Slashdot Mirror
Musical Wings Reduce Aircraft Stall Risk
notwrong writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that a Qantas engineer has found a way to help small aircraft avoid stalling at low speeds: pumping sound through the wings. He found that music also works, having tested Spiderbait and Radiohead (nice choices; Spiderbait apparently works better)."
I would think that playing the B-52's, U2, Eagles, Foo Fighters, a Flock of Seagulls, or Jefferson Airplane would be more appropriate, then again, who am I to say...
Radiohead is shit?
I'm a fairly technical user, not a tech god by any stretch of the imagination, but I know my way around. I know how to forward ports on my router, I do all my own XVID rips from Vdub, I can install most Linux distros without a problem, and I'm damned proficient at packages like Photoshop and Illustrator. In addition, I'm a gamer from back in the DOS days, so concepts like editing text files (config.sys, autoexec.bat, etc) don't necessarily scare me.
That said, as much as I like the concept of Linux, I simply will not try it any longer until I hear that a number of problems have been solved.
A) Having to recompile kernels/worrying that apps will be broken by upgrading that kernel. For that matter, I don't want to have to compile anything, ever. Just to make this clear, never. Come up with either something akin to Windows where I click on a standard installer, or make it like Mac where I just drag and drop the folder.
B) Any time I'm forced to drop to a command line, you as a developer have failed. Back 10 years ago, this may have been acceptable. In this day and age, it isn't. Furthermore, while once in a blue moon I may change a text file in Windows, in Linux it's a constant occurence. Again, you have failed.
C) MAN pages do not cut it. Neither does a message board where half the time I'll be called a clueless n00b, 25% of the time I'll be told to use a different distro, and the other 25% of the time I'll get genuinely helpful people giving me contradictory answers. If I'm expected to jump to an alien computing environment you'd best make sure your documentation is up to snuff. Linux sucks in this regard.
I'm an advanced user who's in favor of open source, but the bizarre, arcane, and technical details I have to jump through to achieve the same things that are comparatively simple in Mac or Windows may Linux a deal breaker. You will never, ever, become successful on the desktop until idiocy like this is exorcised from the OS.
"All we can say is that Spiderbait performs better than Radiohead," said Mr Salmon.
Only for the typical Auzzie who thinks tie-dying is fashionable.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
they don't play 'Crash and Burn' by Savage Garden.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/metricmusic
from the fake-plastic-airlines dept
I'm sorry, I don't get it. Enlighten me?
Sleep is futile.
At one point, they kind of rocked. Then they did OK Computer and sucked.
Not a damn good thing out of them since.
... you are the wind beneath my wings.
If anyone has ever witnessed the Dragostea din Tei music video by Ozone you know that some fat beats can keep even the worst Romanian boy band in the air.
From now on, every small aircarft owner must pay royalties to the RIAA. Otherwise RIAAAF rules of engagement will not apply.
filling wings with rock doesn't seem like such a good idea.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
Mr Salmon said that if they could make small aircraft perform better at low speed, it should be possible to build planes with smaller wings, which would be lighter, less thirsty, and thus cheaper to fly.
I can see the headlines already- "Airplane crashes due to smudged CD"
More seriously, have they done studies comparing the frequency of the sound vs air pressure/density? It's possible that other bands would perform better at altitude- maybe they could finally find an appropriate place to play Wings cd's...
I'll bring my air guitar.
Will the plane explode if you blast some Necrophagist, Psycroptic, or Nile?
Of course, Qantas. Always looking for new ways to keep their crash-safety record intact.
quake3 source been released. submit a proper news post already.
now mod this down.
Thats why the helicoptors played Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now, it was to stop them stalling! You see, them yanks come up with all the best stuff. Except for sliced bread cuz that was invented here in good ol'Blighty.
If added noise makes the flight smoother, isn't this dither?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither
These broken wings
And learn to fly again, learn to live so free
He found that music also works, having tested Spiderbait and Radiohead...
We appear to have stalled, and will now commence emergeny procedures by playing Radiohead through the wings of the aircraft.
While you are now no longer going to die, you can listen to some music for people who wish they could just.
Thank you and have an unhappy day.
I may be talking out of my ass here, but don't bird wings do the same thing when their feathers ruffle as air passes over them? Wouldn't this ruffling be the same as the vibration described in the article?
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Trolls live under bridges, not in caves.
This is a well known phenomenon. The question is how much energy is being used to get this reduction in drag?
Where does this energy come from? Either APUs, or more powerful main engines... which are heavier... which means bigger wings...
spiderbait.com.au MP3s
How about Pigs on the Wing?
Does anyone know anything about this?
hype - bSD's just yet, but I'm 4aranoid conspiracy series of internal is dying. Fact:
Probably a similar phenomenon to adding air blowers on wings. By blowing air out of the top of the wings and into air flowing over them you can have the flow stay attached on the wing much, much longer. This reduces the cross-sectional area of the turbulence and greatly reduces the induced drag.
I suspect that both methods work by adding kinetic energy to the flow, but IANAAE.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis hebes
Aphex Twin was commissioned to do a track for Virgin Airlines, which ended up being called "Aphex Airlines", but it ended up being rejected because he decided to end the track with what sounds like a plane's engines cutting out, followed by a nose dive (and something resembling praying). It's also far from melodic (it's damn close to a detuned radio) and had virtually no chance of being accepted for any commercial purposes. Sort of like the Family Learning Channel spots in "Rejected", you just get the feeling he didn't WANT this to get off the ground.
Wouldn't it be ironic indeed if it helped keep planes in the air?
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
In-flight enterntainment an navigation. Thanks for the info, but it doesn't contradict the grandparent post in any way.
Yes, it seems music may get us to the stars after all!
You've never listened to Kid A, have you?
If you were talking about Coldplay I'd agree completley, but you should listen to Kid A before saying that about Radiohead.
It's nice when science can agree with the things we already know to be true. Music is a great way to overcome more than stalls in aircraft engines. The right song can bring you right back to the moment you first heard it, make time stand still and everything seem alright until the time it ends (and you want to hear it again).
The right song can melt a woman in your arms, make a bad date suddenly go right, turn a night of monotony into a night of romance. When I turn on that Barry White and the moment is just right, the lights go down and...
oh wait...
sorry, forgot this was Slashdot. This kind of talk has no place here.
*ducking*
M
My cousin had a similar idea 20 years ago. We attached bees to a plane's wings and the buzz really helps.
Besides, with enough bees we could even get VTOL.
The only problem is making all bees fly in one direction. We are trying to tame them and teach them to act like eskimo dogs, but it's been hard.
The flower-ahead-of-the-plane trick works for some time, but they get bored real fast. OTOH, when my cousin walks ahead of the plane, they fly it for hours trying to get to him.
Maybe it's like that duckling thing they made a film about. Oh, it's so cute!
... does it run on linux?
I have no idea what you are talking about. Dithering applies to signal *processing* (input -> process -> output). The presented concept doesn't mean "sampling the original wing flapping, adding a signal and applying the end result again to the wings", it just means "adding a signal to the wing". You don't even have the means to start fresh with the "applying" part, since you can't control all of the wing movement.
Could you elaborate your idea?
RTFA. The article is talking about a stalling wing, Bernouli's principle of lift and laminar flow, not a stalling engine.
April Wine "Crash and Burn"
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
I never heard of Spiderbait until just now, because I suspect that at the age of 33 that I've unwittingly moved underneath a rock, but thanks to some... um... research, I find that they are pretty good!
Any other examples of small-aircraft-saving music that you guys enjoy?
Aside from colloquial usage, it is an oft-used mechanical engineering term.
heh, in one breath they say how it could improve safety by making current plane designs have a larger margin for error under stall conditions. But then at the end they suggest that with this technology installed a plane might need smaller wings. If you make the wings smaller then you remove that larger safety margin and get a plane no safer than they are now. Like any new safety tech, once people start to expect it to work it stops improving safety. Like anti-lock brakes. Saved many lives when people still drove as if they weren't there, but now people drive even more recklessly and know that the anti-lock will probably save them if they have to slam stop in a hurry.
...how about an improved stall-onset-warning device that hits the pilot upside the head and yells "AIRSPEED, YA FOOL!" in his/her ear?
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
We tried this years ago, but the plane would only stay up for 17 minutes and 2 seconds, wierd...
Copulation with a horse, while hilarious, doesn't make for good pRon!
Goggles - do nothing.
Wouldn't this be much more useful for removing ice from wings? THAT would be a nice safety feature because the pilot could just hit play and ice would fly of his wings. I think I saw once that they were testing to produce a shock wave somewhere in the wings structure to shake of the ice with the blast. I guess you don't really want to bang the wings with anything. I would if it was the last resource, but doing it with music would solve this more elegantly.
A popular aftermarket wing mod is vortex generators... little pieces of metal or plastic carefully positioned at stretegic intervals along the top of the wing skin, usually just a little ways aft of the leading edge. This induces vortices in the airflow to help keep the boundary layer across the top of the wing from separating off from the surface, and thus lowers the stalling speed by some small amount.
...and yes one of the very first times I took off with music playing just had to be with Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride, as I was haulin' ass down the runway thru rotation and climb-out (ST:First Contact reference).
I am a pilot who flies my own small plane and prefer to simply keep my airspeed up to avoid stalling the wings, and keep the music in my headsets. An iAudio X5 mp3 player fed thru a set of Lightspeed Thirty 3G ANR headsets while you're flying is a great experience.
We should get the military on this right away. Pump nothing but "The One-Eyed, One-Horned, Flying Purple People Eater" through the wings, and our planes will be unstoppable!
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
Don't forget John Denver, you insensitive clod!
I for one welcome our singing wing aircraft overlords.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
So, there might actually be a use for Winger's music after all?
'Rora
80's Cartoons Central
In effect the wings are flapping, on a very very small scale.
This is very impractical (surprise!). What if you are in a region of flight where only the generated sound was keeping your plane in the air? Then you have an electrical failure. You fall like a brick. The ignition systems are already isolated from the main electrical system and fully end-to-end redundant specifically because of concern over electrical failures.
Also, it would pose engineering problems. Aircraft like the C172 I fly have wings that are specifically designed to stall in a very particular way. It's wings stall from the inside out, so that aileron control is maintained as long as possible. In fact, despite my repeated attempts, I've never been able to get into a stall deep enough for the ailerons to stop working. The point is that sound transducers would change all of this high precision engineering. What would happen if a single speaker went out? Would the plane go into an irrecoverable barrel roll?
Also, stalls really aren't that big a deal if you know your ass from a hole in the ground. The people who get into trouble with stalls are idiot doctors who bought their fancy Cirruses and flying lessons at the same time and never give flying the respect it truly deserves. But that is another story.
...Sparks is right out.
S CMZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00000740D.01._
Music: do the lyrics make a difference? Or no instruments at all? Please don't use the phrase "Flying in on a wing and a prayer" or the Intelligent Design folks will get the White House to fund Faith-Based Aviation. Oh, wait, that's what the Space Shuttle has become...
-- Professor Jonathan Vos Post
Why do you think you hear the humming when the flying saucers come down?
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
Maybe Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper shouldn't have taken that break between songs ...
"Hey where's Tommy?"
"He got sucked into the turbines during the last round."
>turn a night of monotony into a night of romance.
You mean monogamy?
Now we know why all the flying saucers have that bizarre humming noise! Outstanding!
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
Uhm, maybe not, watching the Corrs is not likely to stall anything...might even speed it up to the discomfort of your "wing man"...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Would this work with model airplanes?
1) To the first poster: Indeed, I seem to remember that fly thing vaguely, but was unaware of it when I posted the comment. Your memory is amazing. As a side note, and however worthless a fly might be, causing suffering is definitely a bad thing (TM).
2) To the poster of the link: It seems it was indeed that page at MIT. Thanks for the pointer. I bow to your searching powers.
It's kinda like a dejà-vu sensation, only it's something I knew, rather than something I've seen.
Spooky!
... High Speed Dirt ?
Latewire
As the plane plummets towards the ground, the terror of the passengers turns to extreme agony as the dischordant blast of bad karaoke revibrates through the cabin's PA system in the pilot's last ditch effort to regain control of his craft.
Using smaller wings at a higher angle of attack could make the plane lighter, but would overall need more energy to fly, as the "lift" would be directed back more.
You typically see these conditions only on slower craft (small private aircraft), or on large jet-liners at approach and takeoff. Other craft (like jet fighters and such) typically have more than enough engine power to compensate - some of the craft even use stall to their advantage (and a lot of computer processing) to allow the aircraft to do some amazing maneuvers for evasion. So, really, the concern is on craft where the speed is lower. So I ask:
What ever happenned to the Kline-Fogleman wing design?
For those of you who are unaware, back in the mid-1980's, two gentlemen by the names of Floyd Fogleman and Richard Kline came up with a special wing design, which essentially looked like the profile of a "standard" airfoil, but with a notch on the underside of wing (they also found that the wing worked well flipped upside down!). It utilized drag at low speeds to create extra lift in stall conditions. They received a patent for the design, and tested it on R/C models they designed and flew. They had plans to try a full scale test, but in the meantime they published a book about their design (which they also showed on 60 Minutes as well as in an article in Omni Magazine). The book was entitled "The Ultimate Paper Airplane" (ISBN 0-671-55551-0), and contained details on the airfoil design, why they believed it worked, details on the patent, pictures of their R/C aircraft tests, and - of course - instructions (including various models which could be photocopied from the book) to fold various paper airplanes based on the wing design.
So - what happenned to this design? Where did these guys go off to, and why have we not seen anything more about their airfoil? One thing which may have limited its application was the fact that it did create more drag than a regular wing (fuel consumption?), and it wasn't very good at fast flight speeds. But for lower speed aircraft, this shouldn't have been a problem. If there are any aircraft designers or whatnot out there who know more, please post - I always thought the wing design was interesting, and have always wondered what had happenned...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Heck no, it's not dither. First of all, you can't make connections between concepts just because they share vocabulary words in common. That only works in the social sciences.
In this case, the noise added adds energy to the airflow. And it doesn't make the flight smoother, it just makes the airplane stall at a lower airspeed. Most importantly, however, it's a purely aerodynamic affect, having nothing to do with quantization.
However, I applaud you on getting modded up on what has to be one of the least informative or insightful posts I've ever seen. That, in an of itself, is certainly interesting and perhaps worth a different kind of mod. Unfortunately, there are no points given for fooling moderators.