Terry McAuliffe, running for a second, non-consecutive term for the governor of Virginia, let it be known that he thinks parents should have no say in their children’s education, during a recent gubernatorial debate.

According to McAuliffe, “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision. … I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Without missing a beat, McAuliffe’s opponent, Glenn Youngkin, countered with, “You believe school systems should tell children what to do. I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”

Apparently, McAuliffe, who served as governor of the Commonwealth from 2014 to 2018, is unfamiliar with the law in his own state.

Per the Code of Virginia § 1-240.1. Rights of parents, “A parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent’s child.”

McAuliffe’s comment, however, is symbolic of the tense divide that is occurring in school districts throughout the nation.

The crux of the matter is simple: Should parents or government bureaucrats determine (for the most part) how and more importantly, what, America’s children learn in public schools.

While it’s not uncommon for Bell Textron to deliver its helicopters to customers around the world, it is unusual for a buyer from Ukraine to pick one up at the factory in Mirabel, Canada, and fly it home. But that’s exactly what an unnamed customer did last week.

After taking delivery of a Bell 407GXi, equipped for IFR flight, the customer rode along with pilot Maksym Lunov, the owner of Ukraine-based Heliclub, one of Bell’s independent representatives in the country. The light single will be used for corporate transportation.

The flight included stops in 13 different countries. “I’ve been a pilot for 13 years,” said Lunov, “and a transatlantic flight is something I’ve always wanted to do. It would not have been easily done without the IFR kit. We had no weather limitations and it allowed us to proceed with the planned route without any delays.” /)

Terry Spath
September 29, 2021 at 8:10 am
Looks like it can be seen on Flight Aware, registration UR-RAH

Airlines in most nations are now required to carry out at least a modicum of upset recovery training (UPRT) in flight simulators. Unfortunately simulators are not good at reproducing sustained acceleration forces, so realism is lacking. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), aware of both the essential part simulators play in pilot training and of their limitations, is working with simulator manufacturers to upgrade their performance fidelity at the edges of the flight envelope to improve UPRT. The manufacturers have been struggling with EASA deadlines for meeting the performance targets and the effort is ongoing.

What seems to be needed is a way of inculcating in pilots, despite the limitations of UPRT in simulators, an acute awareness that acceleration in flight brings with it the risk of disorientation, and therefore of emphasising the need to ignore all other sensory inputs except the visual picture provided by the flight instruments. This “effective instrument scan” would enable the pilot to control the aircraft attitude and power accordingly. //

Loss of control in flight (LOC-I) has, since the late 1990s, been the biggest killer accident category for airlines. LOC-I linked to somatogravic illusion has frequently occurred, two of the most dramatic recent examples being the March 2016 FlyDubai Boeing 737-800 crash at Rostov-on-Don, Russia, and the August 2000 Gulf Air Airbus A320 crash at Bahrain International airport. Both occurred at night; both involved a go-around. //

there is a general uneasiness with the perception that recurrent training does not attempt to compensate for the insidious effect on pilot cognitive and manual skills of operating with high levels of automation almost all the time.

In the USA the Air Carrier Safety and Pilot Training Aviation Rulemaking Committee recommends that airlines, in their flight manuals, indicate when and where, on revenue flights, manual flying may be carried out by pilots to help maintain their handling skills. In Europe, however, with its denser airspace and stricter rules on where visual flight rules flying may be carried out, manual “flying” practice is basically only available in simulators or base training. //

Until about 20 years ago, the commercially trained and military trained groups had some basic training experiences in common; they both did their early flying in simple aircraft with primitive flight and navigation instruments. Since then, however, the airline sector has grown massively and the military has shrunk, both in relative and in absolute terms. Although there are still military trained pilots in the airlines, their numbers and influence are reducing rapidly.

This change matters, because civil airliners have been designed by their manufacturers according to assumptions about pilot performance that were set in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, an industry-wide debate about the issue of pilot performance expectations has been reignited recently by the final report on the Lion Air Boeing 737 Max crash near Jakarta, Indonesia.

“Battery technology hasn’t changed in over 30 years,” Moshiel Biton, CEO of electric car battery startup Addionics, tells ISRAEL21c.

And here is where Biton saw a huge opportunity “as trillions of dollars will continue to be invested in creating better batteries.” //

Addionics aims to capitalize on this opportunity by introducing a relatively small change into how batteries are designed.

Unlike other companies that focus on improving battery chemistry, Addionics is focused on the physics of a specific part of the battery, the electric current collector.

The current collector serves as the substrate of a battery’s electrodes. These small metal sheets, not dissimilar to aluminum foil, are layered around the “active material” – lithium ion, for example. //

“Using nanotechnology, we can find space that’s not well utilized and make it more efficient,” Biton says.

“That way we get more active material in the same space, which increases the range by keeping the contact between the metal and the active material very high while minimizing internal resistance, enabling higher currents.”