what is the difference between aircraft dispatcher and groud coordinator?

Aircraft dispatcher deals with the aircraft operations on ground as well as airborne which includes flight planing, a/c performance, weather requirements and every possible factors pertaining to the flight dispatch. Whereas ground coordinator limits to ground operations wherein they contribute in the coordination of post arrival of a flight and its pre-departure.

Advanced Machines for Aerospace Manufacturing

The last time BAE Systems designed and flew a U.K.-funded combat aircraft demonstrator, things were different. The company was called British Aerospace, the aircraft was manned, and aerodynamic performance was king.

First flown in 1986, the Experimental Aircraft Program (EAP) demonstrator was the scion of a line of supersonic combat aircraft reaching back to the English Electric Lightning prototype in 1954 and including the BAC TSR2 in 1964 and multinational Panavia Tornado in 1974. EAP was the precursor to the four-nation Eurofighter Typhoon, which first flew in 1994.

The Taranis unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) demonstrator is a distinctly different beast. Where EAP was optimized around the supersonic agility possible with advanced aerodynamics and flight controls, Taranis is designed for low observability (LO) and radar cross-section (RCS) is king.

As France and the U.K. begin to jointly study the feasibility of a Future Combat Air System, Taranis is proof BAE still has the strength in aerodynamics to secure the U.K. a central role in collaborative development of a future unmanned combat aircraft, says chief aerodynamicist Chris Lee, giving the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Lanchester Lecture at Bristol University on July 22.

“EAP’s aerodynamics were developed by the U.K. and built on BAe’s flight control system capability,” he says. “[Typhoon] is a direct descendant of EAP. . . . It is easy to lose sight of the role the U.K. played in Eurofighter aerodynamics.”   

While Typhoon helped sustain BAE's supersonic aerodynamics capability, a new challenge emerged in the early 2000s when the U.K. began looking toward a stealthy unmanned combat aircraft. The result was two small U.K.-funded demonstrator UAVs, Raven and Corax in 2003-05, that gave engineers their first taste of designing for low observability. “The U.K. put in place plans to mitigate the risks and collect data. With the flights of Raven and Corax, a large-scale mission-representative demonstrator became feasible,” Lee says.

Up through Typhoon, aerodynamicists enjoyed almost unlimited control over external shape, Lee says. With the advent of stealth, “the radar range equation has come to dominate aircraft design,” he notes. “Low-observability requirements continue to be the dominant influence on aerodynamics.” 

LO design means a tailless aircraft (see photo) that is inherently unstable longitudinally and directionally, with non-linear aerodynamics and severely constrained effectors for stability and control, compromised air supply to the engine and aerodynamic effects from LO treatments. Much about Taranis is still classified, and Lee says only that BAE took an “innovative approach”   to addressing the stability and control characteristics caused by adverse aerodynamics. These include rapid non-linear changes in pitch and yaw with incidence that arise from initial flow breakdown over the stealthy shape.

A serpentine inlet and exhaust hide the Rolls-Royce Adour engine from radar at all lines of sight. Taranis “transgresses all good air intake design paradigms,” says Lee. “We let RCS tell us what shape it had to be and use aerodynamics to mitigate the result,” which includes unsteady, swirling, separated flow at the engine fan face. A full-scale inlet and engine were static-tested at Rolls. The UCAV's stealthy exhaust posed a further challenge. The high-aspect-ratio rectangular nozzle interacts with the wing control surfaces, Lee says. A dedicated afterbody wind tunnel model was tested to determine the throttle-dependent effects that had to be factored into the flight control laws.

“Aerodynamic performance was not a primary requirement for demonstration. Performance had to be adequate to demonstrate the mission,” Lee explains. Flight results were in good agreement with modeling, although drag was less than estimated. Initially Taranis flew with an air data probe, but for later flights this was replaced by a “novel” low-observable conformal air data system. “Results were almost indistinguishable from the boom-on flights,”  he notes.

Beyond Taranis, the challenge is how to turn what has been demonstrated into an operational military capability with demanding payload and range requirements and a wider envelope in terms of speed and maneuverability, Lee says. He calls for greater investment in sustaining the U.K.’s combat-aircraft aerodynamics capability, with closer collaboration among government, industry and academia.

Lee cites as an example the Flaviir program funded by BAE and government, managed by Cranfield University and involving nine other U.K. universities in developing technologies for a low-cost UAV with no conventional control surfaces. Supersonics is one area of potential collaboration with academia. “Typhoon was 25 years ago. There have to be better ways to do it,” he adds. 

Aerospace Assessing Potential Of Quantum Computing

Realizing the vision of numerically simulating a complete aircraft across its flight envelope, optimizing an advanced configuration, or certifying an autonomous system will demand greater use of supercomputers. But high-performance computing is approaching a technological cusp, and it is not clear what shape the next generation of supercomputers will take.

Aerospace does not rank highly in supercomputer ownership, according to the benchmark Top 500 list. NASA’s Pleiades at Ames Research Center is ranked 21st, well behind the fastest machine, China’s Tianhe-2. The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Spirit is 24th and the highest-ranked supercomputer owned by a manufacturer is Airbus’s HPC4, at 72 on the list.

Tianhe-2 has 3.12 million computing cores and a benchmarked performance of almost 33,900 teraflops—trillion floating-point operations per second—or 33.9 petaflops. Second fastest, at 17.6 petaflops, is Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan, which is set to be overtaken in 2015 by Trinity, a new Cray computer at Los Alamos National Laboratory for certifying the U.S. nuclear stockpile through simulation.

By comparison, Pleiades achieves 1.54 petaflops, Spirit 1.42 petaflops and HPC4 517 teraflops. But researchers and developers will need new design codes and access to more powerful machines if they are to tackle the challenges of fully simulating turbulent, separated flow over aircraft or off-design operation of engines, says a March report on the future of computational fluid dynamics by the U.S. National Research Council.

The U.S. Defense Department has a network of high-performance computing centers, but increasingly restrictive computer security is keeping scientists and engineers from accessing supercomputers in their workplaces. So the Pentagon is deploying a “software-as-a-service” web portal providing secure access via browser to high-performance computing and computational engineering tools. 

The Pentagon also is fielding new multi-physics tools for use in acquisition, and the Create program is developing a suite of web-based and government-owned applications for the design of aircraft, ships and antennae. Create Air Vehicles comprises DaVinci, a conceptual design tool, and Kestrel and Helios, high-fidelity analysis tools for fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft, respectively. 

Supercomputing’s next step is expected to be massively parallel exascale machines 100 times faster than today. But there are competing candidates with different architectures including quantum, superconducting, molecular and neuromorphic computing.

Lockheed Martin in 2010 purchased the first commercially available quantum computer from Canada’s D-Wave. The 512-qubit D-Wave 2 is based at the University of Southern California (USC). In 2013, Google joined forces with NASA to install a D-Wave 2 at Ames Research Center. These machines are being used to explore how best to use quantum computers.

In a conventional computer, bits are either 0 or 1, but quantum bits (qubits) can be 0, 1 or a superposition of both states. Two computations can be performed simultaneously, creating the possibility of scaling computer power exponentially. Quantum computers may also solve certain problems far faster than conventional machines.

The D-Wave is an “adiabatic” computer that encodes problems into the lowest-energy state of a quantum system. The machine is best suited to solving optimization problems in which several competing criteria must be met, often called “traveling salesman” problems. The computer can test a large number of states in milliseconds to find the best—lowest-temperature—solution.

Lockheed is experimenting with the D-Wave for verification and validation of software, a task becoming prohibitively lengthy and costly as systems become more complex. It could also test adaptive, non-deterministic software that cannot be certified by other means, says Ray Johnson, chief technology officer. NASA and Google are looking into machine learning applications. Lockheed, meanwhile, has teamed with the University of Maryland to develop a different type of quantum computing platform that can be used without requiring a deep understanding of its internal workings.

“Classical computing can take us only so far,” says Johnson. “Critical systems will become so complex, problems will take too long or become too expensive to solve using even our most powerful supercomputers. We believe that the next computational revolution will stem from applied quantum science.” 

Intermodal-container Air Cargo Concepts Attract Interest

To the lone inventor in aviation, the chance to have serious engineering horsepower applied to your idea is rare. For Pat Peebles and his FanWing concept, that opportunity has come in the form of a European Union (EU)-funded program led by German aerospace center DLR.

The project is relatively small—two years and €783,000 ($1.05 million), including EU funding—but if the optimization work and feasibility study by DLR, the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics (VKI) and the University of Saarland substantiates claims for the idea it will be a welcome boost for Peebles.

Credit: Adrian Mann/FanWing

The FanWing is one of the more eyebrow-raising concepts in aviation, and involves a horizontal-axis rotor mounted in the wing leading edge that accelerates airflow over the wing to provide both distributed propulsion and augmented lift at low airspeed. The goal is to provide short-field performance close to that of a helicopter or tiltrotor with operating costs approaching those of a conventional aircraft.

Peebles has been developing his idea the way most lone inventors do, by flying small radio-controlled models of increasing scale and complexity. The next step, if funding can be found, was to be a two-seat ultralight demonstrator. Then along came DLR and the EU-funded SOAR (distributed open-rotor aircraft) project to optimize the rotor and wing and explore the feasibility of a FanWing cargo aircraft (see concept).

The SOAR project is aimed at a perceived gap in the global logistics infrastructure—an aircraft able to carry the ISO-standard intermodal shipping containers now moved by ship, rail and road, but not by air because of their size and weight. Today containerized loads are broken up for air transport either as bulk cargo or in lightweight airfreight containers that are not compatible with the other modes.

Proponents of the “container-plane” concept argue that the ability to transport the 20-ft.-long ISO containers by air would be valuable in underdeveloped countries lacking road and rail infrastructure, while enabling “door-to-door” deliveries in developed nations and providing flexibility for military cargo operations. The attraction of the FanWing is its potential for cost-effective ultra-short-takeoff-and-landing operations.

SOAR has begun with wind-tunnel tests at VKI in Belgium to optimize the cross-flow fan and wing shape. The 1.5-meter (5-ft.)-span wing section, with 50-cm-dia. rotor, will allow researchers to test different blade airfoils and angles of attack, rotor angles and speeds, entrance and exit heights, and trailing-edge angles, says Peebles. Tests will include flow visualization, particularly of the trapped vortex that creates a low-pressure region within the rotor and contributes a large part of the lift.

DLR’s feasibility study will define takeoff and landing distances, speeds, fuel consumption and through-life costs for a 10-ton-payload cargo FanWing. Peebles and SOAR project consultant George Seyfang estimate the aircraft will have a takeoff run of 300 ft. and cruise at 150 kt. at 18,000 ft.

FanWing is not alone in aiming at the container-carrying mission, if such a market exists. Another U.K. company, 4X4 Aviation, is developing an unusual unmanned-aircraft concept, the Versatile Vehicle (VV), with backing from a Singapore-based investor in the logistics industry, says founder Torsten Rheinhardt. The design uses gimbaled electric turbines, or ducted fans, for vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL).

Power comes from a combined-cycle engine in which energy from combustion of fuel and recovery of waste heat as steam are combined to drive a generator via sinus discs that convert linear piston motion to rotary shaft drive. If that was not unusual enough, the VV also uses lightweight pressure vessels to store energy as compressed gas to rapidly provide the additional electrical power needed for VTOL.

Rheinhardt has built subscale models to test control software and is working to raise the major funding required for a three-year project to build a prototype of a 10-ton-payload vehicle. While the ability of lone inventors to get their concepts off the ground is highly questionable in today’s investment environment, Rheinhardt has his eye on markets other than aerospace for the power-generation and energy storage elements of his design. 

California Bill Nearly Torpedoed Bomber Bid

Competitions for Pentagon programs have always been cutthroat. But with fewer of them expected in the next decade, each single program is increasingly viewed as a must-win for top Pentagon contractors, driving them to be more creative in their push for a competitive advantage.

Up to 100 new bombers are needed to augment the 20 stealthy B-2s in the fleet today. Credit: Ted Carlson/Fotodynamics

So much so that bids don’t only center on a design’s technical prowess, system engineering and program management attributes. More and more, in a quest to get any edge possible, contractors are beefing up their lobbying efforts. And, some are proving better at this than others.

A case in point is how Northrop Grumman, one of the Pentagon’s top contractors, was politically outfoxed by rivals Boeing and Lockheed Martin, who temporarily scored a tax-incentive leg up in the duel to build stealthy, new bombers for the U.S. Air Force.

Owing to Lockheed Martin’s notoriously effective political prowess, the company nearly scored a half-billion in economic incentives from the California legislature, which could have translated to a commensurate discount in its team’s bid for the program, due to the Air Force shortly. Such an advantage could have tipped the scales in favor of the Boeing/Lockheed Martin design on price alone, sending Northrop Grumman into panic mode this summer. As the manufacturer of the stealthy B-2, Northrop Grumman views the bomber program as critical to its future as a top Pentagon airframer.

At issue was California law AB 2389, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown July 10, 2014. Lockheed Martin’s lobbyists quietly and successfully campaigned for the measure for a year. As a result, the law offered $420 million of incentives specifically to a “subcontractor” providing jobs for work on a special access program, clearly referring to the secretive bomber project. Lockheed Martin is the subcontractor to Boeing on the bomber bid. Northrop Grumman is proposing a design as a prime contractor, excluding it from the potential tax advantages offered in the legislative package.

This put Northrop in an embarrassing pickle, as the company was blindsided by legislators from its own back yard. The measure was sponsored in the lower house by Democrat Assemblyman Steve Fox and also Republican state Sen. Steve Knight, both from the Palmdale, area. Palmale is home to the Air Force’s secretive Plant 42, where both Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have operations; Northrop’s have grown substantially in recent years likely to support its work building the Air Force’s secret, stealthy RQ-180 surveillance aircraft.

“We invited all of the players involved. Northrop did not take us up on this,” said one source in the California legislature, adding that Lockheed’s engagement was swift and decisive.

Lockheed had pounced on the idea that Northrop might not build the bomber if it won in California, but Northrop officials say they do intend to build it in Palmdale, a stone’s throw from Lockheed Martin’s famed Skunk Works facility.

Time, however, was of the essence. The Air Force announced that its classified request for proposals (RFP) for the new, stealthy bomber was released July 10. Typically, proposals are due about 90 days from issuance of an RFP, though service spokesman Ed Gulick declined to say when they would be due. This program is shrouded in secrecy and officials have been selectively citing classification in providing scant public details. The service plans to buy 80-100 bombers, each costing less than $550 million to build, making the stakes high for contractors in this duel. But bottom line, Northrop needed quick legislative relief in order to include the same discount in its bomber proposal and meet the RFP deadline.

Northrop, as a result, took a page out of Lockheed’s book and set up camp for weeks lobbying legislators in California for access to the same advantages offered only to Lockheed, as a subcontractor, in a separate bill. At the 11th hour of the legislative session, the governor signed a bill offering the same deal to Northrop.

“Northrop Grumman is pleased the California legislature passed legislation that supports aerospace workers in the state. This is a victory for fairness, the aerospace industry and all Californians,” said Tim Paynter, a company spokesman.

The measure—passed Aug. 14 by the legislature on the eve of its recess—levels the playing field with the tax package by applying the benefits equally to prime and subcontractors and averting what could have been yet another thorny Air Force procurement train wreck. The service has been on the defensive since its clumsy handling of the Combat Search and Rescue replacement helicopter and Boeing KC‑135 replacement programs.

Northrop supporters claimed that applying such large tax credits to one contractor and not another would have been unfair. And though company officials would not say whether they were exploring legal options in the event the tax incentive package wasn’t applied to its own bid, it is highly likely Northrop would have pursued a remedy in court.

Underscoring what a near miss this was for Northrop, top Pentagon officials had a different view of the issue, signaling that Northrop Grumman could have been left out in the cold without legislative help from Sacramento. “The fact that one company receives a tax break from the state in which it is situated is possibly a competitive advantage for that company, but it is not an unfair competitive advantage because it was not given to that company by the Air Force,” says Maureen Schumann, a Pentagon spokeswoman. “It does not have to be equalized. The general rule is that an agency is not required to equalize the competitive advantage a firm might enjoy by virtue of its own particular circumstances so long as the advantage is not the result of preference or unfair action by the agency.” 

Japan Plans Technology Program For Next Airliner

As flight-test aircraft of Japan’s first jet airliner take shape at Nagoya, the country’s technology ministry is laying out a plan for a second, part of a goal to raise the national industry to the importance of Japanese automobile manufacturing.

The second aircraft would not appear until around 2040, about 23 years after the Mitsubishi Aircraft MRJ regional jet is due to enter service, but it would incorporate an abundance of advanced Japanese technology and even use a Japanese engine.

The MRJ is Japan’s first attempt at a commercial jet aircraft. The ­technology ministry proposes advanced Japanese features for the second. Credit: Mitsubishi Aircraft

The relatively small size of the Japanese aeronautics sector has long seemed anomalous, especially since the country has so many industries that have proven themselves in high technology, precision fabrication, outstanding product reliability and low cost. But instead of building Japanese aircraft, the sector builds mainly high-quality parts for foreign aircraft, especially Boeing airliners.

Aerospace accounts for 1.4% of the economies of the U.S. and European countries but only 0.29% of Japan’s, says the ministry, whose full name is Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Whereas Japanese companies satisfy 23% of the world’s automobile demand, the country accounts for only 4% of the global aerospace industry. The ministry wants to raise that to 20% within 20 years. Since it expects global aircraft production to double in that time, the target implies growth by a factor of 10 over the same period, or 12% a year.

By 2040 Japan should achieve significant leads over other countries in safety, noise, emissions, and economy, which the ministry says are necessary for the country to develop its own commercial aircraft or to initiate international developments.

As a first step, it calls for development of a range of technologies it classifies as “relatively advanced” by 2020: turbulence detection by laser radar, lighter structures, a light, highly efficient composite engine fan, an improved low-pressure turbine, drag reductions and quieter flaps, slats and landing gear. Low aerodynamic noise on takeoff and landing is already a key feature of the MRJ, but Japanese engineers evidently have more ideas, because the ministry proposes flight-tests by around the end of the decade.

Following close behind would be “high-impact” technologies for development by 2025, including a “better” composite wing and a quiet engine with a compact core. The engine program would include a high-pressure turbine that should be tested on an MRJ around 2025. Japan is weak in high-pressure turbine technology, the ministry says, although many countries with aspirations in aircraft propulsion suffer from the same problem.

Before the ministry issued its report on Aug. 19, the Yomiuri newspaper said the government would back development by 2030 of an airliner with fewer than 230 seats, apparently something like the Boeing 757. The Nikkei newspaper reported on Aug. 27 that the ministry was considering either an aircraft of that size or another as big as the MRJ. But Japan has no concrete plan to develop another aircraft, says Shinji Suzuki, a Tokyo University professor closely involved in policy making. 

Japan’s success in other manufacturing processes, especially automotives, shows the country could play a larger role in global aerospace, says Suzuki. “Japan has a special potential to reduce production costs, such as [with the] Toyota Production System, Kaizen, and robot manufacturing systems. Those have been developed in the automobile industry and can be applied for the aircraft industry.”

The automobile industry offers a precedent for the rapid pace of production increases called for by the -ministry: Japan built 1 million vehicles in 1963 and 10 million in 1980. But the U.S. and European car makers of the 1960s and 1970s were probably a good deal more vulnerable to smart new competition than are Airbus and Boeing.

The supply of engineers is not a great challenge, says Suzuki. “Management skill and business experience will be more important to developing a larger commercial aircraft,” he says. “Japan is trying to acquire those skills through the MRJ business.”

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the chief shareholder of Mitsubishi Aircraft and manufacturer of the MRJ, has fitted the Pratt & Whitney PW1200 engines to the first flight-test MRJ. The first flight is due in the second quarter of 2015.

Japan Airlines (JAL) will be the fifth customer for the type, the carrier and Mitsubishi Aircraft announced on
Aug. 28. In July, U.S.-based Eastern Air Lines Group, which has not yet begun flying, signed a memorandum of understanding to order 20 MRJs. If that deal and JAL’s are confirmed, the program will have a backlog of 205 aircraft on order. 

The timing of deliveries to JAL was not disclosed. Mitsubishi Aircraft cannot have many early delivery positions available, because of slippage in airworthiness certification to 2017 from the originally planned late 2013. 

Opinion: Air Safety Challenges Require Constant Vigilance

The world’s flight safety community has been badly hurt in the last few weeks by accidents that took nearly 750 lives. In this unprecedented psychodrama, long before final investigation reports are completed, it is obvious that technical issues are not the only cause. At the same time, it would not make sense to solely accuse human factors; we all share responsibility in a wide-ranging loss of vigilance. Flight safety has never been better, but recent accidents have revealed unacceptable weaknesses, including a failure of threat and risk assessment and poor pilot training.

The worst case is the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash in Ukraine. This was not the first time that an airliner was hit by a surface-to-air missile. And this tragedy was not only related to aviation safety, or security.

Investigators can’t decipher the Swiftair MD-83’s cockpit voice recorder and expect difficulties in determining causes for the crash in Mali. Credit: Agence France-Presse/Newscom

Looking beyond the outraged comments, we don’t need the International Civil Aviation Organization, International Air Transport Association and other trade groups to express indignation or a lack of understanding. As the European Cockpit Association stressed in a strongly worded statement issued in late July: “In hindsight, flying civilian aircraft over an area where powerful anti-aircraft [missiles] capable of bringing down an airliner at cruising altitude are in active use is not acceptable; so the question is what went wrong and how do we fix it?”

Reading newspapers and watching television news programs was enough to make the point, without any help from intelligence experts or warning given by Notams. Airlines—all airlines—simply should strictly avoid flying over war zones. Such preventive measures make flight times longer and involve increased fuel consumption, but make sense. More than two decades ago, during the first Balkan war, Malaysia’s flights between Europe and Kuala Lumpur departed from the usual flight plan day after day, as did aircraft operated by other carriers. This time, apparently, operations managers were too accustomed to such dangers or underestimated the threat. Such behavior can be characterized as a loss of vigilance, inappropriate risk assessment, or a lack of common sense.

At the other end of the spectrum, the crash of a TransAsia Airways ATR 72-500 at Magong, Taiwan, in low visibility, reminds us of the true danger of non-precision approaches in bad weather. The airline’s in-house regulations were rapidly revised, visibility requirements raised and, in case of doubt, pilots encouraged to return to the airport or divert to another destination.

Swiftair’s MD-83, which was operating the Air Algerie flight that crashed in Mali, most probably was hit by thunderstorms, but in conditions that do not explain a fatal crash. The twinjet’s cockpit voice recorder was not working—a possible indication of poor maintenance—and an explanation for the loss of control could remain a mystery.

In other words, negligence is affecting flight safety, in sharp contrast with overall progress achieved in the past several years. This is disappointing, although it may not be a lasting trend, according to Bertrand de Courville. He is a newly retired Airbus A330captain and long was a member of Air France’s flight safety team. “We should not give too much importance to particular events,” he says, although he acknowledges risk management should be enhanced and stresses unclear trends and correlations between accident scenarios while acknowledging an erosion of risk awareness and safety commitment at all levels. In 2012, de Courville submitted similar comments to the European Commercial Aviation Safety Team, an analysis endorsed by the European Aviation Safety Agency.

Jean Pinet, a former Concorde test pilot and founder of Airbus Training, seeks to adopt a broader view. He believes flight safety is reaching cognitive and neurophysiologic limits. Worse than that, weaknesses identified over the years have been treated with rubber repair patches while the whole tire needed to be replaced, Pinet adds. He also agrees that flight safety efforts are suffering from a loss of vigilance.

In the same vein, Jean-Claude Buck, a retired Air France pilot and former head of the French civil aviation in-flight control team, expresses doubts about airline pilots’ training. On flights over war zones, he says the final decision on an aircraft’s flight path should remain with the captain and certainly should not be made by ground staff.

Remarkably, apart from the Malaysian tragedies, public opinion about air travel has not been severely troubled by the recent series of crashes. But, of course, that is no consolation.