Tag Archives: aviation

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Post-postal: is the Iceland volcano the death-knell for physical mail?

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Jeff Jarvis suspects that the ongoing and aviation-distressing plume of volcanic ash currently drifting over Europe may accelerate the demise of good old-fashioned physical mail networks:

Right now, it is impossible to get a document to or around Europe with speed. People can’t fly. Mail can’t fly. Even when the air clears, there’ll be diminished faith in the ability of the post office — not to mention FedEx, DHL, and UPS — to make speedy delivery of documents. Any company or agency with an ounce of strategic sense is creating a plan now to convert to digital. It is speedier (instant!) and more certain (guaranteed) and cheaper (free) and even earns green points (no dead trees, no fuel, no fumes). What’s not to love?

[…]

So what does this do to the post office? In Europe, it’s going to be deadly expensive. The first-class mail that supports postal services around the world will be bound to shrink. Prices will then have to rise, forcing demand to shrink more.

Meanwhile, without air freight — or with the risk of it disappearing for days, weeks, months, even more — more goods will have to be moved by train and truck, raising demand there and thus raising prices of ground transport for the mail.

[…]

When first-class mail declines, the horrendous losses at our U.S. postal service will accelerate, forcing decisions that the government — as is its habit — would like to put off for a few years. There will be less first-class profit to subsidize the delivery of media (another nail in the coffin of magazines) and advertising (another reason to jump to digital) and parcels (opening up more opportunities for private competitors).

The delivery industry could be disrupted as profoundly but much more quickly than media. I’d sell stock in FedEx. If I thought the postal service would collapse, I’d buy it in UPS. I’m not sure about Amazon. You might think that Cisco would be a big winner but I’ll bet on Skype and hope it goes public soon. Of course, short every airline. That sound you hear is dominos falling.

Hmmm. Time to start up that peer-to-peer distributed delivery network?

It’s not just a big disruptive factor for the mail industry, either: all of a sudden, Brits are being reminded uncomfortably of just how dependent on air travel they’ve become. Their response? Start comparing the “rescue” plans (mobilise the Royal Navy!) to Dunkirk, of course. How better to cope with staring down the barrel of continuing economic decline than harking back to World War Two’s fading sepia-tinted glories, right?

More seriously, this is a great time for people everywhere to start thinking hard and pressuring their governments (or themselves) to invest in sustainable mass transit infrastructure that can’t be knocked out of kilter by clouds of dust… or shortages of fuel, for that matter (different cause, very similar effect). If you wanted a sketch or case study of what encroaching Peak Oil might look like from an economic, social and political perspective, watching the UK headlines right now is the closest you’re going to get without burning your fingers. Don’t just sell your UPS shares – sell all the ones you have in airlines, too. Reinvesting in transcontinental high-speed rail might be an option, and dirigibles are very Zeitgeisty (if only in fictional worlds)… but the future don’t got a lot of (civilian) contrails in it no more, mister.

I’ve got five bucks and a slightly-broken swivel chair that says John Robb is grinning a huge I-told-you-so grin right now. Does anyone want to open a book on the odds of the UK government bailing out the aviation sector? Because they’ve got their caps in their hands already…

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The perpetual aircraft carrier: turning seawater into jet fuel

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aircraft carrierIf you’re getting twitchy about the uptick in petrol prices, spare a thought for the US Navy: fighter jets don’t just fuel themselves while parked on those aircraft carriers, y’know. But what if those same aircraft carriers could suck up seawater and catalyse it into aviation fuel?

Navy chemists have processed seawater into unsaturated short-chain hydrocarbons that with further refining could be made into kerosene-based jet fuel. But they will have to find a clean energy source to power the reactions if the end product is to be carbon neutral.

Nuclear-powered carrier? Sorted. So how does it work?

The process involves extracting carbon dioxide dissolved in the water and combining it with hydrogen – obtained by splitting water molecules using electricity – to make a hydrocarbon fuel.

[…]

In the conventional Fischer-Tropsch process, carbon monoxide and hydrogen are heated in the presence of a catalyst to initiate a complex chain of reactions that produce a mixture of methane, waxes and liquid fuel compounds.

Dorner and colleagues found that using the usual cobalt-based catalyst on seawater-derived CO2 produced almost entirely methane gas. Switching to an iron catalyst resulted in only 30 per cent methane being produced, with the remainder short-chain hydrocarbons that could be refined into jet fuel.

Heather Willauer, the navy chemist leading the project, says the efficiency needs to be much improved, perhaps by finding a different catalyst.

There you go – once those niggling little details are out of the way, you’ve got yourself an aircraft carrier that doesn’t need to pick up fuel for itself or its complement of aircraft, and hence doesn’t need to return to base for years (provided they can scrounge up food for the sailors and pilots in whatever theatre of operations they’re in at the time, natch).

But now imagine that it goes rogue… or someone manages to hijack it, Somali pirate style, only with no intention of ransoming it – why get rid of your own private strike-force-equipped floating nation-statelet, after all? [image by Serendigity]

Regular readers may note I’m becoming vaguely obsessed with the intersection of the oceans, geopolitics and sustainable technologies. I’m no Bruce Sterling, but I’m still confident in my assertion that plenty of weird stuff will be happening on the high seas in our not-so-distant future.

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Charles Lindbergh, transhumanist

charles-lindberghIn 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first person to fly non-stop across the Atlantic. His single-seat, single-engine monoplane – the Spirit of St. Louis – made the flight from New York to Paris in just over 33 hours, catapulting Lindbergh to instant stardom.

Initially, Lindbergh used his new-found fame to extol the virtues of commercial aviation; later, as leverage in the America First campaign against US involvement in the Second World War. In anticipation of the UK publication of David M. Friedman’s book, The Immortalists, journalist Brendan O’Neill highlights on a lesser-known chapter in the Lindbergh story [for BBC Magazine];

In the 1930s, after his historic flight over the Atlantic, Lindbergh hooked up with Alexis Carrel, a brilliant surgeon born in France but who worked in a laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan. Carrel – who was a mystic as well as a scientist – had already won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on the transplantation of blood vessels. But his real dream was a future in which the human body would become, in Friedman’s words, “a machine with constantly repairable or replaceable parts”.

This is where Lindbergh entered the frame. Carrel hoped that his own scientific nous combined with Lindbergh’s machine-making proficiency (Lindbergh had, after all, already helped design a plane that flew non-stop to Paris) would make his fantasy about immortal machine-enabled human beings a reality.

But while the Lindbergh-Carrel duo made some significant breakthroughs, including ‘a perfusion pump that could keep a human organ alive outside of the body’ (and precursor to the heart-lung machine), their partnership had a darker side. In a New York Times review of The Immortalists, Kyla Dunn comments on the sinister undertones of these early cyborg dreams;

“We cannot escape the fact that our civilization was built, and still depends, upon the quality rather than the equality of men,” Lindbergh wrote in his 1948 treatise “Of Flight and Life.” As late as 1969, he remained concerned that “after millions of years of successful evolution, human life is now deteriorating genetically,” warning in Life magazine that “we must contrive a new process of evolutionary selection” in order to survive.

Of course, it’s worth noting that eugenicist views were fairly common in the 1930s, and some of the claims made by Friedman in The Immortalists have been criticised as based on circumstantial evidence. Either way, the New York Times has published the first chapter of The Immortalists online, for your perusal.

[Image from the Library of Congress, via Wikimedia]

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First fuel-cell flight fulfills fantasies

Condensation Boeing’s making a series of firsts in aviation, with the latest being a manned flight powered by fuel cells (though batteries helped the plane take off).  While it’s unlikely they’ll power commercial airliners, they may see usage in secondary power capacities or they “could power small manned and unmanned air vehicles.”

This seems to be a more likely future for fuel cells in aviation.  The main benefits here are lighter weight than batteries (since they’ll consume hydrogen, making the plane lighter) and a chance to keep the combustible fuel far from quickly moving parts like the propeller.

(image from Wikipedia Commons)

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New fighter pilot helmet makes plane "invisible"

20071108_Testhelmet_600x400 Not invisible to other pilots: invisible to the pilot him (or her) self. (Via DefenseTech.)

Unlike modern fast jet aircraft the Joint Strike Fighter, which is planned to replace the famous Harrier, does not have a ‘traditional’ head-up display – instead the computerised symbology is displayed directly onto the pilot’s visors.

This Helmet Mounted Display System provides the pilot with cues for flying, navigating and fighting the aircraft. It will even superimpose infra-red imagery onto the visor which allows the pilot to ‘look through’ the cockpit floor at night and see the world below.

It’s being developed by Vision Systems International and Helmet Integrated Systems, and is currently being evaluated by defence scientists at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire.

As you can see from the photograph, it also makes anyone wearing it look wicked cool. Or maybe just wicked. (Photo from U.K. Ministry of Defence.)

[tags]aviation, technology, military, defense[/tags]