SR Technics announces strategic investment in Armac Systems

SR Technics is pleased to announce a strategic investment in Armac Systems, a leading provider of aircraft MROinventory planning and optimization software and solutions. The investment will result in a close strategic partnership between the two companies, enabling customers to benefit from a turn-key planning solution that will continuously optimize component inventory asset investment and maximize component availability.

SR Technics and Armac Systems have successfully collaborated for several years providing significant benefits to SR Technics and its customers. Combining both companies’ core competencies will allow SR Technics to continue delivering enhanced inventory management and optimization solutions to its customers. 
Micheál Armstrong, CEO of Armac Systems, stated: “This is a very welcome development for Armac Systems. It is a natural evolution of our relationship with SR Technics to combine the market-leading services offered by both companies. This combined solution will deliver a unique inventory planning offering to the market that will help our customers maximize the value from their inventory investment. We look forward to leveraging the strong market 
position of SR Technics to significantly develop the business in the coming years.” 
André Wall, CEO of SR Technics, said: “As an inventory management systems specialist Armac Systems has a deep understanding of innovative solutions for the highly complex MRO business. Our collaboration has resulted in a market-leading inventory planning andmonitoring system to boost supply chain efficiency and deliver outstanding fleet protection. 
With this important step SR Technics will further enhance its service portfolio by offering superior total asset life-cycle management solutions. This will further strengthen our position as a world-leading component solutions provider. I look forward to continuing to work with Armac and to delivering even greater value to our customers.”

Source and image: SR Technics

Imperium and Barfield announce distribution agreement

Imperium Inc. today announced the signing of a global distribution agreement with Barfield, a recognized worldwide market leader in ground support test equipment that will be distributing Imperium's line of ultrasound cameras for nondestructive testing (NDT) usage.

"We believe Barfield to be among the most far reaching and visionary company marketing aviation related products. The combination of our unique ultrasonic imaging system and Barfield's marketing reach will foster significant growth. With the need for aircraft inspections expected to grow, this relationship will enable us to meet the needs in the market," said Bob Lasser, Chief Executive Officer of Imperium, Inc.

"The signature of this additional and major distribution agreement highlights a successful collaboration between Barfield and Imperium and strengthens Barfield's expertise in Ground Support Equipment. We are proud of the trust that Imperium has placed in Barfield" said Johann Panier, Chief Executive Officer of Barfield Inc.

"Imperium's NDT products make ultrasonic testing extremely simple, without sacrificing any quantitative data. Imperium's highly innovative products and OEM approval led us to decide to focus our efforts with them," said Lew Wingate, Vice President of Distribution and GSTE for Barfield. Barfield's distribution of Imperium's products will focus initially on the Americas.

Source and image: Air France Industries KLM

FL Technics to support Ural Airlines in Armenia, Russia and Tajikistan

FL Technics, a global provider of tailor-made aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul services, is further developing its cooperation with CIS-based air carriers by signing a Line Maintenance agreement with Ural Airlines. According to the documents, FL Technics engineers will be providing on-call support to the carrier’s aircraft in 5 airportsacross Armenia, Russia and Tajikistan.

Under recently signed contracts, FL Technics specialists will be providing comprehensive on-call line maintenance services to Ural Airlines’ Airbus A320 Family aircraft at Khudjand International Airport (LBD), Kulob Airport (TJU) and Qurghonteppa International Airport (KQT) in Tajikistan, as well as at Khrabrovo Airport (KGD) in Russia and Zvartnots International Airport (EVN) in Armenia.

“Pro-active developing along the expansion of our clients – that is one of our main advantages. We are very glad to have Ural Airlines amongst our clients in both well-established and recently launched FL Technics’ line maintenance stations. We are certain that this cooperation will ensure smooth and timely operations of the carrier as well as support our further development in the region,” comments Asta Zirlyte, Head of FL Technics’ Line Maintenance Unit.

The new cooperation with the Yekaterinburg-based carrier follows FL Technics recent expansion of its line maintenance network under which the company has launched line stations in Kaliningrad (Russia) and Yerevan (Armenia) which have been fully certified by local CAAs earlier this summer.

Ural Airlines is an airline based in Yekaterinburg, Russia, operating scheduled and chartered domestic and international flights out of Koltsovo International Airport. The carrier’s fleet includes 35 Airbus A319s, Airbus A320s and Airbus A321s.

Source and image: FL Technics / Ural Airlines

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.