with larger aircraft.”

Vermeire believes that, no matter how many hub-bypass routes there are, the mega-hubs still need the A380.