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Stories about: airplanes


Piezoelectrics to Convert Air Flows into Electricity

Piezoelectric materials are special classes of ceramics and crystals, which have the ability to generate electrical potential when mechanical pressure is applied on them. They currently provide the basis for a large number of applications, including powering up guitar pickups, making for fuses in rocket-propelled gre...

23 November 2009
01:41 GMT

Building Airplanes That 'See'

To military applications, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are becoming increasingly indispensable and useful. These aircraft, which are currently flown by remote controls, are able to reach dangerous areas that are deemed too hazardous for human pilots. Their small sizes also make them difficult to detect with convent...

16 November 2009
03:11 GMT

New System Shuts Down Lasers When Airplanes Appear

Over the past few years, lasers have become indispensable scientific instruments, which are used for a variety of tasks, ranging from measuring the distance from the Earth to the Moon and analyzing air composition, to offering a focal point for the active optics systems in modern telescopes. But, when firing a high-p...

2 November 2009
09:48 GMT

New Generation of Airplane Sensors In The Works

Despite their impressive sizes, modern planes are still fairly sensitive to mid-air impacts. Over the past year, a cascade of incidents has drawn attention to the fact that birds still remain a major hazard for continental or global flights, especially in terms of the damage they cause when they impact the fuselages....

2 October 2009
15:21 GMT

Nature Prefers Twisting Wings over Straight Ones

Recent scientific studies conducted on insect flight have revealed that nature and evolution seem to favor a wing design that is not flat and inflexible, such as airplane wings. While they may get the job done transporting humans from point A to point B, they are not highly efficient in terms of performances, when co...

18 September 2009
03:42 GMT

Tooth Enamel Inspires Next-Gen Aircraft

For a long time, dentists have expressed their amazement at how the outer layer covering the teeth, the enamel, manages to endure so much stress and wear over the course of a lifetime without degrading or decaying too much. This is especially hard to explain, considering that the material itself is only as tough as g...

20 August 2009
18:21 GMT

New Piezoelectric Device Works on the Small Scale

Piezoelectric devices are well known for their ability to convert mechanical stress into electricity, and a great many research groups around the world are currently working on developing their technology to a point where it could be used in mass applications. Scientists at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI), i...

18 August 2009
09:55 GMT

New Forms of Metal Created with Lasers

A team of scientists from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, led by Dr. Chunlei Guo, recently announced the development of a new method of treating metal, which involves tremendously intense bursts of laser. If a shiny piece of metal is bombarded with the laser pulses, it eventually changes its color to ...

21 July 2009
18:31 GMT

NASA System to Allow Aircraft to Avoid Turbulences

Airplanes could benefit from a new weather control system in the near future, currently under development by the American space agency NASA, and a partnership between the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), in Boulder, Colorado and the University of Wisconsin. The new warning method will employ satellite...

8 July 2009
03:49 GMT

How to Make Good on Your Pledges

In what Swansea University Professor Larch Maxey described as the “irony of our times,” the expert was invited to fly from his home in England to the United States, to attend a climate change conference at the Smithsonian Festival. Maxey, who, for the past 15 years, failed to wrap his mind around the whol...

27 June 2009
05:54 GMT

Math Models Could Make Jet Lags Bearable

Jet lag is a phenomenon associated with long flights, from a part of the world to another, when the biological clock of passengers becomes “confused.” As such, upon their arrival at the destination, they tend to sleep during the day, at the same time when it's night in their place of origin. It takes...

19 June 2009
10:05 GMT

NYC Officials to Kill 2,000 Geese over Plane Strike Fears

In measures spurred by the January incident, when an airplane hit a flock of large birds and was forced to land on the Hudson River, authorities in New York City decided to kill at least 2,000 geese this year, all of them living in close proximity to the LaGuardia and JFK international airports. City Hall is collabor...

13 June 2009
05:09 GMT

Hummingbirds Are Faster than Jet Fighters

These birds have been objects of fascination for biologists for a long time, on account of the fact that they are the only species of birds to have the ability to hover in mid-air, flapping their wings 12 to 90 times per second. This trait also allows them to move backwards, something that no other winged creature ca...

10 June 2009
16:01 GMT

15 More Bodies Recovered from the AF 447 Wreck

Investigators under the gruesome task of searching the waters of the Atlantic Ocean for debris and bodies from the Air France Airbus A330-200 that crashed on June 1st, 2009, some 680 miles (1,090 kilometers) Northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off the northern coast of Brazil, recovered 15 more corpses from ...

9 June 2009
06:58 GMT

Air Companies Call for CO2 Targets

Taking their commitment on reducing their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions further, as previously stated, seven of the largest airlines in the world, including Air France/KLM and British Airways, have requested that the United Nations set the CO2 targets for the aviation industry soon. Together with the international N...

9 June 2009
06:24 GMT

Experts Identify Birds That Brought Down the Hudson Plane

At the beginning of this year, an airplane was forced to make an emergency landing in the waters of the Hudson river in New York. The pilot managed to land the plane safely on the water, after a flock of birds hit one of its engines, forcing it to shut down. Now, using a sophisticated chemical analysis, experts have ...

9 June 2009
01:42 GMT

Weightlessness Wedding Planned for June 20

On Saturday, June 20, an American couple will get married in the weightlessness of an aircraft dive, inside a plane known as The Vomit Comet. The two New Yorkers, Noah Fulmor and Erin Finnegan, will tie the knot in this fashion because they have both been fascinated by space since their early years, and also because ...

4 June 2009
05:52 GMT

Airplanes Are Still the Safest Way to Travel

Despite a relatively large number of high-profile plane crashes taking place over the last months, statistically speaking, traveling by air is still the safest way of getting from point A to point B, hundreds or thousands of miles away. Large, commercial aircraft, especially, are best equipped to handle large number ...

2 June 2009
10:04 GMT

Training Facility Offers 'Space Camp on Steroids'

A Tampa Bay, Florida-based enterprise, freshly opened for business on May 1, is offering would-be space tourists all the training they need for suborbital flights, in what the owners have termed a “space camp on steroids.” Aurora Aerospace offers customers a complete training regimen at its facility in th...

2 June 2009
05:12 GMT

Weird Wings Could Reduce Plane Fuel Consumption by 20%

According to experts from the University of Warwick in the UK, and the aeronautics company Airbus, conventional plane wings may soon become a thing of the past. The researchers, whose work was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), showed that unusual wing designs, which had the abi...

22 May 2009
08:53 GMT

Inventor Builds High-Tech Underwater 'Airplane'

In the field of oceanic exploration, submersibles, or submarines, as they're best known, are still the leaders of the pack. Alternatives to this method of exploring the depths are very rare, and most of them cannot even begin to compare to the large number of applications a submarine can be used for. For this ve...

14 May 2009
08:35 GMT

Future Airplanes Could Fly in 'Geese Formations'

A recent contest, set up by aeronautics company Airbus, the creator of the largest passenger airplane in the world, the A380, has requested students around the world to come up with the most innovative planes of the future. Demands have not been very strict, in that the participants could base their ideas on technolo...

11 May 2009
06:48 GMT

Canadian Satellite to Help with Patrolling Borders

Canada's territorial waters are, at times, safe havens for illegal fishermen, who venture in their small boats off the coasts, and make a dent in the fish population, either by harvesting more than they need, or by doing so during the reproductive season. But surveying such a huge coastline as the country's...

5 May 2009
04:04 GMT

Experimental Airplane Gets Computerized Test Pilot

Ohio State University engineers have created what flight experts until now have considered next to impossible – a computerized guidance system for experimental aircraft, which can adapt to the changing conditions of flying faster than the speed of sound. Specifically designed for a new airplane prototype in the...

30 April 2009
06:39 GMT

'Out-of-Sync' Brain Cells Responsible for Jet Lag

A new scientific study conducted on rats proved that jet lag most likely occurred when two groups of neurons in the brain were thrown out-of-sync, in that they no longer worked together. Regularly, the ventral and dorsal neuron groups in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, at the base of the brain, cooperate in assessing th...

17 April 2009
04:32 GMT

Coating Plane Wings in Feathers Could Reduce Drag

Over millions of years of evolution, birds have managed to develop a highly efficient flight system, in which they use two types of feathers to fly. The longer, more stiff flight feathers help generate lift, while the second ones, coverts, are used to minimize drag while moving through the air. A team of Italian scie...

13 April 2009
05:06 GMT

Europe to Modify Air Routes for Fuel Efficiency

On Wednesday, European lawmakers set the basis for one of their most ambitious projects to date, namely for the creation of a unified air space above the Union, in a move that is aimed squarely at reducing the amount of pollution created by airplanes traveling long routes in order to go around certain areas. That is ...

26 March 2009
11:23 GMT

Diamond Windows Protect Next-Gen Jet Fighters

The US Air Force has big plans for its future generation of fighter jets, which will apparently have the ability to generate high-powered microwaves (HPM). This would allow American pilots to disrupt any enemy plane's electrical systems, but would also expose their own craft to the same risks. That's why th...

14 March 2009
06:02 GMT

Turkish Airplane Crashes in Amsterdam

A serious plane crash has taken place today in Holland, when a Turkish airliner collapsed to the ground while carrying 135 people. Preliminary reports hint at the fact that light fog was responsible for the crash, which nevertheless claimed the lives of 9 people, according to Dutch airport officials. An additional 50...

25 February 2009
14:01 GMT

The Four Largest Planes in Aviation History

Since the beginning of the Flight Age, at the start of the 20th century, experts have been trying to construct larger and faster planes, for the sole purpose of moving more people or more cargo from one place to another. These are just four of the largest airplanes ever to take to the sky.The Hughes H-4 Hercules (reg...

1 February 2009
21:01 GMT

Alaska's Redoubt Volcano to Erupt Again in Days

On Thursday, seismologists announced that a surge in activity registered at Mount Redoubt in Alaska had prompted a widespread monitoring and observation effort on the part of all experts in the area. The volcano lies approximately 100 miles from the American state's most populous city, and there are concerns tha...

30 January 2009
02:52 GMT

Tropical Forests Measured with Lasers

Experts from the US Forest Service and the Carnegie Institution have developed a new laser system that allows them to use a plan for monitoring changes that might have occurred in tropical rain forests. The changes refer to the influence of outside intrusive plant species, as well as to the effect the spread or reduc...

26 January 2009
03:19 GMT

Antarctic Bird Develops Love for Runways, Endangers Planes

Airstrips from all over Antarctica seem to be currently dealing with a bit of an odd situation – many south polar skua birds, which, truth be told, are fairly large and aggressive, have taken a keen interest in runways across the freezing continent, attracted by their warmth and the fact that they are snow-free...

20 January 2009
15:01 GMT

Experts Say Fewer Plane Crashes End in Tragedy

Over the past year, four major airplane incidents, which could have ended in tragedy, were resolved exemplary by the crew on board. Fatalities were kept to zero, and every single passenger and crew member made it out of the plane alive. In the past, when an airplane fell from 20,000 feet with a hole in it the size of...

17 January 2009
06:51 GMT

Birds Do a Fine Job Bringing Down Jet Airliners

Comparing the dimensions of an intercontinental airliner against those of a small bird may not yield results that will back up the conclusions that several commissions investigating plane crashes came to, namely that stray birds or flocks managed to destroy propellers and cause significant damage to the engines, forc...

16 January 2009
05:15 GMT

How Radial Engines Work

Radial engines became widely popular during the World War II and have been mostly used to power the propellers of airplanes such as the B-25 and the B-17 bombers, or even commercial airplanes like the DC-3. Basically, a radial engine is similar to gasoline internal combustion engines, only that the pistons are dispos...

16 May 2008
08:36 GMT


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