AirSpaceMag.com

Sorry about the delay, folks. A Pan Am flight attendant, ca. 1970.

Forty years ago today, Boeing’s 747 Jumbo Jet made its commercial debut on Pan American’s New York-to-London route.

The flight didn’t go exactly as advertised. The widebody’s 352 passengers and 20 crew members sat on the runway for two hours, waiting to take off from Kennedy Airport, before Captain Robert Weeks noticed a malfunction in the #4 engine and decided to head back to the gate. The passengers debarked (a group of protesters, who had loudly complained about the 747′s noise and pollution, taunted them with “We told you so!”) and were treated to dinner in the terminal while Pan Am rustled up a replacement jet. Twenty of the original passengers bailed out right there, choosing to miss out on the historic first flight.

The stand-in 747, hastily christened “Young America” (the name of the original airplane) finally took off at 1:52 a.m., 27 minutes after it was supposed to have landed in London. The rest of the flight was uneventful, although television producer David Susskind, one of the inaugural passengers, must have still been fuming when he sarcastically told a reporter after landing, “It was the most sensational flight experience I have ever had.”

Also on board that night were Mrs. Martha Topera of Fort Worth, Texas, (who wanted something special to tell her grandchildren); George Marchen, a manufacturer from New Jersey; Austin Wilson, a “New York jazz and ‘semi-rock’ trombonist; and an unnamed passenger who told a New York Times reporter that the 747 looked like “Radio City Music Hall with wings.” Mrs. Joseph Lusk of Medford, Massachusetts complained to the Times, “Frankly, I prefer the 707. There are just too many people here and too many helpers to wait on them. And I’m not the kind to feel hemmed in. I have eight kids.”

The return flight to New York carried just 196 passengers. The reason: A seven-hour delay getting off the ground. Seems passenger rage isn’t a modern invention.

Photo: Pride Aircraft

So warns Pride Aircraft in its advertisement offering a pair of Sukhoi Su-27 Flanker Cs for sale. No “aircraft dreamers,” either. So you’ll have to be content to just read it and weep, or drool, but please, not on your moisture-adverse keyboard. Pride, which restores and sells what you might call “sporty” aircraft (for the past 10 years, mostly Aero Vodochody L-39 jet trainers), acquired the fourth-generation Ukranian fighters from an entrepreneur whose company had planned to use them for high-altitude research. When the plan fell through, Pride overhauled the aircraft to better-than-new, “zero-timed” the engines, re-labeled all cockpit markings in English, and had the fighters FAA-licensed.

Asking price is $4.95 million per. Pride recommends that the buyer log some jet time, and offers a customized training program.

At the recent American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington D.C., astronomers Peter Garnavich of the University of Notre Dame and Alex Filippenko of the University of California at Berkley described a whopping stellar explosion called Y-155. It started out as a Humpty Dumpty of a star, about 200 times the mass of the Sun. It became so hot at its core that it may have begun to produce matter/antimatter particle pairs, causing an instability that led to a runaway thermonuclear reaction and an explosion about ten times as bright as a Type Ia supernova, the next most powerful explosion known.

Stars more massive than eight of our suns typically end their lives in a supernova, like the one that created the Crab Nebula in 1054. Really big stars, however, between 150 and 300 solar masses, appear to advance to this next stage of antimatter-triggered destruction that scientists had theorized about for decades, and are now observing beginning with the best candidate, discovered in 2007. Luckily for us, Y-155 blew up halfway across the visible universe, about seven billion years ago.

The Crab Nebula supernova remnant. (Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll, ASU, Davide De Martin, Skyfactory)

In his 2008 book Death From the Skies, astronomer Phil Plait considered how big a stellar explosion would have to be, and how close, to end life on Earth. A Type Ia supernova would need to go off within about 25 light years of us, according to Plait, Filippenko, and Garnavich, to torch the ozone layer enough to disrupt the food chain. There are no stars this close to us on the verge of exploding. Plait offers an appendix of 24 stars within a thousand light years that will one day blow, but at that distance they won’t become much more than very bright. Eta Carinae, 7,500 light years away, will be a beauty, at a very safe distance, and apparently not big enough for an antimatter trigger. But if humans and books are still around then, we’ll be able to read the books at night by Eta Carinae’s light.

As for Y-155, it was more powerful than Eta Carinae would be, releasing at the peak of its explosion about 100 billion times the Sun’s energy output. “If Y-155 had exploded in the Milky Way, it would have knocked our socks off,” said Garnavich in his press release. What does that mean? He replied by email: “Whatever a Type Ia supernova could do, Y-155 could do it ten times better at the same distance.” Or, it could cause the same amount of destruction from three times farther out, as its energy falls off with the square-root of its distance. So if such a supernova occurred out to 75 light years, we’d be in serious trouble.

Fortunately, the chance of that happening these days is very low. Y-155 dates from an era when such huge stars are thought to have been more common due to the early Universe’s more pristine state—it had not yet been polluted by generations of supernovae, which create elements heavier than hydrogen and helium that appear to keep stars from getting so big.

Nice to be living in the modern era.

A neighborhood in Port-au-Prince (Red Cross/ECHO)

The aviation community has responded to the Haiti earthquake with tremendous resolve, so much so that the National Business Aviation Association and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association have established on their Web sites ongoing advisories on how pilots and aircraft owners can best serve the recovery efforts.

The NBAA is working with the Department of Homeland Security’s Critical Incident Management Group to provide aircraft to fly personnel and supplies to staging areas in the United States and to Haiti. The association notes that there is no fuel available at Haiti’s international airport, which is closed to commercial flights. Haiti-bound pilots, once they are cleared to make a flight, are advised to carry at least an extra hour’s worth of fuel for holds and landing delays.

AOPA advises “Because of the damaged airport infrastructure and the large number of relief flights already taking place, the best thing pilots can do now is donate money and stay clear of the area,” and suggests that pilots donate the cost of a flight to Haiti in their aircraft to a relief organization.

Planetary scientist Dan Durda was the co-leader of a two-day training course held this week at the National AeroSpace Training and Research (NASTAR) Center for scientists who want to learn the ropes of suborbital spaceflight.

Durda sent back these dispatches from the NASTAR center in Pennsylvania.

Day One: “Spun up”

The first day of our inaugural Suborbital Scientist-Astronaut Training course at the National AeroSpace Training and Research (NASTAR) center has finally arrived.  This is a two-day class that Alan Stern and I conceived, in collaboration with Brienna Henwood at NASTAR; it grows from our own experiences flying science experiments in high-performance jet aircraft and zero-gravity research flights, and is designed as an introduction to some of the physical and mental challenges of accomplishing demanding research tasks in the dynamic environment of suborbital spaceflight.  The two-day class consists of classroom aeromedical instruction and sessions in an altitude chamber and NASTAR’s high-fidelity centrifuge trainer.

It was my intention to try to make some small blog updates live throughout the day to bring you along through the class, but just as the course itself is focused on how to keep yourself focused on the task at hand during flight, it quickly became apparent to me that blogging was going to have to take a back seat to paying attention to the course work.  So here we are at the end of Day 1, and I can finally pour forth some of my impressions.

First, and perhaps most importantly, it says a lot that ten other scientists were ready to spend their time and money to travel across the country and participate in this course.  The world of pervasive personal spaceflight is right around the corner, and these researchers recognize the potential offered by the next generation of commercial suborbital vehicles to get their science done. Other scientists routinely travel to the bottom of the ocean or to frigid polar extremes or to other equally challenging environments to personally do their own research; there’s no reason for space scientists not to have the same opportunity – not any longer.

As an experienced flight researcher I’ve been through a number of altitude chamber sessions before, so today’s portion of the course was more of a refresher for me.  I still consider today an important learning experience, of course, because there’s always a new angle on course material from new instructors, and it never hurts to get more hands-on training with flight equipment and procedures.  For me, though, the real fun and interesting perspective of today’s chamber ride was getting to share the experience with friends and colleagues for whom this was all brand new.  As experienced professional scientists, they assimilated the new technical information very rapidly, of course. But as human beings facing a new and uncertain experience, there was for some of the participants a bit of apprehension about certain aspects of the training.  How is hypoxia going to affect me?  Am I going to feel pain from the gas bubble expanding under my tooth filling as we ascend in altitude?  Being able to draw on my own experiences to assuage their fears or to add to the academic material presented in class proved to be a very gratifying contribution for me.  The best part was to experience the joy of learning something new all over again through my colleagues’ eyes.

Tomorrow [Wednesday] we head to the centrifuge for g-tolerance training and two flights of actual suborbital vehicle launch, flight, and re-entry g profiles.  That’ll all be new for me as well, so we all get to share in the learning process together.  I don’t think it goes too far to say that Alan and I, and the ten other scientists in the course with us, are rather ‘spun up’ about getting spun up to do our science in space!

"Class 10A" during training at NASTAR. Dan Durda is fourth from the right.

Day Two: “A piece of cake, guys”

The second day of the inaugural Suborbital Scientist-Astronaut Training course at the National AeroSpace Training and Research (NASTAR) center is now complete, and this first course (10A, as Alan Stern has coined it, to parallel the nomenclature of test pilot school graduating classes) is in the history books.  I have a sense that a couple decades from now, this course may be looked back on with some fondness as a sort of “good ‘ol days” when a new era of everyday scientist-astronaut was born.

Today for me was a day to discover my own physiological and mental responses to some of the stresses of high-g flight profiles, and more importantly, I think, to share in the joys of new experiences shared with my fellow graduates of the course.  The order of business for the day was a series of four flights in the NASTAR 25-foot centrifuge to build our experience with g loads in both Gz and Gx – “eyeballs down” and “eyeballs in” – accelerations felt in the cockpit.  These four flights were followed after lunch by two flights to simulate the exact g profile of a suborbital spaceflight aboard Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo (one flight at half the actual g loads, and another flight simulating the profile of a full flight to space, from launch through the ballistic zero-g arc out of the atmosphere to the re-entry).

Once again, I think my own previous experiences in flying high-performance and general aviation aircraft served well to damp down some of the anticipatory anxieties associated with a new and perhaps somewhat challenging experience.  Cameras and an audio link within the centrifuge cockpit broadcast our flights to our waiting colleagues in an observing room overlooking the centrifuge bay, and I did my best to ‘lead the troops’ by providing some encouraging commentary during my own first flights.  It really was a very exhilarating experience, and it was immediately clear to me that scientists from a wide range of backgrounds are going to have no problem training and adapting to this new work environment.  “It’s a piece of cake, guys,” was my reassuring message live from the cockpit.

And it truly is – anyone can fly to space in these new vehicles.  We’re on the heels of a revolution in personal and research access to space.  After today’s introduction to the feel of flying to space and back, I can’t wait to make the flights for real!