With $100 Million, SETI Gets Serious

High RiskCan a glider get to 90,000 feet?

Perlan 2

www.airspacemag.com JULY 2016

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» Robert Taylor’s People and Planes ReunionThe glory of the Golden Age, the pleasure of friends and family.BY MARK HUBER

CAROLINE SHEEN

Somewhere*, under a double rainbow, magical airplanes fly.*Blakesburg, Iowa.

ContentsJUNE/JULY 2016 | Vol. 31, No. 2

AIRSPACEMAG.COM

» Airbus Lands in MobileWhat it costs to bring an aviation giant to town.BY ARIELLE EMMETT

» Listen to the NearestMillion StarsIf we broaden our search, will we hear aliens? $100 million says yes.BY DAMOND BENNINGFIELD

» Mars, UndergroundSpelunking robots may find the critters that surface robots haven’t.BY MARK BETANCOURT

» Sailplane to theStratosphereAn assault on the altitude summit. BY TOM LECOMPTE

» Best ShotsPhoto contest stunners.

Big Ears in Australia: The

Parkes Observatory will listen for messages transmitted from one ET to another.

LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE SPECIAL

The photo contest winner in the Civilian

category, and not just because the subject is a DC-3. (But who doesn’tlove a DC-3?)

This robot, acronym

LEMUR, crawls up the walls of caves, but draws its sticky tech not from how lemurs climb trees but from how cockroaches cling to things. Just ew.

Features

TOP LEFT: DANIEL SALLAI; BOTTOM LEFT: JPL; RIGHT: KEVIN LUKE

Space shuttles carried more

people to orbit than any other spacecraft, and Discovery, now at the National Air and Space Museum, led in numbers: 236, including John Glenn and cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev.

ON THE COVER: In Chad Slattery’s portrait, the Perlan 2 and glider pilot Jim Payne cast long shadows at the Minden, Nevada airport. If the Perlan team succeeds in the record attempt, the figurative shadow they cast will be even longer.

LEFT: DANE PENLAND; RIGHT: NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER/ASU

» Viewport Brand-new Museum

» Letters

» What’s Up Ike’s Connie

» Soundings Predator pretenders;astrochimps

» Solar System Chatter Plungetoward Venus

» Above & BeyondPopular homebuilt v. big bomber

» Oldies & OdditiesChickens have rights.

» In the MuseumAt the National Air and Space Museum:10 artifacts all should see.

» SightingsMagnificent moon

» Reviews &PreviewsFlights in the big,cold empty

» Contributors

» Forecast

» One More ThingThe jet engine started here.

Alaskan bush pilots faced

hideous weather and worse terrain, but boy, they knew how to dress.

Departments

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FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUMViewport

FOR OUR 4OTH BIRTHDAY this July, the National Air and Space Museum will welcome visi-tors to a completely transformed entrance gallery, thanks to an early birthday present from Boeing. With the $30 million gift we received in 2014, we have been working in several ways to make the new Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall a more engag-ing and educational introduction to the Museum’s collection.

First, a number of the historic air- and space-craft that greet visitors in the new gallery have been undergoing extensive preservation. Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis has been a part of the Smithsonian Institution since 1928; conservators have recently cleaned and renewed the preservation treatment of the entire aircraft. The Bell X-1, the first airplane to fly faster than the speed of sound, has been suspended from the gallery’s ceiling since the Museum opened in 1976. In April, technicians lowered the bright orange airplane to the gallery floor, where it

was reunited with its landing gear. Here’s what happened: At some time in its life, the Bell X-1 was mounted on a pole, and, to add the internal structure needed for that type of display, work-ers removed the landing gear. In fact, they cut it off the frame. The landing gear came to us with the airplane, and this spring our restoration shop re-manufactured the connecting pieces

Transformers

WASHINGTON, DC CHANTILLY, VA

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and reattached the gear. The airplane is now more authentic than it’s ever been since it went on display 40 years ago.

Besides repairing and conserving artifacts, we are rearranging the Milestones hall itself. At its center, a 12- by 16-foot media wall will help each visitor personalize his or her trip to the Museum, by providing information and tour suggestions, which connect a single artifact of interest to other objects related to it. To learn more about the wall and how it works with our new mobile app, read “An Aerospace History Tour.”. There you’ll also read about 10 artifacts that could be the beginning of your personalized tour through the Museum.

Finally, as we embark on a project to revital-ize our 40-year-old building—updating our mechanical systems and replacing the build-

ing’s stone exterior—we have the opportunity to carry the transformation begun with the Milestones hall throughout our other 19 galler-ies. And that’s another way the Boeing gift has helped us: It laid the foundation for transform-ing other exhibit spaces, where we’ll be able to apply the lessons learned from Milestones, one gallery at a time.

Work will continue here for many years, but throughout the process we will be open to visi-tors. We know that for some of you the trip to see the Smithsonian is the trip of a lifetime, and we’ll be ready when you come to town. The National Air and Space Museum will always welcome you.

n n n J.R. DAILEY IS THE JOHN AND ADRIENNE MARS

DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM.

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From the 1903 Wright Flyer to the first steps on the Moon, America’s aviation and space flight story is preserved for all time at the National Air and Space Museum. When you leave a gift in your will or trust or by beneficiary designation, you can

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Ghosts of Rockets Past

Bill Sweetman’s column about British contributions to stealth technol-ogy (“Stealth Before Stealth,” Apr./May 2016) called to mind a fascinat-ing landscape: Just north of the Royal Australian Air Force’s Woomera test range, around the campground at the William Creek Hotel, are the remains of some of the British rockets tested at Woomera: the Black Arrow R3 and the smaller Skylark. The contrast between these rocket stages and the site’s rocky outcrops dating back mil-lions of years is incredible.

JEFF BROOKSVictoria, Australia

The Seawolves Saved His Life

Between late 1970 and early 1972, my father, Paul “Jack” Kerr, was a major in the Army on his second

tour in Vietnam. During part of this tour, he was an adviser in the Rach Gia/U Minh forest area of what was then South Vietnam. On several occasions he called on the Seawolves for close air support (“Scramble Seawolves,” Apr./May 2016). When my father’s unit was attacked by vastly superior numbers of enemy soldiers, the Seawolves’ ability to fly, and fight, at night, as well as their accurate and persistent close air flying, often made the differ-ence. My dad gives full credit to the Seawolves, and the nearby “Black Ponies” of the Navy’s Light Attack Squadron 4, for making it back from that tour.

MICAH KERRGreenwood, Indiana

The U.S. Army did not retire UH-1B helicopters by 1967. I served with the 128th Assault Helicopter Company

Gunslingers at Phu Loi Base Camp, and the unit was still flying them in 1970.

JERRY JANIEC Gainesville, Florida

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WRITE TO US at Letters, Air & Space/Smithsonian, MRC 513, P.O. Box 37012, Washington, DC 20013. Please type or print clearly. You must include your full address and daytime phone number.

e-mail: editors@si.edu. All e-mails must include your full name, mailing address, and daytime phone number.

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Lovell’s Navy Years

The profile of James Lovell in “In the Museum” (Apr./May 2016) calls Composite Squadron Three (VC-3) an “aircraft carrier group”; it was a large squadron that sent detach-ments to various carriers. Also, Lovell did not teach “plebes,” which are new Naval Academy students. He taught newly designated naval avia-tors in fleet-type aircraft. The slang term for a Navy pilot on his first tour is “nugget.”

ROBERT R. POWELLVirginia Beach, Virginia

Life on Mars: Did We Miss It?

“Would We Know Alien Life if We Saw It?” (Apr./May 2016) says, “The labeled-release experiment on both spacecraft detected carbon dioxide at first, but not again when retried a week or two later.” This statement dismisses the Viking LR life detection test as a failure. In fact, the second test was the sterilized control; the negative result strongly supported biology as the cause of the first response.

What actually happened on Mars was that the LR gave positive tests for life. Loss of activity of the soil occurred while the soil sat over two- and three-month

periods at about 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit), strongly indicating that the organisms in the soil, isolated from their environment, in the dark, and at a temperature high for them, had died. A variety of other test and control runs by the Viking LR all indicated life over chemistry. But because another Viking instrument did not find organic matter in Martian soil, scientists con-cluded life was not present.

It is time to re-examine the Viking LR data, which I contend did show extant microbial life in the topsoil of Mars.

GILBERT V. LEVIN, EXPERIMENTER VIKING LR LIFE DETECTION EXPERIMENT

via email

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Air & Space is not responsible for the return of unsolicited materials. Never send unsolicited original photographs to the Letters department; send only copies.All letters selected for publication are edited. We reserve the right to publish letters in the magazine, on our Web site (airspacemag.com), or both. We regret that we cannot respond to every letter.

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When Air & Space sends a renewal or billing notice, it will be mailed from either Washington, D.C., or Tampa, Florida. We do have agreements with a small number of authorized magazine companies to sell subscriptions. If you have any questions or concerns about whether an offer you receive by mail or by phone is legitimate, please do not hesitate to contact us first before responding.

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AIR FORCE ONE, CHAPTER TWO: While the Department of Defense slowly makes plans to replace the current presidential rides (the two Boeing 747-

200s that now serve as Air Force One), others are busy bringing the original one back. On March 21, the Lockheed VC-121A Constellation, for two years the official

TYSON V. RININGERAIRSPACEMAG.COM

IN THE SKY, IN SPACE, AND IN THE NEWSWhat’s Up

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The work was extensive: All the rubber hoses needed replacing, as did much of the fuel system, and many hydraulic and electronic problems tracked down and solved. At Bridgewater, all four engines will be overhauled, and the avionics and airframe will undergo major upgrades.

airplane for President Dwight Eisenhower, left the boneyard at Marana, Arizona, for restoration in Bridgewater, Virginia (left, en route).

Columbine II—named after the state flower of Colorado, where First Lady Mamie Eisenhower grew up—became the first Air Force One when an air traffic controller temporarily gave it the call sign to avoid confusion with a commercial flight.

After it chauffeured Eisenhower for two years, it was replaced by a larger, longer-range Super Constellation (Columbine III) and sent back to the Air Force VIP fleet. The Connie was retired in 1968 to the military boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona.

In 1970, its illustrious history long forgot-ten, the Connie was purchased to provide spare parts for some Connie cropdusters. It wasn’t until he got a call from the National Air and Space Museum in 1980 that the new owner, Mel Christler, discovered the airplane’s past, and though he restored it to

flying condition, lack of money often kept it grounded.

And there it would still be but for Karl Stolzfus, head of the aircraft modification firm Dynamic Aviation, who was determined to restore the Connie to its Air Force One splendor. “When we found out about the Columbine II, we were really hoping that someone else would come forward and buy it and restore it,” Stolzfus wrote in an email. “When no one else came forward to buy it, we felt like it needed to be preserved for American history, and we bought it.” The work was extensive: All the rubber hoses needed replacing, as did much of the fuel system, and many hydraulic and electronic problems tracked down and solved. At Bridgewater, all four engines will be over-hauled, and the avionics and airframe will undergo major upgrades.

The aircraft will be restored to its Air Force One configuration, and Stolzfus plans to fly it to airshows around the country.

n n n ZACH ROSENBERG

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LEFT: CIVIL AIR PATROL; RIGHT: USAF/LT. COL. LESLIE PRATT

WITH SO MANY Predators deployed to hotspots overseas, the U.S. Air Force is having trouble keeping up with the increasingly high demand for drone support staff because they have few aircraft available for train-ing. In 2009, officials brought a pro-

posal to the Civil Air Patrol, the all-volunteer branch of the Air Force that provides support through education, training, and emergency services.

Could the Patrol offer up some of its Cessna fleet as surrogate Predators in live training exercises—at least until the real thing returned from

No Predators? Call in a Cessna!

One of the Civil Air Patrol’s Cessna 182s (left) is retrofitted with all the instruments (but no weapons) of an MQ-1 Predator drone (right). The stand-ins train ground support staff.

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NEW IDEAS, ODDBALL EFFORTS, STRIDES AND MISSTEPSSoundings

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war? “Obviously, the wars never really got over and the Predators haven’t come back,” says Chuck Mullin, one of the staff overseeing the Surrogate Predator program at Civil Air Patrol headquarters at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. “The Air Force keeps funding us and telling us, ‘You guys keep doing it.’ ”

Today, 70 volunteers run the pro-gram. Three Civil Air Patrol Cessnas—two 182s and a 206—have been ret-rofitted with the same camera pod and controls used on the unmanned aerial vehicles. The high-wing civilian airplanes carry no weapons, but are otherwise a perfectly suitable stand-in to train new joint terminal attack controllers, or JTACs, the soldier spe-cialists who direct UAVs for close air support. The Patrol also provides the crew: a pilot, a mission coordinator, who maintains the voice link with apprentice JTACs, and a systems opera-tor who manipulates the camera pod.

On the ground, trainees analyze down-linked imagery, including color video, and infrared, wide-angle, or magnified images. “What the JTACs see is exactly what they would see if they were actu-ally using a Predator,” Mullin says.

Patrol crews keep interactions with JTACs scrupulously real. Steve Wood, a former Marine pilot, flies a Cessna on most of the 12-day exercises con-ducted 18 times a year at Fort Polk in Kentucky. (Exercises are also held at Fort Irwin in California’s Mojave Desert.) During a four-hour flight, the aircraft sends data down to multiple JTAC teams. “They all want this asset,” Wood says, “so they’re all trying to get face time on it.”

Typical imagery includes a sweep down a convoy’s path, Wood says, “looking for anyone lying in wait or for a disturbed landscape that might indicate a buried IED [improvised explosive device].” The program trains the controllers to examine highly real-

istic mock villages for patterns of activ-ity. “We might be asked for magnified imagery of a specific building so JTACs can observe persons entering and leav-ing,” says Wood. “We might be observ-ing vehicles on the road and the people inside to determine what sort of arms they’re carrying.” Surrogate Predators even act out simulated air-to-ground strikes ordered by JTACs.

Occasionally, a real Predator shares airspace during an exercise. Even com-pared to the real thing though, Wood says stand-ins score high in post-exer-cise evaluations. “The Air Force really loves us,” adds Mullin. “We’re pretty cheap when you consider that none of our people are paid. They just come out and do this on their own.” Role-playing a $4 million recon UAV in a single-engine light aircraft that goes for an eighth of that price: Just one more way to serve your country.

n n n STEPHEN JOINER

AIRSPACEMAG.COM BREAKTHROUGH INITIATIVES

Sail to Alpha CentauriWHAT’S THE WEATHER like at Alpha Centauri? A new $100 million research program called Breakthrough Starshot might just help us find out. In his April 12 announcement, Russian Yuri Milner (read about his Breakthrough Listen program to find alien signals on p. 36) called it “the Silicon Valley approach to spaceflight.” By harnessing technologi-cal advances from products like cell-phones, he plans to build a ship weigh-ing a few grams, attach it to a lightsail, and push it to near-light speed by laser beams shot from the ground. It could reach the nearest star system in just 20 years.

“As with any moonshot, there are

major engineering challenges to solve,” says Milner, who expects the ultimate mission cost to be on par with the big-gest international science projects.

n n n HEATHER GOSS

Using modern mass-manufacturing techniques, an Alpha Centauri mission might use thousands of tiny space probes.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM ABOVE: ©SOLAR IMPULSE/JEAN REVILLARD: REZO; LEFT: ©BERTRAND PICCARD

“THE PACIFIC OCEAN is vast, but smaller than my dream of being here,” pilot Bertrand Piccard mes-saged from Solar Impulse 2 about 12 hours after taking off from Hawaii on April 21. Crossing the ocean was the ninth leg of a trip that started in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi. After two and a half days, Solar Impulse 2 landed in Mountain View, California. Piccard’s dream: Completing an around-the-world flight without a single drop of gas.

Solar Impulse performed a record-breaking five-day flight from Japan

to Hawaii more than nine months ago, but in the process its solar-powered batteries got fried. With the aircraft’s power supply now repaired, Piccard and his partner, André Borschberg (they take turns piloting), will start a multi-leg jour-ney across the United States. The goal isn’t speed, obviously—the air-

craft cruises at about 30 knots (about 35 mph)—but to show that eliminat-ing fossil fuels from powered flight might be within our reach.

n n n HEATHER GOSS

Pilot Bertrand Piccard (left) lingered over San Francisco for over two hours so fans could spot him.

Solar Impulse Charged Up

AIRSPACEMAG.COM LEFT: AVFUEL CORP.; ABOVE: SAVE THE CHIMPS INC.

Chimp IslandFOUR MONTHS before Alan Shepard become the first American in space, NASA launched the first chim-panzee, named Ham. He had been cap-tured in Africa and flown to the United States, where he was purchased by the Air Force, conditioned in a centrifuge, and with electric shock and banana pellets, trained to operate the Mercury capsule. (Ham is an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center, located on the New Mexico base where the training was done.) “In the early part of the space program, they didn’t

know how the human body would change,” says retired astronaut Robert Crippen, pilot of the first space shuttle flight. “They did not want to risk a per-son.”

After his 1961 suborbital lob, Ham was tested for two more years, to see if the 16-minute trip left any residual effects, then sent to live under the care of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo until his death at age 26. Ham was the lucky one. The other chimps—there

Once confined to centrifuges and exam tables, chimps now have a 12-island sanctuary to explore at Save the Chimps.

The FAA wants an unleaded avgas available by 2018.

UPDATE

TAKING THE LEAD OUT OF AVGASTWO NEW FUELS are in the running to replace the leaded gasoline that 167,000 private airplanes in the United States depend on, according to the General Aviation Manufacturers Association. The Federal Aviation Administration began searching for replacements in 2013. Private pilots worry that if new fuels require engine overhauls, some pilots will just give up flying, leading to a loss of aviation jobs (“The Fight Over Avgas,” Aug. 2013).

The FAA will now start full-scale engine testing on two versions by Shell and Swift Fuels.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM JOANNE MACARTHUR/SAVE THE CHIMPS INC.

were originally 40 flight candidates—were sent off to be used for biomedi-cal research, much of it by Frederick Coulston, who had been perform-ing animal testing at Holloman since the 1940s. In 1993, he established the Coulston Foundation in Alamogordo, New Mexico, which collected hundreds of chimpanzees for testing. “It was a ter-rible place,” Crippen says. “They were locked up in small cages.”

In 1997, biological anthropologist Carole Noon founded Save the Chimps, and filed a lawsuit against the Air Force

to end testing on the animals. She won in 1998, gaining possession of the 20 remaining chimps, who were then moved to an island sanctuary Save the Chimps built near Fort Pierce, Florida. In 2002, the Coulston Foundation lost federal funding after it was found to have violated the Animal Welfare Act, and Coulston called up Noon, asking if she would buy the facility and take over care for the hundreds of chimps on site. With fundraising help from many animal rights supporters, includ-ing Crippen and Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter, Save the Chimps

expanded the sanctuary to 12 islands.Today the chimps choose their com-

munities, says executive director Molly Polidoroff, who earned her chimp cre-dentials working with Jane Goodall at Gombe Stream Reserve National Park in Tanzania. “Because of what they expe-rienced in their former lives, they’re less trusting and less friendly toward humans,” she adds. “But some are very people-oriented, like Cheetah, who was subjected to hundreds of liver biopsies. He can’t wait to see me every day.”

Crippen still sits on the board of advisers, which gives him some quality chimp viewing time. “They’re usually out playing, and they’re quite friendly with the veterinarians. [The vets] have parties for them, and leave food and presents,” he says. He remembers one visit with Carpenter, who died in 2013. “Scott enjoyed the visit,” says Crippen, “and he thought it was all worthwhile.” The descendants of the original astro-chimps probably agree.

n n n PHIL SCOTT

Jude and JD play in the grass all they want now.

THE COUNT

7,000The number of overdue maintenance tasks the 341st Missile Maintenance Squadron completed in less than a year. These tasks piled up slowly over eight years, but now the intercontinental ballistic missile team at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana can flip that counter back to zero. Until the next bolt goes missing, anyway.

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WHAT THE NEWSMAKERS ARE SAYINGAir&Space Interview

TODD CARLANDER

Robert O. HarderA B-52 navigator-bombardier in the Vietnam War, Harder is the author of The Three Musketeers of the Army Air Forces, which details the friendship of Paul Tibbets, Tom Ferebee, and Ted Van Kirk, three of the 12-man crew on the Boeing B-29 Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, helping to end World War II.

What are some of the misrepresentations that have been repeated about Tibbets, Ferebee, and Van Kirk?Probably the worst misrepresentation hurled against all three men was that they were warmongers and murderers. Today we have the luxury of being able to debate whether atomic weapons were fair use. But in the heat of the war in the summer of 1945, when thousands of Americans were still dying daily and every soldier’s sworn duty was to kill the enemy, difficult decisions had to be made.

While Ferebee and Van Kirk remained relatively unknown through the years, Paul Tibbets became the public face of America’s atomic bomb arsenal. A decision to retain an unstable B-29 pilot named Captain Claude Eatherly on the roster of the [509th Composite Group] very nearly wrecked Tibbets’ reputation in the late 1950s.

Bob Harder writes books from the basement office of his home in Chicago. After leaving the U.S. Air Force in 1970, he went into retail management and became a private pilot and flight instructor.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM

AIRSPACEMAG.COM

Eatherly became unhinged after the war, robbing post offices and getting himself committed to mental institu-tions. Anti-war activists got hold of the man, and before they were done, Eatherly began claiming that he—not Paul Tibbets—was the “Hiroshima pilot” and that the mis-sion had been responsible for his derangement. There are people today who still believe Tibbets became insane over the matter, and he had to endure questions about the false story until the end of his life [Tibbets died in 2007].

Is there anything people should know about Paul Tibbets that isn’t widely known?Tibbets never got credit for the many little things he did for his men. Often, an enlisted man would [be granted] a sur-prise leave to go back home to marry the hometown girl or visit an ailing mother.

Years later, Tibbets admitted to his grown sons that their mother got a bum deal. So consumed was he by his work and the war, he virtually ignored his family. It did not help that he was forbidden to tell [first wife] Lucy anything about his work. When Tibbets was unable to

mitigate the damage, it shattered their marriage [they divorced in 1955].

How was the 509th Composite Group regarded by other groups in Strategic Air Command?Initially, on Tinian Island, the group was not greeted enthusi-astically. Tibbets had evicted a long-serving B-29 group from their choice quarters, which got his group off on the wrong foot. Further, it was clear the 509th crews considered them-selves special, and since they did not participate in the much more dangerous conventional bombing missions, that led to a certain feeling that they were a candy-assed outfit that had conned the brass into a cushy assignment.

Anything you’d like to add?It seems incredible that the nation would have handed over such tremendous authority and responsibility to a 29-year-old lieutenant colonel. As Tibbets himself once said late in life: “I can never imagine it happening again.”

Read the entire interview at airspacemag.com/harder

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SmithsonianNational Air and Space Museum

You will also receive a handsome Certificate of Registry suitable for framing and have the opportunity to submit a Wall of Honor profile and photograph

of your honoree that will be available for viewing on the Museum’s web site.

To make a Wall of Honor donation, visit airandspace.si.edu/Honor

Make a special name last forever...

National Air and Space Museum

WALL OF HONOR

Help support the National Air and Space Museum by contributing $100 or moreand your name, or the name of someone you wish to honor,will be seen by millions of visitors for generations to come.

For more information, contact wallofhonor@si.edu or 202.633.2603.

AIRSPACEMAG.COMAIRSPACEMAG.COM ESA/C. CARREAU

PLANETS

A Chilly Dip Into Venus

A SPACE PROBE’S FINAL moments can sometimes be as useful as its primary mission.

In 2014, Europe’s Venus Express ended its eight-year study of the planet’s atmo-sphere when it finally ran out of fuel. Instead of letting the spacecraft plunge into the surface, the team lowered its orbit so it could observe the atmosphere as it slowed. The results, published in Nature Physics this April, show a much cooler, thinner, and more turbulent polar atmosphere than expected.

Solar System ChatterA HUNDRED SATELLITES, ALL TALKING AT ONCE. HERE’S THE INTEL. BY HEATHER GOSS

AIRSPACEMAG.COM LEFT: NASA/ESA/P. OESCH; RIGHT: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UNIV. OF ARIZONA

PLANETS

Mars Data ChampEVERY WEEK, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sends more data than the other six

Mars missions combined, and over its life-time—10 years on March 10—has collected more data than all interplanetary missions combined. MRO directly observes how the Martian environment changes over seasons and years, and helps scientists understand how the planet has evolved. Its HiRISE camera takes spectacular images, such as this one of Gale Crater, right, where the Curiosity rover is working.

UNIVERSE

Hubble Goes the Distance ASTRONOMERS ARE ASTOUNDED at the Hubble Space Telescope’s recent observation of the farthest galaxy ever seen—one dating back 13.4

billion years, to just 400 million years after the Big Bang. Scientists thought they would have to wait until the James Webb Space Telescope starts operations to see this far back. What it saw: galaxies forming only about 200 to 300 million years after the first stars began to shine.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM LEFT: NASA/MMS; RIGHT: JAXA/AKIHIRO IKESHITA

UNIVERSE

Hitomi Breaks UpAFTER LOSING contact with X-ray satel-lite Hitomi (below) in March, Japan’s space agency discovered several pieces of debris

in its orbit—likely the spacecraft itself. After its February 17 launch, Hitomi completed two scien-tific tasks before its failure.

EARTH

Electron Surf WHERE THE SOLAR WIND hits Earth’s magnetosphere, the two fields often break apart and recombine. NASA’s

Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, a formation of four satellites launched in 2015, has now observed the wave this reconnection creates as it boosts elec-trons with up to 40 times their initial energy.

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B-29: JEROME MERVELET; RV-1: PAUL DYE; CHART: FAA; PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY THÉO

“LAKELAND TOWER, RV-1, out of the flyby pattern for landing on Two Seven Left.”

“Roger RV-1, continue your cross-wind and fly downwind as close as you can. Your traffic is a B-29 on a 45 entry to the downwind.”

“Roger the B-29, I have him in sight. Do you want me ahead of him or behind?”

“Definitely ahead!”It was day three of the 2012 Sun

’n Fun Fly-In Expo at Lakeland, Florida, and I was flying the first air-craft designed and built by Richard “Van” VanGrunsven. The RV-1 was created in 1965 and served as the

Chased by Fifi

Fifi was the only B-29 still flying in 2012, when the author, in an RV-1, had a close encounter over Lakeland, Florida.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM

MEMORABLE FLIGHTS AND OTHER ADVENTURESAbove & Beyond

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prototype for the RV-3, Van’s first all-metal airplane and first kit. Over the decades his prototype had changed hands several times, and recently a group of dedicated RV enthusiasts had restored it to flying condition. Because I was the one who found the airplane and persuaded a benefac-tor to fund its restoration, I had the honor of flying it to Sun ’n Fun. The organizers invited me to take it up in the Flyby Showcase, wherein a hand-ful of aircraft are permitted to fly a few passes over the crowd before the airshow proper begins.

During the big fly-in week, Lakeland’s main east-west runway is in constant use for departures, so the parallel taxiway north of it is pressed into service as a second runway; air-craft arriving via visual flight rules and large aircraft arrivals are typically directed to this temporary alternate. Volunteers with batons direct aircraft from their parking spots toward the takeoff threshold, and the taxi routes can be long and circuitous.

I had the 12:10 p.m. time slot. Flying just before my RV-1 was a rep-lica Curtiss pusher; following imme-diately after, a pair of Cessna 195s. We were all instructed to be at the staging point 10 minutes early so we could be flagged into the flyby pattern for takeoff.

We quickly discovered the air boss had failed to tell the ground handlers where the Showcase airplanes were supposed to go for takeoff. Regular arrivals and departures were going on all the time, and almost all arriv-ing aircraft simply needed to be directed to a parking spot. But when the ground handlers encoun-tered one that needed to go else-where, they had no radios to ask for instructions.

The RV-1 has a tip-over canopy, and with the engine running, it can’t be opened safely; a gust could cause it to be damaged or even ripped off the airplane. But with it closed, I had no way to talk to the ground han-

dlers. I’d have to wave them over—behind the wing, obviously—crack the canopy, and yell over the engine, “FLYBY PATTERN STAGING!” Most of them had no idea what I was talk-ing about. I had a map, though, so if they didn’t know where to send me, I simply began to turn toward where I thought I needed to go and let them catch up. No one wanted to argue with my spinning prop.

Being pushy with wand-wavers on foot is one thing; playing chicken with a B-29 is another. There in front of me on the taxiway was Fifi—until very recently the only B-29 in the world still flying. Its four R-3350 engines were roaring away as they prepared for takeoff. While the pilots of the big bomber went through its complicated preflight, the departing airplanes in front of me were being waved around its left wingtip to take-off position.

I was likewise waved around, despite the fact that I was, as instructed, 10 minutes early for my

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flyby slot. I knew I was to stay where I was.

Using hand signals familiar to both pilots and New York City cab driv-ers, I conveyed to the ground control-lers that I didn’t want to take off right

away. As soon as I was clear of the taxiway, the big relic of World War II began its roll onto the runway for departure. I shut the RV-1 down and cracked the canopy. As I crawled from the cockpit, a golf cart approached and a Sun ’n Fun official hopped out. He apologized for the confusion. We watched the Curtiss pusher appear on the taxiway, right on time.

Then the official’s radio crackled with news: A pair of Marine F/A-18s were inbound. Since no one knew

what they would be doing, the air-show man told me my flyby was can-celed: The F/A-18s would get my spot to preen for the crowd. I watched the two jets on short final for landing on the main runway. This didn’t look like

a flyby to me. As they rolled to a stop instead of going around, I gave the official a questioning look: Fly or go home?

Consulting his radio, the man in the cart looked startled. Then he met my eye and twirled a finger over his head. I was airborne in less than a minute.

On the discrete radio frequency, I was told to keep it tight and quick, stay on the briefed path, and expect four passes. They went fast: The RV-1

can fly about 170 mph, and since I was descending from a high down-wind leg to the 500-foot pattern alti-tude for the show pass, I was pushing that more than a little.

It was fun to show off the little yel-low airplane. On pass three I gave the crowd a side-slip, and on pass four followed up with a vigorous wing-rock.

“RV-1, if you’ll give us a nice tight base leg, we’ve got a B-29 on a 45 [degree angle] for the downwind, and we want you ahead of him. We’ll extend the B-29 to get you down and clear.” The tower was making them burn that much more fuel and giving me priority? They’d rather have me on the ground than rolled up in that thing’s wake, I figured—less paper-work that way. “And if you can touch down long and make the turnoff at Foxtrot, we’d appreciate it!”

Restoring the RV-1 had required a lot of new parts, mostly donated by RV vendors who wanted to honor Van, the man without whom their

The F/A-18s would get my spot to preen for the crowd. I watched the two jets on short final for landing on the main runway. This didn’t look like a flyby to me. As they rolled to a stop instead of going around, I gave the official a questioning look: Fly or go home?

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businesses would have no busi-ness. One builder had offered a set of wheels that he had removed from his Cessna 180. Their big, dual-puck brakes were extremely effective in the RV-1. In the dozen or so hours I had flown the airplane, I’d adapted to these sensitive brakes; I knew how much room I needed to stop. I could keep my speed up until getting almost up to Taxiway Foxtrot, then slam on the binders to get out of the B-29’s way.

I’d forgotten that since my last flight, we’d changed the brake pedal geometry, altering the length of some linkages to better fit taller pilots but reducing the total amount of braking force available. This was a good thing, because it gave the airplane the appropriate braking power for its size.

Or rather, it would have been a good thing on any other day. I knew that the big bomber was probably crossing the airport fence as I was chopping the throttle and planting

the tailwheel on the ground for the hard braking I had planned. I slid my feet up the pedals and pushed hard. I imagined myself sliding past my designated turnoff, then spin-ning around to see four monster pro-pellers attached to four big radial engines attached to a huge wing on

a giant cylindrical fuselage, all track-ing straight at me.

With the stick all the way back to keep the tail from coming up, I let off the right pedal just a little and stomped on the left, steering the tail-wheel to kick me into a left turn. I aimed for the near corner of Foxtrot. I felt the left wheel get a bit light, but the wing stayed down. When I’d made the corner, I set up for an arc-

ing turn that would take me almost to the grass on the far side, using all the pavement available. With a few chirps from the tires, I came to a stop well clear of the runway. A moment later, the shadow of the big B-29 rolled past my tail.

“Where’s your parking sign?” one

of the volunteers mouthed at me. I waved him over for yet another shouting match: “Show plane park-ing!” I barked. He shrugged and pointed.

“But be quick,” he added. “There’s a B-29 that’s going to be coming from the opposite direction real soon!”

Tell me something I don't know, I thought. But I kept quiet.

n n n PAUL DYE

I slid my feet up the pedals and pushed hard. I imagined myself sliding past my designated turnoff, then spinning around to see four monster propellers attached to four big radial engines attached to a huge wing on a giant cylindrical fuselage, all tracking straight at me.

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SHUTTERSTOCK (249957358)

THE DRONES ARE COMING! But before they can start flying low over private property to deliver packages, their owners might have to navigate a legal doctrine established in a quirky case involving chicken farmers and an iconoclastic U.S. Supreme Court justice.

In 1934, Thomas and Tinie Causby bought 2.8 acres next to a small airfield near Greensboro, North Carolina, and started raising hens (to produce eggs) and young chickens (to be sold as fry-ers). At the time, the airport was, in Thomas’ words, “just a little old land-ing field,”and his business prospered.

But after World War II erupted, the United States leased the field as a military airbase. Four-engine bomb-ers and other airplanes flew over the Causby property day and night,

descending to as low as 83 feet—a mere 67 feet above their home—on the glide-slope to the runway. “They would swoop down so close to the house that it seemed they were taking the roof off,” testified Tinie Causby.

Besides unnerving the Causbys, the flights terrified the chickens. “They would jump off the roost, get excited and jump against the side of the chicken house and the walls and burst themselves open and die,” Thomas Causby said. “I have taken out as high as six or ten in one day.”

In 1943, after liquidating their

chicken business, the Causbys hired Greensboro attorney William Comer. Had the airplanes been flown by civil-ians, the Causbys would have an open-and-shut case of trespass and/or nuisance against a citizen, but since the aircraft were military, the doctrine of sovereign immunity seemed to

How Much of the Sky Do You Own?

AIRSPACEMAG.COM

FROM THE ATTIC TO THE ARCHIVESOldies & Oddities

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shield the government from lawsuits. So Comer came up with a brilliant alternative.

According to the Takings Clause of the U.S. Constitution, “private property [cannot] be taken for public use, with-out just compensation.” Comer filed suit in the Court of Claims—a court established specifically to hear mon-etary cases against the government—arguing that the military flights had rendered the Causbys’ property unin-habitable, thereby constituting a taking.

The Court of Claims sided with the Causbys. The government, fear-ing the ramifications this precedent could have for other military airfields, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In May 1946, after contentious debate, the justices ruled 5-2 in favor of the Causbys.

At the time, the laws regulat-ing air travel were still murky. The ancient legal maxim of cujus est solum ejus usque ad coelum—essentially, whoever owns the land also owns the sky above it—had been super-seded by the Air Commerce Act of

1926, which declared the air free. Meanwhile, the Civil Aeronautics Authority, a predecessor of the Federal Aviation Administration, had claimed all airspace above 500 feet—the minimum altitude for daylight flying—as public domain.

William O. Douglas was assigned to write the majority opinion for United States v. Causby. At 47, Douglas was the youngest justice on the court, and he was a prolific if mercurial scholar “who was better known for speed than for meticulousness,” according to author Stuart Banner in Who Owns the Sky? His colleagues expected him to craft a narrow opinion, but for reasons still opaque today, Douglas issued an opinion that revolutionized the regu-lation of air travel.

Instead of limiting the Causbys’ claim to the taking of their land, Douglas extended it to the air above their property. “We have said that the airspace is a public highway,” he wrote. “Yet it is obvious that if the landowner is to have full enjoyment of the land, he must have exclusive

control of the immediate reaches of the enveloping atmosphere. Otherwise, buildings could not be erected, trees could not be planted, and even fences could not be run.”

A New York Times headline crowed, “Chickens Upheld in Plane Decision.” The Causbys ultimately were awarded $1,060 for the decline in the value of their land, plus $375 for the dead poultry. Douglas’ opinion didn’t set any boundaries for how high a landowner’s airspace extended. “We need not determine at this time what those precise limits are,” he wrote.

Eventually, a consensus was reached in disputes between property owners and airports: Each case would be decided on the basis of what cir-cumstances applied where the issue arose. But the exact parameters of Douglas’ “precise limits” were never established. That could be a problem for drone operators in the future. And it’s going to force them to grapple with constitutional law fashioned before the dawn of unmanned flight.

n n n PRESTON LERNER

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AIRSPACEMAG.COM

FORTY YEARS AGO, on the nation’s bicentennial, President Gerald Ford declared the newly opened National Air and Space Museum a “perfect birthday present from the American people to themselves.” Although the Smithsonian Institution’s aerospace collection had been established much earlier, it wasn’t until the building on the National Mall opened that hundreds of artifacts could be displayed in one exhibition space.

Four decades later, thanks to a $30 million donation from the Boeing Company, the Museum has renovated its entrance hall and begun work on other galleries and educational activities. In recognition of Boeing’s generous gift, the new entrance

ADAPTED BY REBECCA MAKSEL FROM MILESTONES OF FLIGHT: THE EPIC OF AVIATION WITH THE NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM BY F. ROBERT VAN DER LINDEN, ALEX M. SPENCER, AND THOMAS J. PAONE (ZENITH PRESS, ©2016). PRINTED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.

A new book tells the story of aviation’s progress—through the histories of 29 aircraft in the National Air and Space Museum. An app shows how each object in the collection is connected to others.

STOPS ON A TOUR THROUGH AMERICA’S HANGARIn the Museum

10 GIANT STEPSAN AEROSPACE HISTORY TOUR

AIRSPACEMAG.COM ERIC LONG

gallery has been renamed the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall.One of the first changes visitors will notice is an interactive Media Wall that intro-

duces them to objects on display within the Museum. By downloading the accom-panying Go Flight app onto a smartphone or tablet, visitors can read stories about the artifacts, watch videos of their history, and learn about connections between the world’s most significant air- and spacecraft.

Because the app (available for Android and iOS) can track your location, when you’re in the Museum, it offers you a map to help direct your visit, hour-long guided tours, and a schedule of daily events. If you open the app at home, you’ll get a list of topics that can be tailored to your interests. Each time you open the app, you’ll get a different set of stories.

To celebrate the Museum’s 40th birthday, we’re high-lighting 10 iconic objects of the hundreds on display. Through the Go Flight app, any one of these could lead you on a journey through a dozen historic artifacts, showing how one led to the next.

Bell XS-1/X-1Imitating the shape of one of the few objects that before 1947 could fly faster than sound—a high-powered bullet—the X-1 broke the sound barrier that year on October 14. Although the revo-lutionary aircraft enabled NASA and the Air Force to understand transonic flight, the moment that the test pilot, Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager, slipped past

Mach 1 appears to have been remark-ably uneventful. The wild part of the flight was Yeager’s climb down the lad-der from the Boeing B-29 mothership into the rocketplane in its bomb bay—in the slipstream. “There was a metal panel to protect against the wind blast, but it was rather primitive,” Yeager later wrote. “That bitch of a wind took your breath away and chilled you to the bone.”

After the X-1 was dropped from the bomber, Yeager fired the four rocket engines and climbed to 36,000 feet, hit-ting .88 Mach. He then shut down two of the engines to conserve fuel and climbed to 42,000 feet, where he hit Mach .92. He refired the two inert engines. At that altitude the Mach meter registered .956 and then 1.06—700 mph. “#1 ok,” Yeager wrote in his logbook after the flight.

The Bell X-1 was the first to fly faster than the speed of sound.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM DANE PENLAND

Supersonic passenger travel was con-ceived in the 1950s, developed in the 1960s, and realized in the mid-1970s. And for 27 years, the graceful Anglo-French Concorde carried travelers across the Atlantic Ocean in great comfort at twice the speed of sound.

In Europe, enterprising designers in the United Kingdom and France were indepen-dently outlining their plans for a supersonic transport, and in November 1962, the two nations agreed to pool their resources and

share the risks of developing and building the SST. Despite initial enthusiasm, the air-lines declined their purchase options once they calculated the Concorde’s operating costs. Only Air France and British Airways—the national airlines of their countries at the time—flew the 16 production aircraft, and only after acquiring them from their governments at virtually no cost.

Soon, economic realities forced Air France and British Airways to cut back their already limited service, leaving only the transatlantic

service to New York. Even on most of these flights, the Concorde was only half full, with many of the passengers flying as guests of the airlines. The average round-trip ticket cost more than $12,000; few could afford to fly.

In April 2003, with maintenance costs spiraling upward and new parts becom-ing prohibitively expensive, the aircraft were grounded permanently.

Aérospatiale-BAC ConcordeThe Concorde featured a delta wing for excellent subsonic and supersonic flight.

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The living quar-ters for Neil A r m s t r o n g ,

Buzz Aldrin, a n d M i c h a e l

Collins during their eight-day journey to the

moon in July 1969 had an interior of just 210 cubic feet—a little less than the inside of a compact car. It may have felt roomy to Michael Collins, once his two colleagues departed for the lunar surface, leaving him to orbit alone in the Columbia for almost 24 hours. In his book Carrying the Fire, Collins recalls the feeling of solitude: “[R]adio contact with the Earth abruptly cuts off at the instant I disappear behind the moon, I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it.”

Thanks to recent efforts by the Smithsonian’s 3D Digitization Program, we now know what the three men wrote on the walls in that cramped space. The digitization project uses cameras and soft-ware that capture information without requiring a person to enter—and poten-tially damage—the spacecraft. Space his-tory curator Allan Needell seemed most thrilled with the discovery of a calendar, duct-taped to the spacecraft wall, which appeared to have the dates of the mission X’ed out day by day. Noting that in space there is no sunrise or sunset, Needell finds the need to mark the time in days “a very human thing.”

Once the 3D model of Columbia is completed in June, anyone with access to a 3D printer will be able to download and print his own copy of the artifact.

ERIC LONG

Apollo 11 Command Module

Many of the Museum’s artifacts are associated with single major milestones; the Apollo 11 command module is one of several related to the moon landing.

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It’s a piece of aviation history that would have been lost if not for the Smithsonian. In February 2015, one of the two fans that drove the 30- by 60-foot wind tun-nel at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, was installed in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall. Built during 1930 and ’31, Langley’s wind tunnel was so immense that aeronauti-cal engineers could, for the first time,

conduct tests on full-size aircraft. Until 1945, the tunnel was the largest in the world.

During its 78-year career, the wind tunnel tested nearly every U.S. fighter, including the Lockheed Martin F-22. It also tested the Mercury space capsule, supersonic transport concepts, vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft—even sub-marines and NASCAR racers.

Although the U.S. Department of the Interior had designated the wind tunnel a National Historic Landmark in 1985, it was demolished over a period of two years, beginning in 2011. The drive fan is one of the only items remaining.

ERIC LONG

The NACA/NASA Full Scale Wind Tunnel FanOthers are one of a kind, like the drive fan from NASA’s full-scale wind tunnel.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM DANE PENLAND

Arlington Sisu 1A On July 31, 1964, Alvin H. Parker flew from his hometown of Odessa, Texas, in a Sisu 1A sailplane and shattered a psychological barrier that had defeated sailplane pilots for years: His was the first flight to exceed 1,000 kilometers (621 miles). The aircraft is now in the Museum.

Leonard Niemi came up with the Sisu in 1952, after stints at Bell Aircraft and Curtiss-Wright. He designed the airplane to be buildable by people in home workshops, but the first flight of the prototype Sisu 1, in 1958, was so suc-cessful that he decided not to sell plans or kits to homebuilders. Instead, Niemi modified the design for production as a ready-to-fly sailplane.

Construction began on the first four sailplanes in 1960. Pilots snapped up the finished aircraft, but production costs surpassed profits, and Niemi had to sell the project.

Niemi had a team at Mississippi State University refine the surface contours on his second Sisu (the team’s techniques are

still secret). Niemi took the sailplane into the air for the first time on May 1, 1963. Parker bought this Sisu, and a year and 10 days later, he took off from Ector County Airport, north of Odessa, and released from the towplane just before 10 a.m. Ten and a half hours later, he touched down in Nebraska, setting a world distance record.

Alvin Parker set three records in the Sisu 1A before donating the sailplane to the Museum.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM DANE PENLAND

Bell UH-1H Iroquois Known almost universally as the Huey, Bell Helicopter’s Models 204 and 205 were used by all U.S. military services, many U.S. allies, and numerous civilian operators. The military’s reliance on the Huey during the Vietnam War made it one of the most enduring symbols of the conflict.

U.S. involvement in the war began in earnest in 1962, and the lack of conven-tional roads and other infrastructure in

South Vietnam made the military depend on the helicopter for counterinsurgency operations against Viet Cong guerrillas, who controlled much of the territory. As the war progressed, military operations took the form of quick strikes into the countryside, much of which was covered by the marshes and rice paddies of the delta, dense interior jungle, or rugged hills and mountains.

The Huey was not the only helicopter type used in Vietnam, but it was the most

prominent. Of the 12,000 U.S. helicopters that served in Southeast Asia between 1961 and 1975, 7,000 were Hueys, and most were employed by the U.S. Army. Hueys also made up two-thirds of the helicopter losses in Southeast Asia; more than 3,300 were shot down or destroyed by accidents, in nearly equal quantities.

No U.S. military aircraft since World War II’s B-24 bomber has been produced in greater numbers than the Huey.

With more than 2,500 combat flight hours, the UH-1 Huey 65-10126 exemplifies how indispensable the helicopter was in Vietnam.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM DANE PENLAND

Space Shuttle DiscoveryAfter 39 missions, 365 days in space, 5,830 orbits, and 148 million miles, the space shuttle Discovery was delivered to the National Air and Space Museum in April 2012.

“When a curator is considering col-lecting an artifact,” says Valerie Neal, a curator in the Museum’s space history division, “there are a number of stan-dards that are applied. The principal one is historical significance. Then we look at the nature of the object itself. Is it the only one? Is it rare? Is it the first one? Is it the last one? Discovery gets an A on every measure.”

Consider: Discovery deployed the Hubble Space Telescope. Took the first Russian cosmonaut to fly on a shuttle into space. Brought John Glenn back into space 36 years after he became the first American to orbit Earth. It returned the country to spaceflight after the Challenger and Columbia tragedies. It flew the first mission with a female shuttle pilot—Eileen Collins on STS-63. It was the first shuttle to dock with the International Space Station.

The shuttle program helped increase

knowledge in astronomy and astro-physics, Earth science, materials pro-cessing, life sciences, and engineering. Continuing its role as the do-everything spacecraft, Discovery now serves as an educational tool for the millions who visit the Museum each year.

One of the most instantly recognizable craft in the Museum: The space shuttle Discovery.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM DANE PENLAND

Piper J-3 CubCreated as a trainer to foster aviation during the Depression, the Cub became a ubiqui-tous utility aircraft in World War II. Since 1932, thousands of pilots have learned to fly in Cubs, and in the 21st century thousands more continue to fly them, along with their light sport and bushplane derivatives.

The Cub’s success was due to two men: C.G. Taylor, who designed the aircraft,

and William Piper, who provided finan-cial stability and marketing genius to the manufacturer. By 1941, one-third of all general aviation aircraft were Taylor or Piper Cubs.

To compete in the lightplane market, Piper introduced the J-3 in late 1937 with such “luxuries” as brakes, a steer-able tailwheel, upholstered (instead of plywood) seats, a compass, an airspeed

indicator, and more legroom (the firewall was moved forward). Priced at $1,300, then reduced in 1939 to $995, it was a resounding success with fixed-base operators, flight schools, and air-minded citizens who, due to easing economic times, could now afford to learn to fly. From 1938 to 1947, Piper built about 19,888 J-3s.

During World War II, more than 5,600 Cubs flew in and out of short fields as liaison, observation, and ambulance air-planes, hedgehopping over battlefields or ferrying officers. The Cubs supported invasions in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. The Piper L-4 Miss Me is credited with the last aerial victory in Europe, when its crew used pistols to bring down a German Fieseler Storch.

The Piper Cub captured, even arguably created, the private pilot market and remains one of the most recognized designs in aviation.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM DANE PENLAND

Boeing B-29 Enola GayAt the end of World War II, the Superfortress was the most advanced propeller-driven airplane in the world, a marvel represent-ing the latest advances in U.S. aeronautical engineering, bomber design, and strategic bombing doctrine.

Even before the first test of an atomic bomb, the U.S. Army Air Forces began work, in June 1943, on Project Silverplate, a program to modify B-29s into atomic bombers. The first 15 Silverplate B-29s were produced at the Glenn L. Martin factory in Omaha. Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr., com-mander of the group formed to deliver the weapons created by the Manhattan Project, selected one as his personal aircraft and named it after his mother.

Tibbets and his crew took off from the island of Tinian at 2:45 a.m. on August 6, 1945, and at 9:15 a.m., the Enola Gay, flying at 31,000 feet, dropped the world’s

first atomic bomb. In an explosion equivalent to 16 kilotons of TNT, the bomb killed an estimated 60,000 people instantly. Another 60,000 died later from radiation sickness and related injuries. The single bomb destroyed 4.7 square miles of Hiroshima and left less than 20 percent of the city’s buildings standing.

In 1946, the Army Air Forces trans-ferred the Enola Gay to the Smithsonian Institution. Its restoration, begun in December 1984, was the largest such

project the Museum has ever under-taken, requiring nearly two decades and approximately 300,000 hours to com-plete. The challenge included polishing virtually every square inch of the bare aluminum surface, and refurbishing all four R-3350 engines.

In 2003, after a 21-year restoration, the fully assembled Enola Gay went on display at the Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM DANE PENLAND

Sikorsky HH-52A SeaguardThe two sailors climbed onto the tanker’s handrail for one reason: The heat of the ship’s steel deck was melting their shoes. It was November 1, 1979, and the tanker Burmah Agate had collided with the freighter Mimosa in the Gulf of Mexico, igniting the tanker’s 300,000 barrels of oil.

The two sailors watched the tanker burning around them. Then, through the smoke, they saw a Coast Guard helicopter approach: a Sikorsky HH-52, tail no. 1426, piloted by J.C. Cobb and Chris Kilgore, along with Petty Officer Thomas Wynn.

That day the Sikorsky, along with a second helicopter, rescued the two sail-

The Seaguard was the first turbine engine amphibious helicopter.

ors perched on the handrail and 25 other men; they were the only survivors from the Burmah Agate.

The storied helicopter is now in the collection of the National Air and Space Museum. In 1988, as the Coast Guard was replacing its fleet of HH-52As, Lieutenant Thomas King was asked to find homes for almost 75 of them. King retired the next year but continued his work, as a member of the Coast Guard Aviation Association. Once the Museum’s Steven

F. Udvar-Hazy Center opened in 2003, the Smithsonian was able to accept a Seaguard: It was the national collection’s first Coast Guard aircraft. There was one catch: The Museum required the heli-copter to be fully restored. In late 2014 the association acquired no. 1426 from the North Valley Occupation Center, a vocational-technical school in Van Nuys, California. In little more than a year, a group of volunteers restored it, and now, at last, it’s on display.

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NATIVES OF MOBILE, ALABAMA, can tell you the town’s old slogan: “A City of Perpetual Potential.” In the latter decades of the 20th century, the words some-times seemed to carry a ring of disappointment. It’s an old phrase, dating back to

when Mobile was a booming Gulf Coast port city. But examine the history of Mobile’s storied Brookley

Air Field—its 9,600-foot runway leading straight to the 31-mile-long, 11-mile-wide Mobile Bay and its five estuaries—and you’ll discover the city was also the birth-

AIRBUS

BY ARIELLE EMMETT

Airbus Lands in MobileHalf a century after the largest base closure in U.S. history, Mobile is once more an aviation town.

Airbus CEO Fabrice Brégier shares the stage with more than 200 new employees at the grand opening of the European consortium’s plant in Mobile, Alabama, last September. Said Brégler: “Today shows that Airbus is becoming a truly global manufacturer—and a truly American manufacturer!”

AIRSPACEMAG.COM AIRBUS (2)

place of aviation inventors and dreamers. O.E. Williams, a pilot who invented the first reliable airspeed indicator around 1913, moved to Mobile and started an aviation school. He sold aircraft engines to the U.S. government before perishing in an airplane crash in 1917.

A generation later, 5,000 skilled labor-ers worked at Brookley Army Air Field to convert two dozen Pacific-bound war-ships into vessels capable of repairing and maintaining B-29s, P-51s, and a new type of aircraft: Sikorsky R-4B helicop-ters. Brookley was also where the Norden

bombsight was recalibrated, enabling Allied squadrons to more accurately tar-get the Third Reich’s war machine and thus, some say, shortening the conflict in Europe.

So it feels like a grand turning of the wheel of history that after decades of struggle, a big aviation company has come to Mobile’s aid, part of a broader regional renaissance in manufacturing, shipbuilding, and steel production. In mid-2012, Airbus, the gigantic European

aerospace consortium, signed a deal to build A320-family passenger jets in Mobile. The agreement paved the way for the first commercial aircraft factory ever built by a foreign manufacturer on U.S. soil.

A little more than three years later—

An A320-series tail section departs Hamburg, Germany, for a sea voyage to Mobile.

The former WWII base has been rebranded the Mobile Aeroplex at Brookley. The site of Airbus’ new plant boasts a 9,600-foot runway and direct access to Mobile Bay.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM ALABAMA GOVERNOR’S OFFICE/JAMIE MARTIN

September 14, 2015, to be exact—Lynyrd Skynrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” blared as Airbus officially opened its one-mil-lion-square-foot final assembly plant, located on 53 acres of grassy flatland at the former Brookley Air Field, now the Mobile Aeroplex at Brookley. The site, which has access to Mobile’s port, two interstate highways, and five Class 1 railroads, is Airbus’ only manufactur-ing hub in the western hemisphere. It’s the next step in the company’s “glocal” strategy, whereby the firm builds jets in Hamburg, Germany, and Toulouse, France, for the European market, and in Tianjin, China, for Asian customers. The Mobile plant, which initially aims to produce four jets per month, already employs more than 300 people. At its peak production capacity of eight jets per month, it could generate hundreds more jobs through the manufacturer’s supply chain.

Airbus initially posted openings for 260 skilled workers; in response, about 18,000 Americans applied or inquired. The employees there now were trained at Airbus facilities in Europe,

but the airplanes they’re building are all slated for North American carriers. Allan McArtor, chairman and CEO of Airbus Group, Inc., North America, says the company will need to produce around 5,500 aircraft to satisfy the North American airline market over the next 20 years. About 4,700 of those will be

single-aisle jets, like the ones under con-struction here.

That’s good news for the residents of Mobile, who in 1969 weathered what was at the time the largest base clos-ing in U.S. history. Some believe the closure of Brookley Air Force Base was President Lyndon Johnson’s punish-

A touch of the Old South at the Airbus plant groundbreaking: Alabama Governor Robert Bentley greets one of the Azalea Trail Maids—high school seniors chosen as Mobile’s ambassadors.

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ment to Alabama for supporting GOP candidate Barry Goldwater in the 1964 elections, while others suggested the move was aimed at Governor George Wallace, whose 1964 and 1968 presiden-tial campaigns divided the Democratic Party. (The action predated by more than two decades passage of the Defense Base Realignment and Closure Act, intended to remove political considerations from

base closures.) Whatever the case, 12,300 civilians lost their jobs. The local avia-tion industry didn’t vanish completely: The aircraft engine builder Continental Motors has operated at the Brookley site since 1966, and VT Mobile Aerospace Engineering has had a facility there for 25 years. But the decades that followed the closure were marked by struggle.

In recent years Mobile has attracted

$8.9 billion in capital investment and added 18,000 new jobs, with average salaries topping $55,000. Most of these have come from 39 foreign companies establishing plants or division offices on the Gulf Coast, where the cost of living—and critically, the cost of hiring—is low.

Mobile Mayor William S. “Sandy” Stimpson schmoozed hard to make the Airbus factory happen. So did his pre-decessor, Mayor Sam Jones, who served from 2005 to 2013, and William B. “Bill” Sisson, a bespectacled Clark Kent type who leads the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce. Sisson replaced another veteran negotiator on behalf of Mobile, Win Hallett, who left the chamber to go into private practice in 2013. Hallett went after the Boeing Dreamliner in 2003 and 2004, but ultimately withdrew.

Sisson recounts four separate rounds of brokering before the Airbus deal finally came together. He attributes the eventual win to the cultivation of relationships with Airbus brass and the advantages Brookley offers: the runway, the port, more than 1,600 acres of fallow land. “Brookley is such an incredible asset, a

Sections of fuselage for the first two aircraft assembled in Mobile. The plant posted 260 job openings; some 18,000 applicants responded.

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freak of nature that has everything in it,” Mayor Stimpson says.

There was also, says Sisson, a scrappy underdog spirit at work.

Growing PainsIn the early years of the 21st century, Mobile’s spirit has helped attract several large industrial companies to the city: Austal USA shipbuilding, the German chemical company BASF, FedEx Ground, and steelmaker Thyssen-Krupp (now known as AM/NS Calvert). But it with-drew its bid for the Boeing Dreamliner fuselage project when the negotiating team decided Boeing was asking for too much: incentives and tax breaks worth between $200 million and $450 million, depending on whom you ask.

In any city, incentives are a huge part of the economic development game. But in the fierce competition to lure aviation manufacturers, cities will offer subsidies for new factories, employee training, and infrastructure upgrades, in addition to the usual tax relief packages.

Mobile could be a test case for an aggressive “New South” style of economic

bootstrapping. With almost 196,000 residents, it’s the third largest city in a state that historically has spent less on health care and education than many

of its neighbors, but offers incentive packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars to court manufacturers and tech firms.

JAMES DARCY/AIRBUS

The first A321 built in Alabama was delivered to Jet Blue on April 25, 2016, three years after Airbus broke ground on the Mobile site.

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Mercedes-Benz located here in 1993, followed by Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai. In 2012 the New York Times reported that Alabama spends an average of $277 mil-lion every year on corporate incentives. (Texas spends more than $3 billion.) Critics have warned that the system robs the public of broader “foundation services” that could, if provided, improve overall standards of living while stimu-lating broad-based economic growth.

“There’s no ironclad rule that eco-nomic incentives are always bad,” says Wesley Tharpe, a senior policy analyst with the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, a think tank that analyzes eco-nomic opportunity in the South. “But many states, particularly in the South, tend to over-rely on trying to land the big fish with these kinds of packages. That has meant that these states tend to under-invest in the building block institutions like adequate schools, broadband—the types of investments that strengthen overall economic growth.”

T h e A l a b a m a D e p a r t m e n t o f Commerce expects Airbus to contrib-ute around $409 million to the state’s

gross domestic product. A September 2015 story in the Alabama Press Register reported that Airbus has promised the state it will sustain 600 employees in three of the next six years. (Employees of MAAS Aviation, which operates the Mobile Aeroplex paint shop, count

toward that total.) If Airbus doesn’t hit those numbers, it must repay some of the money the state paid it as an incen-tive, the amount to be calculated based on the size of the shortfall.

The city is counting on the good times to stay good. In 2014, Mobile reorga-nized its system of secondary schools into specialized “academies” to boost graduation rates and prepare kids for col-lege and high-tech careers. One of these

special institutions is the Aviation and Aerospace Academy at B.C. Rain High School.

Downtown, the signs of Mobile’s rebirth are everywhere. After “taking it on the chin in the recession of 2008,” city employment is now back at around 94

percent, says Sisson. Carol Hunter, a com-munications director at the Downtown Mobile Alliance, a development group, says Mobile is experiencing virtually 100 percent rental occupancy and more than 91 percent occupancy in top-grade office space. “Young employees from European companies like to move down-town—lots of conversions of buildings to apartments,” she says.

In 2007, the city reopened the his-

Mobile, an aviation center from World War II through the 1960s, fought for more than a decade to land a coveted aviation contract. And it endured two tough setbacks along the way.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM JAMES DARCY/AIRBUS

The first Airbus built on U.S. soil went to JetBlue. The A321 soars over a Mobile skyline dominated by the RSA Battle House Tower.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM AIRBUS

toric Battle House Hotel, having added a 34-floor tower to the original structure. Last year, it lured Carnival Cruise Lines back to its cruise terminal and opened the spectacular Gulf Quest Museum, where visitors can pilot virtual river-boats and container ships and observe the effects of climate change on an enor-mous suspended globe.

Why, then, does Mobile need an avia-tion giant? One answer: Civic pride.

When Brookley was thriving, 17,000 people were maintaining the Air Force C-119 Flying Boxcar, the C-131 Samaritan, the F-84 Thunderstreak, and the F-104 Starfighter, among other military air-craft. When it closed, the city lost $95 million in payroll. Says Mayor Stimpson: “To have Brookley be the center of our resurgence nearly 50 years later, it’s kind of poetic justice.”

Knowing When to FoldThe first time Mobile tried to land Boeing, in 2003, it was competing with munici-palities in 20 states. “Many of the [Boeing] company officials thought Mobile was a superior location, but politically to put it outside the state of Washington was too much to bear,” says Stimpson. Though Mobile made it to the finals, that first Dreamliner assembly project stayed in Everett, Washington, where Boeing already had a huge investment.

Washington’s then-governor Gary Locke signed a $3.2 billion incentives package to keep Boeing and other aero-space companies in place, offering sub-stantial tax credits and exemptions over a 20-year period. Boeing reportedly got another $32 million to pay for employee training and other goodies. In 2007, a former Boeing executive who now con-sults for the state on aerospace economic development, John Monroe, told the

Jennifer Ogle, director of human resources for the Mobile plant, snaps an opening-day selfie with some of the staff she helped to hire.

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Seattle Times that the Dreamliner project failed to produce the levels of supplier employment and spin-off commerce officials had hoped for.

“Test run” is how Sisson describes that first competition for Mobile. In 2004, another Dreamliner fuselage manufac-turing project appeared, this one run by Boeing partners Vought Aircraft and Alenia Aeronautica, an Italian company.

“We came out as [Boeing’s] first pick in 2004,” recalls Win Hallett. “But then the unions started kicking up. Boeing had promised an engineering center and a Center of Excellence to us, and during negotiations they took that off the table. But they still wanted more in incentives…. You have to know when to say no.” He believes Boeing used Mobile to get more concessions from North Charleston. “As long as there are two parties competing, you’re going to try to get more from one than the other,” Hallett continues. “That’s not unusual in economic development. But it became a one-sided negotiation.”

Alabama withdrew, and North Charleston won that second bid. Vought-

Alenia put up $560 million to build a 600,000-square-foot manufacturing plant at Charleston International Airport. South Carolina agreed to the complete $450 million incentives package the company wanted with a proviso that Boeing create at least 3,800 jobs and invest $750 million within seven years. A 2010 analysis by the Charleston, South Carolina Post and Courier estimated the state package actually exceeded $900 million in property and sales tax breaks and state bonds.

“Boeing’s incentives were substantial,” acknowledges Ryan Johnson, North Charleston’s coordinator of business development. Boeing got property tax abatements for 30 years and arranged to pay a “fee in lieu of property tax” that works out to about six percent, which Johnson says is standard practice for economic development projects. (The normal manufacturing tax rate in South Carolina is 10.5 percent.) He points to a study by the Charleston Metro Chamber of Commerce that estimates Boeing’s presence has pumped $11 billion into the region. The 8,200 Boeing employees

“give back to our community, buy houses in our community, and their kids go to school with our kids,” Johnson says.

Still, Sisson has no regrets about drop-ping Mobile’s bid for Boeing. “Everyone felt we made the right decision,” he says.

Tanker WarfareIn 2005, opportunity knocked in Mobile once more. Northrop Grumman and Airbus North America (then called EADS) had agreed to be partners in a bid to build the KC-45, a proposed replace-ment for the Air Force’s Boeing-built KC-135 Stratotanker. That contract was worth up to $35 billion, with the manu-facturers agreeing to deliver 179 aircraft over a 10-to-15-year span. Stimpson, then chair of the Mobile Chamber Board of Directors, began meeting with Ralph Crosby, then the president and CEO of EADS North America. (He retired at the end of 2012.)

Crosby had been tasked with laying out a North American production strat-egy so Airbus could grow its military and commercial businesses. He was a native of Charleston; his own mother lobbied

AIRSPACEMAG.COM AIRBUS

him to bring Airbus to his hometown. After receiving proposals from more

than 70 communities in 35 states, Crosby winnowed the competitors to five final-ists, among them the Charleston area and Mobile. Mobile’s deep port and easy access to Brookley struck him as ideal for moving tanker parts and equipment; there’d be no need to re-containerize components arriving by ship and drive them through a dense urban environ-ment.

In addition to the practicalities, he appreciated Mobile’s style of recruit-ment. “The [then] governor of Alabama, Bob Riley, showed up at our offices with every member of congress from Alabama, both senators, Mayor Sam Jones…. It was clear that these people were hungry and enthusiastic and putting the best offer on the table.”

In 2006 Airbus announced the creation of the Engineering and Design Center at Brookley, guaranteeing at least 150

engineering jobs, a figure that later rose to 230. Crosby said Airbus wanted to make a show of good faith to the com-munity they’d chosen, one that would not be dependent upon winning the tanker contract; the center opened in 2007. A year later, the bid for the tanker project was submitted, and in February 2008, the DoD announced that Northrop Grumman and Airbus had won.

Laura McDonald, a former Air Force maintenance manager and mother of four who’d moved to Mobile as a civilian just before the recession hit, had been hoping for a miracle. “Everybody was so excited,” she says.

The euphoria was short-lived. In March 2008 Boeing went to court alleg-ing irregularities and unfairness in the Air Force bidding process. After a legal

Assembly of an A321 cabin proceeds in Mobile. At full capacity, the plant will build eight jets per month.

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battle and rebid (in which Northrop Grumman dropped out as Airbus’ part-ner), the $35 billion tanker contract was awarded to Boeing.

“I remember thinking, ‘What are we going to do?’ ” McDonald recalls. “This was very bad news because Mobile has such a strong maritime community, but there was nothing in aviation here unless you wanted to work for a supplier…noth-ing on the scale the tanker would be.”

Sisson recalls the response arriving in stages. “We went from being elated to angry to deflated to feeling the oppor-tunity had been stolen,” he says. “I can just say that when it comes to those tanker projects, the fact that Boeing is an American company was a huge plus.”

Sam Jones, a Navy veteran who had served aboard the Forrestal decades before he became Mobile’s first African-American mayor, remained defiant: “We will build jets in Mobile,” he said the night the Boeing award was announced.

Fourth Time’s the CharmMcDonald channeled her energy into studying for a graduate degree. From

2009 through 2011 she stayed home with her children; her husband, an aircraft mechanic, commuted to Louisiana, a five-hour drive, each week. McDonald sent out résumés, to no avail. “The only jobs I could find I wasn’t qualified for—either medical professional or shipbuild-ing,” she says. Reluctantly, she and her husband decided to move to Louisiana and put their house up for sale.

Mobile remained determined to land a commercial aircraft project. Governor Robert Bentley, Win Hallett from the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce, new vice president of economic devel-opment Troy Wayman, and County Commissioner Connie Hudson all attended the 2011 Paris Air Show and met with Airbus Group CEO Tom Enders, Airbus North America Chairman and CEO Allan McArtor, Crosby, and several others.

“It became almost like getting family together over time,” Sisson says. “And the conversation was like this: ‘If you can make your business case for Airbus commercial manufacturing here, you can count on Alabama to be right with you.’ ”

Soon after, an incentives package north of $154 million was put on the table: $18 million pledged from the city of Mobile, $14 million from Mobile County, about $70 million from the state of Alabama, and $51.8 million from the Alabama Industrial Development Training program. Airbus would get a cash payment and some property tax abatements, among other perks.

In turn, the $68 billion international company committed to building a $600 million center at Brookley to construct the “classic” A320 series jets along with the “New Engine Option” variant, which is intended to provide a 15 percent fuel savings, by end of 2017.

It was the break Mobile had been fight-ing for.

“This was a labor of love,” says McArtor. “We were at this a long time. It’s an important project for the Gulf Coast, and the local community is just so enthusiastic to work with us. It’s not about an incentive package either…. We were impressed with the success of the automobile industry in Alabama, the aerospace industry in Huntsville,

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and the willingness of the state to train high-tech employees.”

Dress BluesAt the grand opening of Airbus’ Mobile plant last September, Laura McDonald was among the 260 recently-hired Airbus employees seated onstage in

matching blue shirts. “I remember hear-ing in the early part of 2012 the rumors that Airbus was going to name Mobile as the site of a commercial facility,” she recalled after the ceremony. “I have strong faith and we were all praying it would happen.”

McDonald had been trained in Hamburg; she started her job as a deliv-ery planner two months prior to the plant’s official opening, coordinating

operations checks between technicians and Airbus customers arriving to fly the aircraft. “Our house was on the market,” she says, “but now this job came up. We’re not going to move because there’s so much room here for growth.”

Another new hire seated onstage was Paul Hernandez, a fuselage inspector who,

after graduating from Chicago Vocational High School, had specialized in aviation quality control and powerplants. Though already in his early 60s and a grandfather, Hernandez remained robust and youthful-looking. He was working at Segers Aero Company—a maintenance, repair, and overhaul facility located on the other side of Mobile Bay from Brookley—when he heard an Airbus recruitment ad on the radio in June 2014.

“I realized I had all the prerequisites for the job,” Hernandez says. He too was shipped off to Hamburg for six months of training. Hernandez had never been overseas before, and the experience delighted him. He loved bicycling to work and meeting people in the same field from other countries. “You learn how others think,” he says. “And with an open mind and open ears, you [dis-cover] there are always things to learn from other people.”

At the opening-day celebrations, the Airbus brass echoed Hernandez’s upbeat sentiments. Executives Enders, McArtor, Barry Eccleston, and Fabrice Brégier all gave speeches. The hall was draped in red, white and blue bunting. “Today is a moment of pride…for all Airbus people everywhere,” Brégier, president and CEO of Airbus, said. “Today shows that Airbus is becoming a truly global manufacturer—and a truly American manufacturer!”

The first jet assembled in Mobile, an A321 ordered by JetBlue, made a successful 3.5-hour test flight on March 21. Reached by phone in April, Win Hallett, the Mobile

“Our house was on the market,” new Airbus hire Laura McDonald says, “but now this job came up. We’re not going to move because there’s so much room here for growth.”

AIRSPACEMAG.COM JAMES DARCY/AIRBUS

Area Chamber of Commerce vet, reflected on the more than 13 years he’d worked to

bring an airplane-maker to Mobile. “There are people in Washington state

who said Mobile couldn’t put a tricycle together the night before Christmas,” he says. “It will be a great satisfaction to many people to see our first jet delivered on the 25th of this month.”

At the opening day ceremony, Brégier and another new Airbus hire, Ryane Dedeaux, walked to an unfinished JetBlue tail cone and applied a label reading “This Aircraft Proudly Made in the USA by the Worldwide Team of Airbus.” The crowd cheered.

The first A321 built in Mobile sets off on its first flight, March 21, 2016. Airbus expects to build about 4,700 such single-aisle jets in the next 20 years.

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The Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia is being used in a new project to detect an alien signal.

LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE SPECIAL

Listen to the Nearest MILLION STARS

The search for extraterrestrials expands. BY DAMOND BENNINGFIELD

AIRSPACEMAG.COM LAURIE HATCH

DAN WERTHIMER DOESN’T MEAN to be rude, but he’s getting ready to eaves‑drop on the neighbors.

For decades, astronomers have been listening for messages sent to us—a “Hello, is anyone out there?” signal from intelligent aliens. But now Werthimer is about to get nosier; his team at the University of California at Berkeley is conducting the first search for commu‑nities on other worlds that are speak‑ing to one another—between planets and even across star systems. And to do it, he has two of the world’s largest radio telescopes and support from a planet‑hunting optical telescope.

Thanks to a new initiative announced last July, Werthimer’s team will begin searching for extraterrestrial civiliza‑tions, using instruments with greater sensitivity and scanning across a wider range of frequencies than any SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project to date. Called Breakthrough Listen, it began earlier this year and will continue for a decade at a price tag of $100 million. “It’s a lot of money, a lot of telescope time,” says Werthimer. “We’ll be able to look at a hundred bil‑

lion radio channels simultaneously. A big problem in SETI is we don’t know on what frequency ET might be trans‑mitting, so the more channels you can listen to, the better chance you have of

finding” a communication.“It’s an incredibly exciting time sci‑

entifically,” adds Werthimer’s colleague Andrew Siemion, director of Berkeley’s SETI Research Center and another Breakthrough Listen leader. “Something like one in five stars has an Earth‑like planet…. And our ability to look for dif‑ferent kinds of signals from intelligent civilizations on those planets is growing by leaps and bounds.”

Even with improvements in technol‑ogy, though, SETI has remained a tiny area within the field of radio astronomy. “In the entire world, there are probably fewer than 12 people who do full‑time SETI research,” according to Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer for the SETI Institute in nearby Mountain View.

But that small cadre of researchers, with the help of a few dozen part‑time SETI dabblers, has plowed through an impressive number of projects. They have scanned the skies at radio and opti‑cal wavelengths for intentional messages from other civilizations. Researchers have picked through data from NASA’s planet‑hunting Kepler space telescope for evidence of vast architecture eclips‑

A telescope at California’s Lick Observatory (with SETI’s Dan Werthimer, second from left) will look for alien lasers.

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ing part of a star’s light. (The public release of one star’s odd light curve last year generated a round of speculation about alien mega‑structures. Sadly, fol‑lowup observations have suggested that the more likely explanation is a swarm of comets.) And they’ve looked for super‑civilizations producing copi‑ous amounts of waste heat in the form of infrared energy. And the ideas never stop coming: There is a proposal to search for alien probes and artifacts in the solar system (possible payoffs but expensive) and another to listen for signals in beams of neutrinos or the recently discovered gravitational waves (far beyond current technology).

“The bottleneck is never a lack of ideas,” says Shostak. “The problem has always been funding.”

From the first search for extrater‑restrial signals—Frank Drake’s Project Ozma in 1960—SETI has struggled to be taken seriously by traditional funding agencies. Modest NASA studies in the 1970s and 1980s were criticized by the U.S. Congress; in 1993, legislators axed what was meant to be NASA’s long‑term sky survey after just a year. Since then

the field has survived, barely, primarily on private funding sources.

Then last summer, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced he would foot the bill for the biggest alien hunt in his‑tory. “In the 20th century, we stepped out from our planet—to space, to the moon, to the solar system,” Milner said at a press

conference for Breakthrough Listen last summer. “In the 21st century, we will find out about life on a galactic scale…. It is time to open our eyes, our ears, and our minds to the cosmos.” Among the luminaries endorsing Milner’s project that day was astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.

Milner, named after first‑human‑in‑space Yuri Gagarin, was studying physics at Moscow University in the 1980s when the entrepreneurial spirit first hit him.

He started buying American‑made per‑sonal computers and reselling them in local shops, then ventured to the United States to get an MBA. After briefly work‑ing at the World Bank, he returned to Russia and began investing in businesses, parlaying the purchase of a small factory into the takeover of the country’s largest

Internet company. With that move as an entry to the world of technology, Milner organized a venture capital fund, DST Global, which became an early investor in Facebook, then Twitter, Groupon, and Airbnb, along with major companies in India and China. According to Forbes, by the end of 2015 Milner amassed a net worth of $3.3 billion. In happy news for non‑billionaire scientists, Milner started a foundation in 2012 that awards three $3 million prizes annually—the larg‑

“There’s speculation that an advanced civilization might colonize another planet in its own solar system, like we might do with Mars. They might send messages back and forth between planets, and we could pick up the signals when they line up with Earth.”

AIRSPACEMAG.COM COURTESY BREAKTHROUGH INITIATIVES

est academic prize in the world—for achievements in fundamental physics, life sciences, and mathematics.

He also refuses to give interviews about his latest investment, so we can get a sense of his intentions only from the people now running the Breakthrough Listen project. “He studied physics, he studied the same kind of books in school that I did, so he knows a lot about SETI,” says Werthimer. “He really appreciates all the subtle nuances, and he asks a lot of great questions. He knows the chances

that we might find something are slim. But he speaks about this in the long term. He’s in it for the long haul.”

Werthimer was already in it for the long haul—he’s been working on SETI for decades, although his original love was the hardware, rather than the research. He’s been a tech junkie since his school days, when he joined the Homebrew Computer Club in California, where his fellow members included Apple found‑ers Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. “We were kind of messing around in our

basements, and we made the very first desktop,” Werthimer says. “Everybody in that club got filthy rich except for me, because I wanted to use the com‑puters to do astronomy. But I got really good at computing. I built a lot of cool machines that were in some ways bet‑ter than the Apple, but I never thought about selling them.”

Werthimer began to build instru‑ments that collect and analyze radio sig‑nals from space, and eventually started SETI@Home in 1999, a program that harnesses the background processing power of any computer it’s installed on to help sift through portions of the massive amounts of data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. And although his work hasn’t revealed any alien civilizations, Werthimer isn’t bothered by the silence. “I wouldn’t be in this field if I were not an optimist,” he says. “We’ve covered maybe a billionth of the parameter space. We can rule out super‑civilizations that want to conquer the galaxy”—whew—“but we can’t rule out civilizations like ours.”

Siemion too developed an early inter‑est in science and technology. “I did

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announces Breakthrough Listen last July alongside Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Frank Drake, and Ann Druyan.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM NASA/JPL-CALTECH/T. PYLE

a report when I was in third grade on a book by Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time,” he says. “When I got to Berkeley I was looking over possible research opportunities, and I discov‑ered that there was a SETI group. I had an ‘aha’ moment—I knew immediately that that’s what I would do.”

Siemion led his first SETI project while he was still a graduate student. He got the idea in 2010, while he was attending a meeting at the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Project Ozma. Attendees were re‑creating Ozma, which originally used a small radio antenna at the Green Bank location, with the observatory’s new 300‑foot‑diameter Green Bank Telescope, the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world. While Ozma took about 150 hours of telescope time, the re‑creation required only a few seconds to scan the same amount of sky.

“I started thinking: Why not do some real SETI with the telescope,” Siemion says. “On the plane back to San Francisco, I met in the aisle with a few other people, and we decided to write a proposal.” The

idea was to look at star systems in which the Kepler space telescope had discov‑ered planets. “We actually received not the best grade from the time allocation committee at Green Bank,” he says. “They gave us a C, because I think they were a little bit suspicious about whether we would actually be able to do it, but luck‑ily, even though it wasn’t highly ranked,

we still got the time.”Breakthrough Listen will take advan‑

tage of the data from Siemion’s work with Green Bank, but more importantly, it comes at a crucial time for the observa‑tory. Constructed in a valley in the West Virginia mountains, the Green Bank Telescope opened in 2000 as part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

SETI will tune into Planet -452b (artist’s concept) and other exoplanets found by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM DR. ANDREW P.V. SIEMION

NRAO is funded by the National Science Foundation and runs several facilities, including the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile (“The Universe’s Baby Boom,” Aug. 2013). But in 2012, NSF issued a report on the next 10 years of astronomy research that recommended pulling Green Bank’s fund‑ing by 2017, because some of its research abilities are duplicated at larger facilities like the VLA and Arecibo Observatory. Now SETI—usually the research area struggling for funding—has come along with Breakthrough Listen at just the right moment, providing a reason and the means to keep the telescope operating while its staff looks for additional funding.

One of Green Bank’s advantages is that it’s cocooned in the 13,000‑square‑mile National Radio Quiet Zone, where radio transmitters, cellphone towers, wifi networks, and other technology are limited by state and federal regulations. Scientists there would have an easier time determining if a signal in their observa‑tions is a message from another planet rather than a local teenager’s text. “One of the hardest things to do is tease out a

signal from another civilization in the radio observations,” says Karen O’Neil, the Green Bank Observatory site director. “There are a lot of repeating patterns, but they’re all man‑made.”

Green Bank’s receivers are so sensi‑tive they can detect the crackle of spark plugs in a gasoline‑powered engine, so only diesel vehicles are allowed within

a mile of the dish. The microwave oven in the observatory’s cafeteria sits inside a shielded box, and once the telescope even picked up interference from a small cur‑rent generated by a wet dog lying down

on an old heating pad. Staff members drive around in a pickup truck equipped with scanning equipment to track down stray electromagnetic signals, and some‑times lend a hand to help repair or replace offending devices in nearby businesses and homes.

SETI is using some of the project fund‑ing to expand Green Bank’s computer capabilities far beyond those of any pre‑vious radio SETI project. The system will be able to process and store as much data in a single day as existing projects do in a year or more. Then it’s sent out to the SETI team at Berkeley and SETI@Home volunteers for analysis. The extra pro‑cessing and storage capabilities are nec‑essary because Breakthrough Listen will scan billions of radio channels between 1 and 10 gigahertz. Earlier surveys have been able to scan no more than a few hundred million channels at a time, with about half the spectral range. “We probably have a trillion times better capabilities today than when I started 40 years ago,” says Werthimer.

That sensitivity should allow the tele‑scopes to pick up intelligent signals not meant for us, something that couldn’t

Andrew Siemion eyed the Green Bank Telescope, in the 13,000 square-mile National Radio Quiet Zone, as ideal for SETI research in 2010.

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have been done before the Kepler mission provided astronomers with exoplanet locations. “There’s speculation that an advanced civilization might colonize another planet in its own solar system, like we might do with Mars,” says Werthimer. “They might send messages back and forth between planets, and we could pick up the signals when they line up with Earth.”

In addition to the nearest million stars to Earth, the SETI group will monitor the densely packed center of the Milky Way galaxy, about 27,000 light‑years away. “Our solar system is about five billion years old,” says Werthimer. “Some stars are 10 billion years old, so there could be some very advanced civilizations out there.” And finally, Breakthrough Listen will stretch its search out even farther, to 100 nearby galaxies where super‑civilizations might be blasting messages between solar systems.

While the Green Bank Telescope searches in the northern hemisphere,

Breakthrough Listen will use the Parkes Telescope near Sydney, Australia, to search the southern sky. The 210‑foot movable dish is best known for transmitting most of the Apollo 11 moon landing video for the worldwide television broadcast (the event was fictionalized in the 2000 movie The Dish). The project will use about 20 percent of the observing time on each

telescope, a jump from the few dozen cumulative hours SETI usually gets annu‑ally to thousands of hours.

The third facility SETI is using will look instead of listen. The Automated Planet Finder, a 96‑inch optical telescope at Lick Observatory, outside San Jose, California, will devote 10 percent of its time to searching for interstellar lasers. “If we took our own highest‑powered lasers and paired them with our largest telescopes, we could send a beam that would outshine the sun by a factor of 10 at a distance of 1,000 light‑years,” says

Siemion. “Perhaps other civilizations are doing that to contact other civiliza‑tions, or to transmit a large amount of information.” It would be the equivalent of a Galaxy Wide Web.

Of course, not everyone is optimis‑tic about the chances of Breakthrough Listen or any other SETI project finding evidence of neighboring civilizations, but not necessarily because they don’t believe in aliens. “Listening for inten‑tional messages seems like a lost cause,” says Paul Davies, a researcher at Arizona State University and author of The Eerie Silence, a book that posits that current searches for intelligent life are flawed. “I’ve argued that we should be looking for other things: beacons, or probes, or alien artifacts in our own solar system. We have no idea how a super‑civiliza‑tion would manifest itself. It could be genetic—we could find signs in terres‑trial biology…. There’s a good chance we might be alone in the universe. So we should search, but we shouldn’t spend a lot of money on it.”

Even Werthimer doesn’t expect to hear from extraterrestrials anytime soon. “I’m optimistic in the long run,” he says. “We

Breakthrough Listen will stretch its search out even farther, to 100 nearby galaxies where super-civilizations might be blasting messages between solar systems.

BACK TO CONTENTSAIRSPACEMAG.COM

Earthlings are a young, emerging civili‑zation. We’re just getting in the game, so a thorough search will take a while.... We probably won’t see anything in the next 10 years, so we’ll have to devise a

new plan after that. Maybe, if the trend in computing power keeps going, we’ll find ET in 30 years.”

In the meantime, let the eavesdropping begin.

The Parkes Observatory in Australia is Breakthrough Listen’s outpost to eavesdrop on alien communication between star systems.

DANIEL SALLAI

AIRSPACEMAG.COM AARON PARNESS/JPL

MARS, UNDERGROUND

LOOKING FOR LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS? GO DEEP. BY MARK

BETANCOURT

IN A MUGGY HOTEL ROOM off I-40 in Grants, New Mexico, two roboticists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are bent over a mass of electronics, the open body of a robot called LEMUR, short for Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot. LEMUR is designed to climb the porous walls of a cave 150 million miles

away, on Mars. At the moment, though, its four multi-jointed limbs are piled in a heap in the closet, beside the compli-mentary ironing board.

Grants is the perfect place to field test a climbing robot. It’s surrounded by an ancient volcanic lava flow spread across the landscape like a jagged sea of

Oreo cookie crumbs. In one corner of the flow, located in nearby El Malpais National Monument, is a network of subterranean corridors known as lava

Practicing for Mars in New Mexico, a team of roboticists and scientists descend into Big Skylight Cave.

LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE SPECIAL

AIRSPACEMAG.COM NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

tubes: long, winding caves big enough to drive a subway train through. There are tubes just like them on Mars, only bigger, due to that planet’s weaker grav-ity. They may be some of the best places in the solar system to look for extrater-restrial life.

LEMUR climbs walls in much the same way cockroaches do, gripping the sur-face with hundreds of tiny microspines in the pads of its paw-like feet (early designs were inspired by conversations with entomologists). For the time being, its pace is more like that of a sloth, as it makes sure every grip is a secure one. The robot had just started its first climb in the New Mexico tubes when it started smok-ing. A short had developed in one of its joints, probably caused by jostling either on the drive from California or on the bumpy hike from the nearby trailhead. Christine Fuller and Neil Abcouwer have been testing LEMUR’s 28 joints, one by one, trying to locate the short. They’ve been doing this for three days, running the hotel room’s shower and wearing special bracelets to cut down on static electricity so they don’t further damage the robot.

A 200-yard-wide pit on Mars, likely a cave entrance, was photographed by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and spotted in the returned images by a group of seventh graders in Cottonwood, Caiifornia.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM AARON PARNESS/JPL

“Sit rep is: We’ve verified that noth-ing’s wrong [with LEMUR] just when sitting on the table,” says Abcouwer, looking a little rumpled after a long day of tinkering. The day before, he carried LEMUR to the cave wall on his back, like a passed-out toddler, before setting it up to climb.

Thus begin great feats in planetary exploration.

The capabilities that a LEMUR-like robot could bring to astrobiology are indeed great. Planetary geologists have known since the first up-close pictures were taken of planetary surfaces in the 1960s that Mars and Earth’s moon also have lava tubes—sinuous, hollowed-out rilles caused by lava flowing on the surface during episodes of volcanism. It wasn’t until 2007, though, that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter found the first opening to one of these caves, where the roof of a tube has partially col-lapsed, creating a “skylight,” which from above looks like a giant pit. By 2009, the Japanese lunar orbiter SELENE had seen skylights on the moon, as well as other pits and holes of various geological ori-gins. Since then, hundreds more caves

have been located, creating a potential new field of science: space speleology.

Why explore extraterrestrial caves? Partly for the same reasons scientists venture into caves on Earth. They’re protected from weather and (on other worlds) from meteoric bombardment,

so their geological formations serve as frozen records of the planet’s past. Then there’s the life question. Liquid water on Mars is likely to exist underground, at depths where ice is melted by warmth from the planet’s interior. In caves, the temperature stays relatively stable, so

The hundreds of gripping microspines in LEMUR’s feet were inspired by cockroaches.

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they would also offer refuge from the 200-degree Fahrenheit day-night swings on the surface. Most important, they offer protection from radiation. Since Mars’ protective magnetic field flickered out eons ago, the constant barrage of cosmic rays on the surface likely would have destroyed any exposed critters. If life moved underground to escape, caves are a good place to look for fossil evidence of their tenancy. It’s even possible that in some Martian caves, life still exists.

“This is where the action is in terms of exploration,” says Penny Boston, a veteran cave scientist who just left the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology to become director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the agen-cy’s focal point in the search for extrater-restrial life. Recently she’s been a leading advocate for what may strike many as a novel idea: that the ideal place to search for alien biology is not on the Martian surface, where NASA’s rovers have been looking, but beneath it.

In the early 1980s, Boston was one of the founders of the Mars Underground, a group of graduate students dedicated to putting human exploration of the Red

Planet on NASA’s agenda, at a time when the agency was more focused on build-ing a space station in Earth orbit. Since then, she has traveled everywhere from Sardinia to the Sahara, exploring some of the most exotic environments on Earth as a way to understand other planets. A few years ago, Boston spent time in this very El Malpais lava tube, trying to determine whether such a formation could provide shelter for humans setting up a base on Mars. Now she’s strategizing about the search for Martian life. The conventional approach is to look for chemical “bio-markers”; Boston says her perspective is different. “I think we need to be casting our net further afield in case [Mars] life is chemically unrelated to the way our life conducts business,” she says.

Boston is studying the patterns Earth microbes tend to print on cave walls: labyrinthine calcium deposits called bio-vermiculation. She believes they would never occur accidentally, even on another planet. If such patterns exist in a Martian cave, she says, there’s a good chance microbes made them. “The compelling thing about them is, it’s a macroscopic biosignature of microscopic life. A lot

of NASA’s work has focused on how we look at the molecular constituents of life. And I’m like, ‘That’s great, but what if it’s not based on DNA?’ ”

In a perfect world, Boston would pre-fer to look for these patterns in person. But robots will likely beat her to it. She’s here at El Malpais evaluating a camera and computer integrated with LEMUR’s body. The idea is that the robot would use pattern recognition software to make its own rough assessment as to whether markings on a cave wall could be biovermiculation or just a random pat-tern. If an area was promising, the robot would decide autonomously whether to look more closely. A team led by Nancy Chanover, a planetary scientist at New Mexico State, is adding another experi-ment to this particular expedition—a small spectroscope designed to inspect caves for chemical signs of life.

In the lava tube next to this one, other JPL researchers are testing an idea for a new communication method that could let a cave-exploring robot talk to its lander through many feet of rock. Others test a technique that could map caves from orbit.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM LEFT: JPL; RIGHT: KENNETH INGHAM

Boston and Aaron Parness, a JPL roboti-cist with his hand in many of the lab’s most forward-thinking projects, have convened this diverse crew to encour-age collaboration between scientists and

engineers. LEMUR has been designed with Boston and Chanover’s science in mind, and this field test is the first attempt to have it work in the wild; the group also wants to see if the robot

can recognize known biovermicula-tion patterns on the lava tube walls. Unfortunately, LEMUR’s mishap has scuttled much of the week’s agenda.

“Until you actually get out in terrain

Left: JPL robotics engineer Christine Fuller studies patterns created by microbes on a cave wall. Above: In New Mexico, Carolyn Parcheta packs her trusty robot, which she ordinarily uses to explore Hawaiian volcanoes.

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like this, which is what the rest of the solar system is made out of, you think you know what it’s gonna be,” says Boston. “I think for the young roboticists on the team, it’s a big eye-opener.”

LEMUR had worked flawlessly in lab trials. But a future Mars mission would have to face getting a rover into, around, and out of a cave like this—while doing scientifically useful work at the same time. The challenge is almost laughably difficult.

First you’ve got to land as close as possible to the cave opening, to avoid wasting energy on a long trek across the surface before the exploration even begins. As the lander flies over the cave, it should be gathering information that shows a rough layout of the entrance. The flyover has to be perfectly executed in order to get the maximum view of the area just inside the cave opening; picture walking past an open doorway and, as your viewpoint changes, seeing as much as you can inside the room. A cave-exploring robot, in other words, will have to land with far more precision than Curiosity, which touched down more than a mile from its target site on

Mars. Ideally, the lander should be able to fly directly over an opening that may be only 100 yards wide, and land within 100 yards of its edge.

And landing is the easy part.A robot descending into a skylight

would have to be lowered onto the cave floor by a crane anchored on the surface, or possibly by another robot suspended from a kind of tightrope strung across the pit. A team from Carnegie Mellon University, led by veteran roboticist Red Whittaker, is working on two robots that use the second method. The team tested it in the lava tubes of Craters of the Moon National Monument in Idaho. It worked, mostly, although the team had a harder time than they’d expected stringing the tightrope across the pit and getting it taut enough to allow the aerial bot to wheel along it. Alone on another planet, the bots would have to use a rocket fitted with an anchor to string the cable across the cave open-ing, or send a surface rover to walk the unanchored end to the other side.

“We did a lot of field tests, and in each one we built more capability into the system,” says Uland Wong, who co-led

the CMU team. “As it got more complex, it got more and more difficult to set up, and there were more possibilities for things going wrong.”

LEMUR is designed to crawl into a cave opening without assistance, and the robot would have to navigate the unpredictable twists and turns of a lava tube, just as a human cave explorer would, perhaps at times even hanging by one or two paws in order to get around big obstacles.

“There’s definitely some evil terrain geometries in there,” says Parness. “That’s why the robot’s got to be smart. It’s got to pick the path of most probable success.” At this stage of development, LEMUR is barely able to step over a small crack in a wall, so it’s got a long way to go before it’s ready for Mars.

As for getting a sample out of a cave and back to Earth for analysis, Boston has no illusions about the challenge ahead. “Having [retrieved samples] myself many times, it’s a logistical difficulty that I think is really beyond our current or immediately foreseeable generation of robotic devices,” she says. Plan A, there-fore, is for the robot to carry instruments sophisticated enough to do the analysis

AIRSPACEMAG.COM KENNETH INGHAM

onsite—hence the field tests by Boston and Chanover. Another solution could be to train smaller robots to bring samples back to a more capable mother robot based near the opening of the cave. The mother would then analyze the sample using better, more power-hogging instru-ments and relay the data to the nearby lander, who would send it on to Earth.

Even the smaller robots would have trouble moving around, however—far more trouble than Curiosity-type rovers have on the surface. Cave floors are often uneven surfaces strewn with debris. The CMU team’s wheeled rover is based on the same “rock crawler” chassis design used in off-road vehicles on Earth, and they’re using software that captures a human driver’s performance in order to teach the robot how to navigate choppy terrain.

“It worked fairly well,” Wong says of the Idaho field tests. In previous trials, there had been “many instances where it flipped itself over. It’s still a develop-ing technology.”

Wong has since moved on to NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, where he’s developing a solution for the mobility problem: passive instrument

stations that don’t move at all under their own power but are launched out of a cannon by a larger robot and scattered to the far corners of the cave, where they take readings and relay communications as a network.

Boston and colleagues have pro-

posed similar “swarm” solutions; theirs involve hundreds of little hopper robots that, once released into a cave open-ing, would mindlessly flip themselves along until they got stuck. Engineers at the University of Southampton in England have proposed packing such a

robot swarm into a Mars surface lander, then sending them out in all directions to search for cave openings that are too small to see from orbit. When they found something, they would return, much as honeybees do after they’ve been out look-ing for flowers. Another project, called Arne, developed by planetary scientists at Arizona State University, would land a spacecraft at the bottom of a lunar pit; the craft would then open to deploy three tiny flying “pit-bots,” which would use chemically fueled micro-thrusters to fly around the cave in short bursts, bypass-ing the floor debris altogether.

But each of these concepts has a stum-bling block: communications. The radio waves used by rovers to receive com-mands and relay data can’t penetrate rock, and, given the terrain, a cable tether isn’t practical. Without a link to the sur-face, a cave robot couldn’t go far from its base station before losing contact.

At El Malpais, JPL’s Darmindra Arumugam and Steven Carnes are test-ing an idea that could make possible at least basic messaging between a cave rover and the surface. They’re working their way around the rocky bowl beneath

Penny Boston in her element, taking samples from Spider Cave in Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM KENNETH INGHAM

a skylight, a laptop in Arumugam’s hands. Every few feet, they measure the strength of signals; instead of radio, they use low-frequency magnetic fields created by a transmitter on the surface and read by a receiver in Arumugam’s backpack. So far, they’re surprised by the signals’ strength, even through several yards of rock. A major benefit to this method is that it generates three distinct signals, which lets the user triangulate the rover’s precise location and orienta-tion and create a rudimentary map of its route. Using the technique for commu-nications is still slightly experimental, and no one knows whether it could be refined to transmit anything beyond cursory messages and data.

Another way around the communica-tion problem is to give the robot more autonomy, so it can make at least some decisions about how to move, where to go, and what to look at without needing instructions from Earth. Right now, such artificial intelligence software is in its

VolcanoBot dangles from a cable as Carolyn Parcheta shows the author how she works its controls.

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infancy. But the engineers can at least develop ways for the robots to find their way around pitch-black caves.

One relatively simple method uses infrared light to map nearby surfaces. By projecting a grid of IR light onto the rock in front of it and interpreting how the grid warps when the light bounces back, a robot can create a basic but accu-rate 3D model of the cave interior.

Another team at El Malpais is working on a fledgling project called PERISCOPE, which involves beaming light from an orbiting spacecraft into a cave open-ing, then using an extremely sensitive, extremely fast camera to measure exactly when the light returns to the orbiting sensor after bouncing off the cave walls. The result would be a synthetic image of the inside of the cave, essentially giv-ing researchers the ability to “see around corners” and learn about the cave’s struc-ture before setting a robotic foot on the surface.

Some of the most promising results have come from Wong, who developed a process called lumenhancement as part of CMU’s cave robots project. Using a combination of calibrated illumination,

LIDAR (light-based radar), and conven-tional photography, he has created cave maps so detailed they look like 3D pho-tos. He thinks they’re “probably the best models that have ever been made of an underground environment in terms of density and accuracy.”

While these technologies can help robots see underground, darkness is still their enemy. Normally, sunlight would serve as the simplest and most readily available source of electrical power for the rovers, but that’s a problem inside a cave. Back at JPL, another team is work-ing on a technique that uses a flexible mirror deployed on the surface to reflect light into a cave opening. Additional “light piping” with more mirrors could deliver sunlight further underground. It would be better to equip the robot with its own power source, but that adds vol-ume and weight. In its current prototype form, LEMUR is powered by a nearby gasoline generator. It has onboard bat-teries too, but they run out after about 90 minutes.

Considering all the logistical difficul-ties, it could be a decade before one of these machines launches into space.

“I’m a big robot fan,” Boston says, “but it’s a long way from where we currently are to a robot that can do what I do in a cave, or even some portion of what I do in a cave.” Parness thinks that, at least from a technology standpoint, a basic version of LEMUR could be ready to go to Mars by 2026.

NASA may not be ready though. The agency has not defined its Mars plans beyond 2020, and that mission, laments Boston, will be “just another rolling robot and lander.”

The first step into an extraterrestrial cave might therefore be taken by a pri-vate company. Red Whittaker’s side project, Astrobotic, is vying for Google’s Lunar XPrize, which will award $20 mil-lion to the first privately funded team to land a rover on the moon, drive it 500 meters (about a third of a mile), and send home high-definition images and video. The Astrobotic team plans to go several steps further, mapping a partially col-lapsed lunar pit in a giant plateau called Lacus Mortis during the lander’s flyover, then driving right up to the edge with a 70-pound rover called Andy. If they get that far, they may even attempt to drive

AIRSPACEMAG.COM AARON PARNESS/JPL

the robot down the ramp formed by the collapse of one side of the pit, just to see what they can see.

Whittaker says the mission is nearly ready to go. Provided it can hitch a ride on one of the next few moon-bound launches, Andy may get its chance before the decade is out. A Japanese team from Tohoku University is also trying for the prize, using two all-terrain micro-rovers, one of which is designed to anchor on the surface and lower the other one into a cave opening. The Japanese and Astrobotic teams plan to share a lander and explore the lunar pit together (they’re even plan-ning to line up the rovers for a friendly lunar drag race).

Whittaker is optimistic that the solar system’s caves are within reach, and that robots are the way forward. “The payoff would be unbelievable,” he says. Seeing what lies beneath the lunar or Martian surface would be, he believes, “like com-ing upon the Grand Canyon for the first time.”

In the meantime, while LEMUR con-valesces back at the hotel, another robot is being tested at El Malpais—a much simpler one. VolcanoBot is designed to

be lowered into the narrow vertical fis-sures created during volcanic eruptions, and to map the fissure as it descends. It’s little more than a remote-controlled toy car with a camera on it. While it’s cur-rently used in Hawaii to study lava flows, it could in principle explore similar fis-sures on the moon and Mars.

VolcanoBot typifies the kind of baby steps that space engineers often have to take at the start of a project. Carolyn Parcheta, the volcanologist spearhead-ing VolcanoBot as a post-doc at JPL, is testing the little rover by simply point-ing it toward a 30-foot drop along a col-lapsed portion of lava tube and press-ing “Forward” on its controller. Even though the wheels have angled gripping spines just like those on LEMUR’s paws, VolcanoBot gets stuck before it can reach the cliff.

Parcheta leans forward and nudges it over the edge, saying gently, “There ya go, kiddo.” A few minutes later, she’s yank-ing the tether sideways, trying to unstick the bot from a tricky perch below; instead she knocks loose its binocular infrared camera, which now dangles by its wires. Nothing a few hours in the lab won’t fix, and Parcheta is working toward building a much more robust version.

“We need to make sure it will work regardless of where we take it,” she says, indicating the general cosmos around her. “Regardless of how many times it gets banged against the wall, it’s got to work.”

BACK TO CONTENTS

The LEMUR cave-climbing robot gets a workout on a vertical rock face.

PERLAN 2 GOES FOR 90,000 FEET.BY TOM LECOMPTE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHAD SLATTERY

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Optimized for altitude: Jim Payne, one of the most accomplished glider pilots in the world, is one of four who will fly the purpose-built glider on its record attempts.

TO THE SAILPLANE

STRATOSPHERE

AIRSPACEMAG.COM JAMES DARCY/AIRBUS

A WALL OF CLOUD RUNS ABOVE THE Eastern slope of the Carson Range, which looms over the town of Minden, Nevada, about an hour south of Reno. The wall runs the length of the ridgeline that stretches south toward the desert cities of Palm Springs and Las Vegas. A broad expanse of brilliant blue sky separates it from another wall of cloud running parallel. Stretching from the California border across central Nevada is a series of cloud lines, like waves rolling toward the shore, accompanied by vicious winds. Airliners approaching Reno report severe turbulence, and most small aircraft are staying on the ground. For pilot Tim Gardner, however, the weather is per-fect—ideal conditions for high-altitude soaring. “It’s killing me not to get up there,” he says, but the glider he’s learning to fly, Perlan 2, is not quite ready.

When it is ready, Perlan 2 will attempt what no glider—what no piloted air-craft—has ever achieved: sustained flight at 90,000 feet, far into the stratosphere

and near the vacuum of space. To get there the sailplane will ride stratospheric mountain waves, prodigious currents of air created by winds that sweep over mountains. The highest known waves rise up over the Andes in southern Argentina and interact with the polar vortex, the giant cyclone of air that swirls

around the poles. In the rarefied atmo-sphere 90,000 feet up, the air density is just two percent of what it is at sea level, and about the same air density as on the surface of Mars. At such heights, an air-craft can maintain lift and power only if it is very light or very fast. A handful of pilots have “zoomed” fighters or X-planes

Perlan 2 releases from its tow rope at 8,000 feet like most gliders.

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to above 100,000 feet by using ballistic trajectories like that of an artillery shell, but for level flight, the current record by a piloted aircraft is 85,068 feet, set in 1976 by an SR-71 Blackbird spyplane, the world’s fastest jet aircraft.

The Perlan Project (so named for the pearlescent stratospheric clouds in Scandinavia) is the brainchild of Einar (pronounced “Ay-nar”) Enevoldson, a former test pilot for the Royal Air Force, U.S. Air Force, and NASA. He’s piloted dozens of aircraft, including the F-86, F-14, and F-111. He’s also flown one-of-a-kind experimental craft, among them the odd, oblique-wing AD-1 and the X-24B lifting body. During the golden age of flight research, Enevoldson was a member of the elite community that included Chuck Yeager, Scott Crossfield, and other lumi-naries pushing the bounds of aviation.

Enevoldson retired from NASA in 1986 and went to work as a test pilot for Grob Aircraft in Germany, where he flew the Strato 2C, a high-altitude research air-craft developed by the German Aerospace Research Center, DLR. That project was

canceled, but the work piqued his interest in high-altitude flight. He recalls walk-ing down a corridor at DLR’s offices near Munich in 1992 and noticing an image tacked outside the office of an atmo-spheric researcher. Made with LIDAR (light detection and ranging), the image showed what Enevoldson recognized as mountain waves, but these were far bigger and extended much higher than any he had seen before. Standing in front of the image, Enevoldson immediately saw the potential to do something unprecedented. He realized that if the waves were associ-ated with enough wind, they could propel a glider to heights previously thought unobtainable. “I really thought at this moment that this could end up being my life’s work,” he says. High-altitude glider pilot Doug Perrenod, a Perlan project team member, says the realization was the project’s eureka moment.

Mountain waves can be compared to water in a stream swiftly running over a boulder. Air is a fluid, and once winds crest over a mountain ridge and roll down the mountain’s other side—the lee

side—they push up into a wave. With the right conditions, the wave can rise thousands of feet higher than the sum-mit of the mountains.

The presence of the waves are often indicated by clouds that are lens-shaped, or lenticular. Early aviators quickly learned to avoid flying near or under the convex clouds because they are associated with severe turbulence and downdrafts. But as far back as the 1930s, glider pilots discovered they could use the powerful updrafts to climb to great heights.

In the late 1940s, a community of soar-ing enthusiasts sprouted up in the central California town of Bishop—not far from Minden—drawn by the town’s proximity to the 14,000-foot-high Sierra to the west and the winds sweeping in over the range from the Pacific Ocean. Bishop became the center of the first scientific study of mountain waves. The Air Force-sponsored Sierra Wave Project enlisted atmospheric scientists, meteorologists, aeronautical engineers, and glider pilots to study the structure and behavior of mountain waves.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM COURTESY OF NASA (PAUL NEWMAN, GSFC)

Routinely flying above 40,000 feet, the gliders set a succession of records, and the study found that mountain waves, or a series of them, could reach above 45,000 feet with vertical wind speeds of 5,000 feet per minute, up or down. The wind rotors beneath the waves, like the hydraulics in a boulder-filled river, sometimes formed an uninterrupted wall of turbulence. The study provided the first comprehensive documentation of the hazards of moun-tain flying, and the findings were widely distributed to pilots.

The soaring community gathered near the Sierra Nevada has grown since the 1940s; on a day of strong thermals, there may be 20 gliders flying. “Here at Minden, where we live, in the summertime it’s not uncommon for thermals to go to 18,000 [feet],” says Perlan chief pilot Jim Payne. “We regularly go to 25,000 in a mountain wave. That’s normally kind of a limit because we don’t have pressurization and high-tech oxygen systems.” Payne is one of the world’s most experienced glider pilots: He has set a number of speed and distance records, and in 2001 the

THE AIR UP THERE AN ATMOSPHERIC PRIMER We live in the troposphere. In addition to being the air we breathe, the troposphere, from sea level to about 60,000 feet, is the location of almost all weather. The ambient temperature in this layer drops with altitude until, at its top, the atmosphere begins to change: Temperatures rise, the air becomes drier and more stable, air convection ceases, along with most clouds and variable weather. This area of transition, the tropopause, was thought to be the absolute limit of glider flight. Above it, the stratosphere is an area of relative calm, but scientists don’t know as much about it as they’d like: Most data about the stratosphere is gathered by high-altitude balloons or earth-bound sensors, but the Perlan project will give scientists the chance to study it up close and at length.

X-15 (rocket): 314,688 ft—rocket-powered, zoom climb

350,000

250,000

150,000

100,000

50,000

25,000

FEET

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ATO

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Ye-266 (jet): 123,520 ft—zoom climb

Helios (propeller): 96,863 ft

SR-71 (jet): 85,068 ft

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Fédération Aéronautique Internationale recognized him with its most prestigious gliding award. In the 1980s, he piloted a high-altitude glider as part of the U.S. Air Force’s Soar Eagle project to demonstrate that aircraft can fly at 50,000 feet (they didn’t quite make it).

Although climbing to high altitudes is common in the Minden community, it is relatively rare elsewhere: National and international organizations give out “lenticular pins” to glider pilots who reach 25,000 feet; higher altitudes bring additional recognition. “In the course of history I think they’ve given out like 1,200 of those,” says Payne. Given the number of glider pilots, “that’s actually a small number,” he says. (The sport reaches back to the 1920s; as of 2011, according to Gliding International, there were more than 110,000 glider pilots.) Payne met Enevoldson when the latter was at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in California—not far, by air, from Minden.

After his epiphany, Enevoldson began studying stratospheric mountain waves.

He learned from atmospheric balloon experiments that all stratospheric waves occur within an arc 35 to 40 degrees from either pole. In 1998, a mutual friend put Enevoldson in touch with Elizabeth Austin, an atmospheric physi-

cist studying the structure of the polar vortex. Austin theorized that during polar winters, the polar night jet, a nar-row band of winds with speeds greater

than 260 mph, would interact with the stratosphere, and under certain condi-tions allow mountain waves to propa-gate as high as 130,000 feet—far higher than anyone thought possible. Austin and Enevoldson began scouring maps, searching for places where conditions for stratospheric waves would likely exist. “We looked at Russia,” Austin recalls. “We looked at Sweden. We looked at Alaska.” But in each case the surrounding land-forms tended to dampen the intensity and endurance of the effect. Austin and Enevoldson turned their attention to the southern hemisphere, where mountain ranges surrounded by wide stretches of open water could be found. The team finally discovered El Calafate, a quiet town in Argentina on the eastern edge of the Andes Mountains, surrounded on three sides by a freshwater lake and lacking the topography that interferes with wave propagation.

IN 2006, after attempts in California and New Zealand, Enevoldson and Steve Fossett, a pilot and financier, traveled to Argentina

It may break the altitude record set by Einar Enevoldson (left) and Steve Fossett.

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and set a world altitude record in a modi-fied Glaser-Dirks DG505M glider, dubbed Perlan I. “Little by little we kept inching our way upward,” Enevoldson recalls. After nearly five hours, they had reached 50,727 feet and were still climbing steadily at 300 feet per minute. “We could have kept going,” Enevoldson says. But by that time “we were both really cold and tired. Steve said we had proved what we had come to prove. We were 17,000 feet above the tropo-pause. So we agreed: Let’s go home.” Upon landing, the group turned to the planning and design of Perlan 2.

Greg Cole, founder of Windward Performance in Bend, Oregon, designed the aircraft. Despite its extraordinary mission, Perlan 2’s dimensions—33 feet long and 84 feet in wingspan—make it a large glider, but not the largest, similar in size to other high-performance glid-ers. Like many other modern sailplanes, it is built of carbon fiber, so it is light (just 1,700 pounds, including pilots) but strong enough to withstand the severe turbulence it may encounter.

Perlan 2 is built for altitude. “Everything

you do when you design an airplane is a compromise,” says Payne. “The Perlan 2 airfoil is optimized for about 60,000 feet.” A typical glider is optimized for about 7,000 feet. “[Perlan is] not as good at low altitude as a racing glider, but at higher altitudes it becomes very good, and at very high alti-tudes, a racing glider’s airfoil would be so bad it couldn’t fly at all.”

At low altitudes, Perlan 2 has a glide ratio of about 40 to 1—it moves forward 40 miles for every mile of altitude lost. That’s a lower performance than typi-cal competition gliders, which have ratios of 60 to 1, but as it climbs it gains performance. At 60,000 feet, just above the tropopause where the stratospheric wave is at its weakest, the glider’s wings have maximum efficiency.

The area of the wing is another com-promise. “In the case of Perlan, you want to be able to climb,” says Payne. Perlan II’s wing “has a larger area than you would build in a racing glider of the same type, which allows you to climb better in ris-ing air because you can fly slower.” Less air travels over the wing at slow speeds

than at fast ones, so to create lift at slow speeds, the wing requires more area. “We definitely have more wing area than an Arcus [a roughly comparable sport glider], which means Perlan will climb better than the Arcus in weak lift.”

In addition to the aerodynamic chal-lenges of reaching 90,000 feet, the team has had to prepare for the extreme condi-tions each two-person crew will face. Four pilots, including Tim Gardner, will fly at El Calafate. Among the dangers: tempera-tures of –60 degrees Fahrenheit, winds over 250 mph, exposure to solar radia-tion, and the possibility of violent turbu-lence. Many gliders could potentially fly to extreme altitudes, but in atmospheric pressures above 62,000 feet, where the boiling point of water falls to 98.6 degrees, humans can no longer draw breath. The pilot must wear a spacesuit, or the cabin must be pressurized. The pressurization system used by most airplanes—com-pressed air from the engines—is not an option for gliders. To eliminate the need for the bulky, awkward pressure suits that the crews used on Perlan I, the

AIRSPACEMAG.COM JAMES DARCY/AIRBUS

designers of the new glider added a pres-surized cabin and an oxygen rebreathing apparatus adapted from those used by fire-fighters, pressurized by a scuba air bottle. “We’re just beginning, but we will be the

first successful glider ever in history to fly with a pressurized cabin that successfully keeps pilots alive at extreme altitudes,” says team member Doug Perrenod. The pressurization system indirectly causes

the biggest piloting challenge, says Payne: Instead of the clear, unbroken bubble canopy typical of other gliders, which would be both too heavy and vulner-able to breakage because of the pressure difference, the team uses several small porthole-like windows distributed over the cockpit. The compromise reduces the pilots’ visibility; to peer out one window or another, they will need to shift around, making relatively simple tasks (like not colliding with the towplane) significantly tougher.

Nearly 10 years after setting the alti-tude record with Fossett, Enevoldson has a clear idea of how the next record-break-ing flight will unfold. Reaching the site of the most powerful mountain waves will take about an hour. Perlan 2 will release from the towplane at 12,000 feet, and the climb to 35,000 feet will happen very quickly: as little as 20 minutes, suggests Enevoldson. Then the pilots will need to find a secondary wave to carry them into the stratosphere. They figure it will take around three and a half hours before they arrive at 90,000 feet. The aircraft will carry

Though Perlan 2 takes off from and lands on Earth, the atmosphere in which it’s designed to fly is so thin that Airbus hopes the data could help them design an aircraft for Mars.

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Perlan 2’s austere forward cockpit. The crew cannot see much through the portholes, so a tail-mounted camera gives them an overview. The red handle deploys a recovery parachute.

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enough battery power for electric blankets and socks, but the pilots are more likely to overheat than freeze: Ordinary, unpressur-ized gliders let in cold air, so the pilots often wear heavy winter clothing, but because Perlan 2 has thick pressurization bulkheads, it retains the heat and moisture that would ordinarily leak out. (The team had to install anti-fog film on the windows to prevent condensation from clouding them.)

The team doesn’t expect much trouble in handling the aircraft above 60,000 feet, even though at extremely high altitudes, the difference between stall speed and never-exceed speed narrows into what pilots call the “coffin corner.” Perlan 2’s wing design allows a luxurious 17-knot (20-mph) difference (The U-2, routinely flying over 70,000 feet, has only a five-knot difference). And though computer simulations show a tendency to enter a tail-wagging oscillation known as Dutch Roll, a yaw damper on the tail should counteract the phenomenon.

As the glider climbs, clouds and weather will drop away; the sky will darken and stars will emerge. The crew

will see the curve of Earth. Because the air is so thin, the airspeed indicator will read about 50 mph at 90,000 feet, but the aircraft’s speed over the ground will be greater than 400 mph. At that altitude the pilot will zig-zag into the wind to hold position over the narrow lift area of the mountain wave, with enough oxygen to stay there for three hours. Descending back to Earth will take less than an hour.

If El Calafate has in the meantime become too cloudy for landing, the pilots will divert to a field at Rio Gallegos, on Argentina’s east coast, about 93 miles downwind. Payne laughed when asked how far Perlan could glide if necessary. “The short answer is: a long way,” he says. Perlan could easily glide past the divert field to the Falkland Islands, but “then there’s no land until you get back all the way around to Argentina, so we’re not contemplating that.” Should anything go really wrong, the glider has two para-chutes attached. If lift is lost and the glider starts plummeting Earthward, a small drogue chute can be deployed at high altitude for stabilization. A large

ballistic recovery parachute can be used below 30,000 feet or so, where the air is dense enough to slow Perlan down.

Of course, since nobody has ever tried this kind of flight before, things may hap-pen differently. But for Enevoldson that’s part of the allure: to pursue the unknown. “The simple fact that it’s kind of mind-boggling…that makes you want to do it,” he says. “To make it real.”

THE CHIEF FINANCIAL POWER of the initial Perlan 2 project, Steve Fossett, went for a flight over the Sierra Nevada on September 7, 2007, and never returned. A year later, his wrecked airplane was dis-covered, and a few months after that, a hiker found Fossett’s remains. Without Fossett’s enthusiasm and financial back-ing, progress on Perlan 2 moved fitfully. Enevoldson began to spend much of his time giving talks and speeches, trying to drum up support and raise the estimated $7 million the project needed. When Enevoldson hit the road he discovered a small but passionate constituency, some of whom were so smitten with Perlan

AIRSPACEMAG.COM JAMES DARCY/AIRBUS (2)

2 that support poured in from all over the world.

Morgan Sandercock, an engineer and competitive glider pilot, saw Enevoldson speak in 2008 before the Gliding Federation of Australia and approached with an offer of $400,000. He has since relocated from his native Australia to become a full-time resident of Redmond, Oregon, where, as

Perlan’s project manager, he helps over-see the aircraft’s completion.

“One thing I liked about the project,” says Sandercock, “was that they weren’t trying some wacky, outlandish design.” Enevoldson, he explains, wanted to avoid newfangled or unproven technology, both to reduce the time and cost of build-

ing the aircraft and to maximize safety. As the pilot, Enevoldson wanted the aircraft to behave as much like a conventional glider as possible.

Ed Warnock, a former professional pilot, soaring enthusiast, college profes-sor, and business consultant, read a 2009 profile about Perlan in Soaring magazine.

Perlan 2 is carefully uncrated for display at EAA’s AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin (top). There Airbus, which rescued the project from insolvency, showcased the glider beside an A350 airliner (right). The A350’s massive engines will get it only about halfway to Perlan’s planned altitude.

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He contacted Enevoldson and asked how he could help. “We met for breakfast, and Einar asked me to do two things: to get the project incorporated and obtain non-profit status so that they could raise more money.” Warnock did both, and today he’s the project’s CEO.

Nearly two dozen others—most of them engineers, nearly all glider pilots—stepped up to donate time, expertise, and in many cases their own money to keep the project moving. The Perlan team today is divided into 11 groups, each responsible for part of the aircraft, and meets over the Internet and in person to review progress, risks, and problems.

IN 2012, FUNDING dried up completely and the program went into a state of suspended animation. But Perlan was resurrected in 2014 when Airbus, the giant European aircraft manufacturer, signed on as a partner and pledged funds to build and fly the sailplane. Perlan will, according to the company, help them learn about aircraft controllability at very high altitudes, potentially useful

for future airliners and even flight on Mars. Finally completed in July 2015, the aircraft was registered with the Federal Aviation Administration as N901EE, the “90” in honor of its intended altitude and the “EE” a tribute to its inventor (and “1” because “N900EE” was already taken).

Though Perlan 2 is an experimental aircraft, its construction has been rela-tively smooth, though there have been a couple of hitches. After installing sin-gle-pane windows, the team rethought the choice and substituted double pane, increasing the safety margin if a window cracks. The pressure bulkheads leaked air at first, but after some detective work the team patched them up. Part of the rebreather system didn’t fit quite as well as the group wanted, but a new part fixed that problem. The members are complet-ing work on the avionics, pressurization, and life support systems, as well as the drogue and ballistic parachute recovery systems. The ground station that will act as mission control is under construction.

On September 23, 2015, Jim Payne made the inaugural flight, from

Redmond, Oregon, where the team is based. The group then moved the glider to Minden, Nevada, to begin f l ight testing in earnest . So far Perlan 2 is behaving exactly as predicted. Chief pilot Jim Payne has an exacting flight test protocol to evaluate every aspect of the aircraft’s systems, perfor-mance, and flight characteristics. As the tests go forward, the aircraft will be pushed higher in 5,000-foot increments.

If all goes according to plan, the glider will be crated and shipped by boat to South America, where, after a handful of test flights, it will finally attempt to reach 90,000 feet sometime this summer.But hav-ing waited this long, Enevoldson seems in no hurry. At a recent meeting, Perlan pilots, designers, and engineers discussed potential emergency scenarios—air leak or sudden decompression, power failure, electrical fire, hypoxia, instrument failure, loss of control—and Enevoldson seemed unfazed by the litany of possible disas-ters, even bored. But he listened carefully; during an exchange about the design of an automatic release valve in the cabin

AIRSPACEMAG.COM JAMES DARCY/AIRBUS

pressurization system, meant to cast off unwanted air pressure and moisture, he broke his silence to ask: What if the valve opens accidentally? Is there any way to override the system? No, he was told. Enevoldson frowned. “I’m not happy with the possibility of a single-point, uncom-manded failure,” he said firmly. “I’ve been there and don’t want to do it again.”

The team hopes to answer many ques-tions: Can mountain waves really reach so high? Will the glider’s subsystems function normally at those altitudes? If it all works out, there may be a Perlan 2, with wings that will enable it to climb higher still. Says Doug Perrenod: “The goal was—and still kind of is—100,000 feet, that sort of magic number. But we determined that the airfoil design for the Perlan at 100,000 feet is dif-ferent from the airfoil at 90,000 feet.” But that experimentation will have to wait. Perlan 2 has a record to set.

Perlan 2 on its first flight, over Oregon’s Cascade Mountain Range. Many gliders can climb high, but none have the pressurization to keep crew alive above 60,000 feet.

BACK TO CONTENTS

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OUR JUDGES had their work cut out for them again this year. We received nearly 900 photographs from all

over the world, showcasing aerospace in everything from the exotic one-off Perlan glider to the ubiquitous

Cessna 152; from enthusiastic airshow crowds to the star-filled night sky. Thank you to all who submitted pho-

tographs and to all who voted in our online Readers’ Choice poll. After a tough selection process, we present

the winners in our five categories (Military, Civilian, Astronomy, People & Planes, and Readers’ Choice). Visit

airspacemag.com to see the finalists, and you’ll understand why it was very tough to choose the winners.

And keep your cameras at the ready: Our Fourth Annual Photo Contest will kick off in August, so visit an aero-

space museum, attend an airshow, or just keep your eyes to the sky, and send us your best shots. ~ The Editors

BEST SHOTS

WINNERS OF THE 3RD ANNUAL AIR & SPACE PHOTO CONTEST.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM

Stan Honda (Socorro County, New Mexico) | April 2014. “A total lunar eclipse as it progresses through the partial phase into totality and back through the

partial phase.... One can see the moon entering the Earth’s shadow as it slowly moves from east to west across the night sky, on this occasion accompanied by the planet Mars and the bright star Spica. Seen above one of the dish antennas of the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico, the technological foreground subject provides an interesting contrast to the natural phenomenon occurring above it.”

GRAND PRIZE WINNER

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Ben Jonkman (Ahmed Al Jaber Air Base, Kuwait) | June 2015. “I feel that the flightline

is a unique environment that has not been well documented. I took these photos to provide memories for us, and awareness for our families.”

MILITARY CATEGORY WINNER

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Mike Busch (Pensacola, Florida) | November

2015. “I took several thousand shots over the weekend but as soon as I saw this image in my viewfinder I knew I had something.”

READERS’ CHOICE CATEGORY WINNER

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Paul Heasman (Wales, UK) | June 2014. A selfie

of a Royal Air Force Hawk pilot and his colleagues over North Wales.

PEOPLE & PLANES FINALIST

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Stan Honda (Longyearbyen, Norway) | March 2015. Travellers gather to watch a solar

eclipse on the far-north Svalbard archipelago. A dedicated worldwide fandom travels to witness each eclipse, no matter how remote the affected viewing area.

ASTRONOMY FINALIST

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Richard Mallory Allnutt (Cascade Range, Oregon) | August 2015. The Erickson Aircraft

Collection’s Lockheed P-38L, ‘Tangerine,’ over Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Note the forest fire in the distant background.

MILITARY FINALIST

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Garry Ridsdale (Southport, England) | November 2015. “I saw the 4 boys intently watching the display so I wanted to capture a moment

that tried to sum up the dreams of young boys and the brilliance of the display pilots. I chose this image with the jets turning towards the boys to increase the connection between them. For me it symbolises hope, dream and ambition.”

PEOPLE & PLANES CATEGORY WINNER

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Kevin Luke (Fort Worth, Texas) | July 2015. “The Flagship Detroit [DC-3] was at Meacham for the airport’s 90th birthday celebration, and I asked

if the pilots minded taxiing the plane over to the old American Airways building for a quick shoot.”

CIVILIAN CATEGORY WINNER

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Don Taylor (Outside Houston, Texas) | January 2015. “To most of the public, this comet looks like the comet they imagine when they think about

comets, with its bright nucleus and its long wispy tail. However, this was probably one of the hardest comets to image.”

ASTRONOMY CATEGORY WINNER

BACK TO CONTENTS

AIRSPACEMAG.COM STEPHEN ZIMMERMANN; INSET: COURTESY AAA ARCHIVES

Hundreds of Antique Airplane Association members fly to Blakesburg, Iowa, every year, thanks to Robert Taylor (inset), who founded the club in 1953 and has been one of its champion restorers.

Robert Taylor’s People and Planes

REUNIONStop for a spell in the Golden Age.

BY MARK HUBER

AIRSPACEMAG.COM DAVE MILLER

EVEN AS GRASS STRIPS GO, this one is spartan: It’s 2,350 feet long, and the markings are minimal. The body of an old Ercoupe, painted blaze orange, rests on a swivel to serve as the wind indica-tor. “It’s a challenging runway for the first time to land on,” admits Rob Bach, who for many years arrived in a 1928 Travel Air. “But it has a wonderful feel-ing. From the north you come over trees and a gully. It creates a bit of an optical illusion as the hill comes up.”

Since 1971 this rural Blakesburg, Iowa, grass strip has been the home of the Antique Airplane Association and its annual Labor Day weekend fly-in. Last year nearly 400 aircraft—most built in the 1930s and 1940s—assembled here, on 177 acres of rolling pasture with corrugated-metal buildings that look like they were left over from the Great Depression.

“There’s no control tower and no con-trol zone,” says pilot Ann Pellegreno. “It’s just a very free atmosphere for aviation.” Pellegreno and her husband Don, also a pilot, fly up every summer from their home in Rhome, Texas, in their 1947

Fairchild XNQ-1, one of only three built and the last remaining in the world. “You can sit in front of the hangars and watch the airplanes come in and critique the landings,” she laughs. Landings from the north often entail a bounce or two, which the peanut gallery finds hilarious.

The Antique Airplane Association was created in 1953 when founder Robert Taylor decided that people who restore and fly vintage airplanes would benefit from a community. He placed

a $12 classified ad in the August issue of Flying magazine soliciting $1-a-year memberships. “We got 12 members that first month,” recalls Taylor, now 91. “We broke even.” Taylor’s office is on the second floor of one of the buildings

No radios at Antique Airfield: A flagger signals “Runway clear” to John Ricciotti, who flew all the way from New Hampshire in his 1934 Waco S3HD Super Sport, the only one flying in the United States.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM CAROLINE SHEEN

The wings of a Great Lakes biplane frame a rare

1941 Meyers OTW trainer and two Stearmans, all typical

sights at the fly-in.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM DON PARSONS

overlooking the runway; it’s a crow’s nest, dusty and jammed with books, magazines, and memorabilia. “I save everything,” Taylor says.

He rarely needs to consult the paper he’s saved because he also apparently remembers everything to do with antique aircraft: foibles, facts, people, parts, sto-ries. “If you’re interested in restoring old airplanes, he’s your go-to guy,” says Pellegreno, who with her husband has restored 14 airplanes. “He’s very gener-ous with his time helping people get the information they need.”

When Rob Bach acquired a rare 1961 Bentzen Sport homebuilt a few years ago, one of his first calls was to Taylor. Not only did Taylor recall the aircraft from a 1963 fly-in, he remembered someone who was there and had seen it, and he put Bach in touch with him. “His ency-clopedic memory for airplanes, people, and what airplanes and projects are where is incredible,” says Bach. “He’s very passionate about old airplanes and keeping them alive.”

Taylor started the AAA after attending an early meeting of the Experimental

Aircraft Association in Milwaukee, which was founded the same year. “Their whole thrust back then was homebuilts and I thought, What the hell, there ought to also be something for old airplanes,” he says. The two organizations have gone down very different paths. Today the EAA holds the largest civil airshow

in the world, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and has 192,000 members; the AAA has 6,000. And if not for a brief childhood friendship in Taylor’s life, the Antique Airplane Association might not be here at all.

Taylor grew up around Ottumwa, Iowa, and as a boy spent time around the

Blakesburg royals: Classic Beech 18s parade at the 2014 fly-in. One of the Tullahoma Bunch, Robert Parish (foreground) hails from the Beechcraft Heritage Museum in Tennessee. Wisconsin pilot Justin Niemyjski is always good for a ride.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM CAROLINE SHEEN

Ottumwa airport, about a mile from his grandparents’ farm. It was there that he sat in his first airplane, a Curtiss Robin, and in 1936 took his first airplane ride, in a Ford Tri-motor, which cost $1. He had to borrow 50 cents.

His family moved to Englewood, Colorado, during his high school years, and there he met Jack Lowe. The two boys struck up a friendship centered on their interest in aviation. Lowe had

cerebral palsy and used a wheelchair. Taylor later reflected, “You know, there are people who can’t stand being around disabled people. Those people who are disabled can tell that. I never felt that about anybody. I never knew what struck him about me.” But Jack Lowe would never forget Bobby Taylor.

Taylor left Englewood before graduat-ing, hitchhiked to California with $12 in his pocket, and found work icing

donuts. On his 18th birthday, he was hired by Lockheed and worked on the center section of P-38s. During World War II he enlisted in the Army Air Forces and was assigned as a mechanic and crew chief in the Sixth Air Force. After the war, he attended the Aeronautical University in Chicago and worked at several California aerospace compa-nies before Iowa called him home. The Army also called: He re-enlisted for a year of service during the Korean War. When he returned to Iowa, he worked for the Ottumwa Airport Commission, and later ran the Ottumwa airport’s FBO (fixed base operation). Along the way, he restored vintage airplanes for himself and other owners.

“I haven’t done anything but aviation since my 18th birthday,” Taylor says.

His fledgling Antique Airplane Association grew. In 1954 it had its first fly-in: five airplanes showed up at the Ottumwa airport. Despite the group’s

This little Pietenpol Air Camper, parked near state flags denoting AAA chapters, attended in 1954 and every year since.

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progress, revenues barely covered the printing and postage for the member newsletter. To take the AAA to the next level and stabilize its finances, Taylor needed several thousand dollars, but money was tight and he had a young family. Then one night the phone rang. It was Lowe’s nurse.

“Do you remember Jack Lowe?” “Sure I do. How is Jack?” “Well, we got something about your

Antique Airplane Association and we’d like to come visit you.”

Taylor learned that his old friend had inherited the Dayton, Ohio Lowe Brothers paint fortune (the company was later bought out by Sherwin Williams) and was eager to help the association with a check for $3,000. By 1961 the AAA had grown to 700 members, and by the early 1960s the fly-in was a major aviation happening, with over 1,000 aircraft showing up every year. When Jack Lowe died in 1968, he left $100,000 to build what became the Airpower Museum and left Taylor his Lockheed Vega, which Taylor had been restoring at the time, and all the stock in his real

estate development company, worth more than $1 million. Taylor used some of the money to buy the site of the cur-rent fly-in because, in Taylor’s view, the local government was making it difficult to base the AAA and hold the fly-in at the Ottumwa airport.

The move from pavement to unmarked rolling pasture was not without its detractors, and Taylor admits the asso-ciation lost a few members and encoun-tered logistical difficulties.

Since the move, the AAA has made improvements: The Airpower Museum, now the joint sponsor of the annual fly-in, exhibits 38 aircraft. Some of them, like the 1936 Rose Parrakeet or the 1939 Brewster B-1 Fleet, have long histories with the association but are exceedingly rare. Among the museum’s prized col-lection is a 3,400-square-foot Library of Flight, with more than 6,000 volumes.

The association also added the primi-tive-looking hangars and a saloon in the small causeway between them. During the fly-in, part of one hangar becomes a “fly market,” where members can rum-mage through and occasionally buy

old airplane parts. The market is run by Harman Dickerson, 79. Every summer he loads up his van with parts to add to the market’s mix, then drives from Columbia, Missouri, where he oper-ates an aircraft restoration business, to Blakesburg. “There’s really no inven-tory taken,” says. “People bring stuff in on consignment or donate it. There has been a lot of stuff that has been donated through the years and if it doesn’t sell, it just stays over until the next year. Some of this stuff you’ll just say happy birth-day to forever.”

Dickerson went to his first AAA fly-in in 1965 and still flies his own Piper P-11. “It’s like the old planes were born into me,” he says. He’s drawn to Blakesburg because “it’s more rural, with the grass strip.” He adds: “I think I live back in that time. You do feel that way when you are there. I always enjoy Robert’s company. We tell tales. We love the old airplanes. It doesn’t matter what you fly, something from World War I or an Ercoupe, he treats everyone the same. I’ve always liked him for that.”

Taylor still lives on his own, drives, and

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THE U.S. AIRPLANE-BUILDING BOOM inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s flight in a little Ryan monoplane did not coincide with an economic boom. Dozens of practical solutions to the problem of flight emerged, but many of the companies creating them did not survive. Luckily, individual airplanes did, and some have lasted to this day. A parade of those unusual survivors, some designed by giants of the fledgling U.S. airplane biz and others by talented tinkerers, is a daily treat at the AAA fly-in.

RARE BIRDS

RARE BIRDS

Lindbergh was an airmail pilot long before the 1928 Boeing 40C flew. The big biplane could carry 750 pounds of mail plus four passengers. Today, it is the oldest airworthy Boeing. Addison Pemberton, who found 50 pieces of the 30,000-part biplane in 1999, grew up hearing his dad, an Iowa boy who lived beneath their transcontinental route, tell stories about the heroes of the airmail. Addison rebuilt the 40C and in 2008 flew it across the country, reenacting the 1920s airmail flights. (RYAN PEMBERTON)

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RARE BIRDS

The youngest airplane in this collection was born in 1961 in Illinois when brothers Ken and Bill Bentzen started with a garage full of Piper Cub parts and fell under the spell of Paul Poberezny, founder of the Experimental Aircraft Association and homebuilder extraordinaire. It is a mid-wing cutie, described in detail by its owner Rob Bach in the April 2016 issue of Sport Aviation (worth a read). Bach calls the build quality “exceptional” and the stance “eager.” (G.R. DENNIS PRICE)

The Robins taxiing past each other at Blakesburg in 2015 are two of six flying worldwide. More than 750 Robins were built in St. Louis by the Curtiss-Robertson Airplane Manufacturing Corporation, a concern run by Lindbergh’s old airmail boss, William Robertson. Texas engineer Terry Bowden has helped keep several Robins flying. “To fly a Robin is a blessing,” he says. “There are no bad habits. Nothing happens fast. And you can ‘feel’ the wind as those large wings float along.” (ROGER CAIN)

AIRSPACEMAG.COM

RARE BIRDS

Before the Kinner Aircraft and Motor Corporation of Glendale, California, went bankrupt in 1937, it supplied radial engines for Wacos, Fleets, and Ryan trainers and built a few dozen low-wing Sportsters like this 1933 Model K. The Sportster has two side-by-side seats and flies at about 90 mph. George Jenkins, whose Eagles Mere Air Museum in Pennsylvania displays 27 vintage beauties, owns two of the three Sportsters flying today. (NIGEL HITCHMAN)

Although only three Fairchild XNQ-1s were built (this is the sole survivor), the taildragger definitely was a contender—to replace the T-6 as the U.S. Air Force trainer. But it lost to the tricycle-gear Beech T-34 Mentor. The XNQ’s first flight: 1947. Don and Ann Pellegreno bought this one as a project in 1982 and spent 10 years restoring it. Don calls it the Big Q; he says it’s easy to fly, and it’s for sale. Previous owners include the Navy, the Air Force, and the Civil Air Patrol. (GILLES AULIARD)

Take a long look because you don’t often see two Tri-motors flying together. The 1929 Stinson in the foreground is American Airlines’ oldest surviving transport; the other is a Ford, and, with the type’s first flight in 1926, the car maker’s reputation for reliability was extended to air travel. Both aircraft are part of a stunning 42-aircraft collection owned by Greg Herrick; it can be toured by appointment at the Golden Wings Flying Museum, Anoka County Airport, Minnesota. (CHUCK STEWART)

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RARE BIRDS

Besides sketching the Ryan M-1, on which the Spirit of St. Louis was based, T. Claude Ryan built a little sports coupe in the 1930s before his company, with the rest of the aviation industry, found building warplanes a full-time job. Ryan Aeronautical built 1,000 PT-22 military trainers, but only 13 SC-Ws, three-place, enclosed-cockpit sportsters with 145-hp Warner Scarab engines. Among the nine survivors is this highly polished looker owned by Russell Williams of Washington state. (BRENT TAYLOR)

What’s so special about a Travel Air? Lloyd Stearman, Walter Beech, and Clyde Cessna. The three soon-to-be rivals were partners in the Wichita, Kansas company that built 1,200 of the open-cockpit biplanes between 1925 and 1930. This 1929 Travel Air D4D Speedwing won the 2014 AAA/APM Grand Champion trophy for Antiques. Named “Sky Siren” by California owner Richard Zeiler, the pretty Speedwing sports the loveliest Art Deco paint job any of us at Air & Space has ever seen. (DAVE MILLER)

AIRSPACEMAG.COM MARK HUBER

comes to the office most afternoons. He flew into his late 80s but finally quit, he says, when “my eyes got too bad.”

“I’ve always recognized that I was no Jimmy Doolittle,” he says. “Flying is one of those things that you eventually need to give up. I’m not one of these guys who is going to keep flying until he can’t talk or walk.”

The task of keeping everything mov-ing in harmony and on a tight budget today falls to Taylor’s son Brent, 59, a pilot and airplane-and-powerplant mechanic with an inspection authoriza-tion, who runs the organization. (Taylor’s other son, Barry, also an A&P mechanic, works with the AAA on restoration proj-ects.) Brent likens the popularity of the AAA fly-in to a Jimmy Buffett concert: “He’s selling a feeling, a dream,” Brent says. “Everyone’s got their own little ver-sion of it when they are there. Well, if

you walk down the flightline here, you will get 10 different answers as to why people come.”

One theme runs through the conversa-tions of those assembled this past Labor Day weekend. Comparing the gathering to the EAA’s annual AirVenture mega-airshow, pilot Doug Rozendaal says: “This

is the antithesis of Oshkosh in every way.” Rozendaal arrived in a replica of Benny Howard’s air racer Mr. Mulligan with the aircraft’s builder, Jim Younkin. “Clearly there is a need and a purpose for both,” he continues. “Both are fun and interesting, but this is as grassroots as it gets: landing on a piece of rolling

Ben Taylor (left) soloed in the same Interstate Cadet his grandfather Robert (center) soloed in. Brent Taylor (right) also flies the Cadet and keeps it and the AAA running.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM CAROLINE SHEEN

pasture, no rubber chicken dinners, and no sport coats.” (Hawaiian shirts are the preferred attire.)

Younkin, 85, a legend in both home-building and vintage airplane circles, just likes the relaxed pace of “being able to sit under someone’s wing and talk to people.”

Bach recalls coming to his first AAA fly-in in 1963 with his pilot parents (his father, Richard Bach, is the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull) when he was two years old, and playing with model airplanes under Robert Taylor’s desk. “I grew up on that airport,” he says. “There are so many memories. It takes me two hours to walk 100 yards because I know everybody. You can be sitting under a wing talking to a stranger and pretty soon you realize that you are talking to a guy who used to work

for Don Luscombe. Every other person there is somebody with an amazing story.”

John Ricciotti of Barrington, New Hampshire, owns the last Waco S3HD—distinguished by its canopy—in the United States. He bought it three years ago and has brought it to every fly-in at Blakesburg since, flying it constantly during the week-end. “This airplane really needs to come

here and be with these airplanes and the people who love them,” Ricciotti says, add-ing that he values how easy it is to just get up and fly, as opposed to more congested and bureaucratic aircraft gatherings. “I fly more than five times a day here. I can go out and enjoy the airplane, and people can see the airplane flying, people can be in the airplane flying with me. I love it.”

Treasures-in-waiting: One day the red Culver Cadet (at left), yellow Rearwin Cloudster (center, back), and Stinson 27710 will be restored for display in the Airpower Museum, and this hangar will have room for more assorted cowlings and fuselages.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM MARTT CLUPPER

Aircraft collector Greg Herrick and his friends brought three of his Fairchild PT trainers to last year’s fly-in. Herrick, who lives in Minnesota, grew up in Ottumwa and says the AAA fostered his interest in aviation. The rare aircraft in his large col-lection—he has also flown his Ford and Stinson Tri-motors to Blakesburg—all come from the 1920s and 1930s, one of

aviation’s most innovative eras. “That’s the period of time that represented real aviation progress in this country,” he says. “Had we not had that kind of devel-opment we’d kind of be what Russia was [in World War II].”

Membership in the AAA is a require-ment for attending the fly-in. (Visitors can sign up on the spot.) Almost all the

people who fly to Blakesburg come in an antique—an aircraft with a type certifi-cate dated 1935 or earlier—or a classic, a category for types certified from 1936 to 1941. A number of World War II-era and post-war “neo-classics” also show up. Modern airplanes are welcome, but their pilots can expect some gentle rib-bing—and segregated parking. Of the 365 airplanes that showed up in 2015, 341 were what Brent Taylor calls “display” aircraft, the kind of vintage beauties that attract attention when they land at small airports. What makes antiques and classics popular with his organiza-tion’s membership, says Taylor, is hard to define, but it has something to do with how they’re built. Before the war, airplanes were made almost by hand; afterward, they were manufactured. “Modern airplanes, just like everything else [modern] in life, are homogenized,” he says. “They all fly about the same. You don’t get that with an old airplane. They’re more challenging to fly, and even though the physics are the same, going from a 1928 Stearman to a 1936 Rearwin to a 1939 Spartan—they’re enough dif-

In 1929, New Standard Aircraft built the D-25 with a roomy cockpit so pilots could give rides. Today, that’s just what owner Ted Davis does.

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ferent that there’s a challenge to fly them and fly them correctly.”

Older aircraft have other appeals, says Brent: “History has a lot to do with it. Nostalgia has a lot to do with it. In our organization, family history has a lot to do with it.” It goes like this, he says: “Grandpa had a 1928 Stearman or what-ever and I rode it in when I was a kid, and that’s what I want.”

Taylor’s own family follows this model. When he was 16, Robert Taylor’s grand-son Ben soloed in a 1941 Interstate Cadet, the same airplane his grandfather soloed in. Not the same type of airplane, the very same Cadet. It’s the airplane both Ben and his father Brent fly today.

The fly-in has always been a family affair for Harve Applegate of Queen City, Missouri. This year Applegate and his flying family brought three airplanes to the fly-in, including a 1947 Stinson 108-1 that has transported five generations of his family, including his daughter, Shalyn. Shalyn started flying when she was 18, and is embarrassed, she says, that she waited so long. At 20, she is a professional pilot with a multi-engine rating.

The Stinson looks remarkable, con-sidering that the wings were last re-covered in 1966, the fuselage in 1979, and the door handles have the original plating. “These are the same seats my great-grandfather sat in,” Shalyn notes proudly.

The 2016 fly-in will celebrate this continuity, which sets the AAA/APM event apart from others. According to Brent Taylor, some families have four generations attending. This year, with the theme of “Back to Blakesburg/Back to Basics,” the association has put out a call to “Antique Airfield kids,” all those who were under 18 when they attended their first fly-in at Antique Airfield, start-ing with the first one in 1971. “We’ve already gotten a lot of interest from people who haven’t been here in a long time,” he says. “It was one of our more brilliant ideas—of the ones we wrote down,” he laughs.

One of the AAA local chapters—there are 19 around the country—is an organization of merry pranksters in LeSueur, Minnesota, who call them-selves Marginal Aviation. They have been

responsible for some of the practical jokes perpetrated at the fly-in over the years: hiding airplanes, alligator sight-ings, Christmas carolling in September until way too late at night, “rolling” air-planes with toilet paper, and pumpkin dropping.

The Marginal gang was started by Minnesotans Forrest Lovley and Gary Hanson; Gary’s son Toby has assumed the mantle of leadership. Toby also vol-unteers as one of the flaggers stationed on the runways who signal pilots “okay to land” or “go around.”

Every morning Brent Taylor, standing atop a picnic table, conducts a pilot brief-ing to explain how the system works: “Turn the damn radio off. Bernoulli flies the airplane, not Marconi. It’s red flag, green flag. Kind of like going through Mexican customs. If the red flag is up, continue your approach, but if they wave it, add power and go around. Once the airplane ahead of you has cleared the runway, the green flag will come out and you will make your landing. Do not stop on the runway, because there is likely someone behind you. If the two of you

AIRSPACEMAG.COM MARTT CLUPPER

come together it makes bad noises and there is a lot of paperwork involved. Flybys are acceptable but absolutely no smoke on takeoff. The reason should be obvious. You just made the field go IFR [instrument flying rules] and the flag guys can’t see.”

On this hot and humid Iowa morning, Brent also needs to settle an important debate. “If you have to put the airplane off airport [he means crash], obviously your first choice is a hayfield and your

second is a road. But the roads around here have high [power] lines. So you are down to corn and beans, and there is some argument. This time of year with mature beans, unless you got tall skinny tires like some of the real old antiques, you want to pick the corn. The reason being is that the mature beans are going to wrap around the landing gear, and 98 percent of the time you are going on your back.”

About 100 members volunteer every

year to help the Taylors “keep the antiques flying”—the slogan painted in big script on the side of one of the han-gars—at the annual fly-in, and various community groups participate as well. The women of the Blakesburg Historical Society sell homemade pie and ice cream. Ann Pellegreno notes with relief that the task of feeding the masses has been outsourced to the catering department of the local supermarket; in Blakesburg’s early days, women volunteers were in charge of provisions.

Beyond the fly-in, the AAA works to address issues seen as detrimental to the viability of antique aircraft. “The knowl-edge gap in the FAA is one of the biggest challenges we face going forward,” says Brent Taylor. “People are coming into the FAA who have no experience with old airplanes, no knowledge of them, and in a lot of cases don’t want to.” So Brent spends a fair amount of time work-

For the 2013 fly-in, which celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Luscombe Model 8, 69 Luscombes (and one Luscombe hybrid) showed up.

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ing with other aviation organizations to address regulations, such as recent federal laws requiring all aircraft be equipped with certain types of modern avionics, seen as detrimental to antique aircraft. The AAA supported the efforts of member Greg Herrick to gain access to the drawings and technical data sup-plied to the FAA for the certification of the 1936 Fairchild F-45. Herrick wanted the information to guide the restoration of his F-45, but the FAA denied him the information, citing the need to protect trade secrets. After years of litigation, Herrick asked the AAA for help. The group won a Supreme Court case argu-ing for the right to view the drawings, Taylor v. Sturgill, and joined Herrick and other organizations to push for access to the drawings of other vintage air-craft. Herrick worked with pilot and U.S. Representative Sam Graves (R-Mo.) to amend the 2012 Federal Aviation Administration Re-Authorization Act to require the FAA to preserve and make available for non-commercial purposes all drawings for aircraft granted type certificates between 1927 and 1939. In

aviation circles, the change to the bill is known as the “Herrick amendment.”

Herrick was concerned that some drawings were being either lost or destroyed. “Those drawings are the very DNA of aircraft development,” he says. “I’m personally interested in preserving airplanes from small manufacturers who went out of business or larger manufac-turers where there were only one or two of a model left.”

The AAA has become the repository of some drawings, Brent Taylor says. “We have all the drawings here on microfiche for Stinsons, we’ve got all the Howard drawings, and a good portion of the Rearwin drawings,” plus other collec-tions.

But some drawings may be gone for good. Shortly after the Herrick amend-ment passed, the AAA’s Steve Black, director of the Airpower Museum, tested it by requesting drawings for a Stinson 10 from the FAA’s Chicago Aircraft Certification Office. Says Brent: “We got the copies but found all kinds of things mixed up in it, including drawings for a Ryan ST,” a 1930s sport aircraft.

Some say that without Robert Taylor and the AAA, many of the vintage air-planes flying today would have them-selves been lost. “There are about 30 of them out there in that hangar,” says Herrick. “He inspired me.”

The AAA still relies on its members for documents, and in most cases it doesn’t need to ask. Every week unsolicited boxes of drawings, books, manuals, and some-times even airplane parts are delivered to the association’s library. “Some days 10 or 12 boxes just show up. It’s overwhelming,” says Black, who manages the library as well as the museum. “And you don’t know what you’ve got until you get in the boxes, and then sometimes you find really neat overhaul manuals on really old engines.”

Some donations come in after a mem-ber has died: The heirs pack up all the airplane stuff and send it in. The dupli-cates are sent to the museum gift shop, where they’re put up for sale. Besides the 6,000 volumes, the library has a large collection of manuals and periodicals. The basement is jammed wall to wall with boxes of them.

The occasional rare gem has surfaced.

AIRSPACEMAG.COM CAROLINE SHEEN

Black shows me a 1904 Curtiss Model 24 airship engine on display on the museum’s main floor. It had been donated more than 30 years earlier, and no one had paid much attention to it until recently. “We contacted the Glenn Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport, New York,” Black says. “They don’t even have one.”

As the afternoon fades, Robert Taylor reflects again on his friend Jack Lowe, and his generous early gift. He thinks the AAA could have survived without Lowe’s help, but it would have been dif-ficult. Taylor says, “I probably could have muddled though here or passed [the asso-ciation] on to somebody else or another organization…,” but he doesn’t think the Antique Airplane Association would be what it is today. “Not without Jack,” he says. Taylor turns in his chair and looks out his crow’s nest window at the gaggle of aircraft assembling on the grass below. “How lucky can an old man get?”

Six hours later, the late evening crowd has overflowed from the Pilot’s Pub onto the grass, and is gathering around campfires in front of the hangars. The victorious Hawaiian Shirt Night contes-tants proudly display their trophies—decorated coconut shells. The assembled

revelers break into song: ’Cause if you stop in for a while, You’re going to come out with a smile! The ballad is actually about a brothel,

but it could equally apply to a special piece of rolling pasture in Blakesburg, Iowa, thanks to the vision of Robert Taylor.

At least four of the crew gathered by this Monocoupe in 2013 (owner Trevor Niemyjski is third from left) are pilots today and keep coming back to Blakesburg.

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NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER/ASU

A PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBIT at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., lets you get as close to the moon as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been. For the last six years, the spacecraft has flown as near as a few hundred feet from the lunar surface. Its three cameras have taken images that help scientists study the moon’s geology and how it evolved, create high-resolution maps that could be used to determine potential landing sites, and even measure how often the moon gets smacked by meteors—useful for calculating how sturdy future lunar outposts should be. A New Moon Rises, which opened at the Museum on the National Mall on February 26, features 61 of these photos.

LRO images have revealed surprising facts about the moon. Less than a year into its mission, the orbiter sent back pic-tures showing thousands of cliffs, called lobate scarps, which indicate the moon is shrinking, likely because of tectonic activity caused by the slow cooling of its interior.

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PICTURES WORTH A SECOND LOOKSightings

AIRSPACEMAG.COM NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER/ASU (3)

Lava flows with no impact craters (right) show the moon has experienced recent erup-tions. Thanks to the LRO, we also get stun-ning views from our natural satellite, like this detailed view of a recent crater (top) and a gorgeous Earthrise (far right).

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BOOKS, MOVIES, CDS, STUFF TO BUY

LEGEND OF THE BUSH PILOTAlaska’s Skyboys: Cowboy Pilots and the Myth of the Last Frontierby Katherine Johnson Ringsmuth. University of Washington Press, 2015. 267 pp., $34.95.

THE BOOK This well-researched account of bush flying in Alaska explains how aviation has shaped the state’s cultural identity and transformed its economy.

Fliers who survived the night flights, frigid temperatures, and

blinding storms were treated like heroes by residents of the communities they served. As the stories multiplied, the bush pilots moved into the realm of aviation legend.

To order these books from

SMITHSONIAN SHOPS call

202-633-4510

Reviews & Previews

AIRSPACEMAG.COM CORINNA WELZENBACH

WHY THE AUTHOR DECIDED TO WRITE IT I started wondering: If aviation is considered a 20th century innovation, then why do we celebrate bush pilots like 19th century cowboys? By understanding Alaska’s bush pilots more broadly, we gain a better appreciation for their feats and their failures.

A CHAT WITH KATHERINE RINGSMUTH Alaskans have long had a reputation for being bold, rugged, and self-reliant. Is it any surprise that Alaska’s pioneering bush pilots might have had these same qualities? Most people, including Alaskans, would describe bush pilots as self-reliant, individualistic, defiant, and daring. The perception of bush pilots as mod-ern-day cowboys, who embody the frontier spirit of Alaska, remains a powerful narrative that reso-nates with most Americans.

Do you think today’s bush pilots are more respectful of safe flying practices than their forebears? Without question, today’s pilots have access to better maps, aeronautics equipment, training, and communications technology, and are man-dated to follow state and federal safety regula-tions. But whether they were flying in the 1930s or in the 2000s, once airborne, there is no exag-geration: Wrangell Mountain skyboys navigate

a skyscape that contains some of the highest and most rugged terrain in Alaska. The unpredict-ability of Alaska’s weather meant that even the safest and most competent pilots crashed.

Do you think some Alaskans would feel threatened by the building of more roads?Being cut off from the road system and the rest of the world can adversely affect a small-town society, but this was not the case in Cordova. In fact, the community not only accepted but embraced its isolation after the railway was abandoned in 1938. One reason was its long-

Katherine Ringsmuth teaches history at the University of Alaska.

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standing association with aviation, which con-nected Cordovans with the world when they chose—not the other way around.

What does Alaska’s general aviation community today think of the legendary bush pilots of yesteryear?In anecdote after anecdote, these fliers are pre-sented as pathfinders, cowboys—blazing trails in fixed-wing biplanes. But for the most part these are second-hand interpretations, and do not come from the fliers themselves.

You frequently travel by air in Alaska. Are you still impressed by the beautiful views of nature you see during these flights?Although I am—admittedly—afraid to fly, the view from an aircraft’s vantage point never ceases to amaze me. It is only from this per-spective one can truly appreciate the insignifi-cance of our man-made footprint, compared to the overwhelming power of Alaska’s dynamic landscape. While flying over the Wrangell Mountains, you see glaciers that have moved earth like bulldozers, and massive rivers that—over the centuries—have flooded, eroded, and ultimately rearranged the topography.n n n DIANE TEDESCHI IS A SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR

AT AIR & SPACE/SMITHSONIAN.

ALASKA’S SKYBOYS

Asked to write a poem about his favorite person, a third grader from Cordova wrote this of pilot Harold Gillam: “He thrilled ’em/Chill ’em/Spilled ’em/But no kill ’em/Gillam. (COURTESY CORDOVA HISTORICAL MUSEUM)

AIRSPACEMAG.COM LEFT: COURTESY GARY GREEN; CENTER: RUSS DOW PAPERS, UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA—ANCHORAGE; RIGHT: COURTESY CORDOVA HISTORICAL MUSEUM

ALASKA’S SKYBOYS

Today airplanes commonly fly tourists over the scenic Kennicott Glacier (Top Left). Bush pilot Bob Reeve in front of his machine shop in Valdez, wearing his trademark rain hat, circa 1937 (Left). Flying in and out of sandbars comes easy for Alaska’s bush pilots (Top).

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Devotionby Adam Makos. Ballantine Books, 2015. 445 pp., $28.

THIS BOOK IS A TALE OF the Korean War, of naval aviation, and of the propeller-driven combat aircraft that did the heavy and danger-ous work of supporting ground troops. Perhaps most important, it is a story of the effect of race on the lives of military men and their families after President Truman desegregated the military on July 26, 1948, when he issued Executive Order 9981. The book traces the lives of Tom Hudner, a Medal of Honor awardee who grew up a privileged scion in New England, and Jesse Brown, a sharecrop-per’s son who became the first African-American officer to earn a set of wings in the U.S. Navy.

Hudner, Brown, and their shipmates train together, ship out on the USS Leyte together, and share shore leave in exotic locales such as Cannes, where, among other adventures, they make the acquaintance of starlet Elizabeth Taylor at a critical juncture in her own life (she was looking for an exit from a bad marriage to hotel heir Conrad Nicholson “Nicky” Hilton Jr.).

This is the age of great propeller-driven combat airplanes: the Grumman F8F Bearcat, Douglas AD Skyraider, and Vought F4U Corsair. Hudner and Brown fly with a squadron of Corsairs, and while the book does not offer exhaustive airplane detail, it does provide plenty of action in its descriptions of the squadron’s operations and missions.

Devotion reads almost like a novel because, as he notes, the author likes dialogue. He gleaned the words from research notes and later verified them with the participants. Some of the detailed research feels like filler, included even though it doesn’t move the story for-ward. And when the pace slows, it’s like watching a movie in slow motion.

Hudner and Brown are both genuine heroes, and Hudner’s medal was earned for a singular courageous act on behalf of his friend Brown, which forms the climax of the tale; even a hint of a spoiler would be unwelcome. Most Americans would benefit from reading this book, especially in the current contentious political climate.n n n GEORGE C. LARSON LIVES AND WRITES IN GOOSE

CREEK, SOUTH CAROLINA. HE IS THE FOUNDING EDITOR

OF AIR & SPACE.

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Jumbo Jet Parking HDApp for iPhone and iPad. Developed by: Tapinator, Inc. Free.

NO MATTER HOW NIMBLE they are in the air, when most airliners move around the tarmac, they turn into lumbering beasts. It takes skill to

taxi an airplane, particularly behe-moths like the Airbus A380, an airplane so large that slight mis-judgments could result in clipping

buildings and other aircraft.“Jumbo Jet Parking HD” makes taxiing an

airliner a bit easier. The app starts by giving you control over an A380 that has just landed. Prompted by a rapidly falling fuel gauge, you must use gas and brake, forward and reverse gear, and steering wheel to get from the runway to the designated gate.

The airport’s ground controller is in a bad mood, and the yellow arrows that mark your route demand backing up on the runway, holds for unannounced traffic, and weaving through low fences, any of which would cause a heart attack for the real-life Federal Aviation Administration. But the game gives you some leeway: Your gate is always open, you won’t be fired for ignoring the path arrows, and pas-sengers—and airplane—won’t complain about hard braking.

“Jumbo Jet Parking” fits solidly into its niche as a way to spend increments of 60 seconds or so. Suffice it to say, this will not be Airbus-approved training anytime soon, but there are worse ways to pass a few minutes while waiting at the gate for your real airplane.n n n ZACH ROSENBERG IS AN AIR & SPACE ASSOCIATE

EDITOR.

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Tora! Tora! Tora!20th Century Fox. Released on DVD in 2006. 144 min. Rated G.

AS THE OLD SAW GOES, “They don’t make ’em like they used to.” Witness Tora! Tora! Tora!, the 1970 Japanese-American docudrama that re-creates Japan’s infamous surprise attack against U.S. military forces at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Hollywood studio executives are generally of a mind that the facts should never stand in the way of a good story. But these filmmakers were determined to make Tora! Tora! Tora! as accu-rate as possible, even though that drew the ire of some critics, who griped that the movie was short on character development and that the plot, exploring events leading up to the attack from both U.S. and Japanese perspectives, was plodding. Regardless of the validity of those points, it’s hard not to marvel today at the com-pelling intensity with which the last part of the film, depicting the attack itself, was staged and captured.

Producers spared little expense to achieve authenticity. They built a full-scale replica of the USS Arizona, even though its only purpose in the movie was to be destroyed. They scoured the world for Curtiss P-40 Warhawks and other World War II-era air-

planes. There are still two breaks in authenticity: North American AT-6 Texan trainers were substituted for Zeros because virtually every real Zero had been destroyed during or after the war. And a Stearman took the place of the civilian Interstate Cadet trainer

that was fired on.The film, which cost a then-whopping $25 mil-

lion, was considered a box office flop domestically. In Japan, though, moviegoers showed up in droves. Thanks largely to overseas markets, Fox eventually turned a profit.

Digitally remastered in 2006, Tora! Tora! Tora! (the phrase came from an acronym that the Japanese pilots used as a code to report that they’d achieved a surprise attack) stands today as a testament to the skills of special effects artists who performed

their magic in an age when no one had the benefit of computer-generated graphics. Indeed, the film would go on to earn an Oscar for best special effects, among five technical Academy Awards for which it was nominated.n n n DAVID FREED IS AN AIR & SPACE CONTRIBUTING EDITOR.

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Warbird Factory: North American Aviation in World War IIby John Fredrickson. Zenith Press, 2015. 224 pp., $40.

NORTH AMERICAN AVIATION built more than 40,000 aircraft for World War II, and this book chronicles part of that out-put: the war-planes produced at the compa-ny’s Inglewood, California manu-facturing facil-ity. Author John Fredrickson documents the behind-the-scenes bargaining that led to the production of such iconic aircraft as the P-51 Mustang and the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber. The book also includes a trove of captivating photographs drawn from Boeing’s copious archives.

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The B-25’s landing gear was fitted with large tires, which enabled the bomber to operate from unpaved surfaces, but this advantage came with a weight penalty.

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A staged publicity photograph taken at North American’s factory in Kansas City reveals that work environments were racially segregated (Top Left). Technicians feed a training aircraft with live ammunition to familiarize student pilots with aerial gun operation (Top). With fuselage skin removed, the lightness of the trainer’s frame is apparent (Left).

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Solar System Chatter. Heather Goss is the departments editor at Air & Space/

Smithsonian.

Chased by Fifi. Paul F. Dye is editor-in-chief of Kitplanes magazine and a longtime homebuilder. He retired from NASA as a lead flight director for the space shuttle and the International Space Station in 2013. He has flown for more than 40 years.

How Much of the Sky Do You Own? Longtime contributor Preston Lerner wrote about low-flying Alaskan bushplanes in the June/July 2015 issue.

Airbus Lands in Mobile. Science journalist

Arielle Emmett has reported from China, Hong Kong, Italy, and Indonesia. She wrote about Chinese airline pilots training in the United States for the August 2015 issue.

Listen to the Nearest Million Stars. Damond Benningfield is a science writer and audio producer in Austin, Texas. He wrote “The Devil’s Observatory” (Feb./Mar. 2016). Read more of his reporting at damondbenningfield.com.

Mars, Underground. Frequent contributor Mark Betancourt is based in Washington, D.C. For the June/July 2015 issue, he wrote about drones preventing poachers from killing elephants in wildlife parks in Africa.

Sailplane to the Stratosphere. Tom LeCompte, a freelance writer and pilot based in Mansfield, Massachusetts, has

written Air & Space stories about his grandfather’s experiences during World War I pilot training and deadstick landings.

Contributing editor Chad Slattery pho-tographs—and occasionally writes about—a wide variety of aerospace subjects.

Robert Taylor’s People and Planes Reunion. Mark Huber has been writing about curious aircraft and their colorful pilots for Air & Space since 2000. In “Meet the Howards” (Oct./Nov. 2015), he covered the legacy of racing airplane designer Benny Howard.

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LEFT: ELISABETTA PUGGIONI; CENTER: NASA/ESA/HUBBLE HERITAGE TEAM; RIGHT: NARA

A lighter colored belly makes a SPAD S-XIII appear flat from eye-level.

Exposed to four percent of the sunlight Earth gets, Jupiter is lovely through a telescope but hostile for a spacecraft.

A Northrop P-61 Black Widow in flight over France.

The Fine Art of Camouflage Great art stands out, but the great artists of World War I were enlisted to help aircraft blend in.

Juno: Power and RadiationAt Jupiter, half a billion miles from the sun, the Juno spacecraft uses a few new tricks to stay operational on solar power alone.

Beaufighters and Black WidowsDark nights meant safe haven for bombers—until 1943, when the first night fighters came into service. But flying at night, much less fighting, was a new and dangerous job.

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Airshow GuideUse our map-driven index to find an airshow near you, highlighting events featuring the F-35 Lightning II. Plan your year at airspacemag.com/airshows

Quiz YourselfThink you know the history of commercial aviation? The first installment of our quiz series will validate your confidence. Or humble you. Test your knowledge at airspacemag.com/quiz

Kings of the SkyA new season of “Air Warriors,” profiling U.S. combat aircraft and the people who fly and maintain them, starts in June. This season explores the versatile F-16 Fighting Falcon, the tireless B-52 Stratofortress, and the beloved long-range World War II bomber escort, the P-51 Mustang. Find local times and more at smithsonianchannel.com

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Air & Space Extras

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The Whittle W.1X turbojet was the powerplant for the first British-made jet to get off the ground, driving designer George Carter’s Gloster E.28/39 during taxiing trials in May 1941.

» Sir Frank Whittle was a cadet at Royal Air Force College Cranwell in the mid-1920s when his thesis, “Future Developments in Aircraft Design,” speculated on the viability of jet propulsion as an alternative to the propeller. He secured a patent for his turbojet in 1930.

» The 10 cylinders surrounding the exhaust nozzle are reverse-flow combustion chambers. They receive compressed air via the arching pipes and blend it with fuel, igniting the mixture, and send the exploded gas forward and down through another set of pipes to drive the turbine.

» U.S. Army Air Forces General Hap Arnold took a keen interest in Whittle’s work, arranging for the W.1X to be flown Stateside in October 1941. The USAAF then tasked General Electric to clone it. Whittle came to Boston in the summer of 1942 to assist. Bell’s clone-powered P-59 Airacomet flew that October.

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