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Five flights of fancy at ‘Above and Beyond’

Image: Full Throttle
Letu Yang helps his 4-year-old son, Rafael Yang, fly a jet through a “Full Throttle” simulation at the “Above and Beyond” exhibit at the Museum of Flight. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

Most of the floor space at Seattle’s Museum of Flight is set aside to celebrate past glories of aerospace – but “Above and Beyond,” a traveling exhibition that opens this weekend, is different: It’s all about what lies ahead.

During a Thursday preview, schoolkids thronged to watch a wraparound video about the future of flight, play big-screen video games, get their selfies taken on a virtual Mars and check out exhibits about drones, 3-D printing and next-generation spacecraft.

The Boeing Co. is presenting the interactive exhibition as part of this year’s centennial celebration, but “Above and Beyond” goes far beyond the story of the company’s first 100 years.

“It doesn’t just concentrate on what Boeing has done. It concentrates on the future,” Doug King, the Museum of Flight’s president and CEO, said as he watched teens and tweens swarm past. “And these are the people who are going to create that future.”

The exhibition has already been at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. That means the producers at Texas-based Evergreen Exhibitions already have a pretty good idea which attractions will be the most popular. Here are the top five, as listed by Mike Kempf, Evergreen Exhibitions’ vice president of marketing:

Check out the top five on GeekWire.

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Solar Impulse visits Wright Brothers’ hometown

Solar Impuse landing
Solar Impulse co-founder Bertrand Piccard holds up a model of the Wright Flyer as the Solar Impulse 2 airplane descends toward its landing in Dayton with its lights on. (Credit: Solar Impulse)

The Swiss-built Solar Impulse 2 airplane continued its fuel-free, round-the-world odyssey today with a nearly 17-hour flight from Oklahoma to Dayton, Ohio, home of the Wright Brothers.

The solar-powered plane took off from Tulsa International Airport before sunrise at 4:23 a.m. CT (2:23 a.m. PT), and landed after dark at Dayton International Airport at 9:56 p.m. ET (6:56 p.m. PT).. In between, Solar Impulse 2 swept over a wide swath of America’s heartland, including Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

After landing, pilot Andre Borschberg was met by two relatives of the Wright Brothers, great-grandnephew Stephen Wright and great-grandniece Amanda Wright Lane. They gave models of the Wright Flyer to Borschberg and Solar Impulse’s other co-founder, Swiss psychiatrist-adventurer Bertrand Piccard.

“It’s a dream to come here, and we made it,” Borschberg told the Wrights.

Piccard noted that Dayton served as the base for Orville and Wilbur Wright’s airplane-building operation more than a century ago. “People told the Wright Brothers, and us, what we wanted to achieve was impossible,” he said. “They were wrong.”

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Boeing opens billion-dollar 777X wing factory

Image: 777X Wing Center opening
VIPs and workers gather for today’s grand opening of the 777X Composite Wing Center in Everett, Wash. The factory’s 120-foot-long autoclave is at right. (Credit: Boeing)

Boeing is showing off the partially automated 777X Composite Wing Center it built at its campus in Everett, Wash. – the result of $1 billion in investment and 14 months of construction work.

Today’s grand opening brought together community leaders, executives and workers at the 1.3 million-square-foot factory, which is big enough to house 25 football fields. It’ll be a while before 777X production begins, however.

Boeing says it has received 320 orders and commitments so far for the wide-body plane, which can accommodate up to 425 passengers in its 777-9 configuration. The first delivery is targeted for 2020.

The 777X’s 114-foot-long wings will be built up from carbon composite material, layer by layer, with the aid of automated fiber placement machines from Electroimpact, based nearby in Mukilteo. The composite pieces will be trimmed and cooked to completion in a 120-foot-long oven known as an autoclave.

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Solar Impulse makes Rocky flight to Oklahoma

Image: Solar Impulse in Oklahoma
The Solar Impulse 2 plane lands in Tulsa, Okla.,, after an 18-hour flight. (Credit: Solar Impulse)

After crossing the Himalayas and the Pacific, the fuel-free Solar Impulse 2 plane overcame the Rockies on May 12 during the Arizona-to-Oklahoma leg of its round-the-world odyssey.

“As you can imagine, flying over the Rocky Mountains is a challenge for an aircraft like Si2,” the Solar Impulse team said in a blog post. “But perhaps not for the reasons you would expect.”

The altitude wasn’t the biggest concern, although pilot Bertrand Piccard used an oxygen mask to cope with altitudes ranging up to 22,000 feet. Rather, it was the weather. Solar Impulse 2 is designed to soak up enough sunlight during the day to keep flying during the night, but it doesn’t do well during cloudy and stormy weather. That’s just the sort of weather that tends to build up during this time of year in the Rockies.

May 12 provided a window of opportunity for Piccard to make his way over the mountains in northern New Mexico and head eastward. Until this week, the plan was to stop over in Kansas City, Mo., but the Solar Impulse team said “we had to find a different solution” due to difficult weather conditions over the Kansas plains. So Piccard targeted Oklahoma’s Tulsa International Airport instead.

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Seattle firm creates showcase for … Airbus?

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Visitors can take the controls in the interactive Briefing Room at the Airbus Experience Center in Washington, D.C., which was designed by a Seattle-based firm. (Credit: Hornall Anderson)

Captain Kirk from the original “Star Trek” is celebrating Star Wars Day today, so maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that a Seattle-based branding and design firm helped create the Airbus Group’s state-of-the-art Experience Center in the nation’s capital.

Hornall Anderson is behind the look of the exhibit space, which takes up about half of the 20,000-square-foot Airbus office space that opened last month on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Experience Center’s videos and interactive displays highlight facets of the Europe-based consortium’s operations in the United States and worldwide.

“You’ll see our Rosetta spacecraft that landed on a comet,” Airbus Group Chairman and CEO Allan McArtor said in a news release. “You’ll see the Perlan II glider that is going to ride wind currents into the stratosphere. You’ll see U.S. Army helicopters that are built in Mississippi, and A320 single-aisle aircraft being built in Alabama.”

A design company based in Seattle may seem an unusual choice for Airbus, considering that the Boeing Co. is building rival 737 jets down the road in Renton. There are Boeing-centric “experience centers” in Renton and other locales. But Airbus decided that Hornall Anderson, which recently did the rebranding for Seattle-based, all-Boeing Alaska Airlines, was the right firm for the job.

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Will NASA’s X-plane campaign pick up speed?

Artwork shows NASA’s concept for Quiet Supersonic Technology, known as QueSST. (Credit: NASA)
Artwork shows NASA’s concept for Quiet Supersonic Technology, known as QueSST. (Credit: NASA)

NASA is laying out a vision of quieter supersonic jets and environmentally friendly X-planes as part of its agenda for aeronautics, the oft-neglected “A” in its acronym.

X-planes – that is, experimental aircraft like the X-1 and the X-15 – played a big role in the history of NASA’s predecessor agency, known as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or NACA. But when NACA was replaced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the focus gradually shifted from the air to the space frontier beyond.

The federal budget proposal unveiled in February shifted some of the emphasis back to aeronautics, in the form of a 10-year program called “New Aviation Horizons.” As Congress debates the budget, NASA is touting its plan to bring back the X-planes.

About $20 million already has been set aside for one project, known as Quiet Supersonic Technology or QueSST. A team led by Lockheed Martin is working on the design for a supersonic jet that produces a soft series of thumps rather than an annoying sonic boom.

Other projects could result in airliners that burn half the fuel and generate 75 percent less pollution during each flight, compared with today’s standards.

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Jet engines join the ‘Internet of Things’

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Rolls-Royce’s Trent XWB jet engine is prepared for delivery. (Credit: Rolls-Royce)

Soon the “Internet of Things” will be keeping watch on jet engines, refrigerators and freezers, factory floors and more, thanks to a series of partnerships announced by Microsoft at the Hannover Messe industrial fair in Germany.

The applications will take advantage of the Microsoft Azure IoT Suite to gather data from industrial products, and the Cortana Intelligence Suite to look for trends and figure out how to improve performance.

For example, Rolls-Royce will incorporate those software tools into its TotalCare maintenance services for its aircraft engines. The data sets will include engine health readings, air traffic control information, route restrictions and fuel usage.

Cortana will look for anomalies and trends in the data, and provide feedback that should help Rolls-Royce improve the engines’ performance and increase fuel efficiency.

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New director for Washington’s aerospace office

Image: 787 jet flies over Mount Rainier
A Boeing 787 jet flies over Mount Rainier. (Credit: Boeing)

Longtime engineering executive John Thornquist has been chosen to head up Washington state’s Office of Aerospace, just as the state’s $70 billion-plus industry sector is heading into a time of transition.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced the selection today, and Thornquist takes over the director’s reins on Tuesday.

Thornquist was managing director, CEO and co-founder of Carbon Aerospace, an Everett-based consulting firm specializing in carbon composite structures. Before his time at Carbon, he was a co-founder of Global Aerosystems in Everett, which later became Kaman Engineering Services.

Under Thornquist’s leadership, Kaman earnedBoeing supplier of the year honors in 2013.

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Boeing will trim 4,000 jobs, and maybe more

Image: Boeing 777 assembly
A Boeing 777 jet is assembled at the company’s plant in Everett, Wash. (Credit: Boeing)

Boeing Commercial Airplanes says it’s following through on its job reduction plan with the target of reducing its workforce by 4,000 positions by midyear.

So far, there have been no involuntary layoffs, company spokesman Doug Alder told GeekWire in an email today. But he said that may have to come as a “last resort” in order to reduce costs and remain competitive with Airbus, Boeing’s European rival.

In addition to the workforce reduction, Boeing has been trying to save on non-labor costs and supply chain expenses, Alder said.

Boeing Commercial Airplanes employs about 82,000 people worldwide, accounting for more than half of the Boeing Co.’s total job count. Boeing’s employment in Washington state, including employees in the company’s defense and administrative units as well as commercial airplanes, amounts to about 78,000.

The Seattle Times, which first reported the numbers behind the company’s job reduction plan, cited Boeing documents suggesting that the reductions could total 8,000 jobs, or 10 percent, by the end of the year.

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Boeing’s first 727 jet makes its last flight

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Fire trucks greet the Boeing 727 at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

The final flight of the first Boeing 727 prototype jet ever produced was one of the shortest trips it’s made in its 53-year history: a 15-minute jaunt from a restoration hangar at Everett’s Paine Field to Seattle’s Boeing Field and the Museum of Flight.

But in another sense, it took decades to make the journey.

The three-engine jet was used as a test prototype when Boeing started flying the 727s in 1963, and was delivered to United Airlines in 1964. The plane put in nearly 65,000 hours of service with United, and made more than 48,000 takeoffs and landings.

The three-engine jet made its last commercial voyage in 1991, and then United donated it to the Museum of Flight. At the time, the museum couldn’t accommodate the plane in Seattle, so it was put into storage in Everett. Some of its parts were scavenged for other planes.

For 25 years, a volunteer team toiled to raise money, acquire spare parts (mostly donated by FedEx) and refurbish the plane for one more flight. Once the plane was judged airworthy, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a special permit to clear the way for the March 2 flight under visual flight rules.

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