I really like the new format in the re-start of the Red Bull Air Races where each race aircraft has an engine and propeller that has been tuned to produce the same performance. For this kind of racing I think putting the emphasis on the pilot's skill is the most interesting way to go. And those standardized powerplants are the incredible American designed and built Thunderbolt customized engines by Lycoming.
Lycoming has been in the same location since they began building horizontally opposed aircraft engines back in 1929... and hopefully they'll stay right where they are if they remain strong and keep building great engines. It's a really nice American success story.
Screenshot: Red Bull Air Racer and a very hardworking Lycoming Thunderbolt engine
The first of the reborn Red Bull Air Races will take place in Abu Dhabi February 28 - March 1 (2014) and from what I can see it will be available to watch on some form of Fox Sports. If I can figure out exactly where it'll be airing I'll post that in a week or so.
I figured I had three choices for what I was gonna post this morning: There was the successful Virgin Galactic flight on Friday, the third conducted using the rocket engine to power the suborbital spacecraft (story and video here)... then there's the Southwest Airlines 737 that mistakenly landed yesterday evening on the 3,738 foot runway at M. Graham Clark Airport, 7 miles away from the 7,140 runway at their intended destination of the Branson Missouri Airport (the only privately owned, privately operated commercial service airport in the US) - see the story here in case somehow haven't seen it 10 times already... and then there's the video posted a couple years ago on youtube of the 'flexible' VTOL aircraft that's powered by the world's smallest production internal combustion engine.
I decided that you've probably seen one of the awesome previous rocket-powered test flights of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, and it was just back in November, just 240 miles from last night's mistaken landing that one of the DreamLifters landed at Col. James Jabara Airport in Wichita Kansas instead of the correct destination 8 miles away at McConnell Air Force Base. It seems that mistaken landings are fast becoming the norm in the heartland... But when have you ever seen a Cox .010 gas engine power a shop rag into vertical flight?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure for most of us, this flexible VTOL with the screamin' 27,000 rpm Cox .010 engine is avgeek story of the day : )
Screenshot of the Cox .010 and the shop rag 'airframe' ready for engine start and flight!
I don't care if you're a tube-and-rag tailgragger lover like me or a jet-jockey driving an F-22 around the sky, if this video doesn't make your mind race with the possibilities (now, and especially in the future) then I don't know what will. This video from GE Aviation reveals technology where they literally 3D print high-temp exotic-alloy turbine engine parts!
It's called DMLM (Direct Metal Laser Melting) and it's an 'additive manufacturing' process rather than subtractive... instead of cutting metal away you simply add the metal where you want it. It's not only an insanely awesome way to envision metal part building but it also allows for parts to be made that otherwise couldn't be. Drilling and machining can't always get where you need to be to get a part to function a certain way. Additive manufacturing has essentially no limits as to the complexity of the design, which not only allows for everything to be possible but it also means that multiple parts can now be produced as a single unit. The whole process can save weight while also increasing operating efficiencies of the components being produced.
Video screenshot: High-temp metal fuel nozzle for a GE turbine engine... 3D printed!
I think most of us are getting pretty used to the idea of being able to 3D print parts in plastic these days, and research indicates that basic metal 3D printing processes have been around for many years now (especially in the repair world), but the amazing idea here is that we can now create critical high-temp parts from exotic alloys and seriously consider using them in areas where failure is not an option. Truly amazing and exciting technologies!
The mysterious Apollo voyage to the bottom of the sea is really a by-product of every Apollo mission that left the Earth... the engines and booster stage returned to Earth after burning for approximately 165 seconds, reaching about 205,000 feet. Interestingly, the momentum carries the booster up to about 360,000 feet before it begins to descend. While falling, the booster stage assumes a semi stable engines-down position until impact with the ocean. The pieces and parts then make their way on down to the ocean floor.
And now, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos (who also founded the low-cost spaceflight development company Blue Origin) along with a very skilled team of deep sea searchers has located two of the Rocketdyne F1 engines used to launch an Apollo Saturn V rocket. These two engines might actually be from the Apollo 11 mission according to this page on the BezosExpeditions website. The info on that page is from nearly a year ago tho, so we may find that these engines are from a different Apollo mission. Makes no difference to me... spent F1 engines that can be recovered and restored for viewing are awesome no matter what mission they were on!
The engines were located 14,000 feet below the surface in the Atlantic Ocean about 400 miles east of Cape Canaveral, and as the video shows, they were viewed and recovered by Remotely Operated Vehicles. It's quite stunning to see these F1 engines in the cold blackness of the ocean so many years after they spent a brief amount of time in the cold darkness of the edge of space.
(click pic to enlarge) F1 rocket engine thrust chamber on ocean floor (Bezos Expeditions)
The Saturn V first stage (known as the S-1C) had five of the F1 engines mounted, one fixed engine in the center and four gimballed around it for controlling the flight path. These were, and still are, the most powerful rocket engines ever built: creating over 1,500,000 pounds of thrust on an empty weight of just 18,500 pounds. But just imagine the weight in the fuel tanks! 318,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and 203,400 gallons of kerosene - wow! Each F1 engine stands 19 feet tall and has a diameter of 12.3 feet. The total liftoff thrust produced by the S-1C and its five F1 engines for the Apollo 15 mission was 7,766,000 pounds!
Jeff Bezos has said that the recovered engines remain the property of NASA but is hopeful that after the National Air & Space Museum most likely gets one of them that maybe the Museum of Flight in Seattle might get the other one. Time will tell. Plus, they may be able to locate and recover more engines as well.
The Historical Aviation Film Unit has just uploaded a new video of the incredible Avspecs Mosquito making some of the best stereo Merlin music ever! Forget the Beatles, it's all about the Mosquitos now! Even tho I'm a hardcore old-school radial engine guy, I have to admit that there just is no sound made by man that's better than the Rolls Royce Merlin V-12 engine... and the concert with two of them bolted to the wooden airframe of the de havilland Mosquito is just pure perfection. Some day I'm gonna publish a top ten (and also a top 100) aircraft of all time, and the Mosquito is most likely gonna be on that top ten list!
So do yourself a favor and stop reading my words and listen to this fantastic video!
After you've enjoyed the awesome sights and sounds of the video, you might wanna check out these Mosquito links:
(click pic for hi-res) A J-3P (Lenappe radial engine) and a J-3C at Oshkosh 2012
I propose a challenge: take any two Cessna 150's and position them however you like and then take your best picture of the two of them together... then put a hi-res version on the internet for the world to see. Will heartbeats quicken? How many people will say 'wow' in their head. How many will say 'wow' out loud? I suspect not very many. I say this not because I dislike the Cessna 150, it's a wildly acceptable little airplane. I say this because airplanes from the past had a passion and a love for flight engineered into them, and it's rare to find that today.
I think this CoolPix image of the somewhat rare Lenappe radial powered Cub painted black and yellow with the iconic all-yellow Continental A-65 powered Cub in the fuzzy background makes my point. That image borders on art. But it's not almost art because I captured a phenomenal image but because those airplanes are just beautiful to look at. As wildly acceptable as Cessna 150's are, they are not very often described as beautiful to look at.
I figured a nice avgeek reminder of the warmth of summer, the awesomeness of Oshkosh, and the beauty of the Piper Cub might be a really nice little pick-me-up for anyone experiencing some winter-like weather right now. As we look ahead to 2013 and set our sights on Spring getting back here so we can have more chances to get in the air, I hope this picture will help some of you realize that old-school airplanes like the Cub do more for the heart and soul (and stick and rudder skills) than our modern airplanes do. To push that idea even harder, I've made this image available in four of the most common desktop sizes so you can put it on your computer to help you get thru the winter. Enjoy : )
(click pic for hi-res) Looking deep inside the exhaust nozzle of the X-15's rocket engine!
I captured these two pictures at the end of January 2012 during the AirPigz meetup at the Air Force Museum in Dayton Ohio, but before I tell you any more about why I think these pix ar so cool, I wanna tell you that I've recently decided that there's gonna be an AirPigz meetup on Fri thru Sun (January 25, 26, 27 - 2013) at the National Air & Space Museum (both the National Mall facility and the Udvar-Hazy) near Washington DC. I don't have any more details yet to share just yet but there will be a dedicated post coming soon with more info. If you're interested in possibly making the trip to tour the museum and meetup with other avgeeks in the process, click here to send me an email to be added to the info list for the AirPigz January 2013 National Air And Space Museum MeetUp.
Now, back to these X-15 pix... only three North American X-15's were built. X-15-A-3 (#56-6672) was destroyed in a tragic accident that took the life of Michael Adams in 1967 when control was lost and the airframe broke up due to extremely high g loading. The other two remaining X-15's are the one on display in the Research & Development Gallery at the Air Force Museum in Dayton Ohio (X-15-A-2 #56-6671) and the one hanging from the ceiling at the National Mall building at the National Air And Space Museum in Washington DC (X-15-A-1 #56-6670). The amazing thing about the X-15 on display in Dayton Ohio is that the R&D Gallery is set up to allow you to walk right in-and-around the aircraft! It's a most amazing opportunity to be within inches of these historic aircraft. (please remember, no touching!)
When I walked around behind the X-15 I was really taken by the opportunity to look right up inside the rocket engine exhaust nozzle... realizing that back in the 1960's when I was just a kid a massive amount of thrust (up to 57,000 pounds) had expanded thru here and pushed this little black beast at speeds up to and well over 4,000 mph! (the fastest X-15 flight was in 1967 at 4,519 mph) - And I'm standing looking right inside that nozzle. Wow. Amazing. (learn more about the Reaction Motors XLR99 that powered the X-15)
Then I noticed that the view inside the nozzle was actually kind of artsy looking. But way more than just artsy, this cool visual was the business end of one of the most amazing aircraft ever designed and built! So I did a little playing around trying to get a really good image looking only at the radial grooves, the coloration inside the nozzle, and the actual central port. The picture above is that view. One of these days I'm gonna have a big enlargement of that hanging on my wall... and if things go like I hope, you might too.
(click pic to enlarge) Wider exhaust view of X-15-A-2 (#56-6671) at the Air Force Museum
This second picture is here to give you a better perspective of what you're seeing in the tight shot. And again, the most amazing part of the X-15 experience at the Air Force Museum's R&D Gallery is that you can walk right around this incredible piece of aviation/aerospace history. Truly a fantastic American moment right there! I'm looking forward to seeing the other X-15 at the Air And Space Museum in Washington DC in late January, but I gotta say I'm ready at any time to get back to Dayton and see this beast up close and personal once again : )
There was an Avspecs open house over the weekend at Ardmore Airfield in New Zealand celebrating the completion of the 8 year de Havilland Mosquito restoration project for Jerry Yagen... it must have been an incredible experience for all who where able to attend. The Historical Aviation Film Unit was there and captured the awesome sound of the Rolls Royce Merlin powered Mosquito flying formation with a Merlin powered Spitfire and P-51 along with an Allison powered P-40. Wow! The Merlin must surely be the best sound ever made by man!
The first pass made by all four airplanes has been altered to look more like we remember seeing WWII aircraft in films, and then the other passes are as we would have seen them if we were there at Ardmore that day. This is definitely a 'must see' video! I highly recommend you watch this video in 720p HD in fullscreen mode and with your speakers cranked way up. Repeat as need : )
The fascinating and radical design of John McGinnis' Synergy (photo: facebook)
The prototype 5-seat Synergy aircraft is making some great progress as can be seen in the recent posting of 92 new images on John's facebook page. John, along with members of his family and a grass-roots team are having the experience-of-a-lifetime knocking down challenges and watching the airframe take shape as a result of their hard work.
Synergy breaks new ground on several levels, including the very unique box wing/tail design, high efficiency pusher configuration (advanced design compared to typical pushers), advanced technology propeller design, use of V-4 turbo-diesel engine (DeltaHawk), and overall high attention to laminar flow.
Projects like this are always extremely difficult to pin down when they will reach completion, but the good news is that they're making serious progress and are hitting important targets along the way. Keep watch of the resources at the links below for updates on the project:
There's really no way to decide what the world's greatest engine really is, but the Rolls Royce Merlin has to be in the running. When you consider the importance this engine had (and its U.S. built counterpart, the Packard V-1650) in being a critical element of winning World War II, you might be able to give it that title right there. But this engine has also proven itself as an amazing race engine, used in hydroplane boats from the late 40's til the 70's, and of course as the powerplant for countless Unlimited race aircraft since WWII... like Strega, the P-51 that's won the last three years at Reno. The versatility and strength of the Merlin is legendary.
I think there's a fair chance that most of us would be likely to consider it the world's greatest engine just based on its sound alone. There's nothing better than the sound of a Merlin! And that's coming from a radial engine fanatic!
But the legacy of powering aircraft like the Supermarine Spitfire, de Havilland Mosquito, Avro Lancaster and the North American P-51 is really what made the Merlin a superstar. This video, while not fast paced and exciting, is an amazing look at the dedicated craftsmen that made the Merlin a reality. It's fascinating to see the amount of hand labor that went into each engine. I also find it extremely interesting that the people that engineered and built this engine (the British), seemed to lose their way in the years after the war. To go from the accomplishments represented in the Merlin and wind up where they are today is hard to imagine. But then, America is on a similar path, from Apollo to where we are now... what is wrong with us all? No need to answer that, it's the frailty of the human condition, and it's in all of us.
Regardless, this was Britain's time to shine... and shine they did.
Monday, February 10, 2014 at 05:44AM 
Screenshot: Red Bull Air Racer and a very hardworking Lycoming Thunderbolt engine 
Screenshot: Lycoming Thunderbolt engine production in Williamsport, Pennsylvania
