In addition to the DC-10 air tanker that’s been getting a lot of press, we also have a new NASA drone aircraft called Ikhana helping out with California wildfires by using advanced thermal-infrared imagery to give firefighters a more accurate picture of fire activity on the ground. Today’s Mercury News reports: Ikhana, NASA’s pilotless aircraft, flew over the 47,000-acre Lick fire for the first time, transmitting images and information to firefighters below as they battled the blaze into Saturday evening. “They used that to facilitate their planning for the day’s firefighting,” said Vince Ambrosio, NASA Ames’s principal investigator on the…
A short news story on the radio this morning was covering the USS Hornet and its role in recovering the Apollo 11 and 12 space missions. The Hornet is permanently docked here in the SF Bay Area in Alameda, but I haven’t yet seen it. Starting this weekend the museum is hosting Splashdown! with various celebrations all week long. The USS Hornet Museum will be hosting a festival July 16-25, 2004, to commemorate the 35th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo 11 and 12 flights, which landed the first humans on the moon. As the primary recovery vessel for these historic missions,…
The Collings Foundation is a non-profit group that has restored and maintains in flying condition several World War II aircraft. Recently their B-17 and B-24 bombers made a visit to Moffett Field here in Silicon Valley and I took a few pictures on the ground.
Today's San Jose Mercury had a story describing the Bay Area's contributions to aviation in conjunction with the 100 year anniversary of the Wright Brother's first flight. I was surprised to see connections to my alma matter (Santa Clara University: John J. Montgomery, a Santa Clara University professor, gets credit for the first controlled piloted flight, in a glider he called the Gull, off the bluffs near San Diego 20 years before the Wright brothers' first powered flight. There was also mention of the founding of Lockheed (Lockheed History): So Allen Loughead, a Santa Clara University student, and his brother…
Today the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) released the final report on the cause of the Shuttle accident on 2003-02-01. The press release says in part: The CAIB report concludes that while NASA's present Space Shuttle is not inherently unsafe, a number of mechanical fixes are required to make the Shuttle safer in the short term. The report also concludes that NASA's management system is unsafe to manage the shuttle system beyond the short term and that the agency does not have a strong safety culture. The Board determined that physical and organizational causes played an equal role in the…