Tag: aerospace industry

Paper airplane designed by Boeing engineers breaks world distance record | CNN

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CNN
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It’s a bird… It’s a plane… It’s a paper airplane!

The world record for the farthest flight by paper airplane has been broken by three aerospace engineers with a paper aircraft that flew a grand total of 289 feet, 9 inches (88 meters), nearly the length of an American football field.

They beat the previous record of 252 feet, 7 inches (77 meters) achieved on April 2022 by a trio in South Korea. Prior to that, the record had not been broken in over a decade.

“It really put things on the map and it’s a really proud moment for family and friends,” said Dillon Ruble, a systems engineer at Boeing and now paper airplane record holder, in a release. “It’s a good tie in to aerospace and thinking along the lines of designing and creating prototypes.”

Ruble worked alongside Garrett Jensen, a strength engineer also with Boeing, and aerospace engineer Nathaniel Erickson. The trio are recent graduates who studied aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology.

The feat required months of effort, as the team put in nearly 500 hours of studying origami and aerodynamics to create and test multiple prototypes. The engineers put their final design to the test on December 2, 2022, in Crown Point, Indiana, where the record was achieved on Ruble’s third throw.

“We hope this record stands for quite a while — 290 feet (88 meters) is unreal,” Jensen said in the release. “That’s 14 to 15 feet (4.2 to 4.6 meters) over the farthest throw we ever did. It took a lot of planning and a lot of skill to beat the previous record.”

The team had decided their best chance at beating the world record would be with an airplane design that focused on speed and minimized drag, so that the plane could fly a far distance in a short amount of time.

Gathering inspiration from various hypersonic aircrafts, vehicles that can fly faster than five times the speed of sound (Mach 5), specifically the NASA X-43A, the team had come up with the winning paper aircraft design — later named “Mach 5.”

“Full-scale and paper airplanes have vast differences in their complexity, but both operate on the same fundamental principles,” said Ruble, via email. “Some of the same design methodologies can be applied to both. One of these methods was our trial-and-error design process. For instance, we would theorize about a fold we could change on our plane, fold it, throw it, and compare the distance to previous iterations to determine if the change was beneficial.”

To find the best technique when it came to throwing the paper airplane, the team ran various simulations and analyzed slow-motion videos of their previous throws.

“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,” Jensen said in the statement. “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.”

Even down to the paper, which the team had decided that A4 (slightly longer than typical letter sized paper) was the best for manipulating and folding into the winning airplane. With these meticulously thought-out design choices, and careful attention to the numerous rules and guidelines set forth by the Guinness World Record Team, the three were set to break a record.

On its record-breaking distance flight the plane was in the air for roughly six seconds. The Guinness paper plane record for duration of flight is currently 29.2 seconds.

“The design objectives for an air-time record would be vastly different from the low-drag version we built for the longest-distance record,” Ruble said via email. “Increasing the wingspan and decreasing the aspect ratio would be the first steps in producing this type of plane.”

Paper airplane aside, Ruble added that this tedious method of back-and-forth trials served as a testament to the importance of rigorous prototyping in the real world.

Ruble and Jensen began their paper plane engineering careers while in middle school, participating in paper airplane events held at Boeing. Ruble said he enjoyed making the paper come to life and the hard work he had to put in to find ways to improve his designs. Both were also fans of origami as kids.

The record-breaking team hopes their accomplishment will inspire other young and aspiring aerospace engineers to chase their dreams.

For those looking to create their own record-breaking paper plane design, the feat is not impossible, but may take some time (and skill).

“Mach 5 flies best at high relative velocity, but to achieve this condition, the aircraft must be launched in a specific manner,” said Ruble via email. “This technique, in addition to the complexity of the plane, means that only the most experienced paper aircraft enthusiasts would have success with the design.

“However, by starting with publicly available designs, anyone can hone their skills to throw paper airplanes farther and higher than all of their friends,” he added.

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April 14, 2023
2 Americans arrested for allegedly sending aviation technology to Russia | CNN Politics

CNN
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Two US nationals were arrested in Kansas City on Thursday for allegedly sending US aviation technology to Russia, the Justice Department announced.

Cyril Gregory Buyanovsky, 59, and Douglas Robertson, 55, are facing several charges, including exporting controlled goods without a license, falsifying and failing to file electronic export information, and smuggling goods contrary to US law.

Their arrest is the most recent move by the Justice Department’s Task Force KleptoCapture, made up of federal prosecutors, investigators and analysts, which has worked for the past year to wage a global campaign against money laundering and sanctions evasion in support of the Russian government. Its work has resulted in over 30 indictments against sanctioned supporters of the Kremlin and Russian military, according to the Justice Department.

The two men’s US-based KanRus Trading Company sold and installed Western electronic equipment for airplanes, according to prosecutors, and allegedly sold equipment to Russian companies and provided repair services for Russian aircrafts. To get around US sanctions, prosecutors say Buyanovsky and Robertson concealed who their clients were, lied about how much products cost and were paid through foreign bank accounts.

After Russia’s war in Ukraine began last year, the US government imposed additional sanctions on shipments to Russia. Buyanovsky and Robertson discussed their options for continuing to send shipments to at least one client in Russia, prosecutors say, including by sending shipments through third-party countries.

A KanRus shipment in February 2022 was flagged by the Department of Commerce because it did not have the proper licensing, according to the indictment.

Soon after, Robertson, who is a commercial pilot, allegedly told a Russia-based client that “things are complicated in the USA” and that invoices needed to be less than $50,000 because otherwise there would be “more paperwork and visibility,” adding that “this is NOT the right time for either.” A shipment to that Russian client was later sent through Laos, prosecutors say.

Lawyers for Buyanovsky and Robertson are not yet listed.

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March 3, 2023
China wants to dominate the ‘near space’ battlefield. Balloons are a key asset | CNN

Hong Kong
CNN
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In China’s eyes, the newest superpower battlefield sits between 12 and 60 miles above the Earth’s surface in a thin-aired layer of the atmosphere it calls “near space.”

Lying above the flightpaths of most commercial and military jets and below satellites, near space is an in-between area for spaceflight to pass through – but it is also a domain where hypersonic weapons transit and ballistic missiles cross.

China has paid close attention to other countries’ developments in this region, which has been hailed by Chinese military experts as “a new front for militarization” and “an important field of competition among the world’s military powers.”

In addition to developing high-tech vessels such as solar-powered drones and hypersonic vehicles, China is also reviving a decades-old technology to utilize this area of the atmosphere – lighter-than-air vehicles. They include stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons – similar to the one identified over the continental United States and shot down on Saturday.

China maintains the balloon is a civilian research airship, despite claims by US officials that the device was part of an extensive Chinese surveillance program.

While questions remain about that incident, an examination of Chinese state media reports and scientific papers reveal the country’s growing interest in these lighter-than-air vehicles, which Chinese military experts have touted for use toward a wide range of purposes, from communication relay, reconnaissance and surveillance to electronic countermeasures.

Chinese research on the high-altitude balloons dates back to the late 1970s, but over the past decade there’s been renewed focus on using older technology equipped with new hardware as major powers around the world have bulked up their capabilities in the sky.

“With the rapid development of modern technology, the space for information confrontation is no longer limited to land, sea, and the low altitude. Near space has also become a new battlefield in modern warfare and an important part of the national security system,” read a 2018 article in the PLA Daily, the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

And a range of “near-space flight vehicles” will play a vital role in future joint combat operations that integrate outer space and the Earth’s atmosphere, the article said.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has urged the PLA Air Force to “speed up air and space integration and sharpen their offensive and defensive capabilities” as early as 2014, and military experts have designated “near space” as a crucial link in the integration.

Searches on CNKI, China’s largest online academic database, show Chinese researchers, both military and civilian, have published more than 1,000 papers and reports on “near space,” many of which focus on the development of “near space flight vehicles.” China has also set up a research center to design and develop high-altitude balloons and stratospheric airships, or dirigibles, under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a top government think tank.

One particular area of interest is surveillance. While China already deploys a sprawling satellite network for sophisticated long-range surveillance, Chinese military experts have highlighted the advantages of lighter-than-air vehicles.

Unlike rotating satellites or traveling aircraft, stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons “can hover over a fixed location for a long period of time” and are not easily detected by radar, wrote Shi Hong, the executive editor of Shipborne Weapons, a prominent military magazine published by a PLA-linked institute, in an article published in state media in 2022.

In a 2021 video segment run by state news agency Xinhua, a military expert explains how near-space lighter-than-air vehicles can surveil and take higher resolution photos and videos at a much lower cost compared to satellites.

In the video, Cheng Wanmin, an expert at the National University of Defense Technology, highlighted the progress by the US, Russia and Israel in developing these vehicles, adding China has also made its own “breakthroughs.”

An example of advances China has made in this domain is the reported flight of a 100-meter-long (328 feet) unmanned dirigible-like airship known as “Cloud Chaser.” In a 2019 interview with the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, Wu Zhe, a professor at Beihang University, said the vehicle had transited across Asia, Africa and North America in an around-the-world flight at 20,000 meters (65, 616 feet) above the Earth.

Another scientist on the team told the newspaper that compared with satellites, stratospheric airships are better for “long-term observation” and have a range of purposes from disaster warning and environmental research to wireless network construction and aerial reconnaissance.

It’s also clear that China is not alone in seeing new uses for a technology that’s been leveraged for military reconnaissance as far back as the late 18th century, when French forces employed a balloon corps.

The US has also been bolstering its capacity to use lighter-than-air vehicles. In 2021, the US Department of Defense contracted an American aerospace firm to work on using their stratospheric balloons as a means “to develop a more complete operating picture and apply effects to the battlefield,” according to a statement from the firm, Raven Aerostar, at the time.

“This isn’t just a China thing. The US, and other nations as well, have been working on and developing high-altitude aerostats, balloons and similar vehicles,” said Brendan Mulvaney, director of the China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI), a research center serving the US Air Force.

“They are cheap, provide long-term persistent stare for collection of imagery, communications and other information – including weather,” said Mulvaney, who authored a 2020 paper that detailed China’s interest in using lighter-than-air vehicles for “near-space reconnaissance.”

China also appears acutely aware of the potential for other countries to use balloons to spy.

In 2019, a documentary series on China’s border defense forces produced by a state-owned television channel featured an incident where the PLA Air Force spotted and shot down a suspected high-altitude surveillance balloon that “threatened (China’s) air defense safety.”

The documentary did not provide further detail about the time and location of the incident, but a paper published last April by researchers in a PLA institute noted air-drift balloons were spotted over China in 1997 and 2017.

Other experts have pointed to the potential use of balloons in data collection that can aid China’s development of hypersonic weapons that transit through near space.

“Understanding the atmospheric conditions up there is critical to programming the guidance software” for ballistic and hypersonic missiles, according to Hawaii-based analyst Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.

Chinese state media reports show China has also used balloons to test advanced hypersonic vehicles. In 2019, state broadcaster CCTV’s military channel showed footage of a balloon lifting off for what it described as maiden testing of three miniaturized models of “wide-range aircraft,” which according to Chinese media reports, can fly at a wide range of speeds, up to five times the speed of sound.

US intelligence officials believe the Chinese balloon identified over the US in recent days is part of an extensive, Chinese military-run surveillance program involving a fleet of balloons that has conducted at least two dozen missions over at least five continents in recent years, CNN reported on Tuesday.

Beijing on Thursday said the assessment was “likely part of the US’ information and public opinion warfare” against China. It has maintained that the device identified over the US is civilian in nature, and linked it to “companies,” though it declined to provide more information on which entity manufactured the balloons.

Both the self-governing island of Taiwan and Japan have acknowledged past, similar sightings, though it is not clear if they are related to the US incident.

A US military commander on Monday acknowledged that the US has a “domain awareness gap” that allowed three other suspected Chinese spy balloons to transit the continental US undetected during the previous administration.

An FBI team is working on understanding more about the equipment reclaimed from the balloon shot down over the sea – including what kind of data it could collect and whether it could transmit that in real time.

CASI’s Mulvaney said that whether the balloon itself is characterized as “dual use” or “state-owned,” data collected would have gone back to China, which is now receiving another kind of information from the incident.

“At the end of the day responses and (tactics, techniques, and procedures) from the US and other countries on how they react, or fail to – all of that has value to China and the PLA.”

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February 9, 2023
Biden admin preparing to ask Congress to approve sale of F-16 jets to Turkey | CNN Politics

Washington
CNN
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The Biden administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve the sale of 40 F-16 fighter jets to Turkey, after weighing a Turkish request for the planes for more than a year, congressional sources familiar with the deliberations told CNN.

If approved, the sale would be among the largest arms sales in years. The administration is also discussing a separate sale of 40 F-35 warplanes to Greece. There are longstanding tensions between Turkey and Greece.

Turkey was removed from the F-35 program in 2019 in response to Ankara’s decision to purchase the Russian-made S-400 missile system.

The sale to Turkey could put pressure on Ankara to approve the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO, a process that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been blocking since last year.

Finland and Sweden were officially invited to join the alliance at the NATO summit in June last year, but as a NATO member Turkey could block them from joining.

A Finnish official told CNN that Finland has “not been part of any discussions” when it comes to the American F-16s.

“Finland has implemented everything that was agreed in Madrid in June. Now we hope all NATO members help us get our accession process over the finishing line. What comes to American F-16s, we obviously have not been part of any discussions. It is an internal US matter,” the Finnish official said.

It is not clear when the administration plans to make a formal request to Congress, as required by law for foreign military sales. But on Thursday night, the administration sent informal notifications about the prospective sale to the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations committees, kicking off the committee review process, the sources said.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.

Most administrations typically give Congress informal notification of proposed sales weeks before taking formal action. The informal notification process is a common practice in which the relevant committees get a heads up on planned sales, allowing committee leadership to raise concerns, give their input, or place holds.

Once the administration formally notifies the full Congress of the intended sale, lawmakers then have 30 days to block the deal, which they can do by passing a joint resolution of disapproval.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez said on Friday that he would not approve any proposed sale of F-16 aircraft to Turkey, continuing his longstanding opposition to providing the weaponry to Ankara.

“As I have repeatedly made clear, I strongly oppose the Biden administration’s proposed sale of new F-16 aircraft to Turkey,” the New Jersey Democrat said. “President Erdogan continues to undermine international law, disregard human rights and democratic norms, and engage in alarming and destabilizing behavior in Turkey and against neighboring NATO allies.”

Menendez has been highly critical of Turkey’s targeting of the Kurds and threatened incursions into northern Syria. He has slammed Ankara’s closeness with Moscow and warned the Turks against purchasing any more S-400 missile systems from Russia. Additionally, Menendez has accused Turkey of repeatedly violating Greek airspace with provocative overflights in the Aegean Sea, calling it “unacceptable behavior from a NATO country” in remarks in Athens last year.

“Until Erdogan ceases his threats, improves his human rights record at home – including by releasing journalists and political opposition – and begins to act like a trusted ally should, I will not approve this sale,” Menendez said.

At the same time, the New Jersey Democrat said he welcomed “the news of the sale of new F-35 fighter aircraft to Greece.”

“This defense capability is not only critical for a trusted NATO ally and enduring partner’s efforts to advance security and stability in the Eastern Mediterranean, but also strengthens our two nations’ abilities to defend shared principles including our collective defense, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law,” he said Friday.

A National Security Council spokesperson referred CNN to the State Department for comment.

“As a matter of policy, the Department is not going to comment on proposed defense sales or transfers until they’ve been formally notified to Congress,” State Department principal deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said at a briefing Friday.

“But what I would say is that Turkey and Greece both are vital, vital, NATO Allies,” he added, noting that the US has “a history of supporting their security apparatuses.”

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January 13, 2023