Free Republic

“Nuke it from orbit”

It’s the only way to be sure.

But but but, it’s now being reported that Kavanaugh drop kicked kittens in middle school!

Yet they require your SSN and photo ID to go a First Lady’s book signing...

What a shame.

In Detroit, ~50% of the homeowners just ignore their property tax bills altogether. Ignore it three years in a row, and they’re supposed to take your house. But they don’t.

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130221/METRO01/302210375

Good. That area has become a jihadi no man’s land. The jihadis recently killed 25 police cadets. Pulled them out of a bus and shot them.

http://www.newsdaily.com/article/ab186bc7495781a3c2eccc4358ef921c/egypts-sinai-emerges-as-new-theater-for-jihad

California already does this. They just made Diamond Bar, a bedroom community (and republican stronghold) in the hills east of LA add a 30 unit/acre low income housing complex even though the city was officially “built out”.

Luckily, I live on the other end of the city, as this is gonna bring in the riff raff.

Pretty good year for Boeing so far. Per Aviation Week: as of July 5th, Boeing had 480 orders year to date compared to Airbus's 117--and 96 of those 117 were for the small, single-aisle aircraft.

In the 767/777/787-A330/340/350 market segment, Boeing racked up sales of 95 aircraft compared to 21 for Airbus.

Airbus's long range flagship, the A340-600, received no orders at all so far this year. The 777-300 has basically stomped on it--unless someone starts giving away fuel.

As for the Big Boys, Boeing has sold 11 747-400s and 800s YTD. I don’t believe Airbus has sold a single A380 so far this year.

Ouch.

Still, I wouldn't write off Airbus. Their production outstrips Boeing's by a good clip and their backlog is huge. Maybe the new management over there will listen to their customers.

Schadenfreude!

Humbert and Foregard needed to go. Airbus is in freefall, and those two had their hands at the wheel.

The A380s delivery schedule the next two years has nearly been chopped in half, and the wiring harness on that thing is a cluster(youknowwhat). ILFC and others are seriously considering canceling their orders, and the 380 order book is awful thin as it is. Current sales are downright moribund.

The announced competitor to Boeing's 787, the A350, was simply a reworked 330-200. Airbus was sent back to the drawing board—twice!--and the airlines still hated the offering—too narrow, too slow and not enough new technology. As corporate screw-ups go, this one was monumental. The airlines told them what they wanted, yet Airbus kept coming back with gussied-up 330s. They really screwed the pooch on this one.

The good news is Airbus can take its time figuring out what the new offering will be because 787 production slots are now sold out through 2011. Likely the new offering will be a little larger than the 787, spanning the gap between the 787 and the 777. Boeing has already answered that by (reluctantly) offering the 787-9, which overlaps the smallest flavor of the 777. Singapore Air (a mad 380 customer) just bought a bunch of 9s without even waiting to see what Airbus came up with.

Soooooooooo, while Airbus scrambles to arrest its freefall, Boeing may look at revamping its single-isle offering (the 737) with 787 technology and come out with an all new plane. The single isle planes (737/A320 families) outsell all other jet transports combined. These planes aren’t glamorous widebodies, but they pay both companies’ bills.

The new "Eco Foam" has a tendency to "popcorn" off the tank as it rapidly heats from aerodynamic heating and the draining away of the super-cold liquid. The old Freon-based foam could take the rapid temp change, but the new stuff can’t vent fast enough as the liquefied air in the foam (as opposed to Freon) turns back into a gas, so it “popcorns" off, blowing out chunks of foam.

Immediately after they switched to the new Eco foam (my term), the hits to the shuttle’s belly tiles jumped to over a hundred and fifty per trip. One trip, the shuttle came back with over 350 foam strikes to the belly tiles. Some were read dooseys too--like six inches long and at least half the depth of the tile(s). They treated it as a maintenance item.

For the record though, the piece of foam that took out Columbia wasn’t this Eco stuff.

“We want to thank all the dudes of dudesses of the snowboarders who are here,” Bush said.

Good Lord. We're gonna hear about this one for a while.

Don't want to get into a pissing contest. Suffice to say Hydrogen is nasty stuff. It doesn't take much of a pressure vessel to turn a hydrogen deflagration into a detonation.

Comparison of explosion pressure for various stoichiometric fuel-air mixtures in a 10 m wedge-shaped vessel

Looks like I can't follow a graph either LOL. According to the chart above, I grossly underestimated the damage radius.

Looks like walls to 200' and windows to 500' are likely in trouble.

How is the "C4 equivalent" measured? In joules, peak pressure, pressure at some specified distance in open air, or what?

I would guess the latter as my father and this guy nicknamed "Blast King" did the calcs and building designs for structures around rocket test stands. Blast pressures were what they cared about.

They had a terrible time working with hydrogen. The stuff leaked like crazy and drove their mechanics nuts. One time, a mechanic waved his hand over a pipe to try to feel where a leak was coming from. He found it. The jet of gas pierced the skin of his arm and inflated it like a basketball.

Here's the other chart they used. It uses TNT blast as a reference. Figure C4 is ~four times as powerful as TNT per weight so that 100 cu ft of mixed H2 would give a blast equivalent to 15 to 16 pounds of TNT. You'll see from the graph that 15# of TNT gives a pressure of ~2.5 PSI at 50 feet.

Keep in mind this chart dates late fifties/early sixties. ....And I suck at math.

Don't know about you guys, but I don't want to be storing hydrogen. Don't want my neighbors storing it either. The stuff leaks out of the tiniest of holes, ignites the easiest of all the gasses and is downright explosive (more so than other gasses) when mixed with air.

My dad worked around rockets way back when and he gave me this chart. Your basic minivan is ~100 cubic feet. If that minivan had a hydrogen leak and it was filled with 35-40% by volume of hydrogen, it would have the explosive effect of almost four pounds of C4. From another chart he gave me, that will take out windows to 200’ and buildings to ~50-60’. Wanna be a first responder when this minivan gets in an accident?

Doesn't the computer override such violent inputs by the pilot?

Not on the Airbus A300-600R. You will only find that on aircraft that use an electronic flight control system such as the A320, A330, A340, and 777.

Boeing and Airbus have different philosophies when it comes to pilot vs. electronic flight control in extreme situations. For example, an Airbus's computer won't allow a pilot to stall the aircraft. If the aircraft is near a stall situation, you can pull back on that stick till the cows come home but the computer won't let the aircraft stall. I guess they figure there’s no possible reason to allow some inputs at some times. Boeing, however, allows pilots to override the computer if they put enough muscle into the controls.

Airbus trusts the flight control laws over the pilot’s skill. Boeing takes the opposite approach, giving the pilot ultimate authority over the aircraft—at least that’s how it was several years ago when it was a hotly debated issue.

The vertical stab was fine. Ya, people blamed it, but there wasn't anything structurally wrong with it.

I just looked up the ATSB's findings and here is their conclusion:

3.2 Probable Cause

The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was the in-flight separation of the vertical stabilizer as a result of the loads beyond ultimate design that were created by the first officer’s unnecessary and excessive rudder pedal inputs. Contributing to these rudder pedal inputs were characteristics of the Airbus A300-600 rudder system design and elements of the American Airlines Advanced Aircraft Maneuvering Program.

Whole report: Warning! Big PDF.

http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/2004/AAR0404.pdf

The official cause, I thought, was wingtip vortices from a departing JAL 747-400. I was unaware that anything had been settled..

Well, the plane did hit the 747's vorticies...twice. The first time the plane enountered them, the pilot made almost no inputs to the controls and the jet flew through it.. No big deal.

The second time, however, the pilot inexplicably stomped on the rudder peddles way beyond what was required. He did either three or four “hardovers” where one rudder peddle was pushed all the way to the right, then the left, causing the plane to yaw. Each hardover made the plane yaw even more—like a pendulum—eventually overloading the vertical stab and snapping it off.

That you could snap off a tail with rudder inputs raised a lot of eyebrows, but I believe it was in the Airbus manual.

Professional courtesy. Back in the 80s, I was hit head-on by a very-drunk, off duty LAPD Sergeant.

Sheriffs came....and took him home.

Later married into a cop family. We had some interesting conversations re: professional courtesy.

It wouldn’t surprise me if taking drunk Congressmen home was SOP for the Capitol Police.

Prolly a third of the little monsters at my kid’s high school are overweight, and half of them are downright obese. I think maybe we had a half dozen (if that) obese kids in my HS back in the 70s.

They are having to pull seats off some jetliners because of the new "average" weight of Americans.

Folks; we have a problem.

Decedents of (Spanish) Cortez telling decedents of (Spanish) Columbus to go home. Ya, that makes sense.

I think Kennewick Man tried to tell his invaders to go home. It got him speared.