Get coupled.
Clever lads, those engineers.
|
|||||
Hot Mic
Bloggers in Arms
BlogrollContinuous WavePaid to BlogReciprocating EnginesSmarter'n MeWingmen
OmakaseAmazon Search |
Got Brownout?By lex, on December 19th, 2009
25 comments to Got Brownout? |
Targets of Opportunityblog advertising is good for you Credo"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones "Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra" "And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche "A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier "Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas "Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex Amazon AssociateFor the Effort!Winnar! Subscribe CategoriesPagesTagsacademy
afghanistan
Araby
Blogging
buffoonery
culture
Defense Industry
economy
Flying
Friday Musings
geopol
Gratuitous slap
GWOT
Headlines
health care
History
iran
iraq
issues
libya
Media
Memory Lane
Military
Navy
norks
Oz
pakistan
piracy
politicians
politics
Politics and Culture
prc
pundits
science
sea stories
silliness
Small Stuff
SoCal
Tech Lust
technology
UAVs
UK
usaf
usmc
weapons
|
|||
|
Copyright © 2012 Neptunus Lex - All Rights Reserved |
|||||
Must mean something to aviators. All I saw was a helicopter flying over clouds of sand.
guess they don’t have any spare diesel to knock down the dust.
Not being an aviator it looks to me like the 2nd part of the “couple” is the photo taker….the first guy goes in to stir the talcum powder while the 2nd guy of the ‘couple’ photographs the incipient accident.
Like the other comments, above, I (obviously) don’t get the “coupled” part.
Looks like someone had a clever use for those 40′ shipping containers too. Makes for a quick & dirty Ft. Apache like. Those S**thooks sure stir up the dust though.
“Got Dust?”
Being at best an elderly civilian, I don’t know much about dust and aircraft engines. But I do remember that, when Downs was on one of his many trips to Alaska, the ‘valley of a thousand smokes’ was in one of its many eruptions, and flights were grounded so that the plane engines wouldn’t suck up the dust and fumes and stall. Too much dust, the enemy of all housewives, is evidently death on aircraft engines.
Who knew? Well, evidently you guys do.
By the way, dear hearts … a Merry Christmas to all and the Best of New Years that we all can manage.
Marianne
Marianne, dust and motors do not mix. Dust is tiny abrasive particles which, when injested by a high-speed precision machine, will result in excessive wear, the clogging of filters which stops the stuff they’re filtering from passing through (generally important things like oil, gas, air, and the like) and severe scarring of the high-speed bits that are moving across it. You may think of it as the motor equivalent of clogged arteries coupled with rasping the knuckles across a cheese grater — one starves you of necessary sustinence and the other abrades away your working parts.
So, no, it’s not a good thing at all.
I actually had a more intimate experience with this recently than I would have thought. Last Sunday I took the pickup (diesel) out for to return a few tools to a neighbor and grab some corn for the birds. All was well as the temps were in the upper teens, when they dropped into the single digits I suddenly found the pickup stalling, no throttle response, in short if I was lucky it might remain idling. Classic case of a clogged fuel filter in a diesel, or of diesel fuel gelling up. So we limp into ny neighbor’s heated machine shed, on Monday I purchase filters and fill a can with 5 gallons of #1 diesel, and proceed to remove and examine the old filter. It was clogged all right. Not with gelled fuel and water, but with algae.
Then I remembered, I don’t drive the pickup often and had last filled the tanks in September. The new low-sulpher diesel does not prevent moisture buildup and algae as well as the older stuff did. The fuel sat stagnant in high heat days and cool nights for weeks, allowing algae to bloom. When I started it next, that pond scum in my tanks clogged the filters and the motor starved for fuel.
Which, on a 5-degree evening in the middle of nowhere is still a lot better than at 1500 feet above terra firma in an aircraft that, of course, needs continuous power to remain airborne. The former makes you cold. The latter makes you dead.
– Max
Hell of a way to sweep the compound.
“A lot of airplanes are even approved for “coupled approaches” where the airplane will actually intercept a localizer and fly an instrument approach. This frees the pilot to shift to a “big-picture” focus and stay ahead of the airplane.” courtesy of http://bit.ly/6ZRnzI
I was not familiar with the term, though after watching the slides I thought that it may have meant “HERE I AM”.
Automatic Carrier Landing System (ACLS)
“The ACLS is similar to the ICLS, in that it displays “needles” that indicate aircraft position in relation to glideslope and final bearing. An approach utilizing this system is said to be a “Mode II” approach. Additionally, some aircraft are capable of “coupling” their autopilots to the glideslope/azimuth signals received via data link from the ship, allowing for a “hands-off” approach. If the pilot keeps the autopilot coupled until touchdown, this is referred to as a “Mode I” approach. If the pilot maintains a couple until the visual approach point (at ¾ miles) this is referred to as a “Mode IIA” approach.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_United_States_Navy_carrier_air_operations
&
“Test results of F/A-18 autoland trials for aircraft carrier operations
Abstract
Raytheon and the US Navy conducted aircraft carrier precision approach trials using the F/A-18 as the test platform. These trials are part of the Navy Joint Precision and Landing System (JPALS) effort to demonstrate Global Positioning System (GPS) technology for aircraft carrier precision approach. The team achieved the historic milestone of the first fully coupled approach and landing to the ground in an F/A-18 using a GPS-based navigation solution…. The test and analysis results show that GPS technology provides the quality needed to perform relative precision approaches in an aircraft carrier environment.”
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=931358
Helos usually use Doppler radar to measure speed across the ground and couple that to the autopilot for a “blind” approach. Still, it’s an imperfect system. More than a few helos have been lost in landing accidents in brownout conditions. And that’s a very small LZ for a blind approach.
What XBrad said. About the only other thing to do is conduct a no-hover landing, followed by full down cyclic, which will minimize brownout. Not having Doppler on the old H-1′s made no-hover departure/arrival a prerequisite to survival in the desert.
I bet the guys in the back are all praying that the guys in front know what the heck is going on in all that dust….
Guys in the front probably feel the same way.
Guys on the ground just wish they would quit making such a mess, but put up with it because that is the price of getting mail, chow, ammo, reliefs.
This may help helos (they need all the help they can muster): “Army Adds Radar to Brownout Landing Aid
The US Army Aviation Applied Technology Directorate (AATD) at Fort Eustis plans to demonstrate a Helicopter Autonomous Landing System (HALS) with millimeter wave radar to help see through blowing dust on landing. AATD previously integrated a Brownout Situational Awareness Upgrade (BSAU) for the UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47 Chinook. The limited HALS Phase I technology demonstration calls for a BSAU-equipped UH-60 Black Hawk to make clear-air VMC landings at Fort Eustis with the aid of a 94 GHz radar and one side of the cockpit masked. It is meant to determine if the radar imagery improves the situational awareness of a pilot already using BSAU symbology.
Designed to give helicopter crews a ground velocity reference and prevent landing mishaps in blowing dust, the BSAU integrates a Rockwell Collins multi-function display with a Honeywell Embedded GPS Inertial navigator and the regular aircraft radar altimeter and directional gyro. HALS adds the radar and two 5 by 6 in. panel-side displays to provide a radar picture of the landing zone. The mechanically-scanned radar has a range of 15 to 350 ft and covers a field of view 30 degrees wide by 30 degrees high to generate an image of landing zone obstacles. Sierra Nevada Corp. is providing the HALS image processing algorithms.”
http://www.vtol.org/news/issues1006.html
Sierra Nevada is providing the image processing algorithms? *boggle* I know whenever I drink a few of their fine brews my visual processing systems improve — after about six rounds of their India Pale Ale everybody in the bar is beautiful!
Not certain that’s quite what we’re after here.
– Max
Americans are funny…: “Headquartered in Sparks, Nevada, SNC is considered the Top Woman Owned Federal Contractor in the United States.” http://www.sncorp.com/
Americans are funny? Where on earth did you get such an idea? Other than VX, we are such a sober people.
QM, and here I was thinking “Top Woman Owned Federal Contractor in the United States” was the twin of ‘MaxDamage’: “MaxHeadRoom”. BoomBoom.
“To enhance mission capability, the MH-47G features improved power, avionics, vibration reduction, and transportability. The aircraft is equipped with a Rockwell-Collins adverse weather capable Common Avionics Architecture System (CAAS) cockpit. This provides an interface between flight crews and aircraft systems. CAAS provides control and display of flight data and system operation for navigation, guidance, flight director, and communication from multifunction displays. The aircraft has a fully – coupled autopilot, integrated multimode radar for nap-of-the-earth and low-level flight operations in the clouds, or in conditions of extremely poor visibility and adverse weather. Improved digital map display, greater situational awareness, mission planning and management capability enable flight crews to conduct missions with pinpoint accuracy. CAAS is migrating to all Army rotorcraft, providing commonality advantages for procurement, maintenance and support and operations. It is notably among the most advanced U.S. Army helicopter systems today, using an Ethernet local area network (LAN) for systems controls and distributed mission processing.” page 3 ‘Chinook News – Sept 2005′
http://www.boeing.com/rotorcraft/military/ch47d/chinooknews/2005-09.pdf (1.6Mb)
This makes me smile on so many levels.
Wow.
So much for hoping nobody notices you getting home a little late.
What refrence were they using to land? Honestly I just thought they should grab a winch and have the Chinocks drop a line with an IR or just plane visual strobe and winch them in.
Seems though I’ve read/heard of this being done, with suboptimal results.
Not sure I would care for it were I the pilot. Minds wiser than mine would know.
We never had dust-offs like that in Vietnam. That is major league.
I’m trying to get MacGyver to chime in here – he’s had experience with all of this. But he’s a tad busy at the moment. I’ll bug him again shortly.