The funeral is taking place at Coventry Cathedral for Red Arrows pilot Flt Lt Sean Cunningham who died when he was ejected from his aircraft.

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Funeral for RAF Red Arrows pilot

The Osprey has survived after repeated safety problems during testing, years of delays, ballooning costs and tough questions about the aircraft’s utility.

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The Next War: Costly Osprey Hybrid Craft Symbol of Fight to Cut Pentagon

The plane smashed into a Ferris wheel outside Canberra, trapping a pair of children and two people in the aircraft as it hung suspended from the ride.

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Small Plane Crashes Into Ride During Festival in Australia

Coast Guard helicopters intercepted a small aircraft Monday as it entered restricted airspace near the Washington region, authorities said. It was the second interception of a small aircraft near restricted airspace in the area in three days. In the Monday incident, the HH-65 Dolphin helicopters under the direction of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) intercepted the civilian aircraft about 9 a.m. The helicopters made positive visual identification of the aircraft, which was permitted to continue to its destination, NORAD said in a statement. Read full article > >

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NORAD intercepts second plane in Washington area in three days

Lance Cpl. Blas Trevino, who was shot in the stomach, is rescued and taken by medevac out of Sangin in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. The Army’s Task Force Lift “Dust Off,” Charlie Company, needed two attempts to get him out as the crew was fired on and took five rounds of bullets in the aircraft’s tail. Read full article > >

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Marine rescued as medevac helicopter comes under fire

PARIS — Investigators have located and recovered the missing memory unit of the flight data recorder of a 2009 Air France flight — a remarkable deep-sea discovery they hope will explain why the aircraft went down in a remote area of the mid-Atlantic, killing all 228 people on board.

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Investigators find black box from 2009 crash of Air France flight from Rio to Paris

The Ministry of Defence auction website is inviting bids for the Royal Navy’s former flagship, the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal.

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Going once…Ark Royal for sale on auction site

The Ministry of Defence begins an investigation after a Tornado crew was forced to eject from their aircraft during landing at RAF Lossiemouth.

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MoD to probe second Tornado crash

by Bruce J. Holmes Since the early 1980s, I have had questions about an iconic picture depicting a dramatic, crimson wake vortex. This picture, with which my former NASA colleagues and I have a deep connection, provokes a telling of “the rest of the story.” This picture was taken during a NASA research program titled “Aerial Applications Research.” The red smoke screen through which the airplane flew was produced by igniting smoke bombs inside a length of hardware store gutter pipes (cleverly conceived by one of the researchers on the project). It took weeks of trial and error involving different colors of smoke and waiting for the perfect sky and wind to get the photographic conditions just right. I was standing to the right of the flight path of the Ayers Thrush Commander aircraft when the automated camera system snapped many images per second and the airplane roared by. The heritage of the picture starts under Jimmy Carter’s Administration — not a fact that would leap off the page for most of us. Carter, a peanut farmer from Georgia, brought to Washington D.C. a person who spent some time at NASA Headquarters, advocating for research that could help farmers with a vexing problem involving aerial applications (or crop dusting in the vernacular). The problem was that the flow behind the aircraft wing disrupts the desired even spread of seeds or chemicals and can carry spray to places that cause trouble (streams, for example). The physics of producing lift with a wing creates an aircraft wake which has a large vortex (tornado) generated at each wingtip. The strength of this vortex increases as aircraft weight increases. The flow from a wingtip of a crop duster picks up the seeds or chemicals and sends them far from the area directly below the aircraft. The strong spinning flow in the vortex can also cause a problem for other aircraft under some conditions. NASA and the FAA had done extensive research beginning in the 1970s and continuing today to understand and predict flow behind transport aircraft to determine safe separation distances (spacing of aircraft). We believed that this research could help the “Aerial Applications Research” program, perhaps, if the physics of the flow behind crop dusters could be understood, predicted, and tamed. Because we see computer images on TV of airplanes the size of counties flying over a map of the U.S., we come to think of the airspace as crowded. In reality, the airspace is not crowded. Instead, the runways and the arrival queue of airplanes lined up to land are crowded. The airplanes are spaced in the queue that keeps each safely following an airplane away from the spinning wake vortex of the previous airplane. Before this picture was taken, the NASA researchers involved pulled together all of the known theory and experimental information about the vortex, with the idea of developing a computer program to predict this flow pattern. (This was in the very early days of computing — think magnetic tape.) Along the way we met with a collection of interesting folks including the holder of a patent for “Distributor Wing Aerial Applications Aircraft.” Here is the original patent. The idea in this patent was to blow air and seed or fertilizer through channels inside the wing and use the vortex to spread the materials on a wider swath. This intriguing concept reached a limited level of fruition in Russia in the form of the Polish-built PZL (Milek) M-15, turbofan-powered agricultural aircraft. Our research led to the work with a startup computational methods company in Princeton, NJ, Continuum Dynamics, Inc., to develop a comprehensive CFD code for predicting where spray and seeds would fly behind the wing of a crop duster. That computer work led to the tests at NASA’s Wallops Flight Research Center, where we took this picture, to prove to ourselves that the computer method worked. It did. In the photo, underneath the flight path, plastic pipes are visible on which we rolled out sticky tape to collect glass beads of varying sizes that were released from movable canisters located under the wing. The results of the testing proved that the computer was an excellent tool for the task of designing spray systems on aircraft. That task resulted in the most famous vortex flow picture of all time (perhaps a little over-stated), shown here . This photo shows up virtually anywhere the subject of wake turbulence, wake vortex, and aircraft wakes is discussed. We never imagined the value of the photo back then. And now, as my fellow Minnesotan, Paul Harvey, used to say, you know “the rest of the story.” Bruce J. Holmes, retired from his NASA career in public sector entrepreneurialism, is now practicing the art in the private sector as CEO, NextGen AeroSciences. Image: NASA Langley Research Center.

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The Rest of the Story

A small aerial drone owned by the Mexican government crashed into an El Paso, Texas, backyard Friday. No one was injured. Authorities say the aircraft was likely conducting surveillance on cross-border drug and human smuggling, and the plane was…

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Mexican Drone Crashes in Texas

Earlier this week, the head of the Transportation Security Administration, John Pistole, told Jim Fallows and me that he was hoping to move his agency toward a more intelligent, discerning posture at our nation’s airports — less focus on the things a person is carrying, more focus on the person himself. This is why, he said, the TSA was modifying the way it screens pilots: Pilots were the biggest group of those I assessed as being low risk to civil aviation. I mean come on, they’re in charge of the yoke, they can put the plane down, like the co-pilot in Egypt Air in 990 did…. Instead of physical screening, we do an identity management base system to say, OK, this ID matches up with this airline’s current records as of five minutes ago or whatever it is, so if they got fired yesterday… And then the airline has the responsibility — shared responsibility — to make sure [of the identity] of anybody that is a licensed pilot with their airline, that they’re actually supposed to be in control of the aircraft, pilot or copilot. For me that’s the first step. Then you start looking at who are the other trusted travelers. What about flight attendants? So we made some modifications to the type of physical screening they go through. I can name another group the TSA could usefully define as trusted flyers: Ambassadors from  countries friendly to the United States : Meera Shankar, Indian ambassador to the U.S, was in Jackson last weekend as a guest of Mississippi State University. Despite presenting her formal diplomatic papers to TSA officers, Shankar was selected for an enhanced screening before her departing flight from Jackson-Evers International Airport — a move that has been decried by India’s leaders, as well as Mississippi officials. India’s foreign minister told media in New Delhi this morning that the Mississippi trip was the second time Shankar has been subjected to a pat-down in three months. “Let me be frank, this is unacceptable to India. We are going to take it up with the government of United States, and I hope that things could be resolved so that such unpleasant incidents do not recur,” said External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna, as quoted by several Indian newspapers. It’s a small group, ambassadors to the U.S. They carry identification, of course, and have high-level liaison relationships with the State Department. Perhaps the State Department could pull together a book of their photos, and distribute this book to TSA checkpoints around the country. Or perhaps the TSA official in charge of the Jackson airport could have googled “Meera Shankar” and seen proof that she was, indeed, India’s ambassador to the U.S., and not a dreaded sari-bomber. This episode isn’t even funny; it’s just pathetic.

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The Indian Ambassador’s Sari, a National Security Threat

A door panel fell off a passenger plane and damaged a wing as the aircraft took off from Southampton Airport, a report finds.

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Door fell off plane at take-off

Faced with widespread resistance to what some passengers see as personally intrusive air travel security measures, US officials are looking for ways to ease the demands on those who fly on commercial airliners. That starts with those flying the aircraft. Beginning in 2011, airline pilots will no longer have to go through scanners or be subject to full-body pat-downs, just as ticketed passengers now do. Instead, they’ll simply need to have their airline-issued ID checked by computer. read more

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Pilots To Be Exempt From Airport Scanners, Intrusive Pat-Downs

The Prime Minister has said he believes the device found on board a cargo plane at East Midlands airport was designed to go off on the aircraft.

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Bomb ‘meant to explode on plane’

An RAF Tornado test pilot tells an inquest that he heard an explosion before discovering his navigator had fallen out of the aircraft.

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‘Explosion’ before Tornado death