The RAeS Publications team report from #Farn10
Day 4 of the Farnborough airshow and the weather finally turned, with a torrential downpour that sometimes made hearing what people were saying difficult in the halls. The press conference frenzy also quietened down, allowing the aerospace media more time to fan out across the show for more in-depth interviews and one-to-one chats.
While many thought that Thursday would see the large orders dry up, Airbus surprised the show with an announcement for a $3.26bn order with Virgin America for 40 A320s (equipped with sharklet wing devices) plus options for a further 20. The sense of optimism, surrounding this deal and others at the show was summed up in his usual style by Airbus chief salesman, John Leahy, who said: “Ladies and Gentleman, the recession is finally over.” Traffic and growth, he said, had ‘turned the corner’ echoing many sentiments that Aerospace International heard again and again when speaking to show attendees. Of course, this applies to the civil aerospace sector only – the defence sector, at least in Europe and to a lesser extent in the US, faces some tough challenges ahead – with the outline of the pain to come only dimly visible.
Boeing, for its part, announced two more 737-800 orders for Alaskan Air. In total, by the end of Thursday, the orderbook for this year’s Farnborough stood at some 237 airliners, worth around $28bn, eclipsing the previous Paris airshow, where the sombre mood led to only 78 orders being booked.
On the military side, this week also saw Embraer secure a significant launch order from the Brazilian Air Force for its twin-jet KC-390 tanker-transporter. The Brazilian Air Force is to procure 28 of these medium transporters, with first deliveries in 2016. With Embraer having come (almost) from nowhere to become a major player in regional, and now business aircraft, is the global military transport market its next target?
In helicopter safety, flexible materials specialist Aero Sekur revealed its hard-landing helicopter inflation system – developed from leveraging Mars Exolander airbag technology. These airbags are dual-purpose, deflating in sequence in a crash or hard landing, or staying inflated in the event of a water ditching. Interestingly, while the model shows a civil helicopter, Aero Sekur reports intensive interest from military pilots and operators in the system. Rough landings following brown-outs have been far too common in Afghanistan and this system may have a role. Indeed, the UK’s post-Haddon-Cave report climate could see systems such as this, not just desirable, but essential for ‘duty-of-care’.
It is not just 14-year old girls on Bebo and aerospace journalists hooked on ‘#FARN10’ social media that will be updating their status multiple times a day. Soon airliners themselves will be ‘twittering’ constantly according to IT solutions provider CSC. CSC, which provides information services for everyone from Boeing to secret spy agencies, is part of Thales onboard Wi-Fi solution (see Welcome to the iPlane, Aerospace International, June 2010), CSC’s role involves GateSync which allows information such as maintenance logs, crew rosters, and IFE content such as daily news and the latest films to be sent to the aircraft while on the ground over next-gen Wi-Fi nets. This means that carriers with short-haul services could potentially use it to update, for example, daily news content several times a day, through a Wi-Max RF ground station. But it gets even cleverer – airliners equipped with this system will also, at remote bases without a ground terminal, be able to update each other automatically, sharing with each other the latest, most up to date NOTAMs, rosters or IFE content. A 787 with its own Facebook page? It could just happen.
And finally…
“You must think in Russian” – is of course a famous quote from the classic Clint Eastwood aviation film Firefox, where he stole a secret Soviet fighter that had a novel cockpit feature – thought-controlled weaponry. But this may be closer than we think. Canada’s Ontario Aerospace Council revealed at an aerospace innovation ‘speed dating’ event it organised earlier this year, a non-aerospace developer, Interaxon, came up with a thought-controlled golf game for the IFE market. Lateral thinking like this, in looking beyond the traditional aerospace sector for the best and the brightest ideas, will only increase the innovation pool and benefit the industry. So will Clint’s thought controlled Firefox ever come about – or is this just a cool gimmick for bored passengers? Don’t rule the former out – after all, it was only recently that the idea of ‘talking’ to your aircraft would be considered science fiction – but is now in operational service as direct voice input (DVI) with the Eurofighter Typhoon.
from the Royal Aeronautical Society
