Aerospace - Blog Posts
A Beginner’s Guide to Advanced Air Mobility
Soaring over traffic in an air taxi, receiving packages faster, and participating in a sustainable, safer mode of transportation: all could be possible with a revolutionary new type of air transportation system in development called Advanced Air Mobility (AAM).
AAM could include new aircraft developed by industry, called electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, or eVTOLs, for use in passenger, package, or cargo delivery. It may also include new places for these aircraft to take off and land called vertiports.
Our work in Advanced Air Mobility will transform the way people and goods will move through the skies. This includes using Advanced Air Mobility for public good missions such as disaster, medical, and wildfire response.
What is Advanced Air Mobility?
Our vision for Advanced Air Mobility is to map out a safe, accessible, and affordable new air transportation system alongside industry, community partners, and the Federal Aviation Administration.
Once developed, passengers and cargo will travel on-demand in innovative, automated aircraft called eVTOLs, across town, between neighboring cities, or to other locations typically accessed today by car.
What are the benefits of Advanced Air Mobility?
The addition of Advanced Air Mobility will benefit the public in several ways: easier access for travelers between rural, suburban, and urban communities; rapid package delivery; reduced commute times; disaster response, and new solutions for medical transport of passengers and supplies.
What are the challenges associated with Advanced Air Mobility?
Various NASA simulation and flight testing efforts will study noise, automation, safety, vertiports, airspace development and operations, infrastructure, and ride quality, along with other focus areas like community integration.
These areas all need to be further researched before Advanced Air Mobility could be integrated into our skies. We’re helping emerging aviation markets navigate the creation of this new transportation system.
When will Advanced Air Mobility take off?
We provide various test results to the FAA to help with new policy and standards creation. We aim to give industry and the FAA recommendations for requirements to build a scalable Advanced Air Mobility system to help enable the industry to flourish by 2030.
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The road to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center. Completed in 1966, the VAB was originally intended for the vertical stacking of the Saturn V rocket during the Apollo Program era. During the Space Shuttle era, shuttle orbiters were mounted to fuel tanks & rocket boosters. The VAB is the tallest building (outside an urban area) in the US. It was the tallest building in Florida until 1974 & is the largest single story building in the world at 526 feet. At 129,428,000 cubic feet, it’s larger than your average 1-bedroom apartment.
Sometimes I complain that my major is too hard then I remember I'm the one who chose to study literal rocket science 🫠
Female Aerospace Pioneers - Elizabeth “Bessie” Coleman In 1921 Elizabeth “Bessie” Coleman, a Texan, became the first civilian (non-military) licensed African-American pilot in the world. She went to France to learn to fly after her brothers, who served in World War II, told her French women were allowed to fly. When she returned to the United States she did air shows: barnstorming, parachute jumping, and giving demonstrations. Coleman would only perform if the audience was not segregated and all people got to enter the show through the same gate. This courageous and adventurous woman fell from the open cockpit of a plane during a test flight which ended her life on April 30, 1926. She was enshrined in the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 2006. Read more #OnTheBlog: http://www.groovylabinabox.com/female-aerospace-pioneers/ #WOAW16 #womenshistorymonth #flysafe #femalepilot #genav #pilotlife #femalepilot #femalepilots #avgeek #STEMists #GroovyLabInABox #STEMist #GroovyLab #WomenInSTEM #GirlsInSTEM #aviation #science #technology #engineering #math #STEM #instascience #homeschooling #homeschoolscience #aerospace #STEMEducation #STEMEd #aviators #AirAndSpace #SciGirls #WomenInTech
Aerospace Innovations: https://goo.gl/sdpPUK
Moving toward an Information Age Air Force: https://goo.gl/ytcEVh
Engineers fly first-ever plane with no moving parts
Since the first airplane took flight over 100 years ago, virtually every aircraft in the sky has flown with the help of moving parts such as propellers, turbine blades, and fans, which are powered by the combustion of fossil fuels or by battery packs that produce a persistent, whining buzz.
Now MIT engineers have built and flown the first-ever plane with no moving parts. Instead of propellers or turbines, the light aircraft is powered by an “ionic wind” – a silent but mighty flow of ions that is produced aboard the plane, and that generates enough thrust to propel the plane over a sustained, steady flight.
Unlike turbine-powered planes, the aircraft does not depend on fossil fuels to fly. And unlike propeller-driven drones, the new design is completely silent.
“This is the first-ever sustained flight of a plane with no moving parts in the propulsion system,” says Steven Barrett, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. “This has potentially opened new and unexplored possibilities for aircraft which are quieter, mechanically simpler, and do not emit combustion emissions.”
He expects that in the near-term, such ion wind propulsion systems could be used to fly less noisy drones. Further out, he envisions ion propulsion paired with more conventional combustion systems to create more fuel-efficient, hybrid passenger planes and other large aircraft.
Barrett and his team at MIT have published their results in the journal Nature.
Keep reading
Yes, this does count as an aerospace question. And yes, their aerodynamics are quite bad. They would not fly very well with modern technology.
That "with modern technology" part is the key word, there. Because according to the lore, a lot of them can canonically fly very well.
Most canon speeds for 40k aircraft are 2000 kph or more, at about a mile above sea level. The speed of sound at that altitude is a bit over 1200 kph, for reference. Having 20,000+ km of range (eg they could fly from anywhere on earth to anywhere else on earth) isn't uncommon, either.
Many are also single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft (meaning that when they go to space, they take the entire spacecraft with them, and don't have boosters that they drop partway up like real world rockets), and all of those are reusable (meaning they can make multiple flights to and from orbit) and able to withstand reentry without any heat shielding beyond whatever armor they might have (and they are armored, with larger craft like the Thunderhawk being similar in durability to heavier tanks like Land Raiders).
There are a few conclusions you can draw from that.
Any of these aircraft would experience immense drag when flying (or when reentering the atmosphere). Not only does this mean that their airframes would need to be able to withstand the stress from that drag, they also need engines powerful enough to push them against it.
The combination of their range and single-stage-to-orbit capacity (and payload) means that they are powered by something far more energy-dense than any real world fuel.
I have a feeling that a space marine (talking about in armour here btw) might actualy be more earodynamic than any of the space marine planes
You know what? Yeah