OK, so this isn’t technically a Seattle story. But how can we resist a bizarre new flying machine being built by Boeing to travel to the farthest reaches of the Earth? This week, Boeing announced it is teaming up with Calgary, Alberta-based SkyHook to develop a “heavy-lift rotorcraft” that can carry a 40-ton load up to 200 miles without refueling. The JHL-40 (couldn’t they come up with a catchier name?) is designed to support drilling and mining operations in the Canadian Arctic and Alaska.

It certainly looks cool. It’s an airship, the length of a football field, with four helicopter rotors spinning alongside it. The ship will be filled with helium to make it neutrally buoyant—that keeps the vehicle and its fuel in the air—while the rotors provide lift and thrust to support whatever it’s transporting. The 40-ton capacity would be twice that of the world’s most powerful vertical lift aircraft, Russia’s MI-26 transport helicopter. Boeing is under contract from SkyHook to build two prototypes at its Rotorcraft Systems facility in Pennsylvania. Once built and tested, the craft will need to be certified by Transport Canada and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

But there are some major safety and technical issues involved, which most news outlets aren’t talking about yet. Remember the Hindenburg? In 1977, my family spent a year in Germany, and I recall seeing the newsreel footage of the fiery disaster—it was the 40th anniversary of the German airship’s demise (the exact cause is still a mystery). Those images have always stuck with me, and with a lot of people, which is a big part of why zeppelins went out of style. Of course, today’s blimps don’t use flammable hydrogen for buoyancy, which was the Hindenburg’s fatal flaw. There are, however, other issues to consider—some of which helped to sink German company Cargolifter AG, which tried to build an airship capable of lifting 160 tons but went bust in 2002 after its prototype was destroyed in a storm.

To get the inside scoop on modern rotorcraft design, I went to Robert Breidenthal, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington who has done consulting work for Boeing. Breidenthal points to three main challenges of the JHL-40′s design, which will need to be worked out before it can become a viable transport ship.

1. Vulnerability to turbulence
This is a “classic problem with neutrally buoyant vehicles,” says Breidenthal. “It might be necessary to limit operations to relatively tranquil atmospheric conditions, securing it during turbulence,” he says, adding that this might not be a problem in the Arctic, which has long periods of calm weather. But if a storm is coming, look out.

2. Aerodynamic control
Because the spinning rotors are close to the hull, they will affect the airflow and pressure along the side of the craft. That could lead to “substantial side forces,” says Breidenthal, which would need to be managed in flight. “It would be fun to work all the fluid mechanics of that out,” he says.

3. Price of helium
Because it’s so light, helium eventually escapes from the atmosphere into space, and is hard to find in the first place (only in natural gas wells). It is a “strategic resource with unique and valuable characteristics” so it’s under high demand, Breidenthal says. Helium prices have already, umm, ballooned by about 50 percent in 2008, and could keep going up.

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Don’t call it a flying car. It’s a “roadable aircraft.”

It’s named the Transition, and the first full-scale model is taking shape inside a former machine shop on an industrial back alley in Woburn, MA. Between now and late July, the 10 employees of angel-funded startup Terrafugia will be spending “a lot of long days, nights, and weekends” in that shop, says CEO and founder Carl Dietrich. That’s because they want to show off their concept vehicle at AirVenture—the world’s largest aviation festival, held annually in Oshkosh, WI—and there’s a lot of work to finish first.

When I visited Terrafugia yesterday, technicians were shaping the grooves in the fuselage’s carbon-fiber skin that will hold the straps for the vehicle’s rocket-fired emergency parachute. They hadn’t yet attached the folding wings to the fuselage or the fuselage to the empanage (which will hold up the dual tails), and they had yet to figure out where to put the engine’s exhaust system. “It’s crunch time,” says Dietrich.

And the work won’t end after Oshkosh. Terrafugia wants to deliver the first Transition to a customer by the end of 2009 and go into large-scale production by 2012. If you were just building a new type of plane or a new type of car, that schedule would be ambitious enough. But the Transition is both—and if, as the company intends, pilots are to land the vehicle on an airport runway, fold up the wings, and tool right out onto public highways, then this hybrid-of-a-different-color will have to meet federal standards for both aviation safety and highway safety.

Which means going through the demanding certification processes set up by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Then there are problems like building fail-safe folding wings that can be verifiably locked into flying position; making the vehicle light enough not only to fly, but to qualify as a Special Light-Sport Aircraft (of which more below); working with insurance companies to create a new kind of policy combining the accident insurance required for automobiles with the hull and liability insurance required for airplanes; and finding new investors with the stomach for the kinds of risks Terrafugia is taking.

In other words, there are a thousand practical obstacles to achieving the flying-car dreams Deitrich says he’s had since he decided to become an aerospace engineer at the age of 8—-to say nothing of actually making a bit of money along the way. “The old joke is that the best way to make a small fortune in aviation is to start with a large one,” says Dietrich. But while he admits that building a plane that you can also drive “sounds off the wall,” he says “there is a real business case for investing in its success. I’m personally invested, as are a lot of the people here. I don’t see any way we’re not going to get this done.”

There’s plenty of reason to take Dietrich seriously. The 30-year-old earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT, and was awarded the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize in 2006 in recognition of his groundbreaking designs, including a desktop-sized fusion reactor, a pumpless rocket engine, and a blast-safe pick for removing land mines. Dietrich put the prize money into Terrafugia, which he co-founded with fellow MIT aero-astro grads Samuel Schweighart and Anna Mracek (now his wife) and two former MBA students from MIT’s Sloan School. Their plan to manufacture a road-ready airplane was the runner-up in the business venture category of the 2006 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition—winning the company a $10,000 check that still hangs on the wall of Terrafugia’s “prototype development facility,” a modest space formerly used to manufacture garage doors.

But prizes alone don’t guarantee success. Nor do cool prototypes (though Terrafugia started generating orders as soon as it showed its first folding wing model at Oshkosh in 2006). To succeed as a business, you need a real market. And the key to Terrafugia’s entire business plan was … Next Page »

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You may remember a few weeks back, when Nanocomp Technologies of Concord, NH, announced that it was able to make what it called the world’s largest sheets of carbon nanotubes. Well, it seems like the folks at Slashdot weren’t the only ones intrigued by the technology. The Air Force has awarded the company a Small Business Innovation Grant to try and develop wires and cables made from carbon nanotubes. The Phase One grant is to study the feasibility of the concept. If it looks promising, further grants could follow.

Even in today’s high-tech world, the main method of transporting electricity through a machine is good old-fashioned copper wire. But despite its excellent conductivity, copper has its downside when you’re flying across continents or launching things into orbit—weight. Nanocomp says that a third of the weight of a 15-ton satellite comes from copper wire, while a Boeing 747 has more than 135 miles of wire weighing two tons. If wires and cables made of carbon nanotubes were to replace all that copper, they could weigh as little as one fifth as much. Lighter weight, in turn, translates into a significant savings in the amount of fuel needed to hurl these things through the air.

Most of the industrially produced carbon nanotubes today are only a few microns long, essentially coming out of the process as carbon nanotube powder. Nanocomp has come up with a way to grow the tubes to lengths of about a millimeter, a thousand times as long, which the company says are “significantly more conductive.” Nanocomp is able to put out nanotubes that overlap each other and form a mat, creating sheets that measure three by six feet and may be as large as 100 feet square by this summer.

Because of the way the carbon atoms link together, nanotubes are potentially as strong as steel but much lighter, and have desirable electrical properties. In announcing the grant, Nanocomp CEO Peter Antoinette said, “Our work can result in a true 21st century change in the game, creating electrically optimized carbon nanotube wires and cables, comparable to copper in terms of electrical conductivity but up to 80 percent lighter and more robust.”

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