Boeing won't be returning to 'normal' anytime soon

Boeing's assembly lines will lurch to a start next week, building commercial aircraft for the first time since its Washington state assembly shut down a month ago. But the utter collapse of demand for air travel means its airline customers may not need those jets -- and might not even accept them.

"If you're an airline today, your last focus these days is buying airplanes, your primary focus is survival," said Ron Epstein, aerospace analyst with Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

News that Boeing plans to resume production helped lift its shares 14% Friday. But it doesn't change the fact that so far this year Boeing has had four times as many orders for new jets canceled -- 196 -- as it has booked new orders. Another 160 orders have been deferred and are no longer counted in its backlog of orders.

And while most of the canceled planes are Boeing's troubled 737 Max, which has been grounded since March 2019 following two fatal crashes that killed 346 people, the problem is much broader than that safety issue. It's the fact that airlines aren't going to need new planes for the foreseeable future.

Of the worldwide fleet of 26,000 passenger jets, nearly 17,000, or 64%, are now parked at airports around the globe, according to tracking service Cirium.

 

Smartphone addiction is unlikely to be caused by notifications, a study by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) suggests. It found that 89% of interactions with phones were unprompted, with only 11% responding to an alert.

Group chats were also considered a "source of distress" for participants in the study. Scrolling features on Instagram and Facebook led to the longest interactions, the research found.

Checking your smartphone is largely caused by “an urge of the user to interact with their phone that seems to occur in an almost automatic manner, just as a smoker would light a cigarette”, the study says.

The experiment analysed the smartphone use of 37 people with an average age of 25 in the UK, Germany, and France. Participants were equipped with cameras that allowed the users to film their daily lives from a first-person perspective.

In total, 1,130 interactions were recorded for research by Maxi Heitmayer and Prof Saadi Lahlou, published on Science Direct.

Why people used their phones: WhatsApp - 22%, lock screen check (to see if any notifications) - 17%, Instagram - 16%, Facebook - 13%, email - 6%, calls - 1%.

Although group chats were considered a “source of distress”, users said the messages contained within them were largely unimportant. Emails were ranked as the most important notification for participants in the study.

Users also spent less time on their phone when with other people, and the longest interactions took place on public transport or at home.

Generally, airlines want to fly as far as possible, with the biggest load (or largest combined weight of passengers) possible, while using as little fuel as possible. If you can maximise all three, you technically have a better aircraft design. The major airliner manufacturers have made tweaks to this equation, but have largely stayed faithful to a tried-and-trusted design.

“The likes of Boeing and Airbus have a lot of experience of building aircraft that look like a tube and two wings,” says Jump. “When it comes to a new airframe that they want to design, it makes sense to evolve rather than revolutionise.”

A cylinder is also a structurally efficient way to contain pressure, which aircraft must do to maintain the right air pressure for passengers when flying at high altitude.

Mark Drela, professor in the department of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, agrees. “The airplane fuselage is a pressure vessel,” he says. “It really needs a circular cross section for that. You don’t see scuba diving tanks that are rectangular. If it’s round, then it’s light.” On a plane, of course, weight is everything.

“Airplanes look the way they do, not because of some stylistic decision, but almost entirely for technical reasons,” he says. “Form follows function.”

Airliners have become steadily bigger in an effort to take fit in more passengers and drive down the cost of tickets. Could a new outsized design change the way we fly?

Spotting an Airbus A380 at an airport can still create great excitement. The giant, double-decker plane can seat between 500 and 850 people, depending on how much space is given to space-saving economy class, and how much goes to higher-paying passengers with all that extra leg room.

It’s an aviation giant, the biggest passenger-carrying aircraft ever to fly the skies. But the A380 could become small fry if another, even more outsized design takes to the skies.

The AWWA Sky Whale is a concept aircraft from Spanish designer Oscar Vinals. With three decks for passengers, it looks like a cross between a tropical fish and a sci-fi space shuttle. Does this huge design herald the future of air travel?

Bigger means better in the world of airliners; the dawn of the jet age brought in the likes of the Boeing 707, an aircraft capable of carrying more passengers quicker and faster than any propeller-driven design. In the ensuing decades, airliners have grown larger and larger. The advent of “jumbo” designs, characterised by Boeing’s 747, meant more passengers per flight, and therefore cheaper seats.

 

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”.