Australian aircraft engineers have called for the grounding of the Airbus A380 – the world’s biggest passenger aircraft – after Singapore Airlines and Qantas found cracks in the wings of several planes.
Is this a story? Australian aircraft engineers have called for the grounding of the Airbus A380 – the world’s biggest passenger aircraft – after Singapore Airlines and Qantas found cracks in the wings of several planes.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Is this a story? Australian aircraft engineers have called for the grounding of the Airbus A380 – the world’s biggest passenger aircraft – after Singapore Airlines and Qantas found cracks in the wings of several planes.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
I have begun to recently ponder how safe these new composite hybrid planes are given it is relatively new technology. Am I right about this being new technology, unproven?
“I have begun to recently ponder how safe these new composite hybrid planes are given it is relatively new technology. Am I right about this being new technology, unproven?
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Rene, composite materials technology was new in the 1960s, but it has been 50 years since the first large-scale aerospace use of composite materials (the Minuteman ICBM series had wound fiberglass/epoxy stages), and hundreds of billions of dollars of work has gone into making them reliable since then. The real questions will revolve around how they used the materials in the structures. They were building a very large airplane, that they *knew* would be restricted to a smaller number of airports than competing aircraft. Their desire to lighten the aircraft and match it to existing terminal facilities, so that they could maximize the number of airports it could fly into *might* have got the better of them, but by now the composite materials are a well-known asset for aircraft. Like all materials, they have their own tradeoffs, but those should have been well-known to the designers.
A couple questions for any aerospace engineers (or just aviation experts): I know the new Boeing 787 is around 50% composite, the most ever for an airliner. How much of the Airbus 380 is constructed of composites? Were the cracks found in areas that were made of the composites, or metal? One final qustion: We know the risk for “metal fatigue” – are composites more or less prone to some form of “fatigue”? I thought they may be less prone to fatigue, but I’ll defer to the experts…