Search results

IN setting out to study the exhibits at a great international exhibition such as that recently held at Olympia, one is naturally inclined in the first place to walk round the exhibition as a whole, so as to form some general impressions before examining the individual stands in detail. In the same way it is proposed in this article to make a general review of the exhibition as a whole before embarking on detailed comments on particular items of interest which were to be found at the various stands. It is by no means an easy matter to analyse the general tendencies of design as demonstrated at the Exhibition for the principal reason that there is so little to go upon in the way of existing standards. No less than nine years have passed since the previous International Aero Exhibition at Olympia, and during that long period there has been no general exposition of British aircraft design. It is true that there has been a succession of International Aero Exhibitions in Paris and that last year, for the first time since the war, there was an International Aero Exhibition at Berlin, but British design has been very poorly represented at any of these or the several other exhibitions held on the Continent.

Europe has adopted the Flight Path 2050 (FP2050) challenge demanding that by 2050, 90 per cent of the travelers are able to reach door-to-door destinations in Europe within four hours. A hypothesis can be formulated that without the Small Air Transport (SAT) system, optimized for short distances and for multiple but narrow passenger flows, this challenge cannot be met.

This paper defines design goals and necessary research focused on small aircraft concepts, as a required condition to fulfil the FP2050 challenge “90 per cent d2d 4h”.

The new small aircraft concepts have been defined as SAT Aircraft Family Program. Three demonstrators with common modules could be proposed: two using the same turboprop engine (first, one engine, 9 passengers; second, two engines, 19 passengers) and third demonstrator could be with a diesel hybrid engine.

The SAT Aircraft Family Program depends on demand optimized for specific regional features (passenger flows, passenger time value spectrum and infrastructure) and a set of matured technologies as a result of Clean Sky 2 (CS2) devoted to SAT.

This practical implications consist of developing on SAT technologies in CS2, deploying the demonstrators by the small aviation industry and launching an SAT system pilot phase.

FP2050 has changed the approach to a citizen-oriented from an atomized technologies taxonomy-oriented one. The challenge “90 per cent d2d 4h” also covers the needs of remote regions. This niche could be filled by the SAT system using the small aircrafts family.

The paper value is in defining entry requirements, answering how to build the SAT Aircraft Family Program satisfying the FP2050 challenge “90 per cent d2d 4h”.

THE eleventh annual meeting of the Institute was for the first time held simultaneously in three centres—in New York City at Columbia University, in Detroit at Rackham Educational Memorial, and in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California—from January 25 to 29. The purpose of the three simultaneous meetings was to minimize travel by executives and engineers from important war jobs in the present emergency. The same programme was offered at all three centres, papers being sometimes presented by proxies—experts in the same field as far as possible. In spite of the fact that attendance was divided between three centres, there was splendid representation at each place and a wide range of subjects was covered in the many papers. Naturally these were restricted more to analysis, and technology and information as to the latest design or production features of current aircraft or engines was withheld. The same ban applied to striking developments in accessories, instruments and armaments. All papers had to be approved by the Army or Navy and to be read substantially as written. While off‐the‐record discussions were permitted, these discussions were not made public. In particular there was a ban on comparisons between foreign and American materials, equipment or methods. The formula for control of comparison performance stated that the manufacturer's smooth curve calibrations and performance figures might be quoted, but no Wright field performance figures or data could be revealed. In spite of such restrictions a tremendous amount of valuable technical information was presented to the assembled engineers.

The presented research is carried out in reaction to the soaring costs of fuel and tight control over environmental issues such as carbon dioxide emissions and noise. The purpose of this paper is to study the feasibility of applying the environmental-friendly energy source in an unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) propulsion system.

Currently, the majority of UAVs are still powered by conventional combustion engines. An electric propulsion system is most commonly found in civilian micro and mini UAVs. The UAV classification is reviewed in this study. This paper focuses mainly on application of electric propulsion systems in UAVs. Investigated hybrid energy systems consist of fuel cells, Li-ion batteries, super-capacitors and photovoltaic (PV) modules. Current applications of fuel cell systems in UAVs are also presented.

The conducted research shows that hybridization allows for better energy management and operation of every energy source onboard the UAV within its limits. The hybrid energy system design should be created to maximize system efficiency without compromising the performance of the aircraft.

The presented study highlights the reduction of the energy consumption, necessary to perform the mission and maximizing of the endurance with simultaneous decrease in emissions and noise level.

The conducted research studies the feasibility of implementing the environmental-friendly hybrid electric propulsion systems in UAVs that offers high efficiency, reliability, controllability, lack of thermal and noise signature, thus, providing quiet and clean drive with low vibration levels. This paper highlights the main challenges and current research on fuel cell in aviation and draws attention to fuel cell – electric system modeling, hybridization and energy management.

A new IFR couplet, to enhance significantly the capability of the IFR TCAS‐201 ramp test set, has just been launched by Hunting Avionics, a subsidiary of Hunting Aviation.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a flexible design-oriented development cost method for commercial aviation aircraft based on small sample and poor information.

To predict the development cost of commercial aviation aircraft accurately, the methodology is based on the collected cost data and actual technical, and then the cost prediction relationships derived from an exhaustive statistical and filtered from regression analysis are incorporated. A series of regression equations with high regression coefficient are yielded after the cost driving factors of the development cost are fixed. Next, several sets of equations with high regression coefficient are selected for final integration. It is a flexible method that can be used efficiently to predict the cost of commercial aviation aircraft.

The development of commercial aviation aircraft has relatively a late start and no cost prediction model has been suitable for small sample, the proposed method is expected and is rather desirable.

By comparing the approach with the ordinary regression model and back propagation (BP) neural network, the scheme in this work is more efficient and convenient.

The results obtained in this paper show that the proposed method not only has a certain degree of versatility, but also can provide a preliminary prediction of the development cost of commercial aviation aircraft.