(Fox News) Malaysia Airlines confirms an incident following reports that a passenger plane was shot down by a surface to air missile in Ukraine near the Russian border, according to Sky News.
An adviser to Ukraine's Interior Minister told The Associated press that the plane, carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew people onboard, was shot down.
The adviser also told Russian news agency Interfax that all onboard have been killed.
The plane – believed to be a Boeing 777 -- was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with, Sky News reports, citing Interfax.
A spokesman for Malaysia Airlines confirmed “an incident” on board one of its flights and is expected to release a statement soon.
“Malaysia Airlines has lost contact of MH17 from Amsterdam. The last known position was over Ukrainian airspace. More details to follow,” read a tweet from Malaysia Airlines’ account.
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Showing posts with label jet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jet. Show all posts
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Missing Airplane Flew On for Hours
By Andy Pasztor
(The Wall Street Journal) U.S. investigators suspect that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 stayed in the air for about four hours past the time it reached its last confirmed location, according to two people familiar with the details, raising the possibility that the plane could have flown on for hundreds of additional miles under conditions that remain murky.
Aviation investigators and national security officials believe the plane flew for a total of five hours based on data automatically downloaded and sent to the ground from the Boeing Co. 777's engines as part of a routine maintenance and monitoring program.
That raises a host of new questions and possibilities about what happened aboard the widebody jet carrying 239 people, which vanished from civilian air-traffic control radar over the weekend, about one hour into a flight to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur.
Six days after the mysterious disappearance prompted a massive international air and water search that so far hasn't produced any results, the investigation appears to be broadening in scope.
U.S. counterterrorism officials are pursuing the possibility that a pilot or someone else on board the plane may have diverted it toward an undisclosed location after intentionally turning off the jetliner's transponders to avoid radar detection, according to one person tracking the probe.
The investigation remains fluid, and it isn't clear whether investigators have evidence indicating possible terrorism or espionage. So far, U.S. national security officials have said that nothing specifically points toward terrorism, though they haven't ruled it out.
But the huge uncertainty about where the plane was headed, and why it apparently continued flying so long without working transponders, has raised theories among investigators that the aircraft may have been commandeered for a reason that appears unclear to U.S. authorities. Some of those theories have been laid out to national security officials and senior personnel from various U.S. agencies, according to one person familiar with the matter.
At one briefing, according to this person, officials were told investigators are actively pursuing the notion that the plane was diverted "with the intention of using it later for another purpose."
As of Wednesday it remained unclear whether the plane reached an alternate destination or if it ultimately crashed, potentially hundreds of miles from where an international search effort has been focused.
In those scenarios, neither mechanical problems, pilot mistakes nor some other type of catastrophic incident caused the 250-ton plane to mysteriously vanish from radar.
The latest revelations come as local media reported that Malaysian police visited the home of at least one of the two pilots.
Boeing officials and a Malaysia Airlines official declined to comment.
The engines' onboard monitoring system is provided by their manufacturer, Rolls-Royce PLC, and it periodically sends bursts of data about engine health, operations and aircraft movements to facilities on the ground.
Rolls-Royce couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
As part of its maintenance agreements, Malaysia Airlines transmits its engine data live to Rolls-Royce for analysis. The system compiles data from inside the 777's two Trent 800 engines and transmits snapshots of performance, as well as the altitude and speed of the jet.
Those snippets are compiled and transmitted in 30-minute increments, said one person familiar with the system. According to Rolls-Royce's website, the data is processed automatically "so that subtle changes in condition from one flight to another can be detected."
The engine data is being analyzed to help determine the flight path of the plane after the transponders stopped working. The jet was originally headed for China, and its last verified position was half way across the Gulf of Thailand.
A total flight time of five hours after departing Kuala Lumpur means the Boeing 777 could have continued for an additional distance of about 2,200 nautical miles, reaching points as far as the Indian Ocean, the border of Pakistan or even the Arabian Sea, based on the jet's cruising speed.
Earlier Wednesday, frustrations over the protracted search for the missing plane mounted as both China and Vietnam vented their anger over what they viewed as poor coordination of the effort.
Government conflicts and national arguments over crises are hardly unique to the Flight 370 situation, but some air-safety experts said they couldn't recall another recent instance of governments publicly feuding over search procedures during the early phase of an international investigation... (continued)
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Tuesday, April 24, 2012
How Lockheed’s Skunk Works Got into the Stealth Fighter Business
How do you hide an airplane behind a bird? Very skillfully. Lt. Col. William B. O'Connor (ret.) flew the F-117 Nighthawk during the Bosnia Conflict, and in Stealth Fighter, he explains the history, operation, and soul America's most advanced stealth jet.
(Gizmodo) While the United States had never embraced a defensive mindset and had only fielded one strategic SAM system to that point, the Nike-Hercules dating from the 1950s, and one real medium-range tactical system, the HAWK (homing all the way killer), the Soviets had fielded over fifteen different systems. One Soviet SAM system was even armed with nuclear warheads.
It had become clear that there had to be a better way. So in 1974, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a program known as Project Harvey (named after the 6 feet 3 1/2 inches tall invisible white rabbit from the play of the same name). The ultimate goal was to develop a combat aircraft with as low a radar signature as possible. Five aerospace corporations had been contracted a million dollars each to give it their best shot. Surprisingly, Lockheed hadn't been among them. It was only an accidental tip-off that allowed Lockheed's Ben Rich to lobby for inclusion. Rich had been an engineer on the secret U-2 and SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft and had by then advanced to become Lockheed's successor to the famous Kelly Johnson as director of the Skunk Works. The "Skunk Works" is the official alias for the department responsible for all of Lockheed's highly secret advanced development projects. It was formed in 1943 to build America's first jet fighter, the P-80, and numerous other projects that belong to the shadow world of military operations.
By the time Rich had gotten wind of Project Harvey, there was no money left for another developmental contract. So Lockheed was offered a shot-for a dollar. But Rich wanted in and wisely turned down the token dollar. He knew that any new technologies developed with company funds would then be proprietary. Lockheed was famous for building small fleets of extremely advanced aircraft-often used for highly secretive missions. During World War II, they had built the United States' first operational subsonic jet fighter, the P-80. They skipped the Mach-1 era altogether and jumped right to fielding the United States' first fighter capable of speeds in excess of Mach 2, the F-104 Star Fighter. Along the way came the high-flying U-2, the higher-flying SR-71, the hypersonic D-21 drone (which would ride piggyback on an SR-71 until released), and other things not yet named.
In Rich's own words, the unsung hero of Lockheed's effort was an anonymous staff mathematician and electrical engineer named Denys Overholser. Overholser and his mentor, another mathematician named Bill Schroeder, had discussed the possibilities of utilizing some of the equations associated with optical scattering (how electromagnetic waves bounce off variously shaped objects) on this project. Both had the rather odd hobby of reading obscure Russian mathematics papers and had made the ultimate "nerd's nerd" discovery. They had stumbled across a paper published in Moscow a decade earlier titled "Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction." It had been written by Pyotr Ufimtsev, the Soviet's chief scientist at the Moscow Institute of Radio Engineering and the last in a long line of scientists developing a long series of wave equations originally derived centuries ago by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
The U.S. intelligence community had helped translate this research and brought it to the West. The paper was in no way classified or related to weapons development at all. It was purely theoretical math. Years later, Ufimtsev immigrated to the United States to teach at the University of California, Los Angeles, and only then discovered his inadvertent contribution to the development of stealth aircraft.
The equations that Ufimtsev had developed made the reflections of radio waves off hard surfaces predictable. Not invisible, transparent, or tactical in any way-just predictable. The problem for Lockheed was that the calculations were so ferociously difficult that the most advanced supercomputers in the world at the time could only compute results for flat surfaces. Any attempt to perform the calculations for the curved surfaces you would find on a conventional aircraft-well, those machines would still be grinding away toward a solution today.
Schroeder recognized how these equations could be applied to Lockheed's current project. The solution was not even to attempt to design an aircraft with any curved surfaces, but to build one with dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of individual flat triangular and rectangular plates. Then the challenge was to compute the reflection from each and every flat surface before adding them all together to build a picture of the aircraft's total radar signature. Once you knew where every bit of radar reflection was coming from, you could then reorient those individual plates so that the reflection would go off in a direction away from the radar looking at it.
The process became known as "faceting." And that became the real secret-not to absorb all the radar or make the plane somehow transparent, but to make the plane's signature predictable. That predictability could then be used to shape a tactically useful aircraft. The jet would also be covered in thin sheets of RAM, but the bulk of the stealth effect was achieved by its shape.
Traditionally, a single engineering specialty will take the lead during the design of a new aircraft. An aerodynamicist may be in charge of pushing through a new wing or fuselage shape, as happened with the early delta wings and area-ruled fuselages of the "Century Series" of interceptors. Sometimes it may be the power-plant guy: "Here's the engine we're going to use, build us a jet fighter for it." This is how the P-80 came about. Occasionally it may be the armaments people- the A-10 is fundamentally a massive 30mm Gatling cannon with a plane built around it. In this particular case, this was the first time the lead was owned by an electrical engineer.
The computer program designed by Overholser's team to make these calculations was called Echo- 1. Armed with that tool, the first test subject, the Hopeless Diamond, was built. It was described as a diamond for obvious reasons and "hopeless" for its aerodynamic qualities (or rather, its complete lack thereof).
Early radar testing of the Hopeless Diamond turned out to be staggeringly successful. The White Sands experimental radar range near Holloman AFB was used. When the radar was fired up for the initial testing, the only thing that showed up was the reflection of the pole on which the test model was supposed to be mounted. Assuming that the model had fallen off the pole, the radar operators sent technicians downrange to fix the problem. To their surprise, the ten-foot model was still in place.
To test the model at all, Lockheed then had to design an invisible "stealth pole" to mount the model utilizing the same technology as the proposed fighter. The results were once again astounding, and incredulous USAF officials were called in to witness and verify the data.
The first opportunity to impress these officials almost resulted in embarrassment. When the radars were turned on, the reflections, while still very small by airplane standards, were orders of magnitude larger than what the USAF officials had been led to expect. They could still clearly see a small radar return from where the model was mounted.
While the Lockheed engineers were trying to explain this discrepancy, a radio call came in from a technician downrange. He reported that a bird was perched on the ten-foot model. The quick reply was an order to blow the horn of the pickup truck the guy was sitting in. As the startled bird flew away, the radar reflection on the test scope disappeared.
The very idea that a combat aircraft could be made so invisible as to hide behind a bird was an opportunity that couldn't be passed up. Everything associated with the program became classified at the highest levels. The program was transferred from DARPA to the USAF special projects office. The word "stealth" was forbidden to be mentioned in any unclassified document. And in April 1976, the Ford administration gave Lockheed the go-ahead for a full-scale aircraft. The Skunk Works was officially in the stealth fighter business.
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Friday, October 24, 2008
The new Concorde: Supersonic jet will get you from London to New York in just three hours
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 7:13 PM on 23rd October 2008 
Last updated at 7:13 PM on 23rd October 2008
It is five years ago almost to the day that Concorde approached Heathrow airport under much fanfare and nostalgia on its last official flight before heading off into retirement.
In a move which for some people signalled a step backwards for technology, the Anglo-French aviation-engineering masterpiece touched down and with it the chance for people to experience supersonic air travel.
But now, an American firm is on the cusp of re-imagining the supersonic dream and confidently plans to have supersonic commercial aircraft back in the skies as a reality by 2015.
The future: It's hoped the £47.5million jet will be on the market by 2015
The Aerion Supersonic Jet may not have the same grace and style and the size of the great Concorde, but the Aerion group are so sure that the plane will fly that they have pencilled in test flights for 2012, with transatlantic testing to follow soon after.
Reaching a top speed of mach 1.6 the jet will once again put New York within three hours flight time of London.
The company are so confident in the design that they claim to have 50 interested parties, who have all paid the £150,000 deposit.
‘It simply will change the way global business is conducted. Flight times in general will be reduced about 40 percent,’ says Jeff Miller, chief spokesperson for Aerion.
‘Business and government leaders will be able to travel more in pursuit of opportunity. And they will feel a lot better when they step off the airplane.’ As everyone remembers Concorde was far from the budget airline options that are available now.
Historic: Concorde takes off for the last time from New York on October 24, 2003
The Aerion Supersonic Jet will be no different.
‘It’s priced at £47.5million - each,’ explains Miller.
‘To date, Aerion has more than 50 letters of intent secured by £150,000 deposits.
‘The cost per nautical mile will be similar to today’s large business jets.’ The biggest advance in technology that the Aerion has improved upon Concorde is in its noise reduction ability.
Concorde was famously and some would say intentionally scuppered by jealous Americans who banned the plane from flying over U.S. territory at the speed of sound.
This immediately removed any advantage the small plane had over its larger competitors and ended the supersonic age before it had begun.
The Aerion aircraft can successfully fly at nearly the speed of sound without any significant noise impact and more amazingly has the ability to fly at mach 1.15 without emanating a sonic boom.
The first Aerion Supersonic Business Jet, shown in a design above
‘This is due to the patented supersonic natural laminar flow (SNLF) technology that substantially reduces drag at supersonic as well as high-subsonic cruise speeds,’ says Jeff Miller.
Despite the fact that the Aerion is obviously only ever going to be flown by those who can afford it, the very idea that commercial supersonic airliners are going back into the skies will please the enthusiasts.
‘Aviation progress has always been synonymous with an increase in speed. To be flying more slowly in this century than in the last seems like a step backwards.,’ says Miller.
Admitting a huge debt of gratitude to Concorde, Miller impresses that the Aerion jet is a significant leap forward in aircraft technology.
Luxury: The comfortable Aerion Jet will ferry private buyers at speeds of mach 1.6, meaning New York will once again be within three hours flight time of London
‘Concorde was a beautiful machine and a product of its time, but technology has moved forward and new designs such as the Aerion jet offer greater efficiency.
‘Concorde was withdrawn due to high operating cost, which Aerion technology has successfully overcome,’ says Jeff.
Aerion will start small but hope to have the technology and the capital to one day expand their operation beyond smaller aircraft to larger Concorde sized vehicles.
‘With the success of the Aerion supersonic business jet, we expect to see supersonic flight becoming commonplace.
‘With market acceptance it will be possible to fund the development of airliner variants, offering time savings to a much larger group of travellers,’ says Jeff.
As incredible as it seems that Concorde was flying only five years ago, Aerion will be tearing across our skies in four, heralding a return to the skies of supersonic travel.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
World's Priciest Stealth Plane Takes First Run to Vertical Landing
Needing a boost after a negative report leak, Lockheed Martin tested a prototype of its latest Joint Strike Fighter for the Marines today—a supersonic F-35 that lands like a chopper (with super lift engines) and thinks like a pilot (with a HAL-esque brain).
Published on: June 11, 2008
The Air Force's A-1 model of Lockheed's stealth F-35 fighter jet has been flying for more than a year, but the Marines' next-gen F-35B took off for the first time today. (Photograph Courtesy of F-35 Global Industry Team)
The skies over Fort Worth, Texas, hosted a historic aviation milestone today when the most expensive plane on Earth—a modded version of the F-35 Lightning II that lands vertically like a helicopter—made its first flight. Its pilot certainly had the chops to do the job: He learned to fly short take-off/vertical landing (STOVL) airplanes when Jimmy Carter was president.
Retired Royal Air Force squadron leader Graham Tomlinson, now employed by BAE Flight Systems, flew AV-8 Harriers (the first STOVL warplanes to see action) for 28 years, including time in the late 1980s as a test pilot qualifying the FA-2 Sea Harrier for carrier operations. And today he became the first ever to fly the prototype of the F-35B, a next-gen Lockheed Martin aircraft built for three branches of the U.S military and a host of international partners. The program, at nearly $300 billion, is the most expensive weapons acquisition program in history.
Flight testing has evolved significantly in the years since Tomlinson first flew STOVLs. Computers have so many responsibilities on these planes that they've taken some of the tactile feedback away from pilots. "In the Harrier family, the pilot took care of the aircraft," Tomlinson says. "With the F-35, the airplane takes care of the pilot."
The F-35, known widely as the Joint Strike Fighter, comes in three versions with the same fuselage, identical wing sweeps, and similar tail shapes. The first, a conventional Air Force airplane, A-1, has been flying for more than a year. The STOVL B-model, which will fly for the first time this week, is designed for the U.S. Marine Corps. The last C model will be a larger airplane more suitable for the Navy. (C models will be bulky enough to handle the stresses of the sharp stops associated with hooking cables while landing on aircraft carrier decks.)
Any armed force that operates from ships smaller than aircraft carriers has a soft spot for vertical landers because they can take off from short runways and land on a dime. That's why the U.S. Marines want a stealthy, STOVL airplane that can provide close air support and electronic-jamming missions.
The STOVL F-35 version uses a lift fan engine that can generate 40,000 pounds of lifting force—170 percent more powerful than current-generation STOVL fighters. At the heart of the system is an articulated exhaust outlet that bends to face the ground to support the airplane as it descends. [Check out video of a lift fan engine test from last month here.]
The lift fan that makes it possible for the plane to land vertically is located just 3 ft. behind the pilot's helmet, Tomlinson notes. "When that spins up, you hear this subdued rumble below your head," he says.
The British Harrier was designed in the 1960s, with constant upgrades possibly extending its life to 2020. Pilots who didn't know the airplane's quirks were in real danger, as opposed to the "fly-by-wire" approach of modern aircraft that keeps pilots out of trouble. "There were golden rules for flying Harriers, like ‘You can't let the sideslip or angle of attack build up, or you'll quickly end up killed,' " he says. "You had that drilled into your forehead during training."
In the case of the F-35, the airplane itself is built to react to pilots' commands and follow the golden rules, allowing pilots to concentrate on tactics and mission-related tasks instead of flying. But when a pilot wants this plane to turn a certain direction or pitch, the aircraft itself figures out the best mechanical way to make it happen.
This translates to less pressure for test pilots and far more for flight engineers. The F-35's engineers have filled the airplane's brain with models of flight situations. During the plane's testing phase the engineers need to make sure that those models match reality. It's a long process: F-35B engine and flight tests will stretch until 2009. Today's flight didn't feature an actual STOVL landing, but instead calculated the airplane's handling in conventional flight. Vertical landing test will begin early next year, Lockheed officials estimate.
June has already proven itself as a month of highs and lows for the Joint Strike Fighter program. Several countries, including Israel and Turkey, have deepened their commitments to the program. At the same time, a defense watchdog group released a leaked report from Defense Contract Management Agency that alleged that lead contractor Lockheed Martin lacked control over the project and could not accurately project its costs. Lockheed responds that the complaints are old and have been addressed, but on Capitol Hill, with a new administration on the way into the executive branch, there is blood in the political waters. The fighter program could use some good news this week.
Enter Tomlinson, whose flight will mark a visible milestone in the airplane's development. Flying this plane will be different from flying the F-35A: An F-35B demonstration model is a far heavier plane, but its engine should more than compensate for the girth. "It will still accelerate like a dingbat," says Tomlinson, his pinched English accent somehow making the phrase make sense. "It will still feel sporty in flying, but it will be more stable."
Check back for footage from the flight test later today. In the meantime, this clip below shows Lockeed's 2001 F-35 prototype executing a STOVL landing.
Flight testing has evolved significantly in the years since Tomlinson first flew STOVLs. Computers have so many responsibilities on these planes that they've taken some of the tactile feedback away from pilots. "In the Harrier family, the pilot took care of the aircraft," Tomlinson says. "With the F-35, the airplane takes care of the pilot."
The F-35, known widely as the Joint Strike Fighter, comes in three versions with the same fuselage, identical wing sweeps, and similar tail shapes. The first, a conventional Air Force airplane, A-1, has been flying for more than a year. The STOVL B-model, which will fly for the first time this week, is designed for the U.S. Marine Corps. The last C model will be a larger airplane more suitable for the Navy. (C models will be bulky enough to handle the stresses of the sharp stops associated with hooking cables while landing on aircraft carrier decks.)
Any armed force that operates from ships smaller than aircraft carriers has a soft spot for vertical landers because they can take off from short runways and land on a dime. That's why the U.S. Marines want a stealthy, STOVL airplane that can provide close air support and electronic-jamming missions.
The STOVL F-35 version uses a lift fan engine that can generate 40,000 pounds of lifting force—170 percent more powerful than current-generation STOVL fighters. At the heart of the system is an articulated exhaust outlet that bends to face the ground to support the airplane as it descends. [Check out video of a lift fan engine test from last month here.]
The lift fan that makes it possible for the plane to land vertically is located just 3 ft. behind the pilot's helmet, Tomlinson notes. "When that spins up, you hear this subdued rumble below your head," he says.
The British Harrier was designed in the 1960s, with constant upgrades possibly extending its life to 2020. Pilots who didn't know the airplane's quirks were in real danger, as opposed to the "fly-by-wire" approach of modern aircraft that keeps pilots out of trouble. "There were golden rules for flying Harriers, like ‘You can't let the sideslip or angle of attack build up, or you'll quickly end up killed,' " he says. "You had that drilled into your forehead during training."
In the case of the F-35, the airplane itself is built to react to pilots' commands and follow the golden rules, allowing pilots to concentrate on tactics and mission-related tasks instead of flying. But when a pilot wants this plane to turn a certain direction or pitch, the aircraft itself figures out the best mechanical way to make it happen.
This translates to less pressure for test pilots and far more for flight engineers. The F-35's engineers have filled the airplane's brain with models of flight situations. During the plane's testing phase the engineers need to make sure that those models match reality. It's a long process: F-35B engine and flight tests will stretch until 2009. Today's flight didn't feature an actual STOVL landing, but instead calculated the airplane's handling in conventional flight. Vertical landing test will begin early next year, Lockheed officials estimate.
June has already proven itself as a month of highs and lows for the Joint Strike Fighter program. Several countries, including Israel and Turkey, have deepened their commitments to the program. At the same time, a defense watchdog group released a leaked report from Defense Contract Management Agency that alleged that lead contractor Lockheed Martin lacked control over the project and could not accurately project its costs. Lockheed responds that the complaints are old and have been addressed, but on Capitol Hill, with a new administration on the way into the executive branch, there is blood in the political waters. The fighter program could use some good news this week.
Enter Tomlinson, whose flight will mark a visible milestone in the airplane's development. Flying this plane will be different from flying the F-35A: An F-35B demonstration model is a far heavier plane, but its engine should more than compensate for the girth. "It will still accelerate like a dingbat," says Tomlinson, his pinched English accent somehow making the phrase make sense. "It will still feel sporty in flying, but it will be more stable."
Check back for footage from the flight test later today. In the meantime, this clip below shows Lockeed's 2001 F-35 prototype executing a STOVL landing.
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