Fatal Boeing Crash Raises Questions
When a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 with only 800 hours crashed into the ocean in November, killing all 189 on board, the event raised a lot of questions. It behaved erratically in flight before the crew lost control, and several crews had reported problems with the airplane in the days before. The event was difficult to handle for Boeing, which faced questions about what crews had or had not been told about how to manage the flight-control system. Whether the fault was in the system, or the documentation, or an error by the crew, is yet to be resolved.
Diamond’s Hybrid Airplane Flies
Diamond Aircraft’s new twin-engine hybrid aircraft flew for the first time, from the company’s headquarters in Austria, in November. The project, in development since 2013, is in partnership with Siemens. The reconfigured DA40 uses a standard combustion engine to power two independent electric drive systems, each consisting of a motor, battery and inverter. “A distributed propulsion architecture opens entirely new possibilities for the design of highly efficient planes,” said Frank Anton, executive vice president for Siemens eAircraft, “and we have now proven its technical feasibility.” The hybrid plane has an endurance of up to five hours.
