Braniff International's McDonnell Douglas DC-8-62 "Flying Colors" in flight, 1973. Photo courtesy Braniff International and NASM.

“No airline in the 1960s and ’70s displayed more stylish pizzazz than Braniff International,” write Melissa Keiser and David Romanowski in their book The Legacy of Flight. “Its new corporate owners made it their mission to remake the successful but stodgy airline into a vibrant, top-tier carrier by overhauling everything from where it flew to the food it fed its passengers (which soon included the inspired BRANwich).

“To reinvent the company’s image, Braniff hired a New York ad agency, which tackled the task with relish. They brought on board internationally acclaimed design talents Alexander Girard and Emilio Pucci to reimagine aircraft paint schemes, airport lounges, uniforms, logos. Out went the traditional red, white, and blue airplane colors; in came a jelly bean bag’s worth of pastel hues. Pucci introduced space age-inspired stewardess uniforms that the cartoon family members of Hanna-Barbera’s Jetsons would have envied. The outfits included bubble helmets to ensure that a gal’s hairdo wouldn’t get mussed while crossing a windy tarmac.

Famed fashion designer Emilio Pucci created the "bubble helmet" for Braniff. Photo courtesy Braniff Collection, The University of Texas at Dallas.

“In 1973, to promote its South American destinations, Braniff commissioned artist Alexander Calder to create a unique work that would grace a DC-8 jetliner. The result, pictured here, was the exuberant Flying Colors. Calder created another work for Braniff in 1975, the Bicentennial-themed Flying Colors of the United States, using a Boeing 727 as his canvas.”

There are more than two million images in the archives of the National Air and Space Museum, and chief photo archivist Melissa Keiser has gathered 132 photographs into the 2010 book The Legacy of Flight: Images from the Archives of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (by David Romanowski and Melissa Keiser, Bunker Hill Publishing, 2010). See a slideshow of images here.

“SteadFast’s” World speed Record Flight. from Principal Photography on Vimeo.

As the most technically advanced helicopter in the world, the Apache AH Mk1 was also the hardest to fly…. To train each Apache pilot from scratch cost £3 million (each custom-made helmet alone had a price tag of £22,915). It took six months just to learn how to fly the machine, another six to know how to fight in it, and a final six to be passed combat ready. And that was if you were already a fully qualified, combat-trained army helicopter pilot. If you weren’t, you’d have to add four months for ground school and learning to fly fixed wing at RAF Barkston Heath, six months learning to fly helicopters at RAF Shawbury, half a year at the School of Army Aviation learning to fly tactically, and a final sixteen-week course in Survival, Evasion and Resistance to Interrogation, courtesy of the Intelligence Corps’ most vigorous training staff. Three years in total….

Flying an Apache almost always meant both hands and feet doing four different things at once. Even our eyes had to learn how to work independently of each other. A monocle sat permanently over our right iris. A dozen different instrument readings from around the cockpit were projected into it. At the flick of a button, a range of other images could also be superimposed underneath the green glow of the instrument symbology, replicating the TADS’ [target acquisition and designation sights] or PNVS’ [pilots night vision sight] camera images and the Longbow Radars’ targets.

The monocle left the pilot’s left eye free to look outside the cockpit, saving him the few seconds that it took to look down at the instruments and then up again…. New pilots suffered terrible headaches as the left and right eye competed for dominance. They started within minutes, long before take-off…. As the eyes adjusted over the following weeks and months the headaches took longer to set in. It was a year before mine disappeared altogether…. I once filmed my face during a sortie with a video camera as an experiment. My eyes whirled independently of each other throughout, like a man possessed.

An Apache helicopter pilot with the U.K. Army Air Corps in Afghanistan, May 2009. Photo: Cpl Rupert Frere RLC, UK Ministry of Defence.

And, of course, this beautiful moonset, which was filmed over the North Atlantic ocean on January 9.  The video is sped up: the sequence covers 10 minutes as the station orbited from northeast of the Caribbean to just west of Europe.

Click on the image to watch the video.

NASA’s Open Government initiative is tasked with “expanding transparency, participation, and collaboration and creating a new level of openness and accountability.” Part of accomplishing those goals is finding a way to present NASA, its mission, and the volumes of data it collects to the public in an easy-to-understand “I’m not a scientist” way.

Recently they’ve been working on this pretty neat “Global Exploration Roadmap” to illustrate the upcoming endeavors for the space program, including trips to asteroids and Mars. The graphic itself is pretty snazzy, but if you head over to the interactive site, you can click on each section to get more information. For those of us with a deep interest in space exploration, it’s mostly a pretty poster (I printed one out for my office wall!), but for folks who only keep up a casual interest — or want to get more educated while hearing the presidential candidates discuss future space programs — this is a fantastic way to quickly get caught up on the initiatives already planned for the next decade.

Eurocopter's X3 (Photo: Patrick Penna)

Helicopter speeds have traditionally been limited by a phenomenon called “retreating blade stall,” which describes what happens to the main rotor at high speed. The relative wind on the retreating blade is reduced by the forward speed of the helicopter to a point where it no longer generates lift, and the helicopter rolls off to the side with reduced lift.

Tilt-rotor vehicles like the Bell Boeing Osprey turn the rotor blades into propellers. Now a less complex solution that dates back several decades is re-emerging: the compound helicopter, which uses a dedicated propulsor to produce forward speed. The Piasecki X-49A modified a Sikorsky UH-60 with a lifting surface made up of two wings, plus a ducted fan in the tail to push the aircraft to speeds of around 200 mph. The wings take up part of the lift load so the main rotor doesn’t have to provide as much at high speeds, and blade stall no longer matters as much.

The Eurocopter X3 is a modified EC155, itself a derivative of that company’s Dauphin (the U.S. Coast Guard operates one version). The X3 has achieved speed bursts as high as 267 mph, propelled by two tractor propellers driven by the main engines and mounted on stubby wings just beneath the main rotor. At high speed, the six-blade main rotor is slowed to reduce the drag of the advancing blade, while the wings provide necessary lift.

Sikorsky’s X-2 has advanced far enough to become the proof-of-concept for a prototype military aircraft  now designated the S-97 Raider, a high-speed attack and scout helicopter. The X-2 proved the efficacy of a coaxial main rotor blade in which both sides of the helicopter have advancing blades opposite retreating blades, providing a symmetrical lift that requires no wing. Forward thrust is provided by a pusher propeller in the tail, an arrangement that took the experimental craft to a top speed of 290 mph, and, in a descent, to 300 mph. There is no tail rotor à la the traditional helicopter, and the X-2 maneuvers about the yaw axis by applying differential torque to the two main rotors. The little X-2 (it weighed less than 8,000 pounds on takeoff) was retired after only 22 hours of flying.

The X-2 is not Sikorsky’s first compound helicopter. Its S-72 employed a fixed wing and two turbofan engines to achieve a design speed of up to 345 mph. The wing generated enough lift to allow the craft to fly without a main rotor, which it actually did during testing. The X-Wing, another 1980s experimental craft, employed large, rigid main rotor blades that were intended to be stopped inflight to form an X-shape wing that supplemented lift from a conventional wing. Two turbofans provided thrust.

The closest the U.S. military came to buying and operating a compound helicopter was when it launched the Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne with a contract in 1966 for 10 prototypes. Problems and delays during development led to cancellation of the Cheyenne, but the Army followed that with the AH-64 Apache, which is not a compound helicopter but is in operation today.

Here’s a demo of Eurocopter’s X-3 at last summer’s Paris Air Show:

DARPA's Space Surveillance Telescope in White Sands, New Mexico. Photo courtesy DARPA

At a little after 10:00 EST this morning, a “bus-size” asteroid will give us a little buzz. It isn’t big enough to do damage, even if it were to hit our atmosphere, but its a reminder that there are objects out there that we might want to be worried about, if only we knew where they were.

Now an innovative new telescope is getting into the asteroid hunting game. DARPA’s Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) had its first light early in 2011, and is now officially online and going through its first demonstration, seeking out potentially Earth-threatening asteroids.

It’s not the first asteroid hunter. Among others, NASA’s WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) space telescope found over 33,000 new asteroids during its all-sky survey in 2010 (the team will be publishing their official results this March). There’s also the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) on top of Mount Haleakala in Maui, Hawaii. The team’s goal since they started operations in 2010 is to complete a survey of all asteroids over 1 km wide.

DARPA hopes the SST will fill out that catalog further by seeing even smaller, but still potentially dangerous, asteroids. Commissioned in 2002, the SST is unique in that its “mirrors are some of the steepest aspherical curvatures ever to be polished, and allow the telescope to have the fastest optics of this aperture class.” It’s short focal length and wide field-of-view allow it to be moved rapidly. By seeing smaller objects, it can help protect not just Earth, but satellites in orbit — military satellites, that is, as SST is primarily run by the U.S. Air Force at the White Sands Missile Base in New Mexico.

January 22, 2012 solar flare. Photo courtesy NASA/SDO/AIA.

Despite being the strongest solar storm since 2005, this week’s flareup appears to have caused few disruptions on Earth. (As Space.com reports, the Coronal Mass Ejection “hit Earth at an angle, so the electromagnetic burst was largely shielded by the planet’s magnetic field.”)

But the storm did lead some airlines—including Delta, Qantas, and Air Canada—to alter their transpolar routes to reduce potential disruptions to high-frequency radio communication along the way. At least one Qantas flight, reports AvWeb, carried an extra five tons of fuel in order to fly a less southerly route.

We may have gotten off easy. The remarkable electrical effects of solar storms have been recorded in newspapers since British astronomer Richard Carrington noticed a solar eruption in 1859 while sketching sun spots seen through his telescope. Just days later, the northern lights—seen as far south as Cuba—damaged telegraph systems, even setting offices on fire and melting wires. On August 30, 1859, the New York Times included this observation from the superintendent of the Canadian Telegraph Company:

I never, in my experience of fifteen years in the working of telegraph lines, witnessed anything like the extraordinary effect of the Aurora Borealis, between Quebec and Further Point last night. The line was in most perfect order, and well-skilled operators worked incessantly from 8 o’clock last evening till 1 o’clock this morning, to get over in even a tolerably intelligent form about four hundred words of the steamer Indian‘s report for the Associated Press, and at the latter hour so completely were the wires under the influence of the Aurora Borealis, it was found utterly impossible to communicate between the telegraph stations, and the line was closed for the night.

Another solar storm, nearly as strong as what has come to be known as the Carrington event, occurred in 1921. On May 16, 1921, the Los Angeles Times reported that “electrical influences exerted by the Aurora Borealis…continued today to play havoc with telegraph traffic throughout the United States…. For more than an hour before midnight Saturday nearly every telephone wire leading from New York and Chicago was out of condition.”

The New-York Tribune hoped to calm its readers by noting that the sun would soon “turn [its] spotted face away and end earthly wire troubles,” while the New York Times reported disturbances in France: “The operators at the central transmission stations came to the conclusion that a strange force had got into their instruments, for nothing would go right. Morse instruments, instead of making dots and dashes, recorded one long line. Hughes instruments produced words in what might have been an unknown language, and Baudot, of which French telegraphers are proud because it is very intricate, seemed possessed by evil spirits.”

Newcomb Carlton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, was quoted in the New York Times as saying: “The magnetic disturbances were much the worst ever experienced. A great many fuses were blown out on our land lines and we had great difficulty with the submarine cables.” The story also reports that the solar storm burned out a telephone station in Sweden, which then contributed to a short circuit in the New York Central signal system, which was followed by a fire in the Fifty-seventh Street signal tower.

In 1989, the Washington Post reported on December 18 that a solar storm—or “titanic temper tantrum”—set off radiation alarms aboard the supersonic Concorde in flight, damaged orbiting satellites, and caused a nine-hour power blackout in most of Canada’s Quebec province.

In comparison, Space.com reports, this week’s solar flare caused “minor disruptions to spacecraft and power grids.”

Screenshot from UAVForge submitted video for a concept by team GremLion

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is trying out innovation the 21st century way: crowdsourcing. The agency, along with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Atlantic and Northwest UAV Propulsion Systems, wants to build an advanced unmanned aerial vehicle, so it asked engineers and designers to submit their ideas.

The initiative, called UAVForge, received submissions from more than 1,400 teams, who were encouraged to share ideas and problems they’ve encountered in the hope that they would build on each other’s ingenuity and create something they might not have by working in secret. It’s still a competition, though; whichever team creates the best product will take home a $100,000 prize. UAVForge is currently in the process of voting for the top 10 ideas.

This isn’t the first crowdsourcing project by the Department of Defense, which has experimented with software and, last summer, unveiled a particularly hideous but — DARPA hopes — extremely versatile and inexpensive combat support vehicle, the FLYPmode.

Crowdsourcing is certainly one way to cut way back on parts of the defense budget. And though the idea is probably not well-received, generally speaking, by defense contractors, it’s not all bad news — Northwest UAV has already been awarded a contract to manufacture the winning idea. One has to wonder how the 1,400-plus teams can integrate classified military do-dads — which one might assume an “advanced” UAV would have — not to mention keeping whatever they come up with themselves a secret.

Lufthansa tested biofuel in this Airbus A321, operating one engine on Jet A and the other on a 50-percent blend of Jet A and a fuel made from processed plant and animal-fat hydrocarbons.

Jet A, the fuel that civil jets use (the military’s are designated JP), comes from crude oil that’s been distilled and standardized to meet a chemical specification. While many turbines can run on almost any light oil or liquid hydrocarbon, jet aircraft fly very high where it’s cold, and Jet A has to resist solidifying up there in the stratosphere, among other requirements.

In recent years, synthetic jet fuels have been created by processing coal and by using biological methods, which produce so-called “bio-fuel.” Although crude oil – petroleum – technically comes from plants, the crude was formed eons ago, and is considered “fossil fuel.” The first bio-fuel to appear in quantity, and the most common one available to consumers, is a blend of gasoline and ethanol in various proportions. The ethanol is made by fermenting the sugars in corn, cane or sugar beets. Ethanol reduces the energy density of the blends compared to gasoline, and researchers are looking for ways to produce butanol instead, because it has better energy density.

Synthetic bio-jet fuel has to closely resemble kerosene and Jet A in its energy density and other properties, and small quantities have been made to be blended with traditional fuels – with some success. Lufthansa recently completed trials using some bio-jet fuel in a roughly 50 percent mix with standard Jet A. But the reason Lufthansa halted the trials highlights a problem posed by bio-fuels generally: They’re not available yet in sufficient quantity or at an affordable price.

Doing demonstrations is one thing; operating large fleets of airliners using even a modest blend of bio-fuel and Jet A will require enormous capital investment in an infrastructure that can produce the fuel. Algae-based oils from bioengineered plant cells, for example, would require huge quantities of water and tanks in which to hold the algae. Right now, the energy it takes to produce biofuels usually exceeds the energy yield. Petroleum flows out of wells and through pipes to refineries, and while the price of oil occasionally spikes in response to market demands, the actual cost of producing it will probably continue to undercut the cost of making fuels from renewable sources. Nonetheless, the U.S. Air Force continues to pursue synthetic fuels to ensure it can continue to operate if crude oil were to be unobtainable.

(Poster: movieposterdb.com)

We swear we were doing work-related research when we came across this quote from Daniel L. Rust’s 2009 book Flying Across America: The Airline Passenger Experience:

“The first Hollywood movie showcasing airline travel, Three Guys Named Mike, was released in 1951 and starred Jane Wyman as a plucky American Airlines stewardess who became the object of affection of three men, all named Mike (Watch the full movie at Internet Archive). Directed by Charles Walters, the lighthearted film chronicled a stewardess’s training and provided a glimpse into the not-so-glamorous world of airline employment…. [A] young writer named Sidney Sheldon wrote the screenplay. As one of the most successful novelists of the twentieth century, Sheldon would eventually sell more than 300 million books worldwide, besides creating successful television shows such as I Dream of Jeannie and Hart to Hart.

(Poster: moviegoods.com)

Three years after the release of Three Guys Named Mike, John Wayne starred with an impressive cast in the granddaddy of airline disaster movies entitled The High and the Mighty. Based on Ernest K. Gann’s book of the same name, the film set the genre standard for decades to come. A generation of people watched spellbound as John Wayne defied the odds in successfully bringing a crippled airliner in to land at San Francisco after experiencing in-flight problems en route from Honolulu. The theme song, which won an Academy Award, was so closely associated with John Wayne that it was played at his funeral.”

Don’t worry if the 3D animation is confusing; it’s not so much a Thomas Guide (Take the 405 to the Pegasus Galaxy) as a statistical representation of how mass is distributed through the universe. It’s the clumps and lack of clumps that are important. Astronomers took measurements of nearly a million galaxies, and by graphing them out are able to learn about the structure of the universe, including how it evolved over time, back to the inflationary epoch — the moment just after the Big Bang when the universe rapidly expanded. In the animation, each green dot represents one galaxy. The image covers a redshift range from 0.25 to 0.75, reaching back to six billion years ago.

The measurements are ongoing, and will eventually include around 1.5 million galaxies, which the researchers hope to be finished with sometime this year. They’re already making interesting finds: Their data shows that dark matter makes up 73% of the density of the universe.

Robert K. Smyth learned to fly in the U.S. Navy, where he flew fighter aircraft from the F8F Bearcat to McDonnell F2H Banshees, one of the first carrier-borne jets. In 1952, he successfully completed the Navy’s Test Pilot School and eventually left the service in 1955.

He soon joined Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corpopration as an engineering test pilot, flying the F9F Cougar, F11F Tiger and A-6A Intruder. He also contributed to the certification of the Gulfstream I, a pioneering twin-turboprop business aircraft that led to the Gulfstream II, which became the first of a long line of twin-jet Gulfstream aircraft.

Smyth was instrumental in the development of the Apollo Lunar Module during the 1960s, and in 1967 he was appointed Grumman’s chief test pilot. He and Bill Miller crewed the first flight of the F-14A Tomcat in 1970, but made bigger headlines when he and Miller had to eject from the aircraft just nine days later. (Smyth spoke about his career at the National Air and Space Museum in 2007. You can watch an archived video here.)

He left Grumman to join Gulfstream Aerospace, which was no longer part of Grumman, in 1981 and set numerous records as vice president of flight operations. He retired in 1993 and moved to Florida, where he died on Tuesday at his home at the Leeward Air Ranch in Ocala. He is survived by his wife, Sally, who requests that friends remember her husband by contributing to the Hospice of Marion County.

NTSB member Robert Sumwalt at today's hearing.

As far as Washington hearings go, today’s National Transportation Safety Board panel on air race and air show safety was cordial. But the questions and answers suggest a battle brewing.

Panelists, including FAA officials and air show professionals, described procedures and regulations already in place to assure safety at shows and races. Board members were, politely, looking for more—some response to last year’s terrible show season, when a pilot and 10 spectators were killed at the Reno air races and five pilots were killed in airshow crashes. It appears that just strengthening existing procedures may not cut it.

The sternest moment of the morning session came when NTSB Chair Deborah Hersman pressed Reno Air Racing Association officials to explain how the prescribed 1,000-foot buffer zone between spectators and the race track had been decided. She assured RARA president Mike Houghton and rules chairman Michael Major that this was an area the NTSB would look into.

Several board members wondered whether special medical certificates should be required for the more physically demanding flying done by racers and show pilots, and that’s a good point. Others questioned FAA Flight Standards officer John McGraw about how much oversight the FAA had delegated to airshow professionals in certifying pilots and aircraft. A reasonable concern, although one would think that airshow professionals are precisely the right people to certify pilots and aircraft. Their survival as a profession depends on it. Plus they know their stuff—probably better than FAA officials, who are responsible for overseeing many different types of operations.

Even though International Council of Air Shows president John Cudahy emphasized that airshows hadn’t had a spectator fatality in more than 50 years, the NTSB was searching for a change to recommend. Increased setbacks? More regulations? More thorough inspections of aircraft modifications? Increased standards for pilots? Air boss George Cline may have given them one answer. As an air boss, Cline has overseen safety standards and operations at airshows for 20 years, but he is not certified—because there is no certification program for an air boss. Create the standards for certification, Cline suggested. Not a bad idea, but I have a feeling it won’t stop there.

The Marines were just too late to see action in the [October 1962] Cuban [missile] crisis, but the “Gray Ghosts” [VMF-531] did make it to Key West, where they flew scrambles against Mexican airliners, lost lightplanes and even the odd Cuban MiG-17. After Cuban MiGs strafed a fishing boat 50 miles southwest of Key West, Marine Phantoms were scrambled to investigate. Their crews soon discovered that the MiG-17 enjoyed a very short turn radius. As one of the MiGs closed onto the tail of his aircraft, one laconic RIO [radar intercept officer] was heard to remark, “You’d better do some of that pilot sh-t, ’cause we’re losing!”

Check out our February/March 2012 issue for more on the F-4—and nine other aircraft—in “100 Years of Marine Aviation: A Salute to 10 Aircraft That Carried the Few and the Proud Into History.”

A USMC McDonnell F-4 Phantom II on base, probably in Vietnam. Squadron VMFA-232. Photograph by Richard Rash, courtesy NASM.