Analyzes the process of finding out why airplanes crash, taking into consideration such sources as Clint Oster of Indiana University who co-authored `Why Airplanes Crash,' recorded dialogues from retrieved black boxes, and reports on the intricacies of technology ...
The airplane industry suffers from a lack of innovation. The basic design of airplanes hasn’t changed in more than 70 years. When innovation disappears, companies are incentivized to engage in exactly the kind of behavior that led to the 737 Max crash. As Sorscher wrote: “The last great ...
and that operation works best when you have one person checking the other, or both people willing to participate,” says Earl Weener, who was for many years chief engineer for safety at Boeing. “Airplanes are very unforgiving if you don’t do things right. And for a long time it’s be...
The chaotic scenes that have unfolded in airports and on airplanes over the past few years are raising the question: Is air travel getting more miserable for the American public? The frustrations of passengers seem to be boiling over, even though flight cancellations, airfares and customer compla...
Why do airplanes wings not flap to fly? Why do the lower strings of a piano have another wire tightly coiled around them? Why does a wire not simply cut a block of ice in two when it passes through the ice? Explain why airbags in cars can help to prevent injuries to the occupan...
These spiralling vortices reduce efficiency because they convert useful energy being used for lift into the spiralling movement of air at the tips of the wings. How do we stop this? Simply, with a fence. Winglets on airplanes are the tiny fences; they get in the way and stop the areas of...
Why do airplanes normally take off facing the wind? When airplanes take off, why don't they become satellites and permanently circle the Earth? Why does a bicycle tire have spokes? Why can't the tire be a complete disk? Why are the mud guards used over the rotating wheel of the vehicle...
Airplanes can also create turbulence. The wings cause wake turbulence as it passes through the air. This can affect planes flying behind one another. It’s why planes avoid taking the same flight path on takeoffs and landin...
The headline-grabbing crashes seem to fly in the face of the promise that computer-driven cars will be safer than human-driven cars – as automatic pilot systems have been shown to be in airplanes. In its marketing, Tesla has made a point of its Autopilot systems ability to take over driv...
In addition to being dangerous, shooting at aircraft – whether drones or manned airplanes – is illegal across the country. “Firing a weapon at what a person perceives to be a drone is a terrible idea for myriad reasons,”Andrew Stengel, an attorney and former New York City prosecutor, ...