Table of contents for October-November 2018 in Air & Space

EARLY THIS YEAR, 27 WOMEN became the largest group to form two distinct formations during a high-speed, head-first skydive (a “two-point sequential vertical” in skydiving parlance). The February 9 jump over Sebastian, Florida, ended the first meeting of the Fly Girls, a group organized to enable women skydivers to exchange experiences with female athletes from othersports.(Joining for a discussion panel—but not the jump—were soccer goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris, skier Grete Eliasson, and wakeboarder Meagan Ethell.) Legendary professional skydiver Amy Chmelecki—veteran of some 18,000 jumps—organized the Fly Girls to help women find a place amid a sport that skews heavily male. It wasn’t her first rodeo: In 2016, she led a record-breaking,65-woman,single-formation vertical jump (pictured here). Most of the Fly Girls who set the recent record also jumped with Chmelecki in 2016.…

COULD AN AIRCRAFT stay aloft forever? Two companies are working on it. On August 8, the Zephyr S HAPS (High Altitude Pseudo-Satellite) landed after a record 26 days in flight. The solar-electric Airbus drone will offer “persistent surveillance” capabilities. Luminati Aerospace claims it can achieve perpetual flight with flocks of its solar-powered drone, the Substrata. It recently tested vortex formation flying software inspired by geese that showed a 79 percent power savings. Machines haven’t beat nature yet, though: One bird, the common swift, can stay aloft for 10 months.…

What were the biggest challenges in designing Stratolaunch? In this case, it is the size. We had to manage the disassembly of two 747s, keeping all the useful components cataloged and tracked. The logistics for shipping, transporting, and assembly of the larger airliner pieces is a constant challenge. It certainly got easier as we went along, but we did experience a learning curve. You used numerous parts from two donor 747s. Was that the plan all along? Yes, because as the design progressed, the operational history of the 747 provided solutions to the challenges of designing a large airplane. For example, we used several hydraulic actuators for the flight control surfaces on the Stratolaunch. The flight control actuators in the 747 have addressed many safety concerns by their use of…

NESTLED AMONG the pre-1920 aircraft at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center are two recent arrivals, donated by the late Javier Arango. Unlike their heavy metal neighbors, they’re small, fabric-covered airplanes from 100 years ago and more. Each is an icon of early flight—a Blériot XI, from the years before World War I; and a Sopwith Camel, perhaps the most famous fighter of the war. Arango, a scholar of World War I aviation, had amassed one of the world’s finest collections. A board member and donor to the Museum, he had recently sponsored its World War I centennial programs, including an art exhibit, concerts, family days, and a film festival. Arango died last April. His final gifts to the American people were the impeccably restored…

BY THE TIME THEY GOT to the International Rocketry Challenge at the Farnborough International Air Show in England last July, the four students from Creekview High School in Canton, Georgia, knew precisely what their rocket could do. They had the data. Before they could make it to Farnborough, though, they had to win the national competition in The Plains, Virginia, 50 miles from Washington, D.C., where their rocket, according to contest rules, carried two raw eggs to an altitude of 800 feet and returned them safely to Earth within 41 to 43 seconds of liftoff. Of the 100 teams competing from 28 states and the District of Columbia on that May day, the Creekview four—Brayden Dodge, Warren Teachworth, Kennedy Hugo, and Aiden McChesney—came closest to the altitude and duration targets.…

JON BLANCHETTE IS NOT THE KIND OF GUY to give up on a project once he’s started it. In 1953, he took a job as an engineer with General Motors and stayed with the company for 34 years. During that time, he took a five-year leave of absence to serve as an officer in the U.S. Navy in charge of ship construction before returning to GM and transitioning to the Naval Reserve for another 19 years. So when he became the owner of a MiG-17 that was destined for a scrapyard in Poland, he was going to finish its restoration, no matter what obstacles he ran into. And he ran into a bunch. Without corporate sponsorship or private donors, Blanchette worked on the single-engine, swept-wing jet fighter for more than…

AS A KID I WAS OBSESSED with World War I aviation—or with what I imagined it to be. I hung pictures of the Red Baron, built Sopwith Camel models, and played computer flight simulators while wearing homemade goggles. Around 1991, when I was 10 years old, my father suggested that I write to the League of World War I Overseas Flyers, a veterans organization of surviving American aviators from that war. I threw myself into the task. First, I wrote what amounted to a fan letter to the president of the league, 95-year-old Captain Ira Milton Jones. Shortly thereafter, Captain Jones sent me a packet of information with a cordial, encouraging letter. I was thrilled by having his autograph—a real World War I pilot!—but the most useful item he sent…

Ecker Flying Boat Amateur passion, pro-level skill THOUGH ITS RESEMBLANCE to the 1911 Curtiss F is more than casual, Herman A. Ecker’s Flying Boat was the product of a self-taught tinkerer who even by the primitive standards of powered flight’s first decade was working with limited resources. He attached his airplane’s muslin covering with carpet tacks and sealed the fabric with wallpaper glue that tended to dissolve in wet weather. Repurposed motorcycle spokes served as turnbuckles to keep tension in the bracing and control wires. Ecker modified his homebuilt continually throughout its brief, thinly-documented operational life, taking members of the public for short flights at fairs and exhibitions. In the 1930s, Ecker told a reporter he’d flown the airplane for about three years after building it in late 1912 or…

Problems on a Different Scale I read with interest your article “Night Stalker” (Aug. 2018). I build scale models and recently completed a model of the Heinkel He 219. I also had difficulty in mounting the radar arrays on my He 219, but my problems were with the model being 1/48th scale; not quite what the National Air and Space Museum’s restoration crew went through. RICHARD F. MCCLOUGHAN Murfreesboro, Tennessee Memories of Lacey Lady Your article “A B-17 Came to Roost in Oregon” (Aug. 2018) brought back a flood of memories. In 1954, my younger brother, age 7, and I (age 11) played in Lacey’s B-17 as it sat atop his gas station just outside Portland. We played bomber pilots in the very complete-with-instruments cockpit and blister gunners…

NEARLY 500,000 PEOPLE die from malaria each year, and more than 200 million are infected worldwide. Studies show that basic technology—insecticide and the use of bed nets—can greatly reduce infections, but it can be hard to predict exactly where an outbreak will occur and where countries should deploy limited public health resources. That state of unpreparedness is about to change: Using data from satellites, scientists are now refining a method to predict malaria outbreaks three months in advance. The NASA-funded project focuses primarily on Peru, which reported roughly 65,000 cases of malaria in 2014. (While 90 percent of all malaria cases in the Western Hemisphere occur in the Amazon, distribution isn’t uniform; infections in Brazil are decreasing, while those in Peru are on the rise.) The key to the project…

THE FIRST MOONWALKER’S artifacts could soon be yours. After Neil Armstrong died in 2012, his family discovered a literal treasure trove of spacecraft hardware, mission souvenirs, and correspondence with, for example, several presidents. A significant part of the collection will go up for sale at Heritage Auctions of Dallas starting in November and continuing through the Apollo 11 50th anniversary next year. Among the more than 2,000 items on the block are a piece of fabric from the original Wright Flyer that Armstrong took to the moon and handwritten notes from his time as an X-15 test pilot.…

Smith works on the Commercial Infrastructure for Robotic Assembly and Services (CIRAS) program, a partnership between Northrop Grumman and NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate to develop technology for assembling large structures in orbit. The job: Smith helps design, build, and test robotic tools for use in space on structures such as next-generation telescopes or the Mission Extension Vehicle, a satellite-refueling spacecraft. Typical day: “When I firststarted working on CIRAS, I spent a lot of time on computer-aided design software,” says Smith. “We printed the designs on a 3D printer, which is a cost-effective way of checking that the assembly functions before ordering the metal parts. Now I design or build prototype hardware and test it in the lab. Sometimes modifications need to be made, so I often interact with the…

I AM NOT OLD ENOUGH to have seen Twelve O’Clock High in its initial public theatrical release in 1950. The first time I saw this classic end to end was probably in the 1980s, on a scratchy cassette via my tape-eating VHS recorder. It wasn’t what I had expected. I’ve seen it five or six times since—remastered for DVD, through online streaming, and on the old-movie cable channel. It still isn’t what I expect. It throws me because I grew up in the cinematic backwash of World War II, a period that produced dozens upon dozens of unmemorable war movies. But Twelve O’Clock High is different, even from the others that have endured on artistic merit. It isn’t a rousing patriotic adventure like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo or a thoughtful…

AT ONE END OF THE FLIGHT was remembrance; at the other, celebration. Old Glory Honor Flight, based in Appleton, Wisconsin, is part of a network that escorts veterans to the nation’s capital to visit its war memorials. Old Glory’s 46th flight returned last July to a crowd at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Oshkosh airshow. Aviation photographer Jim Koepnick documented the homecoming. “There were special moments as the veterans toured the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” says Koepnick, “but as we touched down at Wittman Field and they opened the door of the aircraft, the sight took my breath away. There were thousands of people lined up to give the veterans a welcome home they did not get when they returned from Vietnam.”…

THE U.S. ARMY, Navy,and Air Force are using incompatible systems when collecting data from aircraft mishaps—accidents that result in personal or property damage—a new report reveals. Each branch is collecting far too few, but also different, data points. The disparities leave the Department of Defense no way to analyze mishaps across the military, most significantly in human error and training issues.…

MORE THAN 10,000 birds strike civilian aircraft every year, causing millions of dollars in damage. Airports use various methods to keep the airspace over their runways avian-free, from disrupting nearby habitats to employing predator birds to scare the less aggressive flocks away. After geese struck US Airways Flight 1549, forcing it to land in the Hudson River, a team of Caltech engineers thought robotics might solve this problem. They’ve now developed a drone that can shepherd trespassing birds out of the flight path. The drone is autonomous—it’s programmed with a flock-dynamics algorithm that was originally designed for sheep. The engineers reprogrammed it to work in three dimensions.…

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP in Akron, Ohio, my family would take a camping trip each summer. None of them stands out in my memory more than the one from 1961, when I was 16. My mom and dad piled my two sisters and two brothers into our 1957 Chevy Nomad station wagon and headed east. Our only firm destination was to arrive at the Willow Grove Naval Air Station outside of Philadelphia by the last week of July, when the Academy of Model Aeronautics was holding its annual meet there. We’d planned to camp somewhere on the Hudson River and catch a train down to New York City. Before we left, Dad bought a Sunday edition of the New York Times to scope out any deals or coupons. In…

WHEN IS THE LAST TIME a welcoming committee created an international incident? The last time it happened in the air was in 1974, when President Richard Nixon paid a visit to Syrian president Hafez al-Assad (father of Syria’s current president). As Air Force One entered Syrian airspace, four camouflaged MiG fighters joined up on the VC-137’s wings. White House officials awaiting the president’s arrival in Damascus told UPI reporters that they had been informed of the Syrian military’s plan to send honor escorts for Air Force One, but the officials didn’t bother to pass the information along to Air Force One pilot Colonel Ralph D. Albertazzie, who, fearing attack, banked violently right. For the next seven minutes, Albertazzie flew a series of evasive maneuvers, including a steep dive. Remembering the…

APOLLO 7 ROSE ON A PILLAR OF FLAME from Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 34 on October 11, 1968. The launch was not just the achievement of a single mission but confirmation that NASA had recovered from the searing setback of the Apollo 1 fire that had killed three astronauts 21 months earlier. Overlooked today, Apollo 7 was an indispensable test of NASA’s redesigned moon ship. If the crew could demonstrate the spacecraft’s performance, the success would jump-start a rapid sequence of missions—four in eight months—leading to a lunar landing. Failure would likely forfeit any hope of reaching John F. Kennedy’s goal for a moon landing by 1970 and open the door to yet another Soviet space triumph. Crew of the Phoenix The deaths of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and…