AirSpaceMag.com

"Have you seen me?" (Photo: Museum Vliegbasis Deelen)

The Museum Vliegbasis Deelen in The Hague, Netherlands, is missing its F-104 Starfighter. The 33-foot-long model of D-8105, with dummy missiles on the wingtips, had been mounted on tripods outdoors — until Sunday morning, when museum workers Twittered what they call an Amber Alert:

“A shocking discovery! Our Starfighter has fallen prey to people who use the current high metal prices to earn their keep. Or is it a practical joke? To kidnap the model, you need some seriously heavy machinery. If you see a Starfighter in a parking lot or on a flatbed trailer, contact us.”

Museum chairman Edwin van Brakel told reporters, “It would not fit in the back of a Fiat 500,” adding that it may be a prank because a note said, “Fly away. See you next year.”

An artist rendering of the gas cloud being pulled towards Sgr A*. Courtesy ESO/MPE/Marc Schartmann

Not long from now, astronomers are going to witness something they’ve never seen before: a black hole chowing down on a feast. Although scientists have a short list of probable black holes, there’s only one close enough for us to observe with any detail, and that’s the one in the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics confirmed this week in Nature that they’ve discovered a gas cloud plowing straight for it.

Sgr A* is a “supermassive” black hole, with the mass of about four million Suns. Although these still mysterious objects are difficult to observe directly, since they absorb all light that gets too close, there are a few ways to gather data. One is by studying the accretion disk; the extreme gravitational forces coming from the black hole compress material as it falls ever closer, and this causes an emission of electromagnetic radiation. With black holes, that radiation is usually in the x-ray range. Studying this radiation can tell astronomers a lot about the black hole itself.

So why is the discovery of this gas cloud so exciting? Because Sgr A* is a fairly quiet black hole. There’s not a lot of nearby material for it to feast on, and so not a lot of data for astronomers to collect. But this gas cloud is barreling down a path almost straight toward Sgr A*. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama desert, the astronomers have been able to track the cloud’s path and determine its size and mass — it covers an area about the size of our solar system, with the mass of just three Earths.

Even more exciting, in a universe where human life spans are mere blips in astronomical time, it turns out this gas cloud is going to reach Sgr A* in just about 18 months. The same Max Planck scientists who authored the Nature paper will be the ones collecting data from the VLT in mid-2013. That has to be high on the list of astronomer dreams.

The cloud is already close enough to start being stretched apart by gravitational forces, which are pulling it toward the black hole faster and faster — the speed of the cloud has doubled in the last seven years, and it is now moving over 5 million miles per hour. In this short film, astronomer Stefan Gillessen says the cloud “will be elongated and stretched, it will become essentially like spaghetti, and… fall into the black hole.” Or, as one of the best lines we’ve read in a science article in a long time puts it, “The inevitable doom of such a blob of gas is its inexorable tendency towards fragmentation.”

Reading about L2 Aerospace’s new device, you might think of MacGyver. Suddenly needing to do a little reconnaissance, he grabs a scrap of pipe and some duct tape and cobbles them together, while his cohorts look on in amazement, wondering why they didn’t come up with such an obvious plan.

Instant Eyes, a 9-inch UAV, can be set up and launched in about 20 seconds, reaching up to 2,500 feet high. When it hits its target altitude, it deploys a sensor platform with a parachute, which takes five-megapixel images of the ground below and transmits them over encrypted wifi back to the user.

It’s quick, easy, portable and …kind of brilliant, right? Instant Eyes is hand-launched, smokeless, and self-destructs upon landing, making its application in the field by the military seem like a no-brainer. L2 is developing them for civilian use as well, and one could certainly see it coming in handy for both police and firefighters.

L2 communications officer Tina Lange told A&S that they’ve completed the testing phase of the little UAV, and have started working with the U.S. Air Force “to demonstrate and observe Instant Eyes’ utility to the battlefield airman, Joint Terminal Attack Controllers and other [line-of-sight] ‘disadvantaged’ users.” The plan is to have demonstrations during USAF exercises this coming February.

Space Florida, the independent agency that fosters the state’s space industry, gave a half-million dollar grant to L2 earlier this year, according to Florida Today, to develop a prototype. Eventually the company hopes to get its range up to the edge of space.

Sullenberger with his daughters in 2001 -- pre-fame. (Photo courtesy Chesley Sullenberger)

Scuttlebutt inside the FAA has it that Chesley Sullenberger, or “Sully,” the pilot who executed a spectacularly successful ditching of a USAirways Airbus A320 in New York’s Hudson River, is the object of a petition drive to have him replace Randy Babbitt, who resigned as FAA administrator following a drunk driving arrest.

Now Sullenberger may be a hero and a durn’ good pilot, and yes, FAA administrators who were pilots have had some modest advantages over non-pilots in speaking the language and knowing the aviation community. But Sullenberger has also come across in his many public appearances as a nice, modest guy. He has stepped up to the plate when various causes have asked him to be their spokesperson. And he’s written a couple of books, one of which is awaiting release.

Well, Mr. Smith may have survived Washington when he served a term there, but the town can sometimes be pretty hard on FAA chiefs. Before the FAA administrator’s term was defined as five years in length, to extend it beyond the election cycle, each new presidential administration had to find an acceptable candidate for approval by Congress. It was a political football, and both parties knew it. Jack Shaffer, Nixon’s man, was pilloried by the air traffic controllers’ attorney, F. Lee Bailey, and when Shaffer left, Alexander Butterfield (a pilot, by the way) moved from the White House Staff office to FAA headquarters as administrator — where he promptly became entangled in the Nixon Watergate scandal. J. Lynn Helms set about modernizing the FAA, and must have irked somebody with some power, because the Wall Street Journal ran a series of unrelenting attacks on his education record, which caused him to resign.

It’s gotten better since the advent of five-year terms, and the first administrator under the new rule, Jane Garvey, as well as her successor, Marion Blakey, seemed to thrive at the job. Both were professional managers and highly attuned to the politics of the capital. For now, Michael Huerta is acting administrator, and he has a reputation as a manager. Maybe Sullenberger’s petitioners just want a pilot back at the top, but do they really want to do that to a nice guy?

John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Whether you love it or hate it, John Gillespie Magee’s “High Flight” remains the most enduring of aviation poems:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Sunday, December 11 marks the 70th anniversary of the mid-air collision over Lincolnshire, England, in which 19-year-old Magee was killed. An American Pilot Officer, he had crossed the border into Canada in 1940 to join the Royal Canadian Air Force. This weekend, Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire celebrates Magee’s life with a series of events, including a reading of his poetry.  Wikipedia has a very good page on Magee, who dashed off “High Flight” in a letter to his parents shortly before his death. His father, a curate of Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., subsequently reprinted it in church publications. But the poem really gained fame after poet Archibald McLeish (then Librarian of Congress) included it in a poetry exhibition at the Library of Congress in February 1942.

Aerial view of Lincoln Cathedral, site of the December 11, 2011 commemoration. Courtesy Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire.

While Magee wrote poetry in prep school (even winning a prize), the BBC speculated in 2007 that “High Flight’s” inspiration was due in part to hypoxia (oxygen deprivation) experienced by the author in his Spitfire. (Magee had written in his logbook about experiencing the symptoms of hypoxia while flying above 10,000 feet.)

“High Flight” is the official poem of the Royal Canadian Air Force. A copy was carried by astronaut Michael Collins on his Gemini 10 flight, and it was quoted by President Ronald Reagan in his speech to the nation after the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986. The poem has found its way into dozens of pop culture references, including The Simpsons (in one episode Homer declared “we are about to break the surly bonds of gravity and punch the face of God”), Mad Men, The West Wing, and Battlestar Galactica.

“High Flight” also was used by U.S. TV stations when signing off for the evening. See a clip from the 1960s, here (“I was born in ’64, and I honestly recall seeing this from a playpen in my parent’s living room. I always wanted to be on that plane! I also loved this man’s voice,” writes one poster), and one from KCRA, in Sacramento, California, as late as 1986, here.