The Awesome Airplanes of Burt Rutan

Posted on January 5, 2019 by James Briggs

Great photo collection of Burt Rutan-designed planes by Flying Magazine.

He favored composites since he could mfg. prototypes almost 10x faster than metal or wood.

All of his designs appear to be subsonic, which allows non-exotic composites to be used in wing and fuselage design without concern for high skin temperatures.

(SpaceX just replaced carbon fiber with stainless steel in their “Starship” vehicle for that reason. I’m not sure how they went down that blind alley, in 2018 no less.)

One of the nice things about composites is that they’re hail-resistant (small hailstones just rebound) unlike painted aluminum. However, it takes discipline to realize weight savings over metal, and long-term maintenance of composites is still an open question.

W: Burt Rutan
Composites: Tips for working on Cirrus composite structures
A Hailstorm Completely Obliterated This American Airlines Plane
Preparing for hail season

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Manila 2018 Mobile Commerce

Posted on January 1, 2019 by James Briggs

This is an annual update of my Manila mobile commerce report. Use the search widget for previous editions.



Rockwell/Powerplant Mall as seen from the newish City Garden Hotel Makati 32nd storey pooldeck. iPhone 8+, hand-held.

Chinese payment methods available in Manila.

Hmm … I guess handicams are still a problem.

Screen protectors that prevent strangers from reading your Facebook are popular.

Not a Mac!

There is a new, locally-advertised prepaid card solution PayMaya/Smart Padala, “duly licensed by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP).”

For computer repairs, the two main districts are Gilmore and Greenhills Shopping Center. The latter is cheaper for Mac repairs.

HN: Hugely Regret Using Stripe Atlas

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Southwest 737 Runway Overrun and EMAS

Posted on December 7, 2018 by James Briggs

Avweb has an article mentioning EMAS: “Southwest Airlines Flight 278 slid off the end of the runway while landing at California’s Hollywood Burbank Airport (BUR) at 9:05 am local time on Thursday. According to a statement issued by the FAA, the Boeing 737 came to rest in the Engineered Material Arresting System (EMAS) at the end of Runway 8. No injuries …”



Note the crushed “bricks” near the nose wheel – that’s EMAS

The initial cause seems to be that the plane landed on a wet runway with a tailwind. It looks like the EMAS was high enough to touch the landing gear, engines and access panels.

EMAS is used in the USA when there is less than 1000′ of suitable overrun for a runway. As the “bricks” get crushed, speed is dissipated. Of the 13 reported incidents, half have been airliners and half GA or cargo planes.

I’m interested in finding out:

  1. how much it costs to remediate the EMAS
  2. how the pax got back to the terminal
  3. how the plane got free of the EMAS since it can’t taxi
  4. did the engines ingest EMAS?
  5. were the landing gear or doors damaged by EMAS?

faa.gov: Fact Sheet – Engineered Material Arresting System (EMAS)

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Dart Pop-out Float Test On R66

Posted on December 3, 2018 by James Briggs

Informative video on deploying Dart pop-out floats on a Robinson R66 helicopter, then repacking them.

Takes about 8 seconds to fully inflate, but a couple hours to repack all 4 floats.

Requires 3 men, talcum powder, a vacuum cleaner, replacing the shear rivet and refilling the helium cylinder.

yt: Emergency Dart Float Test On R66
W: Robinson R66 Helicopter

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Correct-endian

Posted on November 23, 2018 by James Briggs

Programmers who want to curry favor (to be polite) with Paul Graham, the founder of Ycombinator, upvote postings on the Lisp programming language on news.ycombinator.com.

Humorously, one commenter noticed this gem in a Lisp article: 🙂

classichasclass 3 hours ago [-]

> correct-endian, i.e. little.

Hey now.

Paul and his co-founders used Lisp to write ViaWeb, an ecommerce startup that Yahoo! bought and rebranded as Yahoo! Stores. That sale became the stake used to start Ycombinator.

Paul himself credits these things with the success of ViaWeb in the pre-Web 1.0 era:

  1. using a scripting language, like Lisp, rather than Java
  2. right place and right time
  3. hiring a PR firm to get the word out and start traction.

Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine: The Deffenbaugh, Marshall, Powell, Willison architecture as remembered by Joe Marshall
W: Viaweb

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