The first A stands for Aeronautics

NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration.  This week Jaiwon Shin, associate administrator for aeronautics, laid out six goals for the aeronautics side of the house.
1. Safe, efficient growth of operations. 
2. Low Boom Supersonics
3. Ultra efficient subsonic commercial aircraft.
4. Low Carbon propulsion
5. Real time system wide safety assurance
6.  Assured autonomy

Growth of operations probably means advanced navigation aids to permit more aircraft to fit into the air.  Sounds good, but the current bottleneck to more flights, is the lack of runways to handle them.  Building new runways is not an NASA mission (it's FAA) and the major difficulty is the armies of NIMBYs who raise political hell every time airport expansion is proposed.

Low Boom Supersonics is more work on cleverly shaped aircraft that make a less noisy sonic boom.  It's interesting,  and a fine science project, but we tried supersonic transports 40 years ago.  They cost too much, both to buy and to operate.

Ultra efficient sub sonic commercial air craft.   At least they limited the project to subsonic.  Boeing and Airbus all ready put a lot of work into this, both companies have higher efficiency versions of their bread and butter airliners under development.  What can NASA bring to the party?

Low Carbon propulsion.  We looked into nuclear powered aircraft back in the fifties.  It got as far as test firing a prototype nuclear engine.  The program was dropped because of radiation safety concerns and the excessive weight and marginal thrust of the Kiwi A engine.  The other  avenue is solar electric propulsion.  There isn't enough energy in sunlight to achieve much more than a pedal power level of performance. 

Real time system wide safety assurance.  Not quite sure what that means, unless they are talking about a computerized system for accident reports, safety advisories, Notices to Airman, and so forth.

Assured autonomy.  We think this means figuring out how to allow unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) to fly in US airspace.   Anti collision policy right now is "See and be seen".  Pilots are expected to look out for and avoid other aircraft.  UAV's are not so good at this, the microprocessors don't scan the sky. UAV's were invented to fly missions too dangerous to send real air crew on.  I was not aware of any places in US air space where the flak is that bad.  Are the druggies using shoulder fired anti aircraft missiles against the Border Patrol? 

Jaiwon Shin is hoping to get $560 million to spend on this stuff.  Down from $1.7 billion in 1998.  Aviation Week feels funding should be increased.  No surprise there. 

In real life, the improvements from the 707 of 1957 to the 787 of 2013 lie in better materials to make the plane from.  Better turbine blade material that lets the turbines run hotter, and better structural materials (carbon fiber) that reduce weight.  I note an absence of any material science research in this NASA program.

Firefox and Internet Explorer tie.

The two rival browsers are neck and neck with 31 % of page views here.  Chrome is coming on strong with 20 %.   Windows is still the dominant operating system, followed by Linux (12%) and Macintosh at 6%. 

Choppers are death traps

Since 1986 there have been 13 crashes of helicopters servicing oil platforms in the North Sea.  127 passengers and crew have died.  The last crash was just last week.  Five US built Sikorsky helicopters and 8 Eurocopter machines were lost.  All the crashes since 2009 were Eurocopter.  European authorities grounded the Eurocopter EC225 in  October 2012 and kept it grounded until just a few months ago. 
   Failure of the main gearbox was responsible for six accidents.  Full power of the engines, 5000 to 10000 horsepower flows thru the gearbox which has to gear the 10,000 RPM of the turbines down to 100 RPM or less for the rotor.  This is a terrible strain, the slightest weakness, stripping of gear teeth, a crack in the casing, loss of oil pressure, bearing failure, anything, and the gearbox blows apart leaving the helicopter hanging in mid air without power. 
   Two helicopters were struck by lightening and two other accidents look like pilot error.  There was one engine fire, one loss of control (reason not given) and last week's accident where all that is known is the chopper lost power and ditched two miles away from Sumburgh airport.
   It's gotten so bad that oil rig workers are reluctant to travel by chopper.  Oil companies are chartering ships to transport their workers.  This is less than ideal, a three hour flight becomes a couple of rough days at sea.  Disembarking from a pitching vessel onto a platform in bad weather is quite dangerous. 

Do stealth fighters need active radar jammers?

Some say no.  The idea of stealth is to become invisible on radar.  If the stealth aircraft starts radiating, it can be a give away, similar to violating radio silence at sea.  Jamming can give your position away.  On the other hand,  stealth or no stealth, there comes a point when enemy radar sees you, and is guiding missiles your way.  In this case a range gate stealer, an angle track deflector, a sidelobe jammer, or what ever else has been dreamed up since Viet Nam, can save your bacon.  If you have the equipment on board that is.  If you don't, best to check your ejection seat. 
   The Aviation Week article goes on to criticize the F16 for lacking internal jammers,  and the F15 for having old internal jammers.   Back when I was on the flight line, you put your jammers in pods under the wing.  That way you could upgrade your jammer to meet new threats by just loading a new pod, rather than rewiring the entire aircraft to install new internal jammers. The jammers are most effective against missiles.  A good radar man can often sort the target out from the jamming.  Missiles are dumber than radar men.
  What set off this Aviation Week commentary?  The Malaysian Air Force showed up with new model Russian jamming pods on their Russian built fighters.  The accompanying photo shows a Sukhoi 30 fighter so old that the twin rudders are mounted straight up and down.  The simplest stealth design would have canted the rudders off the vertical, so radar reflections would go down toward the ground, rather than straight back to the enemy radar set.  This bit of stealth has been well known, even to Russians, for at least 10 years, maybe longer. 

What matters is Syria, not American credibility

The TV has been all Syria, all day.  Being newsies, they get a lot wrong.  They yack a lot about credibility and what the rest of the world thinks about America.  But intervention in Syria must be decided upon what intervention will do to Syria, not what the rest of the world thinks about us.
   Does anyone think we can just do a fireworks display?   When we intervene against one side, we are handing victory to the other side.  If we zap Bashar Assad, much as he deserves it, we tip the civil war to the opposition, who seems to be mostly Al  Quada.  Have you seen the video of an opposition soldier disemboweling a fallen soldier, and eating the heart and liver, raw?  Do you want to put  those people in charge of Syria?  Think about it. 
   Obama has convinced the entire world that the Americans are flakes.  Intervention is Syria isn't going to make them think better of us.

Words of the Weasel, Part 33

"Military grade" firearms.   Phrase used by anti gun types to imply that some guns are more dangerous, more worth of being banned.  In the real world, a gun is a gun, they all shoot bullets, and bullets hurt.  It is true that guns made for the Army are more plainly finished than guns made for commercial sale.  But a plain finish doesn't effect the shooting quality of a gun. 

Flying a satellite in atmosphere

The Mars Atmospheric and Volatile Evolution  ("Maven")  mission, getting ready to launch for Mars, is planning to do just that.  To investigate the Martian upper atmosphere, the satellite will be placed in an elliptical orbit around Mars, which dips into the Martian upper atmosphere to take readings.  The orbit will go within 150 kilometers of the surface.
   That's about the altitude that the old Mercury capsules orbited at.   On Earth, there is enough air left above that altitude to form the ionosphere, important to HF radio transmission.  Clearly the experimenters believe there is a Martian ionosphere, thick enough for Maven's instruments to take a reading on.
   They didn't say how long this can go on before atmospheric drag pulls the satellite down. 
   They mentioned that Mars used to have a strong magnetic field which disappeared some time in the distant past.  That's a new one on me.  It is thought that the magnetic field used to shield Mars from the solar wind.  When the field went away, they think the solar wind stripped away most of the Martian atmosphere.  Just how the ancient Martian magnetic field was discovered, and what might make it go away wasn't discussed. 
   Anyhow they hope to use Maven to measure what in the upper atmosphere might be related to, or causes of, Mars' lack of air and water.