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Category: <span>technology</span>

FAA Receives Unleaded Fuels Proposals in Safe Fuel Initiative

vintageFAA Receives Unleaded Fuels Proposals

The Federal Aviation Administration announced today it has received ten replacement fuel proposals from producers Afton Chemical Company, Avgas LLC, Shell, Swift Fuels and a consortium of BP, TOTAL and Hjelmco, for further evaluation in the Piston Aviation Fuels Initiative (PAFI). The industry-government initiative is designed to help the general aviation industry transition to an unleaded aviation gasoline. The FAA will be assessing the viability of the candidate fuels to determine which fuels may be part of the first phase of laboratory testing at the FAA’s William J. Hughes Technical Center.

The goal is to have a new unleaded fuel by 2018.

“We’re committed to getting harmful lead out of general aviation fuel,” said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “This work will benefit the environment and provide a safe and available fuel for our general aviation community.”

The 167,000 general aviation aircraft in the US that rely on 100 low lead aviation gasoline for safe operation are running on the only remaining transportation fuel in the United States that contains the addition of lead.

Commercial planes have never used leaded gas.

Congress authorized $6 million for the fiscal year 2014 budget to support the PAFI test program at the FAA Technical Center. PAFI was established to facilitate the development and deployment of a new unleaded aviation gasoline with the least impact on the existing piston-engine aircraft fleet.

The FAA asked fuel producers on June 10, 2013 to submit proposals for replacement fuels by July 1, 2014. The goal is to identify, select, and provide fleetwide certification for fuels determined to have the lowest impact on the general aviation fleet.

The FAA will analyze the candidate fuels in terms of their impact on the existing fleet, the production and distribution infrastructure, their impact on the environment, their toxicology and the cost of aircraft operations.

Tracking Down #MH370 or Physics of an Air Space Game of Marco Polo


The guessing/math triangulating the path of Inmarsat’s pings was the only thing experts seemed to agree on regarding to pinning down the location of Malaysia Airlines flight 370. Yet at the location, at least, the location according to the data laying out the path according to Inmarsat’s analysis, nothing was found in the recent search of the ocean floor off the coast of Australia. The engineers and mathematicians involved may have done their best but the guess seems to have been faulty or otherwise off somehow. If you will pardon the circular reasoning, if only we knew how it was off, we would know how it was off.

Investigators have come up with two maps that can be drawn based on the ping data, based on the speed. The variation is due to considerations of the pings which do not indicate the speed or direction the plane was moving, but only the probable distance between plane and satellite. See Inmarsat’s global representation …

Inmarsatglobe

However, there is opposition to the Inmarsat calculations which is presented by * Michael Exner (founder of the American Mobile Satellite Corporation) **Duncan Steel(physicist and visiting scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center) and satellite technology consultant ***Tim Farrar which presents other data that should be considered. See the Dopplar shift jpg…

dopplarshift

My pragmatic response to these experts is a major simplification: just that the plane did not disappear into a textbook, under textbook conditions. The pings occurred in a real atmosphere, with atmospheric variations that were not and possibly could not have been taken into account. Not only are the speed, direction and height of the aircraft factors that must be taken into account, but also the quality of the atmosphere, density, weather, etc, plus factors that a non-mathmatical, non-scientist like myself would not even know how to bring into the picture. In this search at least, the untested math used is as vulnerable as statistics is to presenting a defective or imprecise representation, or a representation which would only be true under certain conditions.

For further study on this, * Michael Exner, the Atlantic Official Explanation article, input from physicist **Duncan Steele (who calculates “a uniform ring radius based on the aircraft-satellite range given the elevation angle and the satellite’s altitude, and the latitude of the sub-satellite point, the aircraft being taken to be at the same latitude in this simplified geometry; and satellite consultant***Tim Farrar.

New Black Boxes with one big Upgrade

The thirty-day ping life that black boxes are known for is about to be history, thanks to Radiant Power Corp, and Air France 477. After AF447, U.S. and European agencies decided to raise their expectations of black boxes. In 2011, they mandated a requirement that acoustic emergency transmitters be powered for at least 90 days. But with the rapid-fire application (standard for aviation procedures) that standard goes into effect next year. Associations like the FAA and the NTSB, and the BEA in France are cognizant of the size of airlines fleets, and the prohibitive cost of upgrades; so it is common for safety standards to take a long time to go into effect.

If they had raised the bar sooner and faster, MH370 might have had a bigger “ping” window, but the black box batteries are quickly coming to the end of their span.

Recommendations included the standard of expecting a new, lower-frequency emergency locator on every airliner, in addition to the 90 day battery-life.

The video Below has a representative of Radiant Power Corp showing a current beacon.


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Bombardier CSeries Testing

The CSeries by Bombardier will be undergoing high-speed taxi tests on its new CSeries aircraft next week, after this weeks tests were foiled by dastardly weather.

After high speed taxi testing will come stabilization tests on landing gear and vibration tests.

The tests are being performed in Montreal outside on a dry runway at Bombardier’s facility in Mirabel, Que., on the first CSeries flight test vehicle.

Weather permitting, tests will be performed next week.


Financial Post Interviews Mike Arcamone, President of Bombardier Commercial Aircraft


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A Word about Safety, Brazil and Towers

In George’s Point of View

With aviation safety issues buzzing in the US because of the widespread tower closures, I was surprised to find US safety being held as a higher standard in a critique of Brazilian aviation by pilot Antônio Carlos Cruzeta.

His article at *http://paduim.blogspot.com/2013/02/relato-de-um-piloto-de-linha-aerea.html pillories the conditions of flying in Brazil, even compares the pilot to driving a luxury BMW in the middle of a safari in Africa.

But I cannot but wonder if even as this pilot pushes for progress in Brazil, we in the US are bound to be falling back. Will it take an aviation disaster here to wake up our government that we need to maintain our current standards of safety?

A Brazilian pilot can ask that question, and so can we. How can pilots continue to fly millions of passengers millions of flights in state-of-the-art planes when losing so many towers? And now there are lawsuits piling up as localities begin legal battles to keep their towers. Should tower support be withdrawn, leaving pilots to “fly by the seat of their pants?” What do US pilots think of this withdrawal of support? DO pilots consider towers extraneous?

Three hours or so from home the ride from Rio was unusually turbulent. Though I slept all the way to Houston this time, will I be so confident in the future? I worry for the state aviation safety as thousands of pilots converge flying to and from airports where tower support was once but is no longer.

Closures

*English translation here: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fpaduim.blogspot.com%2F2013%2F02%2Frelato-de-um-piloto-de-linha-aerea.html

Safeland Technology

U.S. carriers including American Airlines, Delta Air Lines Inc are testing Aviation Safety Technologies LLC’s SafeLand concept, a new technology which is designed to provide numerical scores relaying accurate information about conditions on the tarmac. The system is still in development.

The website touts AST’s SafeLand software as “the first-ever technology designed to leverage the availability of real time data to monitor and measure aircraft systems such as speed brakes, spoilers, flaps and hydraulic and mechanical braking systems and many physical parameters such as speed, deceleration, temperature, pressure and wind in order to accurately report true aircraft runway surface characteristics, true braking friction, cornering friction and tire and brake wear.”


Click to view the Information Flow Diagram on AST’s website

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