Australia: Greenvale girl takes to the skies

From the Hume Leader: Greenvale girl takes to the skies
Monday to Friday Deniz Kocaoglu studies at Aitken College, but come the weekend she’s up in the clouds above Melbourne.

The Greenvale 16-year-old wants to be a commercial pilot and last month took a giant leap towards her goal by taking her maiden solo flight in a PA-28 Warrior.

Deniz has been working towards becoming a pilot since she was 12, and trains at Moorabbin Flying Services.

“It’s pretty awesome being able to fly a plane on my weekends,” Deniz said.

Although she’s gained the freedom of the air, out on the road the L-plater still requires supervision.

“In the car I have to drive with a full licensee, in the plane I don’t even need my teacher,” Deniz said.

Deniz’s mother Ijlal said it was nerve racking when her daughter first began flying.

“In the beginning every time she flew my heart was in the mouth. Now we just let her go,” Mrs Kocaoglu said.

The next step for the year 10 student is to sit the general flying progress test, which if she passes, enables her to fly with passengers

24-26 Oct, 2011: Aviation Week in Phoenix, AZ

From Yahoo News: Aviation Week Presents 2011 A&D Programs Conference and Awards on Oct. 24-26 in Phoenix
NEW YORK, Sept. 1, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Aviation Week will present the on October 24-26 at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Arizona. With continuing economic pressures, falling budgets, and increasing calls for industrial investment, it is critical that government contractors and customers strategize their approaches toward performance, innovation and sourcing today. During the event, Aviation Week will also present the Program Excellence Award Winners and Innovation Challenge Finalists, the industry's preeminent awards for program managers and tiered suppliers in the A&D industry.

At the event, attendees will gain valuable business and program intelligence related to key issues, such as progress in supply chain health, DoD and NASA acquisition strategies, program performance trends, and OEM strategic sourcing efforts. Speakers will present in-depth case studies for developing and executing subcontracts, shared services models, and changes in affordability. Program leaders, such as Tom Kilkenny, general manager of IBM Global Aerospace & Defense Industry, will discuss global supply chain optimization, integration and risk mitigation. Other prestigious speakers include:


Craig Blue, Director, Office of Energy Efficiency/Renewable Energy Industrial Technologies, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Charles Burbage, EVP/GM, F-35 Program Integration, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co.
Byron Callan, Director, Capital Alpha Partners
Tom Captain, Vice Chairman and Global A&D Leader, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu
Tom Clancy, VP, Advanced Concepts, Aurora Flight Sciences
Tom Dolan, President, Hi-Rel Products
Maureen Dougherty, VP/Program Manager, Next Generation Tanker, Boeing Military Aircraft
Phil Dunford, COO, Boeing Military Aircraft
Bob Fecteau, CIO, BAE Systems Intelligence & Security
Doug Fronius, Chief Engineer, Air and Land Systems, Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems
Vivek Kamath, VP, Supply Chain Operations, Raytheon
Jason Kinder, Director, Product Management, Deltek
Lisa Kohl, Sector VP, Supply Chain, Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems
Kenneth Krieg, Founder, Stamford Global, and Former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense-AT&L
Roger Krone, President, Boeing Network and Space Systems
Zachary Lemnios, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering
Mike Madsen, President, Honeywell Defense & Space
Philip McAlister, Special Assistant to the Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems, NASA
Doug McCrosson, COO, CPI Aero
Mike Owens, VP, ISC, Americas, Honeywell Aerospace
Mark Sirangelo, Corporate VP, Sierra Nevada Corp. Space Systems
Allan Swan, VP, Supply Chain Planning and Control, Rolls-Royce N.A.
Don Theriault, President, Industrial Tool, Die & Engineering
Jeff Wilcox, VP, Engineering, Lockheed Martin Corp.




For more information or to register, visit . On Twitter, follow @avweekevents or search for #ADP11. Special rates apply before Sept. 16 and for government, military, media, alumni, and groups of three or more.

A&D Programs is produced by Aviation Week, with support from Forecast International, International Centre for Complex Project Management, and Supply Chain Council. The diamond sponsor is IBM. The emerald sponsor is Oracle. Dassault Systemes is the gold sponsor. The charter sponsor is Deloitte. Silver sponsors include Deltek, Parametric Technology Corp., and Software AG. Bronze sponsors are Constellium, Infotech, and Siemens. Program excellence sponsors are BAE Systems, Boeing, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. Media support is provided by Aviation Week & Space Technology, Bvents.com, Defense Procurement News, Defense Technology International, and Military Suppliers & News.

About Aviation Week:
Aviation Week, part of The McGraw-Hill Companies, is the largest multimedia information and services provider to the global aviation, aerospace and defense industries, and includes http://AviationWeek.com, Aviation Week & Space Technology, Defense Technology International, Business & Commercial Aviation, Overhaul & Maintenance, ShowNews, Aviation Daily, Aerospace Daily & Defense Report, The Weekly of Business Aviation, Aviation Week Intelligence Network, and MRO Links. The group also produces major events around the world.

7 Sept in Wichita: Founder of Women in Aviation to speak

From Blogs.Kansas.com: Founder of Women in Aviation to speak Wednesday

Peggy Chabrian, president and founder of Women in Aviation International, will be the keynote speaker at the Wichita Aero Club luncheon Wednesday.

A local chapter is forming.

Chabrian will speak about the challenges facing women and men seeking careers in the aviation and aerospace industries.

The non-profit organization provides networking, education, mentoring and scholarship opportunities.

Chabrian is a pilot with commercial, instrument, multi-engine, helicopter and seaplane ratings and a flight instructor. She has 2,300 flight hours.

The luncheon begins at noon at the Wichita Airport Hilton.

Cost is $30.00 for members and $40.00 for non-members.

For tickets contact the Wichita Aero Club.

Film-maker to receive award for Breaking Through the Clouds doc

From Dayton Daily News: Aviation film producer to receive award

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE — The National Aviation Hall of Fame will present an award and $20,000 cash prize to filmmaker Heather Taylor, of Columbia, Md., for her documentary about a 1929 race between female pilots flying from Santa Monica, Calif., to Cleveland, Ohio.

The aviation hall, based in the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, said Tuesday it will present its Combs Gates Award to Taylor on Oct. 11 at the National Business Aviation Association’s annual meeting in Las Vegas, Nev. The award is given in recognition of aviation history research and preservation efforts.

Taylor’s film, “Breaking Through the Clouds: The First Women’s National Air Derby,” used actual footage of the 1929 summer air race. The competition featured pilots including Amelia Earhart. Taylor spent 13 years researching, writing and producing the film. Information about the film is available online at www.breakingthroughtheclouds.com.

Modern-day aviation pioneer achieves world's first untethered, manned electric helicopter flight

From Gizmag.com: Modern-day aviation pioneer achieves world's first untethered, manned electric helicopter flight
Designing a prototype electric helicopter
For the basics of conventional helicopter flight and definitions of a couple of the terms below, check out our "How to Fly a Helicopter" video - it really is fascinating how these contraptions work in a conventional sense.

A conventional system wouldn't work here though - a tail rotor, for example, drains somewhere between 8% and 10% of total hover power. So Chretien modelled and built a coaxial design with two counter-rotating rotors on top - a torque-balanced design that can fly without the need for a tail rotor to stop the aircraft rotating out of control - instead, it just needs a simple, lightweight tail fin.

In place of the typical cyclic control, which uses an ingenious variable blade tilting system to control which way the helicopter tilts and advances, Chretien chose an extremely simple weight-shifting system - a big set of handlebars (incorporating the collective control) that literally tilt the main weight of the aircraft underneath the rotors - as his steering assembly. But this increased Chretien's risk factor by a significant margin - because it meant the controls would be reversed compared to a normal helicopter.

As Chretien puts it: "Weight savings were substantial - 4 to 5kg compared to a conventional arrangement... But habits being second nature, after 15 years of flying conventional machines the risks of crash were quite high." So during the development phase of the aircraft, Chretien built himself a pendular weight shift training machine to get himself used to the system and make sure he didn't react the wrong way when he first took to the air.

Yaw control was achieved with a combination of electric controllers (presumably varying the speeds of the two rotors) and a mechanical linkage that tilts the tail fin against the downwash from the main rotors - and the yaw controls are operated through pedals as in a conventional helicopter design.




The frame of the helicopter was built from welded 7020 aluminium tubing - composite materials would have been lighter, but time was of the essence, and crash-worthy aluminium frames can be built in very short timeframes - plus, this decision helped keep the cost of the vehicle down.

The Powerplant
Chretien had been given a target of 10 to 12 minutes' flight time by Solution F, so the most critical part of the aircraft design was working out how to store enough power for this kind of flight, as well as how to use that power most efficiently.

Chretien chose brushed DC motors for the rotor shafts, even though the required power output was "just on the edge of what can be achieved with brushed motors" - because brushed motors are exceptionally efficient, and their simple controller units are significantly lighter than those of more powerful, less efficient brushless motors.

With these in place, Chretien was able to achieve an 87.5% energy efficiency between the battery terminals and the rotor shafts.

The rechargeable battery cells are Lithium ion polymer pouch cells, with an energy density of 160 Watt-hours per kg. Although reasonably lightweight, these cells presented probably the biggest danger to Chretien in the test flight phase. As he puts it: "The infamous thermal instability of lithium/cobalt chemistry does not leave room for error... It is important to take it slowly, if I don't want to wreck tens of thousands of Euros worth of hardware; but also, in case of crash I stand good chances to end up in kebab form, as LiPo batteries are notoriously infamous for bursting to flames once distorted. The chemical reaction is violently exothermic. This machine looks like a toy, and flies like a toy, but there is a raging tiger under the seat, waiting to bite at the first mistake."




Test flights
Chretien initiated a few tethered test flights earlier this year, and was able to test the action and torque balance of the rotor controllers, the weight-shift directional tilt system and the ground effect behaviour of the aircraft.

And then, on August 12, it was time for the main event - the world's first untethered, manned flight of an electric helicopter, an event which lasted 2 minutes, 10 seconds up to a maximum height of 1 metre.

In this moment, Chretien and Solution F beat aviation goliath Sikorsky to the punch - Sikorsky has been working on its own project to get the first manned electric helicopter in the air, and unveiled its pre-flight Firefly prototype at the Experimental Aircraft Association AirVenture exhibition in July 2010.

But the Firefly is a much more conventional helicopter than Chretien's creation - it uses a conventional enclosed body shape, a single top rotor with a conventional swashplate and cyclic control, and a tail rotor - all of which add considerable weight, requiring additional heavy battery packs. This may have contributed to the fact that Sikorsky hasn't been able to run its first manned flight yet.

It's perhaps a little ironic that Chretien beat Sikorsky to the punch using a coaxial twin-rotor design, as Sikorsky is one of the leading proponents of coaxial helicopters - notably pushing a demonstrator version of its X2 to an unofficial helicopter speed record of 250 knots just last year.

Where to from here?
While he works on expanding the device's flight envelope, Chretien has a few things to think about after his pioneering test flight. The electric drive train needs more work, for example, and Chretien believes that "looking at the excellent power reserve we have today, it appears that we could have used a conventional cyclic [control] stick."

Before he takes the helicopter out of the ground effect zone - or above about 4 meters - he wants to refine the current yaw control setup.

Eventually, Chretien sees a hybrid drive train being the ultimate outcome of this project. To understand why this is important, you need to understand that at present, helicopter flight is nearly 40 times as dangerous as airplane flight, at about 23 deaths per million flight hours versus just 0.6 for aeroplanes.

Current figures, Chretien says, put engine failure and internal/mechanical failures down as responsible for over 40% of helicopter crashes. But if a helicopter was to use a hybrid power system, you could store backup power in the battery. Chretien says a simple system could offer 3-4 minutes of battery powered flight if the petrol engine failed, enough to land the craft safely and help to reduce that 40% of crashes.

So as he works on patents in that area and further developing his prototype electric helicopter, Chretien is certainly a busy man - he's had just six days off since last August and it's hard to see how things will slow down from here!

We wish him all the best and congratulate him on his new place in the history books.

Save the Date, every September: Stearman Fly In, Galesburg IL

The info below is from the September 2011 fly in, but I'd say it must take place every year around Labor Day, so mark your calendars.

200 in 2011! Start making plans now to attend the 40th anniversary National Stearman Fly-In scheduled for Sept. 5-10, 2011, at Galesburg, IL, Municipal Airport.

Help darken the skies over Galesburg with the wings of 200 Stearmans! Use the links on the left side of this page for a pre-arrival registration form and a map listing others who are planning to attend.

The 40th anniversary celebration promises to be the must-attend event of the year for Stearman enthusiasts. The schedule will include a variety of flying contests, technical seminars, a special concert, air shows starring the Stearman, the traditional Dawn Patrol, lunchtime flyouts, a pizza party, a picnic on Labor Day evening, and the Fly-In’s annual awards banquet.

Best of all, it’s a week-long opportunity to fly and relax with friends.

Stay on top as planning for the 40th anniversary National Stearman Fly-In continues. Visit our Web site at: www.stearmanflyin.com

Have a suggestion to make the Fly-In experience better than ever?
Here’s our contact information:


National Stearman Fly-In NFP Inc.
370 Lloyd Stearman Drive, P.O. Box 1937
Galesburg, IL 61402-1937
E-mail: stearman@stearmanflyin.com
Phone: (309) 343-6409

Want to know more about the host community? Here’s where you can find it:

Galesburg Area Convention & Visitors Bureau
2163 E. Main St.
Galesburg, IL 61401
E-mail: visitors@visitgalesburg.com
Phone: (309) 343-2485
Web site: www.visitgalesburg.com

Stearman Fly-In to feature bi-plane events

From the Quad City Times: Stearman Fly-In to feature bi-plane events

The centennial of naval aviation is being celebrated at this year’s National Stearman Fly-In at Galesburg, Ill., an event that is marking its 40th anniversary itself.

Events take place from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday at the Galesburg Municipal Airport, one mile west of the U.S. 34 and Illinois 164 intersection on the western edge of the city.

Trams will take guests along the Stearman flightline for a close-up look at the airplanes. The cost of admission to the fly-in is $1 per person.

The naval anniversary will be noted by Charles S. Downey, 87, of Poplar Grove, Ill., who retired from the U.S. Navy in 1975 after a 33-year career. Commissioned in 1943, he became the youngest naval aviator in World War II, breaking a record set by a pilot who later became better-known as President George H.W. Bush. Downey served on the Ticonderoga and Hancock aircraft carriers, and he helped sink a Japanese light cruiser at Manila Bay in late 1943, an act for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Downey’s presentation, “Fly Navy,” will begin at 8:30 p.m.

Other programs throughout the week include:

Stearman pre-purchase inspections, 9:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Fabric work and rib stitching, 3:30 p.m. Wednesday.

Radial engines, 9:30 a.m. Thursday.

“Flying the Stearman,” 4:30 p.m. Thursday.

“Grassroots Pilot Tour,” 7:30 p.m. Thursday.

More information is available online at StearmanFlyin.com.