The open source flight simulator project has just released Flightgear 2.0.

...FlightGear is a free flight simulator project. It is being developed through the gracious contributions of source code and spare time by many talented people from around the globe. Among the many goals of this project are the quest to minimize short cuts and "do things right", the quest to learn and advance knowledge, and the quest to have better toys to play with.

The idea for Flight Gear was born out of a dissatisfaction with current commercial PC flight simulators. A big problem with these simulators is their proprietariness and lack of extensibility. There are so many people across the world with great ideas for enhancing the currently available simulators who have the ability to write code, and who have a desire to learn and contribute. Many people involved in education and research could use a spiffy flight simulator frame work on which to build their own projects; however, commercial simulators do not lend themselves to modification and enhancement. The Flight Gear project is striving to fill these gaps.

It looks great and the price is right so check it out!

FlightGear Web Siite

An amazing achievement that shows the innovation of private industry.  I can't wait to see these aircraft fly!

Virgin Founder, Sir Richard Branson and SpaceshipOne (SS1) designer, Burt Rutan, today reveal SS2 to the public for the first time since construction of the world’s first manned commercial spaceship began in 2007. SS2 has been designed to take many thousands of private astronauts into space after test programming and all required U.S. government licensing has been completed.

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As with most things I do these days, it starts with an idle bit of chat when there’s nothing better going on and ends up turning into a Vice blog post. One afternoon in Seoul, while bored and looking for anything to occupy my time, a guy I’d met a few days earlier told me he’d heard a rumour that a giant Boeing 747 had been dumped inexplicably on the doorstep of a housing complex out in the suburbs, and was now slowly wasting away. That was literally all the information he had, but the possibility of jumping up and down on a jumbo jet wing without getting shouted at or accused of terrorism by lingering air traffic control staff seemed like a lot more fun than another morning hanging out with the art kids of Insadong, so I got on a train to check it out.

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Computers definitely have an advantage in responding to situations when given the proper inputs.  But I'd be far more comfortable in an aircraft the allows the pilot to override the flight systems in an emergency.

But while most reports are focusing on why the sensors gave incorrect information (icing, an electrical fire. etc.), the more substantive issue is that the pilots of Flight 447 never had a fighting chance because their airplane's controls were never in their hands -- they were in the hands of the on-board computers made by the likes of Northrup Grumman, Litton and Honeywell.

Flight 447 was an Airbus, which uses so-called "fly-by-wire" technology that relies entirely on electronic rather than hydraulic and manual systems. Boeing jets also use fly-by-wire, but allow pilots to override computers in an emergency -- whereas Airbus systems don't.

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Wired.com got its mitts on the first official cockpit video and other footage from the recent test of Virgin Mothership Eve at the Scaled Composites skunkworks operation in sunny SoCal. Scaled Composites and Virgin tend to keep the test results hush-hush but say “several recent published articles have been sufficiently inaccurate and negative” to make them “set the record straight.”

Video

Russian_Antonov_Jet_225.pps (2.27 mb)

Lufthansa_D-AIQP_A320_crosswind_Hamburg.wmv (3.42 mb)

A great selection of abandoned aircraft and airfields

Web Urbanist

Once airports cannot grow any further, aviation will require concepts to increase air travelling capacities without the need to build new runways. Keeping that in mind, a Bauhaus Luftfahrt solution study is based on a new type of hybrid airliner that facilitates a more efficient use of existing runways. Named HyLiner-Wing, this concept with fan-in-wing lift-device (combining uplift and propulsion) is currently being developed to allow greater airport passenger capacities by combining the use of existing long runways for long-distance travel with very short runways or double use of existing runways with HyLiner airplanes capable of extremely short takeoff and landing (ESTOL). The concept is still in the early concept phase as it targets the year 2020 and beyond but could be of relevance to U.S. airports in particular as they are more rapidly getting congested than European airports—perhaps except Heathrow.

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