Table of contents for December/January 2019-20 in Air & Space

Our first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 came after years of hard work and centuries of dreaming. And almost as soon as we took to the skies, inventive minds began thinking up new ways to fly and new ways to incorporate aviation into our daily lives. Some of these ideas still elude us, and you’ll read about one of those challenges, commercial hypersonic flight, in this issue. But the quest to solve seemingly intractable problems is at the core of every air and space achievement. Closer to earth, but not all the way down, is another example of an aero-puzzle that’s defied innovators and inventors for years: urban air mobility. The concept of flying cars is more than a century old, and yet always seems just over the horizon.…

The Beechcraft C-45H Expeditor on display at the Museum of Flight in Rome, Georgia has seen a lot of history, including a four-year stint flying cargo and military VIPs between Osan Air Base and Pohang during the Korean War. In September, it was called upon for another mission, delivering medical supplies, including a kidney dialysis machine, to the hurricane-stricken Bahamas. “The plane did great,” says Peter O’Hare, the mission co-pilot and a volunteer at the museum. “It still did what it was built to do back in the day, and that’s to get in and out of challenging areas with 2,000 pounds of stuff.” The relief mission was initiated by AERObridge, an organization of volunteers from the business aviation community that enlists the aid of donated aircraft to provide rapid…

The 1980s briefly returned to Gate C2 at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, as passengers and aviation enthusiasts—some dressed in retro neon attire—gathered at a retirement party to bid farewell to the MD-80, which departed at 9 a.m., September 4, on its final revenue flight (Flight 80, of course). Also known as the Super 80 and Mad Dog, the MD-80, manufactured by McDonnell Douglas, was the workhorse of American Airlines, constituting 44 percent of its fleet at its 2002 peak. After its final trip, Flight 80 joined 25 other MD-80s in retirement. Collectively, those aircraft carried more than 87 million passengers, according to American Airlines. Most were sent to an airplane graveyard in Roswell, New Mexico, but two are being donated to flight-training schools.…

IN MAY 1968, the Vietnam War was at its peak. Our nation’s newest service school, the Air Force Academy, where I was completing my third year of study, was only 14 years old at the time but already had many graduates in combat. To honor the Academy, the United States Air Force sent a decommissioned Republic F-105 Thunderchief—a “Thud,” in USAF language—to be placed on permanent display. A dedication ceremony was scheduled for May 31—the first day of graduation-week festivities for the class of 1968. The academy’s superintendent, (then) Lieutenant General Thomas S. Moorman Jr. would speak, as would Major General George Simler, a former F-105 wing commander, and Donald Strait, an executive with Republic Aviation, which built the F-105. After their remarks, four Thuds from McConnell Air Force Base…

There’s something flying over Spaceport America on this warm October afternoon, and as usual, it’s not a spacecraft. It’s an Extra 300, owned by Virgin Galactic. Alone in the cockpit is company chief pilot David Mackay, who’s doing tight, descending corkscrews designed to spike the G-forces. Mackay doesn’t live here in New Mexico—not yet—but his presence here on an ordinary work day indicates the progress Virgin is making toward launching its suborbital space tourism business. Another pilot has relocated to Spaceport America full-time, and a new one is already training. The test flight team, like the rest of Virgin’s employees at Spaceport America, is preparing for the first commercial operations of SpaceShipTwo and the WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane that launches it on short hops to the edge of space. “I think…

If you’ve ever endured the frustration of changing a tire, take a moment to appreciate the challenge confronting airmen who have to replace the tires on a C-5M Super Galaxy. Capable of carrying more than 280,000 pounds of cargo, the C-5M is the largest aircraft in the U.S. Air Force inventory, equipped with five sets of landing gear consisting of 28 wheels, each four feet in diameter. The tires wear down approximately 0.002 inches every time the behemoth lands. And, several times per week, the task of changing those tires falls to a work crew of five airmen—three of whom struggle to keep a 15-pound spanner wrench in position while tightening the wheel’s hub nut—including one who has to lie on the ground while pressing his feet against the wrench,…

Flying into Camarillo, as I do often in my 55-year-old Piper Cherokee, is like touching down at Disneyland—if Disneyland were wholly dedicated to general aviation. It’s not uncommon to find yourself cleared to land behind a restored World War II fighter, a home-built kitplane, a multi-million-dollar executive jet, a Cessna trainer with a young student behind the yoke, or some vaguely confused guy driving a Beech Bonanza who sounds over the radio like he’s never talked to air traffic control in his life. Any aviation-minded person who questions the existence of nirvana on Earth has never spent a day at Camarillo (CMA). It’s hardly the nation’s busiest general aviation airport. That distinction, Federal Aviation Administration records show, belongs to Deer Valley in suburban Phoenix, which logged more than 600,000 takeoffs…

Low-Tech Signal Your article “Sea Fury Dynasty” (Sept. 2019) reminded me of my time working with Neil Anderson when he flew Dreadnought. Several of us at General Dynamics worked with Neil to optimize his flight path at Reno. We figured out that Dreadnought wanted to fly a continuous turn around the far three pylons in one move rather than making high-G turns at each pylon like the Mustangs did. But this required Neil to start his turn about one quarter mile before the pylon. The crew made a pile of sagebrush on the ground at the appropriate point to start the turn, leaving the other pilots wondering what the Sanders team was up to. KEVIN RENSHAW Ft. Worth, Texas Model Skills “My Trips to the Moon” (Sept. 2019) and the…

IN OCTOBER, NASA unveiled a prototype of the next-generation spacesuit that astronauts will wear when they return to the moon in 2024. The space agency has sped up development in recent years, following criticism from the NASA Office of Inspector General that the program was lagging (see “The 21st Century Moon Suit,” Oct./Nov. 2019). As its name suggests, the new Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) places emphasis on mobility and flexibility—a welcome improvement over the Apollo-era suits, which were so cumbersome that astronauts had to bunny hop across the lunar surface. The lower torso includes advanced materials and joint bearings that allow bending and rotating at the hips; on the upper torso, shoulder enhancements allow astronauts to move their arms more freely and easily lift objects over their heads.…

EXPLORING ALIEN WORLDS such as Saturn’s moon Titan can be treacherous for robotic rovers, especially since we still know so little about actual terrain and surface conditions. So NASA is developing small robots that can be ready for any environment by morphing into rolling spheres, flying drones, cave explorers, and even swimming submersibles. The project is called Shapeshifter. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory tested a prototype in late September. The robot—a 3D-printed prototype resembling a drone encased in an elongated hamster wheel—rolled on the ground and then split in half, becoming two mini robots (“cobots”) that took flight with small propellers. For now, Shapeshifter is semi-autonomous, but engineers envision a system comprising multiple cobots that can auto-assemble without needing commands from Earth. In large enough numbers, they could work…

WHEN THE CREW of Apollo 17 went to the moon in December 1972, one of their tasks was to bring back rock and soil samples so that scientists could better understand the moon’s geologic history. Astronauts Gene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ronald Evans would return to Earth with nearly 250 pounds of lunar souvenirs. The largest rock—collected by Schmitt at the last minute—was a lunar basalt weighing in at 18 pounds. A sliver of this priceless rock has been on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum since the building on the National Mall opened in 1976. Recently, the 3.8 billion-year-old artifact made a short jaunt across the Mall to the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History while the National Air and Space Museum undergoes renovation. Natural History was…

Chris Galloway swore he’d never do a restoration project. “Everybody told me, ‘Just buy ’em done. It’s so much cheaper,’ ’’ he says. “I don’t know what came over me...and I still don’t know why I did it. But now I’m ready to do another one. I had so much fun restoring this airplane.” This airplane is the 1931 prototype Waco QCF-2, a one of a kind that was famous in vintage aircraft circles even before it won the online reader poll that made it the Air & Space Magazine Airplane of the Year. Ours is not the first title it has won. The Continental Aircraft Engine Company test pilots who flew it and loved it in 1931—they used it to prove the 210-horsepower R-670 engine—named it “Betsy.” At this…

Everyone who visits a museum has probably wondered what it would be like to wander the vast halls after hours, looking at the artifacts unencumbered by crowds. On one October evening, 70 photography enthusiasts did just that when the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum hosted an exclusive workshop at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. The event was the second photography workshop held as part of the Air and Space Photo initiative, supported by the Ryna and Melvin Cohen Family. It gave guests the opportunity to snap their own black-and-white images and, in doing so, become part of the Smithsonian’s mission to educate and inspire the public. Among the photos (clockwise, from top) is an epic view of the space shuttle Discovery that appears as if it is preserved in…

On International Girls in Aviation Day October 5, an all-woman flight and cabin crew flew 120 female middle- and high-school students from Salt Lake City, Utah to Houston, Texas for a STEM field trip to the NASA Johnson Space Center. “You have to see it to be it,” says Beth Poole, the general manager of pilot development at Delta Air Lines explaining the idea behind Delta’s initiative to fly young women on flights with an all-woman crew. Delta hopes eventually to increase the number of women pilots at the airline; currently Delta pilots are five percent women, on par with other airlines, according to a Delta spokesperson. The percentage of women among U.S. pilots flying both private and commercial aircraft is seven percent, according to Women in Aviation International, an…

At one time or another, you’ve probably supported your local high school by buying candy. Now you have another option: purchasing an airplane, built by the students themselves. The students are participants in a program created in 2016 by the nonprofit Tango Flight, which got its start by raising $90,000 in Georgetown, Texas. Since then, Tango Flight has expanded to five other cities across the country, boosted by funding from Airbus and local sponsors, such as the Aviation Museum of New Hampshire. “It’s really amazing to see the aviation community come together and support this,” says Tango Flight co-founder Dan Weyant. “Most of the folks in this business recognize that we are in desperate need to bring younger new folks into it either as a hobby or as a career.”…

TO ACHIEVE MACH 18 at the right pressure, aerodynamicists can’t just stick a fan at one end of a tunnel. Instead, Tunnel 9 director Dan Marren says, his facility uses a more advanced version of the engineering pioneered at Nazi rocket facility Peenemünde, the “blow down” wind tunnel. Marren likens the concept to a balloon. “As soon as you open up the balloon, the air wants to rush from high pressure inside the balloon to the room,” he says. “So that air rushes out of the balloon as soon as you open it up. That’s all we do.” Of course, the set of lungs powering Tunnel 9 works at an entirely different scale. A large metal globe outside the facility— a vacuum sphere—is seven stories tall with a volume of…

I had been warned that there wasn’t much left of the airplane that designer Gianni Caproni had intended to be a transatlantic flying boat—the Noviplano—which had crashed and broken apart concluding its first and final flight, on March 4, 1921. There wasn’t. I’d trekked up into the Italian Alps to the Caproni museum in Trento only to learn that a small section of the hull and other pieces from the wreck of the Noviplano were in storage, awaiting conservation. Next I took the train to the Volandia Museum of Flight, just outside the perimeter fence of Milan’s Malpensa international airport. I was ushered inside to meet Gregory Alegi, a Yale-educated Italian journalist, defense analyst, and aviation historian. Alegi led me to the Noviplano relic display on the far side of…

FOR ROUGHLY THE FIRST TWO decades of spaceflight, NASA had to rely on a vast global network of terrestrial communications stations to talk to orbiting craft. That began to change in April 1983, when the space shuttle Challenger carried the first of what would be six first-generation Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS) into geosynchronous orbit about 22,200 miles above the surface of the Earth. (TRW built seven first-generation TDRS units; one was destroyed in the 1986 Challenger accident.) This constellation of orbiting antennas allowed controllers on the ground to remain in longer contact with spacecraft, both crewed and uncrewed, than before, and substantially increased the amount of data that could be transmitted. The TDRS system is designed to use three satellites as primary transmitters, with the others instantly available…