The history of engineering is a history of breaking barriers and in aviation we all know one barrier that seems easy on today’s planes to break but was a huge trouble in late 40s, and yes, it’s the sound barrier. Back in the World War II, the necessity of having faster and better planes than the enemy lead to a great jump in aviation technology: the mad…
Tag: EUROAVIA
Welcome on board, this is your airplane speaking…
As the years pass by, the technology around us is evolving day by day and even we have artificial intelligence on our smartphones or in our cars, aviation is lagging behind in this area. But what is AI? Artificial intelligence (AI) is a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing…
The future of supersonic flight?
The Concorde was that beautiful dream that could have ended better (Better not talking about the Tu144). After more than 25 years of supersonic flights, the Concorde was retired in 2003 and since then, nothing like it has ever been seen on airways. But it is time. Let’s look at what is going on. Possibly the most known option of this time is…
Where all started
Mankind has always been fascinated by the mirage of flight, but when was the first time we tried to soar into the sky? One of the fathers of aviation is Abbas Abu Al-Qassim Ibn Firnas Ibn Wirdas Al-Takurini but he is usually referred to as Abbás Ibn Firnás. He was born in what is known today as Ronda,…
The history of a Giant
The Boeing Company’s (BA) origins date back to 1916, when William E. Boeing founded Pacific Aero Products Co., after developing the single-engine, two-seat B&W seaplane with Conrad Westervelt. Renamed The Boeing Airplane Company in 1917, Its first source of income came from the U.S. military, as Boeing began building various military aircraft (patrol bombers were a mainstay) in…
A very rare tie
Today’s story is about one of those pioneers in aerospace industry, concretely about a very known company that revolutionized the history of aviation, not with iconic planes, not with powerful thrusters or revolutionary structures, yet with seats. However, Martin-Baker born as a plane manufacturer in the thirties being a collaboration between the engineer James Martin and the captain Valentine-Baker. The idea behind this enterprise was…
The queen of the skies
The first of its class Truly the first Jumbo jet, Boeing 747 also referred to as “The queen of the skies” is in service for over 50 years now. It was introduced in 1970 to the public with the now-defunct company Pan Am which wanted a large airplane that could lower the price of tickets for the average paid man. Boeing accepted the challenge and designed a four engines, two-deck airplane that now has decades of faithful service. The thing that differentiates the 747 from other airplanes is its specific hump that houses the cockpit, a feature that makes this airplane not only a great passenger aircraft but a cargo-capable one too. For Boeing 747 to become a reality, it needed a big factory which the company constructed in Everett, 50 km outside Seattle and almost three million cubic meters of earth had to be moved to make space for a queen palace. But the queen had its problems too, initially, the airplane did not meet the FAA requirements for the evacuation process which had to be done in 90 seconds, then, the pilots were not trained for such high deck airplanes so Boeing mounted a cabin above a truck to make pilots train for taxing. The 747 had problems with its structure also when tests showed that wings suffered oscillations under certain conditions but this was solved by reducing the stiffness of some wing components, however, a particularly severe high-speed flutter problem was solved only after depleted uranium counterweights were introduced in the outboard engine nacelles of the early 747s. This measure worried people, especially when these aircraft crashed, for example in 1992 in Amsterdam, the airplane had 282 kilograms of uranium in the tailplane. This and other problems did not stop Boeing from bringing the 747 to Paris Air Show in mid-1969, where it was displayed to the public for the first time. Before the end of development, the company was over $2 billion in debt to a banking syndicate, and if the airplane was a failure this could have meant the end of Boeing, but the gamble succeeded and Boeing had the only Jumbo Jet at the time and held a monopoly in this category for many years. The program’s final cost was 1 Billion US $ (7.4 Billion today). On January 15,…
DC-3, where it all began
Many times referred to as the aircraft that changed the world, the DC-3 had a great impact on the airline industry in the 1930s/1940 and on World War II. For that, we have to thank C.R. Smith, American Airlines CEO. Smith persuaded Donald Douglas through a marathon telephone call into designing an aircraft based on…
F-104, an Starfighter
Evolution is a curious process,while searching for wealth and advantages mistakes and weird combinations can happen. In aeronautics it happens too. Our todays look is for one of those weird steps in evolution, those that one is not sure to hate or love instead. I`m talking about a huge jump in aerospace technology, maybe too…
The ‘Caspian Sea Monster’
After being abandoned for decades, the Lun-Class Ekranoplan faces a new life as museum. The history of the “Caspian Sea Monster” as CIA called it, or KM (Korabl Maket, which in Russian means Ship-prototype, the original name), starts in the 1960’s when the Soviet Union experimented with ground effect vehicles, basically, airplane-like vehicles that fly only…