Category Archives: Aerospace & Defence

May 29, 2011 · 12:20 pm

Muret Air show 2011

The Red Arrows are the UK Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team. They are one of the most famous acrobatics teams worldwide. They were formed in the ‘60s when several unofficial teams were united under the new official team of the RAF.

The Red Arrows were performing yesterday at Muret Air exhibition, just 12km away from Toulouse so I went there to spend the day with some colleagues from Airbus (which kindly sponsored the show providing fuel for the aircraft). The organization of the event left the Red Arrows for the end of the day. The team is composed of 9 pilots plus an extra one who acts as road manager and commentator during the show (animator I should say). They fly BAE Hawk airplanes and are about 33 years old on average.

The several figures in different formation patterns that they performed were impressive (Diamond, Apollo, Vixen, Heart, Palm tree, etc.). I must admit that this was the first exhibition I attended, as the only other time when I witnessed acrobatics was at the Red Bull Race in Budapest in the summer of 2007, when I was on holidays there with friends.

I took several pictures and videos of their performance, but somehow I didn’t manage to save most of the videos correctly, so I can only show below the pictures in the slide show below:

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There were another two teams performing: the French Air Force Cartouche Doré (flying 3 TB30 Epsilon, made by Socata, a filial of EADS) and the Breitling Jet Team. The latter is a civilian acrobatic team (the only one) based in France. They fly L-39 Albatros.

Apart from these teams, there were several other planes that were flying in the show: L-39 Albatros, Cap 232, ATR-42, Beech King Air 200, some Pipers (simulating a fight between a police airplane and another one), P40… but the only ones my smartphone saved correctly in videos were the flights of the A380 and the A400M (no kidding, I did over 20 videos and discovered only these 2 were stored in the memory), enjoy them:

It was a good experience, perfect for a sunny Saturday. I wanted to remark the importance of having a good commentator and music to enhance the show. In Muret the commentator was great (apparently he is famous in France and engaged in all air shows) but the music was not always the best, though when it was it really made you (seriously) think “I want to fly one of those”…

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May 26, 2011 · 8:00 am

National Air & Space Museum at Dulles

Let me quote from the Wikipedia:

“The Smithsonian Institution was founded for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge” from a bequest to the United States by the British scientist James Smithson (1765–1829), who never visited the new nation. In Smithson’s will, he stated that should his nephew, Henry James Hungerford, die without heirs, the Smithson estate would go to the government of the United States to create an “Establishment for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men”.

“The Smithsonian Institution is the largest museum complex in the world, and many of its buildings are historical and architectural landmarks.”

During our last trip to USA, Luca and I visited both locations of the National Air & Space Museum of the Smithsonian institution. I had already been at the one in the Mall and I already talked about it briefly in a previous post. I wanted to write about the museum at Dulles, close to DC international airport.

That museum is named after Steven F. Udvar Hazy, who is the CEO of Air Lease Corp, an airplanes leasing company. Previously he was chairman and CEO of ILFC, another leasing company, together with GECAS, one of the 2 biggest. The guy is a living legend or commercial markets: when he blessed or criticizes an aircraft it is seriously noticed by the manufacturers. He donated 65M$ to the Smithsonian to set up this museum and that’s why it carries his name. Thanks Steve! What a museum! The NASM is awesome!

The museum has dozens if not over a hundred of airplanes, satellites, rockets, helicopters, etc., in display, all tagged with small explanation of the aircraft.

On our visit we joined a free guided tour, another fabulous feature of the museum. Our guide was Bill Laux, a veteran pilot from the Navy. He was originally from Omaha where we would be going in a couple of days while he would be heading also in a couple of days to Belgium… crossing roads.

We stayed with Bill for about 2 hours, following one explanation after the other, one curiosity here, another detail there, etc. I remember visiting Ellis Island in NYC 2 years ago with a ranger who also filled the tour with stories. This is something I really like: instead of paying for a quick tour or audio-guide, they make use of the willingness of these volunteers to pass on their knowledge.

I have to admit that the session was for core aviation geeks, and I want to commend Luca for standing it. At the beginning we were a group of 10-12 people, wives and children included. The guide asked: “Who has got an aerospace background?” 4 or so of us raised hands… after 30 minutes of tour only Luca and those with aviation background continued with the tour (no sight of wives and children). After 1 hour 30 minutes, only Luca and me. After 2 hours the guide went “well, we’ve seen pretty much everything” :-). Thanks Bill!

I scanned one of the sides of the map of the museum to post it here. The map covers the Boeing hangar, but bear in mind that there is another hangar missing (James S McDonnell, which hosts a Space Shuttle), an IMAX cinema, the restoration hangar and the control tower.

I wanted to post it here so you can get a grasp of what we’re talking about. Airplanes packed side by side, one of top of the other… and not any airplane, some are unique pieces. Let me just comment on a few of them (of which below you can find the pictures):

  • The Space shuttle Enterprise: which never went to outer space as it was used only for training purposes, to let astronauts command the powerless flight after re-entry. Believe it or not, it was going to be named “Constitution”, trekkies had not stepped in.
  • A Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird: the reconnaissance aircraft which set the record as fastest aircraft back in 1976.
  • The Boeing 367-80 “Dash-80”, which as I already mentioned in a previous post, was the prototype Boeing built to test and market a new configuration for commercial jet aircraft, a configuration which all commercial aircraft have followed more or less ever since.
  • A Concorde.
  • The famous B-29 Enola Gay.
  • The Langley Aerodrome A: a model that Samuel Pierpont Langley (a manned flight pioneer and secretary of the Smithsonian institution at the time) used to try to set the first heavier-than-air flight… he didn’t, as the model crashed in the Potomac river.
  • A Junkers 52 built by the Spanish CASA.
  • A Boeing 307 Stratoliner: the first pressurized commercial aircraft.

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I would only give one point of improvement for the museum: now you cannot get into the aircraft except for simulators, if they would just change that policy it would be just perfect (in the Mall you can actually enter in some models, e.g. Spacelab).

I forgot to mention some extras: the museum is free (free as in zero dollars), it has a transport leaving every hour to and from Dulles airport which costs just 50 cents, has lockers for big luggage free of charge, has a nice souvenir shop with plenty of aviation books and even a McDonald’s to recover some strength at half way of the visit…

In future posts I will comment some of the details of some aircraft… give credit to Bill, our guide.

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May 13, 2011 · 7:00 am

Beluga vs. Dreamlifter

While looking at the small-scale models of aircraft at home, some days ago, I locked on the Beluga and the Dreamlifter (Airbus and Boeing transport aircraft to bring major components from one factory to another). I had become used to the sight of the Beluga but seeing then both together I realized that they are indeed bizarre.

While Airbus relied on the Beluga since years ago (and before, it used the Super Guppy; now resting at the museum by Airbus factory in Toulouse), Boeing only decided to modify 747s for this purpose to reduce transportation times in the 787 manufacturing.

In this post I didn’t want to make any technical comparison, just wanted to show this picture and ask: which one do you think is the prettiest (or the ugliest)? I haven’t made up my mind yet.

Dreamlifter vs. Beluga.

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May 9, 2011 · 7:00 am

747

I attended a course at the AirBusiness Acedemy of Airbus some weeks ago. In one of the coffee breaks I hanged around in the building’s library and I found a book that I wanted to read, so I picked it: “747”, by Joe Sutter with Jay Spencer.

Joe Sutter is the engineer who led the engineering development of the Boeing 747, the Jumbo. The book, a biography of Sutter, covers all his life but it is mainly centered in the happenings, decisions, struggles, individuals, etc., involved in the development of the 747 and other aircraft.

I particularly liked the many engineering problems that he mentioned in the book, why & when they encountered them and how they overcame them: e.g. how they debugged the B 377 Stratocruiser, the decision of placing 737 engines under the wing, going for 4 main landing gears in the 747, etc., and the innovations that they introduced in commercial aviation with different aircraft: first pressurized aircraft (B 307 Stratoliner, with the issue they had with the vertical stabilizer), the jet engine mounted in pylons under the wings (with the B 367-80 prototype –now resting at the Air & Space museum at Dulles, DC- which evolved in the 707; configuration mainly used until today), the first wide-body aircraft (B 747), etc.

He also described many details about dealings with customers (e.g. Juan Trippe in Pan Am, Iraqi customers), competitors (including Russian delegations during Cold War), and colleagues at Boeing (with some heated discussions and internal politics, where he doesn’t save any detail).

As a curiosity, I finished the book while flying from Chicago to Frankfurt some days ago aboard a B 747, the first time I flew in one. I was sitting by the wing and took some pictures of the wing (first with a triple-slotted flaps) at different moments of the flight.

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The book is a very interesting read which I recommend to anyone with passion for aircraft (engineer or not).

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April 19, 2011 · 8:00 am

Turboprops market different dynamic

In the last post I discussed about the dynamics of commercial aircraft orders and its correlation with air traffic growth and GDP growth.

In the previous post, I had discussed about turboprops. Today, I want to connect the two dots in a particular way.

I want to show how civil turboprop market is unrelated to the larger and more known turbofan civil aircraft market and how its dynamics are completely unrelated to World GDP growth and thus world air traffic growth.

For this purpose I studied the numbers of ATR (using the info available in its website from yearly news releases discussing results).  I proceeded in the same way as before, analysing the correlation between the different variables.

In order to take a larger time span, I used ATR deliveries instead of orders, as I found a larger data set for deliveries (obviously aircraft delivered were previously ordered, lag in between is not that obvious, today’s backlog is about 3 years production).

In the following graphic I plotted ATR deliveries, GDP growth and oil price:

ATR deliveries vs. GDP growth and oil price.

When calculating correlation between the different variables, I discovered that the correlation between GDP and deliveries is rather low, despite of the time lag applied (be it 2, 3, 4 years…). However I found that the oil prices and deliveries did correlate very well with a lag of 5-6 years, yielding coefficients of 0.55-.65, which are rather high.

This different behaviour of the turboprop market compared to the bigger turbofan market could be explained by the oil price forecasts that airlines shall make each time the oil price goes up.

Again, I can imagine some C-suite executive of a regional airline demanding an oil price forecast/report with which to substantiate his gut-feeling that prices will continue to go up and thus turboprops,  which are more fuel-efficient than turbofans, will be best suited for their short-haul routes.

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April 16, 2011 · 10:00 am

Air traffic growth vs. aircraft orders

Taking the topic of the headline of this post I want to share some reflections on the commercial aircraft market.

The first is how closely air traffic growth is correlated to world economic growth. This sentence and the following graphic are taken directly from the Global Market Forecast [PDF, 7.9MB] produced by colleagues at Airbus.

Air traffic growth vs GDP growth (source: Airbus).

You may see in the graphic the correlation (correlation coefficient above 0.7) and how the air traffic growth is however much more volatile than the economic growth. This is very intuitive. The better the economic situation the more business trips, family visits and holiday trips will take place. Nevertheless Airbus explains that in some situations and regions this is not enough to forecast traffic and thus they produce hybrid models.

Then, I wondered: how do airlines translate this growth in traffic into airplane orders?

I made some numbers and played with them. I gathered aircraft orders for both Boeing and Airbus in the last ~20 years, plus air traffic and GDP growth over the same period of time. Then, I tried to connect one with another and see how best they would correlate with each other. Even though correlation does not imply causation, it may indicate existence of such causal relations that it’s why I searched for such results.

Here I plotted GDP growth (IMF), traffic growth (ICAO) and aircraft orders:

Aircraft orders vs. air traffic and GDP growth.

One could expect that airlines, after collecting first hand data of traffic growth plus the aggregate demand from industry sources (IATA, ICAO) and after applying their complex planning models would order aircraft from manufacturers. Thus, a correlation might be expected between traffic growth and aircraft orders. What we don’t know is whether airlines would place orders in the same year where the traffic growth actually takes place or there would be a lag (due to the airline analysis process, the negotiation with the manufacturer, arranging the financing, waiting for the next air show…).

The correlation results I got between these 2 variables are satisfactory though not that high. Matching data of the same year yields a 0.35 correlation coefficient. If however, we apply a 1-year lag in between air traffic growth data and orders the correlation is better, 0.44 (a lag of 2 years would worsen it down to 0.27 and so forth).

I found it curious that correlation between orders and GDP growth is much better! Matching data of the same year yielded a 0.61 correlation coefficient (which is rather high). A lag of a year would produce a still high 0.56 (2-year lag, 0.41; 3-year, 2.6…).

This was a striking result for me. After all, even though individual airlines do have complex models and experienced analysts behind them, taking the aggregate of the market, it seems that orders are placed less on data of traffic and more relying on data of economic growth, and rather soon, acting within the same year or a year later!

Who knows how the process within the airlines actually works… I can imagine thoroughly thought and thick studies coming from planning & analysis departments being put aside in the board room where one or two directors (more assertive than the average) convince the rest of the soundness of an operation based half in broad economic prospects (world GDP growth) and half in gut-feeling… wouldn’t surprise me much.

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March 29, 2011 · 8:00 am

Turboprops

Since some time ago I wanted to write a small entry just to show the following graphic to point a very basic issue to non-engineers:

Efficiency vs. airspeed.

I have very often heard remarks about turbo propellers referring them as old or old technology, etc. I guess that this comes from seeing images of old aircraft with propellers and reciprocating engines, and now people being used to fly in turbofan engines.

However, turbo propellers are neither old nor a worse technology. As almost everything in engineering it all depends on what the requirements are and the price to pay for the solution. Then come the trade-offs. As you may find in the Wikipedia entry [turboprops] “they are mostly used where high-performance short-takeoff and landing (STOL) capability and efficiency at modest flight speeds are required”.

The first requirement is among the ones explaining why some military transport aircraft such as the C-295, the C-130 or the most modern A400M are equipped with turboprops.

The second requirement explains why some regional airlines employ turboprops for short-haul flights, when the distance can be covered at a bit lower speed without a big impact in the flight time.

If you take a look at the picture above, you could start roughly guessing what type of engine you would choose depending at what speed you would normally fly (then more requirements would come into play).

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March 19, 2011 · 11:00 am

Lamentable entrevista de Ana Pastor a Mahmud Ahmadineyad

El pasado día 15 leí varios tweets haciendo referencia a una entrevista que la periodista de TVE Ana Pastor había hecho a Mahmud Ahmadineyad. Así que la vi.

Debo ser muy raro, porque no he dejado de leer elogios a la periodista y a mí me parece que la entrevista, el papel que hizo como entrevistadora, es lamentable. Sin paliativos.

Me explico:

Se pasa la entrevista interrumpiendo las respuestas del entrevistado o apresurándole con frases del tipo “déjeme estamos terminando, me dicen que se me acaba el tiempo”.

En ocasiones contradice al entrevistado. Aunque éste diga cosas que no sean ciertas, ¿interesa acaso lo que piense la entrevistadora?.

Sonríe mostrando desinterés por las respuestas del entrevistado. Por ejemplo, cuando Ahmadineyad le dice que las armas que usa Libia son vendidas por Occidente. Quizá no le guste escucharlo, pero antes de hacer la entrevista podría haberse informado y habría visto que es cierto.

Esto último me es fácil de comprobar porque he visitado las fuentes anteriormente. Dejo a continuación un par de ejemplos fácilmente demostrables:

  • España. Fuente: el ministerio de industria [PDF]. Las exportaciones en 2009 NO fueron de defensa ni armas como la prensa ha dicho en varias ocasiones, sino lo que se llama material de doble uso, como radares para navegación y control de tráfico aéreo. En total fueron 12.7 millones de €. Habría luego que ver el uso que finalmente se le da.
  • Francia e Italia. Fuente: el Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), autoridad internacional en la materia. En la siguiente herramienta, se puede hacer una búsqueda de exportaciones de armas con destino Libia en los últimos 20 años. Aparece un registro por valor de ~168M€ de exportación de misiles anti-tanque MILAN por parte de Francia, y otro por valor de ~80M€ de exportación de helicópteros por parte de Italia.
  • Estados Unidos. Fuente: el Departamento de Defensa. En su informe anual de 2009 [PDF] muestra como Libia, que había estado bajo embargo durante años, desde 2006 comenzó a recibir exportaciones comerciales de armas desde Estados Unidos, aunque por un valor muy bajo, menos de 1M$ en 2009.
  • …

Si la gente vitorea la entrevista porque le ha plantado cara a Ahmadineyad, me parece bien, pero le podría haber tirado un zapato o una estatuilla de Il Duomo a la cara, en vez de hacer una entrevista.

Si TVE quería incordiar y molestar a Ahmadineyad, podría haber hecho muchas otras cosas, en vez de una entrevista.

Si querían presentar una imagen deplorable o ridícula de Ahmadineyad podrían haber hecho un documental, en vez de una entrevista.

A mi ese hombre también me parece detestable. Pero es que Ana Pastor termina la entrevista diciendo “creemos que es bueno escuchar todas las opiniones”, y precisamente eso es lo que no ha hecho. Si desde TVE, no lo querían hacer que no le hubiesen puesto un micrófono delante para empezar.

Lamentable.

Lo único bueno que me pareció que tuvo la entrevista fue el saludo final en farsi.

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February 26, 2011 · 2:00 am

Wrong forecasts

Close to midnight of past Thursday we learnt that the winner of the KC-X competition to provide the aerial refuelling aircraft to the US Air Force was Boeing. That was cold news for our company.

I had just tweeted the previous day my bet on the competition:

I never get it right...

To reach to that conclusion I had done some numbers for fun on a late Friday afternoon some months ago in a similar fashion than the defence analyst Scott Hamilton showed in his blog. It is clear that I got it completely wrong.

As I have often told to my friends and colleagues, I am extremely bad with these predictions, as I was already mistaken when the JCA and the previous KC-X competitions were decided…

A note of humour: as my brother points out in fact I am very reliable, you just have to bet to the opposite option of my forecast.

Another colleague told us yesterday “you look like economists explaining your miscalculations…”, as someone put it “it is already hard to explain the past, it is even more difficult to predict the future”.

Already looking forward to the next win.

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February 13, 2011 · 11:00 am

Model of an airport

When I was in primary school I used to have a friend who had an impressive train model layout at home. Soon after, my parents gave me some very nice models that I still keep, though I do not play with them anymore and never continued to grow the layout nor purchased more train models.

Since I joined EADS I began collecting a few static models of aircraft: first an A380, then a Beluga, an A340-600, 2 A400M… Each time I stop at Schiphol airport with enough spare time I pay a visit to the model shop over there, so do I to Airbus online shop…

"Static" aircraft model collection at home... as of today.

However, few days ago, I found via Twitter a post in a blog that contained the following video of a model of an airport in Miniatur-Wonderland, Hamburg:

… if I take on this hobby it could be the beginning of my own end! What it’s sure is that whenever I go to Hamburg I’ll pay a visit to the place.

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