Lufthansa shuts low-cost airline and says aviation won't recover for years

Lufthansa shuts low-cost airline and says aviation won't recover for years

Lufthansa, one of Europe's biggest airline groups, is permanently reducing the size of its fleet and shuttering one of its low-cost carriers, as it warns that the aviation sector will take years to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

The airline group, which owns national carriers in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Belgium, said in a statement Tuesday that it will permanently decommission at least 43 aircraft, about 6% of its fleet, and ground its budget airline Germanwings.

Lufthansa's assessment is that "it will take months until the global travel restrictions are completely lifted and years until the worldwide demand for air travel returns to pre-crisis levels." Based on this, it has decided on "extensive measures to reduce the capacity of flight operations and administration long term," it said.

Flight bans and nationwide lockdowns are threatening to bankrupt airlines around the world. Carriers have grounded thousands of planes, suspending short-term flight schedules and placing workers on unpaid leave.

 

Challenges faced by astronauts

Volunteers are trying to live like astronauts on Earth in preparation for manned missions to Mars, but face isolation, confinement and terrible food.

After almost a year without fresh air in the cramped, near-weightless environment of the International Space Station (ISS), American astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko seemed remarkably healthy when they touched down back on Earth last spring. They had just completed a 340-day mission onboard in orbit, one of the longest space trips in recent years.

They rank among the more than 200 people who have had the fortune to visit the ISS, and hundreds more who have travelled to space. That’s not a lot in the scheme of things, but plenty of people all over the world are investing billions in the future of space travel in the hope that many more of us may one day follow in their footsteps.

Yet, it is not always necessary to travel into space to experience what it is like living as astronauts do. It may come as a surprise to discover on Earth, dozens of people all over the world have spent months, and even over a year, living in specially built confined spaces that mimic life in space. These simulation pods are found in places like China, Hawaii and Russia, giving researchers the ability to study the effects of long-term isolation and confinement on people in preparation for long-haul space travel.

 

Inside the 'lightning lab'

On average, every single airliner is hit by lightning once a year. How do designers make them safe from a bolt from the blue?

Airplanes have moved on more than a little since the first aviators soared into the sky, clad in leather jackets, caps and goggles. Back then, they needed quite an element of faith before taking to their flying machines. One hundred years on, they board highly complex machines often made from unusual materials such as carbon fibre and flying partly thanks to computers. The days of flying on “a wing and a prayer” are over.

Nowadays, aircraft testing is incredibly elaborate and rigorous. New planes only make it into the air after a long list of tests – from chucking chickens into jet engines to simulate bird strikes to bending the wings to extreme angles.

In the last 10 years, the testing methods have undergone major changes– both on the ground and in computer simulations. The aim, in both cases, is to minimise the number of hours testing planes in flight.

Accidents of the past – such as the crash of an airliner at Dallas Fort-Worth in 1985 during a thunderstorm, or the electrical fault which brought down a TWA flight near New York in 1996 – spurred aircraft designers to bring in more and more safety features into new aircraft at the design stage, long before they started carrying paying passengers.

 

Bending wings

Many of us have experienced a bumpy ride on a plane, but the routine – albeit always scary –of sudden drops or wobbling wings is nothing compared to what an aircraft is subjected to when undergoing tests. Many modern passenger jets can flex their wings nearly 90 degrees in a test rig.

To see how the wings and fuselage would behave under both normal and exceptional loads during their life, manufacturers perform so-called “static tests.”

Airbus, for example, performed the ultimate load test on a specially built static airframe of its A350 XWB Airbus in December 2013. The plane’s wings received loads of up to 1.5 times higher than they would ever encounter in service. And at ultimate load, the plane’s wingtip deflection exceeded five metres – that means the load bent the wing up almost 90 degrees.

The final test involves getting the aircraft wings to snap – this helps find out their breaking point, and ensures it is well beyond the predicted load level.

Virtual plane: Iron Bird

One of the most cutting-edge ways of testing modern planes involves building the guts of the aircraft on the ground and then testing these systems digitally. Bombardier, for instance, has built a ground testing facility called “Aircraft Zero” in Montreal. It’s basically a rig that has all the key systems of a typical plane. It is used to simulate an aircraft in flight virtually even before the actual aircraft takes to the sky.

The simulation uses high tech full aircraft system layouts on the ground called Iron Birds. Iron-birds can simulate all flight segments such as take-off, cruise, landing, and so on, so that the aircraft is virtually tested on ‘real’ flights such as London to Dubai without any actual flight taking place. All this can be done well before the first pieces of the first aircraft to fly are assembled.”

The simulation helps anticipate any potential structural issues such as miniature cracks that could appear at a specific point of an aircraft’s service life.

Engineers also carry out ultrasound tests on where the wing meets the fuselage; it allows to look inside the material and find possible defects without having to take the plane apart.

Lightning tests

On average, every commercial plane is hit by lightning about once a year, according to the Cardiff University’s “lightning lab” in the UK – a recently established laboratory where Airbus, for example, conducts lightning tests. The university’s lab is formally called the Morgan Botti Laboratory at the School of Engineering.

Despite lightning strikes, traditional aluminium planes are usually able to continue their journey safely – the high electrical conductivity of aluminium can dissipate the electricity through the aircraft structure quickly without causing any damage. But not all planes are made from metal anymore: to reduce weight and therefore fuel consumption, next-generation aircraft are built from new and much lighter materials such as carbon fibre, which tend to have much lower electrical conductivity than aluminium, says Airbus’s Matthew Cole.

This can lead to up to 25% improvement in fuel efficiency. These materials, however, need to be protected against lightning strike. It is usually done by adding a thin layer of metal mesh or foil. “This layer is safe and effective and successfully dissipates the charge, mitigating damage,” says Cole. The problem, though, is that it adds weight.

Lightning tests

At Cardiff’s lightning lab, researchers are looking for other solutions to protect systems against strikes, while maintaining safety levels and without adding weight. The work involves “putting panels through lightning strike tests to better understand the reaction of different materials,” says Cole. Discharges can be up to 100,000 amps – enough to power a small town.

At Boeing, there are two different systems to test for lightning. One is a two-megavolt high voltage generator that produces a lightning “strike” indoors and can mimic where the lightning will attach on an airplane in flight. The second system is a 50-60 kilovolts high current system that can output 200,000 amps to simulate a powerful strike on the airplane’s skin.

We’ve come a very long way since the early 1950s, when the early commercial jet liners such as Britain’s pioneering Comet suffered serious problems, some of them resulting in fatal crashes. Ever since, aircraft manufacturers have been searching for ever more sophisticated ways for testing their planes. So next time you encounter turbulence or bad weather on a flight, be assured that your plane has survived much worse.

 

 

Of all the world’s materials, which one will “run out” first? The more we consume as a society, the more we hear about how vital ores and minerals are dwindling, so it seems logical to assume that a few may be about to disappear.

Yet that may be entirely the wrong way of looking at the problem. According to natural resources experts, many of the materials we rely upon in modern life won’t “run out” at all. Unfortunately, the scenario they paint about what will happen instead in the near future is hardly rosy either.

Some of our most cherished devices – smartphones, computers and medical equipment, for instance – rely on a rich list of elemental ingredients. Mobile phones alone contain a whopping 60 to 64 elements. “Many of these metals are present in only minute amounts, a milligramme or less,” says Armin Reller, a chemist and the chair of resource strategy at Augsburg University in Germany. “But they are very important for the function of the device.”

This includes things like copper, aluminum and iron, but also less well-known materials, like the “rare earth elements”, what the Japanese refer to as “the seeds of technology”.

 

Lufthansa shuts low-cost airline and says aviation won't recover for years

Lufthansa, one of Europe's biggest airline groups, is permanently reducing the size of its fleet and shuttering one of its low-cost carriers, as it warns that the aviation sector will take years to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

The airline group, which owns national carriers in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Belgium, said in a statement Tuesday that it will permanently decommission at least 43 aircraft, about 6% of its fleet, and ground its budget airline Germanwings.

Lufthansa's assessment is that "it will take months until the global travel restrictions are completely lifted and years until the worldwide demand for air travel returns to pre-crisis levels." Based on this, it has decided on "extensive measures to reduce the capacity of flight operations and administration long term," it said.

Flight bans and nationwide lockdowns are threatening to bankrupt airlines around the world. Carriers have grounded thousands of planes, suspending short-term flight schedules and placing workers on unpaid leave.