The four finalists include:

• MagniX for magni650 Electric Propulsion Unit (EPU)
• NASA, University of Arizona, and Lockheed Martin for the OSIRIS-REx Team
• Reliable Robotics for Advanced Autonomous Flight Systems
• U.S. Air Force for the X-62A ACE Team

Amy Spowart, president and CEO of the NAA, emphasized the organization’s commitment to recognizing outstanding contributions to aviation and aerospace.

“The Collier Trophy, bestowed since 1911, is the story of aviation innovation and advancement,” Spowart said.

• READ MORE: Webb Space Telescope Team Earns Collier Trophy

The final round of the Collier Trophy selection process is set for March 21 in Washington, D.C. Each finalist will present their nomination, accompanied by visual aids and presentation slides, followed by a Q&A session with the selection committee.

Spowart expressed anticipation to see who will be honored as the 2023 Collier Trophy recipient.

For additional details and a comprehensive list of Collier Trophy honorees, visit the NAA website.

The post Meet the 4 Finalists for the 2023 Collier Trophy appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

“Boeing’s longstanding partnership with Brazil dates back more than 90 years, and during that time, we have collaborated with the Brazilian aerospace industry and community to tap into the incredible technical abilities and problem-solving skills of Brazilian engineers,” said Lynne Hopper, vice president of Boeing Engineering, Strategy and Operations.

“Their expertise strengthens our commitment to engineering excellence and positions us to tackle the next generation of challenges in our industry,” Hooper.

Settling Lawsuits?

The move comes more than three years after the company ended the $4.2 billion deal to buy Embraer’s commercial branch. In addition, the regional jet manufacturer was also among a group that sought to stop the aerospace giant from poaching local talents in court.

Abimde (Brazilian Association of Defense Materials Industry) and AIAB (Association of Aerospace Industries of Brazil) sued in November 2022 to interrupt the hiring in draconian terms. It’s unclear if Boeing’s Memorandum of Understanding for Technological Cooperation with the state of São Paulo includes any concession regarding the lawsuit filed in the state’s 3rd Federal Court of São José dos Campos.

• READ MORE: Boeing and Embraer at Odds Over Strategic Partnership Agreement

Boeing’s Talent Problem

The new engineering center is part of the Arlington, Va.-based company’s initiative to ditch Russia, where it used to hire as many as 1,500 engineers. The company had to shutter its operations in Russia weeks after the country started invading Ukraine. The US company relocated about 100 engineers from its Moscow engineering center to countries in the Middle East and East Europe. However, the interruption still left a dent in its engineering resources.

Although not very directly impacting Boeing, the recent conflict in Israel will undoubtedly impact the company’s ability on some of its engineering projects due to its relationship with companies such as Israel Aerospace Industries. The Middle Eastern company supplies the 787’s passenger & cargo floor grids, door surrounds, and the pivot bulkhead. In the past, Boeing has also inducted many engineers from its supplier’s cargo conversion division to its own. 

Boeing is also facing more challenges at its home base in the Seattle area. It lost more than 500 of its senior engineers due to pension changes in 2022. It has also lost its engineering talents to tech companies for many years. A slew of new space and aerospace start-ups are also fighting fiercely for engineers in the area. For instance, Amazon’s Blue Origin has grown from 850 employees to more than 3,000 in the Seattle area in 2022. In the last two years, both MagniX and ZeroAvia, leaders in electric and hydrogen aircraft propulsion, opened offices down the street from Boeing. 

The challenges have forced Boeing to fill the holes elsewhere. However, it’s concerning how much more fragmented the Aerospace’s giant operations will become and how that will affect its effectiveness as a product design organization.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on AirlineGeeks.com.

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Willford retired in May 2022 after a 32-year career at the Cessna Aircraft Company where he worked in a number of high profile programs. And technically, while Cessna is now part of Textron Aviation, Willford makes it clear that he considers himself a “Cessnan.”

In an interview with FLYING, Willford provides an inside perspective on aircraft design and his career at Cessna.

FLYING Magazine (FM): When did you know you wanted to become an aviation and aerospace engineer?

Neal Willford (NW): My father was a corporate pilot and mechanic, and he started bringing my brother and me to the annual [Experimental Aircraft Association] Fly-Ins at Rockford, Illinois, and Oshkosh, Wisconsin.Though I was around airplanes, I never had a desire to become a professional pilot. I liked building things, andI liked math and science, so engineering seemed like a natural choice. During college, I tried getting a job in the aerospace industry, but it was an absolutely awful time to try to get hired. Fortunately, Boeing in Wichita, Kansas, was hiring, so I landed my first aerospace job there.

FM: How did you end up working on a number of Cessna’s business aircraft programs?

NW: About the time Cessna introduced the CitationJet at the 1989 [National Business Aviation Association] show, Boeing was moving much of [its] engineering activity to Seattle, and I didn’t want to move. When Cessna started hiring engineers to help design the new jet, I applied and got a job there. I was hired to be a design engineer in the propulsion group, and I thrived in that environment. Once the airplane was designed and the prototype was flying, I volunteered to go work on the all-new Citation X, where I was responsible for designing the nacelle and finishing up the APU installation.

FM: Why did you move from Cessna’s business aircraft programs to developing its single-engine piston line?

NW: When Congress passed the General Aviation Revitalization Act (GARA), Russ Meyers honored his promise to re-enter the piston market. I was always a “little airplane” guy, so when the engineering effort really got underway for reintroducing the 172, 182, and 206, I became a group leader in the propulsion group. In my career, I worked on several single-engine programs, including the Next Generation Piston proof of concept, and the Beechcraft Denali and Cessna SkyCourier.

FM: What was your role as Cessna designed its own light sport aircraft?

NW: When Jack Pelton decided Cessna should take a serious look at getting into the light sport market, he tasked a small group of us to make a trip to the U.S. Sport Aviation Expo in Sebring, Florida, in 2006. After Jack watched our head of the Cessna Pilot Centers get a ride in an LSA, he said to me, “We need to do this. Go build one.” I selected a small group of designers, and we flew the LSA proof of concept nine months to the day after Jack said to go build it. I led the engineering effort for what became the Model 162 Skycatcher.

FM: What do you think was at the root of the lower-than-expected sales and discontinuation of the 162?

NW: It is easy to forget that the Skycatcher deliveries started when we were in the grips of the great recession. Many of the orders were taken before then, when the economy was booming, and I suspect that this was a major factor in the lower LSA sales for all manufacturers.

FM: Describe your personal motivation when you are presented with a challenge that seems impossible to overcome.

NW: I’ve learned the importance of being proactive and always having options beyond what you are attempting in order to solve an issue. Much of engineering is problem solving, whether addressing challenges during the design phase or during flight testing. Bill Lear once told his engineers to “stop thinking and try something,” and there’s a lot of truth to that statement.

FM: When you work on a “clean sheet” design like the SkyCourier, how are the performance parameters established?

NW: Sometimes the parameters are defined by the limitations of the category of airplane, such as the airspeed and maximum takeoff weight limitations of an LSA. Input can also come from customer advisory boards as used for the SkyCourier. Without prioritization of desired attributes, it is next to impossible to develop a product that can do everything that a customer wants and meet the expected price point.

FM: From an engineer’s point of view, if you look out 10 to 20 years into the future of GA, what do you see?

NW: The next 10 to 20 years could be very interesting for general aviation. Near term, if the FAA’s MOSAIC program does what is hoped, then there may be opportunities for lower cost airplanes larger than an LSA to be designed and put into production. Longer term, autonomous aircraft for cargo-carrying purposes will likely be accepted sooner than ones designed for carrying people.

FM: What is the biggest challenge facing aviation engineers in the future? And what about all-electric airplanes?

NW: I don’t think the general public realizes that “technically-viable” and “FAA-certifiable” are two completely different things. How successful some of the more promising eVTOL [electric vertical takeoff and landing] companies become in bringing their product to market may depend on if they can successfully navigate FAA certification and still have a viable and profitable product. 

Electric propulsion offers the aircraft designer moredesign flexibility for relocating the propulsion units than can be done with a reciprocating or even a turbine engine. I see hybrid-electric aircraft being a viable interim solution because they still allow the propulsion unit flexibility that an all-electric aircraft provides,without the range and weight challenges that are the result of current battery technology.

FM: Now that you’re retired, what are you flying?

NW: I’ve been a private pilot since 1987 and most of my hours are in the Thorp T-211 Sky Scooter that I built and have been flying for 10 years—it’s the only airplane that I have ever owned.

Quick 6

Who’s the one person living or dead you would most like to fly with?

Without a doubt, Jimmy Doolittle

If you could fly any airplane or helicopter you have not yet flown, what would that be?

P-51 Mustang, especially if someone else was paying the fuel bill

What is one airport you’ve always wanted to fly into?

Put-in-Bay Airport (3W2) on Lake Erie’s South Bass Island

What do you believe has been aviation’s biggest break-through event or innovation?

The availability of low-cost GPS devices

What is one airplane (past or present) you wish you could have worked on as an engineer?

The Travel Air Mystery Ship

When not flying, I’d rather be…

Working on my Model Ts. I’m currently restoring a 1911 Model T touring car.

This article was originally published in the December 2022/January 2023 Issue 933 of FLYING.

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Two Boeing engineers—Dillon Ruble and Garrett Jensen—who are second- and third-generation Boeing employees, now hold the Guinness World Record for flying a handmade paper airplane. The pair, who are based in St. Louis, set the new record in Crown Point, Indiana, in December of 2022.

Record-Breaking Flight

The Ruble and Jensen design flew 290 feet, which, for perspective, is slightly less than the length of a U.S. soccer field.

Ruble and Jensen both studied aerospace and mechanical engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Their design broke the previous record of 252 feet, 7 inches, set by a team from Malaysia and South Korea in April 2022.

The previous record was set in 2012 by Joe Ayoob and paper airplane designer John M. Collins, who flew a paper airplane a distance of 226 feet, 10 inches.

It Takes a Village

During the paper airplane distance competition, which was held at an indoor football stadium, Ruble and Jensen were supported by team members Nathan Erickson, Jeremy O’Brien, and Pat Neiman.

Their jobs ranged from setting up the table to calibrating and properly configuring equipment to taking accurate measurements. Flags were used to mark the distance of previous records. Glen Boren and Fire Chief Mark Baumgardner assisted in measuring the distance.

The Flight, By the Numbers

The winning design was inspired by hypersonic aerospace vehicles. According to Jensen, the pair used A4-sized paper, which is 8 by 11 inches, in the heaviest weight they could find, because the heavier the paper the greater the momentum when it is thrown. They spent several hundred hours developing the design and practicing the throw.

It takes more than 20 minutes to accurately fold the record-breaking paper airplane design, which Ruble noted, “Is a little different from your traditional ‘fold in half, fold the two corners to the middle line down the middle.’ It’s pretty unique in that aspect. It’s definitely an unusual design.”

According to Ruble, the airplane is named Mach 5 because hypersonic vehicles travel at speeds over Mach 5, which is five times the speed of sound.

On the day of the attempt, they achieved the record on the third attempt with Ruble throwing.

Jensen, ever the engineer, explained the math of the event, saying, “We found the optimal angle is about 40 degrees off the ground. Once you’re aiming that high, you throw as hard as possible. That gives us our best distance. It took simulations to figure that out. I didn’t think we could get useful data from a simulation on a paper airplane. Turns out, we could.”

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Imagine linking Boeing engineers around the world with 3D, virtual reality headsets so they could collaborate in real time, leveraging vast amounts of interlinked data across all internal databases. The result would be a digital ecosystem that could save money, boost sales, avert mistakes, and accelerate production timelines for clean-sheet airplane designs. 

Moving Forward

It’s been two years since Airbus (EURONEXT FR:AIR.FP) snatched Boeing’s crown as the world’s top aviation OEM by revenue and deliveries. Now, Boeing is looking beyond the 737 Max debacle and recent challenges with its sophisticated 787 Dreamliner.

First reported by Reuters—and confirmed to FLYING by Boeing—chief engineer Greg Hyslop offered details about the company’s emerging plans.

“It’s about strengthening engineering,” Hyslop told Reuters. “We are talking about changing the way we work across the entire company.”

Hyslop told Reuters the overwhelming number of production quality issues stem from design problems. An overall digital ecosystem would improve both design and production. If successful, the timeline from concept to market could shrink to as short as four to five years, Reuters reported. 

Read about Boeing’s expectations for growth, despite the pandemic

The Airbus Digital Ecosystem

Boeing rival, Airbus, has been ramping up its digital ecosystem program, dubbed Digital Design and Manufacturing Services for the past five years. DDMS aims to fully transform Airbus’ design, manufacturing, and overall operations to a digital-first model from end to end. The goal: cut costs and reduce time to market while ensuring quality, safety, and environmental performance.

Read more about Boeing’s new orders from UPS for 767 cargo airliners

A 2019 report to the company’s board of directors said Airbus intends to build  “a new worldwide industrial ecosystem” to “design, produce and maintain aircraft.” Ultimately, “DDMS’ ambition is no less than to achieve a native digital continuity for 3D design, engineering, manufacturing, services, simulation, and artificial intelligence activities, with the mandate to be ready for the next aircraft program.”

As both Airbus and Boeing are now increasing their digital aircraft design and production capabilities, neither has announced plans for a new clean-sheet commercial airliner program. 

“It makes no sense at all unless you’re creating a new airplane, which they both badly need to create and don’t show any signs of creating,” said Richard Aboulafia, veteran commercial and military aviation consultant and vice president of analysis at Teal Group.

Last year, Airbus said it was already using DDMS to create virtual factory simulations for the emerging A321XLR—a long-range variant of Airbus’ popular, single-aisle A321. DDMS is being used to develop design and assembly simulation—as well as simultaneous real-time 3D visibility—at Airbus facilities in Toulouse, France; Hamburg, Germany; and Filton, England.

Next-Level Computer Design and Manufacturing

The commercial aviation industry has been creating airplanes using computer-aided design in evolving formats for decades. In the 1990s, Boeing’s 777 was touted as the first transport category jet that was 100 percent digitally designed using 3D graphics programs, which allowed it to be pre-assembled by computer, skipping the necessity of an expensive, full-scale mock-up.

More recently, the company has worked to move its manufacturing systems forward in order to share and communicate data across management for production life-cycle and manufacturing operations and resource planning. The Boeing Sheffield fabrication facility in the U.K. includes fully digital-capable infrastructure and state-of-the-art machinery and is intended to serve as an incubator model to replace legacy systems. 

Developing a full digital ecosystem could take Boeing’s design and manufacturing to the next level. The result would be a system-wide, immersive, virtual world that would increase the power of Boeing’s engineering data and supercharge its resources.  

Boeing’s defense arm used digital simulation to quickly build the first T-7A Red Hawk jet trainers for the U.S. Air Force. That program has had its share of minor issues, so far. “I guess T-7 will be a really interesting test case about whether this is an oversold panacea,” Aboulafia told FLYING.

In a typical digital ecosystem, aeronautical engineers and industrial engineers would create digital twins of their aircraft along with specifically designed virtual production systems. Digital twins are virtual copies of real objects that can be performance tested using computer simulations. With a digital ecosystem, complex tests and experiments that would be time-consuming and expensive to execute in the real world could be streamlined in the virtual world. 

This kind of technology would empower engineers to more effectively pinpoint potential flaws and figure out ways to overcome challenges long before the problems show up in reality.

Boeing is predicting $9 trillion in aerospace market opportunities during the next decade. Leveraging the power of digital technology will be critical for the company so that it can take advantage of the market and keep pace with its competitors. 

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This year’s Aviation Design Challenge mission was to modify a Glasair Sportsman to virtually fly as many COVID-19 vaccines as fast as possible from Seattle, Washington, to Packwood, Washington, using X-Plane flight simulator. The teams needed to design their aircraft to maximize transportable payload and successfully land on a small runway, surrounded by high terrain. Judges scored the teams based on performance parameters, a checklist of steps involved in the demonstration flight, and a video submission in which the team summarized what they learned.

Members of the first-place team from RAHS include Atticus Bhat, Garett Griner, Jason Poon, Alex Shemwell, and Lyra Young. Their design included the addition of spoilers, installation of retractable gear, and a narrowing of the Glasair’s fuselage profile to reduce drag. Their first-place prize includes a unique general aviation manufacturing experience at CubCrafters, tours of GAMA member company facilities in the Seattle area, demonstration flight opportunities and much more.

During the first portion of the challenge, teams used complimentary “Fly to Learn” curriculum to learn the principles of flight and airplane design, which is developed in alignment with national STEM standards. During the second portion of the competition, teams applied their knowledge to virtually modify an airplane design and compete in an X-Plane fly-off.

“We are extremely proud of the work done by the winning teams from Raisbeck Aviation High School and The Pennington School,” said Pete Bunce, GAMA’s president and CEO. “Their submissions showed a sophisticated grasp of aircraft design for accomplishing an important and timely simulated mission—delivering COVID-19 vaccines to a remote area. In the coming weeks, we look forward to offering these teams unique experiences that showcase the rewarding opportunities available in the general aviation industry. We also want to applaud all the teams that participated in the ninth annual GAMA Aviation Design Challenge for their commitment to learning the dynamics of flight and aviation design even while navigating pandemic-related challenges.”

The Raisbeck Aviation team was taught by Steven Chapman, with volunteer assistance by Dave Jones. “Without the opportunity to hold GAMA meetings in person, the five of us had to be self-driven, organized, and hold each other accountable throughout the design and testing process,” the team said. “COVID changed everything about how we competed this year: three brand new teammates, no live interaction, and members with insufficient tech at home. We worked through numerous design phases, testing and compiling data from each to create the final aircraft. Our hard work and dedication to the challenge throughout the pandemic highlights our deep passion for aviation and commitment to one another.”

Members of the second-place team from The Pennington School include William Arthur, Nicholas Callan, Gavin Cui, Sebastian Drezek, Jonathan Eaton, Michael Krajci, Avani Prakash, Charles Sanders, Elias Sebti, Jack Wang and David Zhang. They will receive a two-day Redbird Flight Simulations STEM Lab Camp. The Pennington School team was taught by Ryan Vogt.

The 2021 Aviation Design Challenge sponsoring companies include Bombardier, Cirrus Aircraft, ClickBond, CubCrafters, Daher, Embraer, Eviation, Garmin, Gulfstream Aerospace, Hartzell Propeller, magniX, Redbird Flight Simulations, Signature Flight Support, Textron Aviation and Wipaire. Sponsors provide financial support for the competition as well as in-kind donations.

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Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are developing a method to produce aerospace-grade composites without the enormous ovens and pressure vessels currently used in the process. The technique may help to speed up the manufacturing of airplanes and other large, high-performance composite structures, such as blades for wind turbines. The researchers detail their new method in a paper published in the journal Advanced Materials Interfaces.

To understand the complex world of aerospace composite construction, MIT describes a modern airplane’s fuselage as made from multiple sheets of different composite materials, “like so many layers in a phyllo-dough pastry.” After these many layers are stacked and molded into the shape of a fuselage, the uncured structures are wheeled into warehouse-sized ovens and autoclaves, where the layers fuse together to form a resilient, aerodynamic shell.

“If you’re making a primary structure like a fuselage or wing, you need to build a pressure vessel, or autoclave sometimes the size of a three-story building, which itself requires time and money to pressurize,” says Brian Wardle, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. “These things are massive pieces of infrastructure. We are working towards making primary structure materials without autoclave pressure, so we can get rid of all that infrastructure.”

In 2015, MIT postdoc Jeonyoon Lee led the team in Wardle’s lab to create a method to make aerospace-grade composites without requiring an oven to fuse the materials together. Instead of placing layers of material inside an oven to cure, the researchers essentially wrapped them in an ultrathin film of carbon nanotubes (CNTs). When they applied an electric current to the film, the CNTs, like a nanoscale electric blanket, quickly generated heat, causing the materials within to cure and fuse together.

Using the technique, called “out-of-oven” or “OoO,” the team was able to produce composites as strong as the materials made in conventional airplane manufacturing ovens, using only 1 percent of the energy.

An additional challenge for the researchers was to develop ways to make high-performance composites without the use of large, high-pressure autoclaves—those building-sized vessels that generate high-enough pressures to press materials together, squeezing out any voids, or air pockets. “There is microscopic surface roughness on each ply of a material,” Wardle said, “and when you put two plys together, air gets trapped between the rough areas, which is the primary source of voids and weakness in a composite. “An autoclave can push those voids to the edges and get rid of them.”

Researchers including Wardle’s group have explored “out-of-autoclave,” or “OoA” techniques to manufacture composites without using the huge machines. MIT stated that most of these OoA techniques so far have produced composites where nearly one percent of the material contains voids, which can compromise a material’s strength and lifetime. In comparison, aerospace-grade composites made in autoclaves are of such high quality that any voids they contain are negligible and not easily measured.

Wardle explained that while progress is advancing for introducing OoA to secondary structures, such as flaps and doors, none of the materials are qualified for primary structures such as wings and fuselages. “We’re making some inroads, but we still get voids.”

The science and engineering behind these developing composite construction techniques is complex but also highly innovative. A full description of the processes and materials involved is available in the published research paper.

Much of the work behind this developing technique focuses on developing the nanoporous networks–ultra-thin films made from aligned, microscopic material such as carbon nanotubes, that can be engineered with exceptional properties, including color, strength, and electrical capacity. MIT describes a thin film of carbon nanotubes as “somewhat like a dense forest of trees,” and the spaces between the trees can function like thin capillaries. If a thin film of carbon nanotubes were sandwiched between two materials, then, as the materials were heated and softened, the capillaries between the carbon nanotubes should have a surface energy and geometry such that they would draw the materials in toward each other, rather than leaving a void between them.

Lee calculated that the capillary pressure should be larger than the pressure applied by the autoclaves when this new technique is fully developed. The researchers tested their idea in the lab by growing films of vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes using a technique they previously developed, then laying the films between layers of materials that are typically used in the autoclave-based manufacturing of primary aircraft structures. After wrapping the layers in a second film of carbon nanotubes, they applied an electric current to heat it. The resulting test composite lacked voids, similar to aerospace-grade composites that are produced in an autoclave.

“In these tests, we found that our out-of-autoclave composite using carbon nanotube technology was just as strong as the gold-standard autoclave process composite used for primary aerospace structures,” Wardle said. The team will next look for ways to produce pressure-generating CNT film on a much larger scale to make the process viable for manufacturing entire wings and fuselages.

This research was supported, in part, by Airbus, ANSYS, Embraer, Lockheed Martin, Saab AB, Saertex, and Teijin Carbon America through MIT’s Nano-Engineered Composite aerospace Structures (NECST) Consortium

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