Month: March 2019

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  Part of the Smart Columbus initiative is increasing the rate of electric vehicle adoption in the area. [credit: Smart Columbus ]

In 2016, the city of Columbus, Ohio beat out nearly 80 other metropolises to win the Department of Transportation's Smart City Challenge. The title is more than just bragging rights: there's a $40 million DOT grant—with another $10 million coming from Paul G. Allen Family Foundation—to help the city put together a holistic approach to using technology to make getting around Columbus safer and more sustainable. I've been keeping an eye on Smart Columbus, as it's known, for a while now. But as is the way with these kinds of large multidisciplinary programs, the first couple of years aren't particularly newsworthy unless you really love hearing about planning meetings. Now, that's starting to change.

Among the projects underway are the Smart Columbus Operating System, an open data platform which will become the backbone of the smart city strategy; a multimodal trip planning app, which is the kind of Fifth Element multipass for which Alex Roy often evangelizes; and various programs to provide mobility solutions to residents needing prenatal care or those with cognitive disabilities. While all of those things are still in relatively early stages of development, Smart Columbus' plan to spur the adoption of electric vehicles has been underway for a bit now.

Since the beginning of 2017, the city has seen an uptick in people choosing battery EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs that's outstripped both the national and midwest regional average. Specifically, the increase in new EVs since January 2017 has been 121 percent in Columbus, 94 percent for the US as a whole, and just 82 percent for the Midwest.

Enlarge / The Boeing 737 MAX's MCAS software was officially linked by FAA investigators to the crash of an Ethiopian Airlines flight earlier this month. The software was intended to compansate for the aerodynamic differences caused by the aircraft's larger engines.

At a high-level briefing at the Federal Aviation Administration on March 28, officials revealed "black box" data from Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 indicated that the Boeing 737 MAX's flight software had activated an anti-stall feature that pushed the nose of the plane down just moments after takeoff. The preliminary finding officially links Boeing's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) to a second crash within a five-month period. The finding was based on data provided to FAA officials by Ethiopian investigators.

The MCAS was partly blamed for the crash of a Lion Air 737 MAX off Indonesia last October. The software, intended to adjust the aircraft's handling because of aerodynamic changes caused by the 737 MAX's larger turbofan engines and their proximity to the wing, was designed to take input from one of two angle-of-attack (AOA) sensors on the aircraft's nose to determine if the aircraft was in danger of stalling. Faulty sensor data caused the MCAS systems on both the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights to react as if the aircraft was entering a stall and to push the nose of the aircraft down to gain airspeed.

On March 27, acting FAA Administrator Daniel Ewell told the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee's aviation subcommittee that there had been no flight tests of the 737 MAX prior to its certification to determine how pilots would react in the event of an MCAS malfunction. He said that a panel of pilots had reviewed the software in a simulator and determined no additional training was required for 737-rated pilots to fly the 737 MAX.

Enlarge / A Vulcan rocket panel is shown after the bump forming process. (credit: Tory Bruno/Twitter)

On Thursday night, United Launch Alliance chief executive Tory Bruno shared an image of a rocket panel on Twitter and declared, "The age of Vulcan has begun..." This is one of the first pieces of metal being cut and formed for the Vulcan-Centaur rocket's fuel tanks, Bruno later confirmed. "This is a piece of actual first flight hardware," he told Ars.

The image showed a large machine, at least the size of a freight train car, producing a long, slightly curved panel that will form the barrel components of a fuel tank. The fabrication work was being done inside United Launch Alliance's factory in Decatur, Alabama.

Bruno characterized the piece as being "bump formed," a process which occurs after barrel panels are machined. During this process, the panels are formed into cylindrical arcs so that they can be welded into a barrel for fuel tanks. (More about the materials used in aerospace structures and this specific manufacturing process can be found in this NASA document).