In this episode of the Struck aerospace engineering podcast, we discuss Jaunt Air Mobility‘s gyrocopter EVTOL design and talk about it’s future. We discuss NXTCOMM’s new flat satcom radome antenna design, Airbus’ white paper on hydrogen-powered planes and the EU’s plan to become carbon-neutral. We cover Embraer’s new foray into Turboprop planes, antimicrobial tech in cabins, and the toxic, costly nature of fire-suppressing foam.
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Full Transcript: EP18 – Jaunt Air Mobility EVTOL – Will it Fly? Hydrogen-Powered Planes and Is Fire-Suppressing Foam on Its Way Out?
Dan: This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at weather guard. We support design engineers and make lightning protection easy.
You’re listening to the Struck podcast. I’m Dan Blewett
Allen Hall: I’m Allen hall.
Dan: And here on struck, we talk about everything. Aviation, aerospace engineering, and lightning protection.
All right, welcome back. This is struck episode 18, Allen. What’s going on?
Allen Hall: Hey, it’s been a great week, Dan, pretty busy things. Just starting to pick up. Looks like air. Aviation’s getting a little, a little more busy. Flights are ticking up a little bit. So it’s
Dan: gonna be, yeah, you got another trip this week.
Don’t you?
Allen Hall: I want, so this is my second trip outside of Massachusetts. Uh, we’re a little curious to see if the. Any changes have occurred in the, uh, airport experience and on the aircraft, it seems like the Southwest airlines was what were travel on. It is still blocking out the middle seats. And there was a report by MIT I saw yesterday or day before that was talking about how that reduced.
Um, exposure to COVID by like roughly 50%, which, which was interesting. But the last time we traveled through the airports, airports seem busy. They were really busy, but the parking lots were empty. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s what it was. Um, so yeah, it can be a busy week.
Dan: Well, I heard, yeah, I heard Delta’s gonna keep, uh, their middle seats blocked off until September, but then again, other.
Uh, companies hadn’t really followed suit. And of course, with American airlines, they didn’t even seem to enforce, uh, one of our United States senators wearing a mask, the whole flight, apparently. So
Allen Hall: it’s not
Dan: still spotty regulation across the industry.
Allen Hall: Well, it’s not regulation, right? Uh, the FAA can’t oppose company
Dan: policy, company policies,
Allen Hall: right.
And the companies can remove you from an aircraft for whatever reason they want it’s denial of service. That’s what it is. So, yeah. Uh, when we traveled, uh, on the, on the last flight, it was, I think there was one or to people who weren’t wearing a mask, but you notice what happens is it kind of get shuttled to the back corner of the airplane.
What seems to be part of the approach that at least Southwest was taking at the time. And I’ve heard that from other airlines that they try to take people who decided not to wear a mask for whatever that could be medical conditions, that dissolve variety of reasons why that would occur.
Dan: Oh. So they know ahead of time.
So it was just thinking to myself, I’m like, well, how would they know if they’re not on the plane yet? Yeah. But I guess some people.
Allen Hall: Some people with breathing problems, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a big deal. They have a mask on it. Doesn’t make it easier to breathe.
Dan: Sure. And this is true. This is true. So in today’s show, we’re going to cover, I’ve got a good, good smattering of topics.
We’re going to cover Jaunt Air Mobility’s aircraft which uses ROSA technology, which is a slow rotor, uh, just really interesting, uh, Airbus and some of their, they had extensive white paper. They’re talking about, uh, the use of hydrogen fuels in the future. So we’ll catch up on that. Uh, Embraer is developing a new turboprop, so they haven’t really made a new one in a while.
So we’re gonna talk a little bit about that. And then a next column has a new design of a flat panel antenna. So some interesting Satcom news there, and then rich out a little bit about the Textron explosion and OSHA has just recently cited them. Uh, that was back in December, but still really scary incident.
I think they were lucky to not, um, Have as nearly as much a injury. And then we’re talk a little bit about fire suppressing foam, which is a crazy thing that just, this seems like a very toxic and just a it’s. It seems as I did research on this seem strange that it’s hasn’t been banned yet, but anyway, so let’s start with, uh, with Jaunt Air mobility.
So this is their attempt and their, I guess, partnering with Uber elevate. And they make a lot of claims that this is a really great little aircraft that it’s fast, that it’s a quiet, that it’s smooth, you know, vertical takeoff and landing. Uh, but this is a gyrocopter am I right?
Allen Hall: Essentially it is just a, what I call a power.
Gyrocopter a gyrocopter or an autogyro. Is a think of it as a, it has a main rotor blade on top, but it’s not powered and it needs four thrusts for the, for the blade on top to start rotating, to act like a propeller or a wing, that’s essentially what it does. And this particular case, uh, Jaunt is actually powering that rotor on top of the aircraft to provide lift. So they, they power that rotor up to take off the, the vertical takeoff. And then when they’re flying forward, they just kind of let it auto rotate. What looked like, um, with a forward thrust provided by four electric engines, two on each smaller, it’s a really small wing, just enough to put some propellers out there.
So it looked like, so it’s sort of a combination of an auto gyro power gyro electric aircraft. Somewhere in between all those things
Dan: yet another kind of hybridized design. So what along and these have been around for a little bit. So like what’s the history of like safety and efficiency. It’s a really, like I said, it’s a unique, cause I said it gains, I think it can rotate as slow as 80 revolutions from maybe where you can just very clearly see.
The rotor you can move in it’s round.
Allen Hall: And the autogyro is a way to fly slowly. What, in a smaller aircraft, that’s what it’s been used for originally. I don’t remember where it was designed originally. I think it was in Europe, maybe in Spain where the auto Jara was first invented and as a long time ago.
Uh, but what, what it can allow you to do is. Really fly slowly across, uh, I think they’re using it for agricultural purposes originally. That’s where I’ve seen it use is where a regular aircraft is going to be flying at say a, um, roughly a hundred miles an hour. And this auto gyro can fly much, much slower than that and still get the cover the same amount of ground.
So it’s basically a simplified way of flying slower. Uh, so you don’t need that much for thrust, kind of a combination helicopter airplane. So it’s not helicopter. He can hover. It’s not an airplane where you’re going a hundred knots, but it’s somewhere in between. That’s the way to think about it for an urban transport.
It may be a good fit because ultimately, um, you, you really, you, you need that vertical aspect, right? You want to be taken off. If you aren’t on top of a building, when it lift off and go fly to the next building, or he wouldn’t take off from your building, go fly to a restaurant or wherever you were going to.
I I’m always dubious at anything. That’s rotating over my head. And, uh, the
Dan: you’re not a big decapitation guy, not
Allen Hall: into that. No, if you see helicopter crashes that are really turn you off to helicopters, uh, uh, and, and this situation not on dry roads. So I think, or even worse because the blades going to be floppy, even though they’re not moving all that fast, you get hit with a rotor moving.
Even a couple RPM says it’s going to be a severe damage. So. I think you’ve got to balance those two off the thing, John, what is interesting at least to me was a little certification timeline. I think they’re talking about starting the certification process in 2022. So they’ve got some design phase company stuff they’re going to go do and then transition off into certifying for part 27 and part 29, which is the rotocraft regulations from the FAA part 27, essentially small rotocraft or to a nice large road craft.
Not sure why this would fit. In between those two, I would consider to be parked 27, but maybe there’s some technology about it that makes it part 29 are some aspects about the way it flies that were thrown into part 29, but they only a three year window to get that done. That will be very difficult. I haven’t seen a lot of aircraft certification programs get to get done in three years now.
I’ve seen a lot of schedules that say three years or two and a half years from start to finish. But very few from start to finish, get down at three years as more likely five. Uh, because there’s always setbacks and delays, particularly some sort of new design, you just never can get through that hurdle.
And more realistically, a lot of later programs have been new aircraft programs closer to seven. So there’s, there’s a time clock that when you go to the FAA, you start their certification, say I’m applying for a type certificate for this aircraft being. That starts a clock. And I forget that clock is three or five years.
And after that three to five year window, I think it’s three years and you can have us for a year in a year extension. I think that’s all. So what happens is you have your defense regulatory basis to find the day you apply, and then you get this grace period where if new regulations committee do not have to incorporate them.
And if you go past that certain threshold, certainly you have to read it, apply in the FAA, can apply new regulations. That’s what kills the program because there’s always new regulations, right? So you have to go back and redesign your aircraft for these new regulations. I’ve been through a couple of those programs and what’s, that has been done and it is severely painful.
And that’s why, that’s why a lot of companies got smart and stopped. Making the application, just stop starting the clock. Don’t start the clock until you’re pretty sure you’re going to finish it. Otherwise you kind of get this snowball effect going on.
Dan: Yeah. That’s a man. That sounds crazy that, yeah, you’ve got to rush to finish that. Otherwise now your whole, everything you’re trying to get certified for has changed. That’s terrible. I mean, it makes sense. Cause you don’t wanna get outdated, like they’ll grandfather you in for a little while, but not for half a decade right
Allen Hall: on that.
That’s what was happening. Right. So you’d apply and then. Have you had a concept for an aircraft you would apply and then if it took you 10 years to finish it while you’re still with the original regulations, well, that doesn’t make any sense. These are because the guy that, that started and finish a project in two years is getting penalized because it eventually becomes a competitive marketplace and the aircraft at a slightly less expense, which means it probably has.
Less FAA know that it’s not directly related to this, but it’s kind of related to this. If there’s less regulations to comply with is probably less expensive to manufacturer certifying. So that gives them a competitive advantage on the marketplace. And then the, the company that has the SuperDuper safety feature gets penalized.
Dan: speaking of another long road. So Airbus is considering the future of, uh, of propulsion. So hydrogen, this also has a really, I mean, this is a much longer timeline because there’s just a lot of hurdles to get hydrogen power. But one of the interesting things that I, um, notice as I was reading through this white paper was just that.
You know, it’s going to be most viable for smaller aircraft and that, as it gets to, as the scale of the, you know, the amount of passengers they’re carrying increases, the amount of hydrogen, they have to be at a store on board increases. And so then the fuselage has to get extended, right. And that’s where the costs are really ramp up.
So what, what’s your take on hydrogen
Allen Hall: really mandating it. So I’m not sure there’s a way out of this. Airbus put out some nice congratulatory words to the EU about hydrogen being the future.
And that Airbus was looking to participate in that future. You really don’t have a choice. Honestly,
and if you’re serious about putting some sort of hydrogen fuel tanks in an aircraft, there’s, uh, there’s some problem, it was worth it, right? Because you want to do in order to get hydrogen condensed enough to get onto the aircraft. It’s going to be in liquid form. When it gets in liquid form, us be really, really cold, which means you need some sort of.
Insulated double-walled triple walled storage container on the aircraft. And that’s why they’re talking about, it’s basically extending the fuselage on the AFT fuselage. Basically putting the storage tank in the fuselage, took to store the hydrogen, which makes sense on a simplistic sense on a simple.
Holistic basis, just because a hydrogen storage tank is going to look something similar to a propane tank, a very expensive propane tank, or it’s a cylinder, and it’s got caps on the ends. But if you’re going to use hydrogen, you really need to rethink the way you build airplanes.
And is it makes sense to use a conventional shaped airplane with it’s got a long fuselage and then very slim wings, because right now all the fuel is essentially stored in the very, and the, in the wings it’s liquid can be stored at room temperature. So all the fuel goes into the wings. When you told her hydrogen model.
What’s stored in the wings. Nothing. I guess the wings will be empty, right? I guess you put
Dan: luggage, suitcases, little kid, little kids. The smallest kids can just crawl in there and be like a jungle gym and be like a indoor play place.
Allen Hall: It’s the, no, we’ve
Dan: got to read. We got to think big Allen. We’ve got to rethink all this.
Oh. You know, sponsored by McDonald’s.
Allen Hall: have you seen the uni body airplanes have been like Boeing has been discussing with NASA for a couple of years where it’s just looks like a B to a B a very thick B2, triangular shape aircraft, uh, where the passengers are all kinda in the middle and you don’t have really don’t have any windows you ever, do you ever see that
Dan: NASA?
I haven’t. No.
Allen Hall: Well, that makes a little more sense. If you think about like a B two, which is just huge volume and that’s essentially what it is, it’s just a flying wing concept and you don’t have windows. Maybe then it makes more sense because you could put hydrogen storage cells inside of there. Instead of having this empty wing, they may use the space more efficiently.
Maybe that’s what they’re thinking, but, and if, if I’m Airbus and I think that’s the way to go for is that that’s the way to go forward. I’m not telling Boeing that and that’s for darn sure. So I wonder if part of this white paper is just to say, well, here’s conventional technology. You start getting modern conventional technologies, but, and.
The real world, you’ve got to take a clean sheet at it and start over and come up with some of their design. That’s what I’m thinking. But hydrogen, you know, the thing about hydrogen is that it’s really inefficient to make, especially if you use electrolysis to make it.
Dan: Yeah, it’s really expensive. They said that like, that’s the way you’d want to do it.
To be carbon neutral is splitting water molecules. But it’s really expensive,
Allen Hall: cause it’s a very inefficient process. But at the same token, if you have, if you have a lot of unused power, particularly at night time, uh, and if you have a lot of renewable energy, if the wind is blowing at nighttime and you have no place to put it, why would you not use it to create hydrogen?
It’s an inefficient, but at the same time, you’re also making can heat. All these processes make heat. And you, at some point, I haven’t heard a lot of discussion about this, which is odd, but if we’re concerned about the global heating of the earth and carbon dioxide is a main contributor to that, isn’t just plain making heat.
Part of that discussion too, because in an inefficient process is a, is a heat latent process. And to make hydrogen, it’s a little, there’s a lot of extra wasted heat, involved energy involved to do it. So, um, I’m sure at some point we’re gonna see some discussions about the total heat generated by the hydrogen process versus, um, other technologies like batteries, that district don’t use as much heat to store the energy.
That’s going to be the comparison over time, because what the EU is saying and what their white paper is saying is, is that. It’s there’s no carbon doc. So I created by the process. So it could be totally true. That could be totally true, but there’s other consequences for doing that.
Dan: All right, so we’re gonna move on to our engineering segment. So we’ll real quick touch on the safety stuff that we’ve been kinda talking about with COVID-19, which is the, uh, there’s a bunch of industrial adhesive films that they’re using now. I know, uh, ad HEATTECH is one of them and they’re going to be putting these in cabins.
Uh, maybe in the future here, coming up. I’ve seen them actually in a building that I, I frequent here in DC and it just, uh, it just wraps around the. The high touch points. So like the, the, the entrance bar of the, the door handle, that’s the word. I was like, I was looking for the word door handle, but these are wrapped around the door handles.
And, uh, I guess they sort of like self heal is what it kind of says. And they’re just like, self-cleaning these films. Um, so yeah, interesting. Just like I have an antibacterial antiviral microbial. Process, but, um, just to kind of get that stuff is kind of the right. Yeah. I guess that’s, stuff’s kind of the way of the future.
I don’t know the brand name of the ones that I’m familiar with. Like in real, in real life. I don’t think they’re made by, uh, at home.
Allen Hall: Is it a very thin film? Is it clear? Like a
Dan: clear, not clear you like, you know, like, you know, it’s there because they want you to grab it. Like that’s where they want you to touch the door.
Allen Hall: Is it colored though?
Dan: It’s
Allen Hall: just like kind of Milky color. It
Dan: just seems kind of, it just seems kind of it’s it’s like. It just looks kinda medically, like it’s white, but it’s got a texture and it says it’s got like a little, like little printing on it. And now that kind of says what it is, because again, they like the first time I encountered it, I’m like, am I supposed to touch this?
And then you look at it and you’re like, yes, they want you to touch this because this is cleaning itself, essentially. So put your dirty, disgusting poisonous hands here. Well, because it’s gonna. How many times have you avoided interesting technology? Don’t
Allen Hall: we have a tendency to devoid. I’ve seen all kinds of contraptions lately to avoid touching door handles.
And
Dan: now we’re saying touch away. Yeah. Oh, well, have you seen the, the foot, the foot things? Is that one of them you’ve seen?
Allen Hall: Oh, what thing
Dan: to open a door? So, yeah, so at we work. Which, you know, they’re doing just like any other business where there’s a lot of people. And of course, there’s very few people and we, most Wheeler, we work locations here, but they have these little like door catches, which they’re not promising.
It’s not clear like what they are until you like, stopped to really look at it. But. It basically allows you to just pull the door open with your foot. It’s like a little cleat, so it’s extends out like six inches and then as a, an upward kind of lip with some like little spikies on it, on the bottom, and you can just dip the door and the bathroom and you can just put your foot on it and pull and it’ll open the door for you.
So it’s a way to open it without touching with your items, which makes sense. Honestly, you have shoes on them. Yeah. I’ve seen that you’ve sent, you’ve seen them, but he didn’t know what it was.
Allen Hall: I did. Now that you say it. I have seen that I’ve seen it down in Maryland of all the places I’ve seen it, that I’ve seen it down.
Um, wherever the baseball camp we used to go to was near gravity. Uh, there was some restaurants down there that had them and I always thought what the why in Aberdeen? I don’t know. But, uh, so it’s getting a little more wider use. Maybe it was an idea that was too early for its time. Kinda like the Studebaker.
Dan: Yeah. I feel like the, um, the what’s the word? Not, not ergonomics. That’s not the right word, but just a. I’ve found that they’re a little hard, like they should be a little longer where like my foot or would be, but they certainly work. So it’s been interesting. I don’t know. Well, the idea of just re-imagining a lot of this stuff of how we opened doors and how do we not touch things that are unnecessary?
It’s a really interesting, I idea. I mean, I was just jokingly early on in the COVID-19 stuff. I was. I made like a little silly like video. I was like, Hey, I figured out how to be safe opening doors. And I was like reaching as high as I could reach to push open a door, like the seven foot Mark.
Allen Hall: And,
Dan: uh, it’s like, no, one’s touching it here.
Like this is the safe zone, you know, the very bottom of the very top. Well, I
Allen Hall: bought an airplane. I really don’t have a lot of. I guess the restrooms on an aircraft, they have funky doors, those bi-fold doors glee cause they’re smaller and everything so tight. But I, I, you know, I’ve seen some discussion about antimicrobial services, uh, for the restrooms on the airplanes, but I really haven’t seen that for anything in the past, in generic passenger area, like over here at bins.
Are just whatever and the seats in front of you and the tray tables and the armrests are just jection molded plastic parts. It looks like no magic. And those boy, it seems like
Dan: a good time to, I mean, it makes sense that it makes sense to have the yeah. These adhesives or whatever it is, where it just like, Hey, makes this a really inhospitable place for.
Bacteria and viruses and microbes to live. I mean, it makes sense. Yeah.
Allen Hall: And it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t evolve, changing. Oh, maybe it would involve change in the certification of the aircraft, just because anything has stuck permanently inside the aircraft at least have to do a burn test to see if it catch fire or smoke and all those good things.
So maybe there’s some certification in getting that Hellman,
Dan: everything, everything, everything.
Allen Hall: Well,
Dan: that’s what it’s. Yeah. I mean, positives. Yeah. Will come from this I’m sure. I mean, you never know. This might just reduce spreading just the general common cold for years to come. But so let’s talk about Embraer.
So briefly they’re developing a new turbo prop and part of the reason seems like, Hey, they’ve had a lot of experience in this and there’s just really not much competition in the turboprop market at the moment. Why do you think that is.
Allen Hall: Well, cause there’s not a lot of new technology in it. And, uh, you know, GE is talking about making a turboprop prop engine.
At as significant reduced costs by, I think it was three D printing parts of the engine Pratt and Whitney is on that market for forever with the PT six and the variants of the PT six and the, and the beach King air has been sort of the gold standard through all, all that time has to engine turboprop pretty reliable.
Good good on fuel burn, easy to fly. It’s really easy to fly quite honestly. And, uh, so it’s, and there’s a lot of them around so you can buy them. Use those aircraft will last forever. If they’re maintained and the PT six is a low cost operate engine. It just, hasn’t been a lot of new stuff out. So if, if Embraer wanted to bring some of their newer technology and a bear has a ton of new technology and all their other jets, if they want to bring that into the application of the toolbar prop and sort of upgrade the turbo prop, that could actually make some sense for some making it a little more out of dynamic, a little lower fuel burn would be great.
Uh, put some garment in it and I know beaches put some Garmin avionics inside the, the King airs. And, uh, I think there’s an opportunity for Embraer to make some money in this marketplace and with the separation from Boeing, they probably need to do it. Gotcha.
Dan: Yeah. I mean, I know, uh, Embraer has a great reputation for their turbo props and yeah.
I mean, I, it’s funny that it seems like, yeah, everything is jets these days, but it clearly isn’t that way. That’s just mainly the good, longer middle range commercial sector. Right. But it seems like there’s still is a viable market for turboprop. So that’s interesting that no one else wants to tackle that.
And if they’re going to tackle it.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s surprising. Good. Yeah. And it’s surprising how well Honda jets done in South America and central America. There are big marketplaces down South, and that has tended to be a trouble prop market. So there’s a lot of countries in which the Tober prop makes total total sense in terms of efficiency of flying that far it’s comfortable.
So Embraer has got a, got a good concept going,
Dan: and then NXTCOMM, they have a new design of their, of their Aeromax flat panel antenna. And so tell me a little bit about these Saccos are these Satcom radon antennas? So what does the flat design do? Like why is it different
Allen Hall: electronically steered? That means there’s no mechanical components to, to pivot or to rotate or, and it can respond faster to track him because it’s electronically steered.
It can move quicker than a mechanical system could to lock into a spacecraft or to multiple spacecraft in some cases. And it can’t do that in certain applications. It’s a little lower profile. Doesn’t have to stand up crowd on the aircraft. So that means less drag. I’m not sure really how much less drag there is.
Quite honestly, they always make up these numbers. But aircraft where these radars were installed in these aircraft antennas are installed. They’re not the most efficient parts of are craft any way in terms of aerodynamics. So, uh, but then the NXTCOMM. Just mixed a simplified thing. And they’ve been there down in Atlanta and they I’ve been working with Georgia tech.
It appears like to develop this set of antennas. They got a couple of other things. Competing products on the marketplace. So they have to get through that next com hasn’t done anything in terms of aircraft certification. So that’s gotta be new to them. They got to partner with somebody to design a radar home and to get the thing installed.
So like a standard arrow could help them as a company to get the, get the design figured out and get it installed on aircraft and check it out. But, uh, we’re going to, we’re going to see more and more and more of the electronic is steered antennas. That’s coming.
Dan: All right. And so in our final segment here, we’re going to cover, um, so again, the, uh, the text drawn company, uh, they were cited for failing to protect workers and an explosion just by OSHA. Recently, of course, fixes this explosion took place back in December and Alan was this an autoclave that exploded,
Allen Hall: right?
And autoclaving. What is called plant three. And I used to work in plant free for a number of years. I worked in plant three. So I know where this is. The autoclave in the back part of plant three is probably 60 foot diameter and it is massive. It is one of those massive feats of engineering. Whenever you see.
Saw it, that man, that thing is huge. And they used to make star ship parts back there. So the beat Starship was the twin engine turbo prop pusher plane. It was our carbon fiber used to make whole wing sections back there and they made all the premier and the horizon fuselages in that autoclave. So some of the bigger jets were all made back there and plant three.
That’s what I always said. The fabric. At least they used to have the fiber place machines to, to wine. Um, fuselages for those aircraft and not making those anymore, but the autoclave looks like part of it let loose. And exploded and hurt several people. And that’s, I think we all get very complacent rod autoclaves, quite honestly, just because you’re around them some often and they’re seemed DASA.
I’ll not, but they’re pressurized and they’re massive. And so if anything substantial were to happen as some sort of structural failure, it would be a huge explosion and it was, and the employees at Textron are. So, I mean, obviously we, we, you know, we think about the people that got hurt there and, and.
Wish them well on the recovery. Uh, but there could’ve been a lot more people in the factory. It happened just after Christmas. It was early in the morning when it let go. I haven’t seen any of these descriptions of anything, um, where it was an operator error sort of thing, or some sort of fail sucks system that went bad.
I haven’t seen any of that, but they only find Textron like $13,000. It makes you just think it’s
Dan: you. It’s nothing.
Allen Hall: Just nothing. Right. Yeah, it makes you think it’s just one of these weird failure events that they’re going to have to evaluate and see if they can find ways to inspect the autoclaves. Make sure they don’t have that happen again.
And maybe it was just perfect. Go to that particular autoclave cause that autoclave it’s gotta be going on 40 years old. It’s been there awhile.
Dan: It’s not young. No, no one along that same line. I want to talk briefly about fire suppressing foam. So read an article recently. I’m on ain online. About, is it more trouble than it’s worth?
And it sounds overwhelmingly like it’s way more trouble than it’s worth. I mean, this seems like one of those crazy poisonous cancer causing it’s corrosive to planes. I mean, one manufacturer, one plane manufacturer, so that if a plane is exposed to it, they recommend replacing the wheels and the brakes, which is like a million dollar fix apparently to this one business jet.
This stuff sounds like a nightmare and it, and apparently there’s one false discharge every six weeks on average for the last 16 years, every six weeks, just filling it, really filling a hangar with foam by accident. That’s what the report
Allen Hall: says. Wow. That seems like a lot more than I thought it was.
Dan: Okay.
That’s a nightmare. Not to mention a person died in 2014 over in Europe because they got trapped in a hangar that filled foam. What a terrible way to
Allen Hall: go. It’s supposed to sell the auction out. So things don’t burn, right? If you take the fuel away, which takes oxygen away, you can suppress fires. That’s what it does.
And it is aggressive. I know that it’s aggressive. And when I worked at beach, I think, I don’t know if Learjet had it, but definitely beach had it. Yeah. And you’re very aware of it, not setting that thing off by accident. That was a big thing. It wasn’t a, I mean, if I remember correctly, I was in the J Pat, sorry.
What’s was the little single engine of Turboprop that Beech made as a trainer for the air force. And that’s or I believe had that system. I don’t know if it went off when I was there, but it wouldn’t surprise me. If you listen to nameless statistics, then it would say they would have went off at some point over the last 20 years, the problem with it.
And I think it was an industry and insurance industry push to put it in. That was the first thing, because you have these very expensive aircraft IA, multiple of them. If one of them were to catch fire that will spread to all of them. So it could be a huge insurance payout to cover all those aircraft. So for the cost of putting a suppression system in, if, if there was some sort of fire, they could stop it.
That was the thought process. But unintended consequences are, is that when you put chemicals on aircraft, all the aircraft component manufacturers need to go evaluate it. And some of them, we’re not going to design against that. Corrosive material. So, Oh, that just means they’re going to have to replace parts.
And that ends up being expensive too. You know, what was, what was, what was the worst condition being safer in the hanger is probably the best thing you can do. And as far as suppression system, Uh, doesn’t seem to be all that beneficial over time. And I wonder if it’s still going to be enforced, you know, as we get more and more data, it seems like we’re gonna unwind some of these things, maybe disable them and put in other systems that aren’t as aggressive towards the aircraft.
Dan: Yeah. Well, and I think part of this, um, was that the hangers used to be more. Costly than the planes that they house way back in the day. And now that’s obviously not the case at all, not even close. And so then you start talking about, or trying to save maybe this hanger, and yet we’re sacrificing the way more expensive.
Aircraft inside. Um, and then also there was a lot of debate about the company. So 3m started phasing out the use of, I think it was Teflon in it as a known like hazardous to humans, uh, additive. And then DuPont took up the, uh, making this foam and they’ve been lobbying again. So I guess 3m created a safer alternative and 3m law has been lobbying to like, not.
Like, no, we want to keep making it our way unsafe way essentially. So there’s also some, like some of that going on, this is a really interesting, like Hm. Multifaceted debate about it. Most people are saying like, look, this, this foam was mainly used for getting like. Fuel spills like preventing fuel spills and the like, and those never happen anymore.
No, I said like this isn’t a realistic fire threat any longer, like it’s not 1960.
Allen Hall: I’ll tell you what change that environmental regulations, things that if you have a fuel spill, you got a big bill because you have to go clean up that mess. And you’re probably, especially like if you have a big fuel dump, if, if you overfill on airplane, particularly in Europe, If you have a fill an airplane and it starts pouring fuel out the fuel vents on the wingtips, you got I’d expensive bill to go fix.
So that’s what really had initially drove it. But all the airplane manufacturers made sure that didn’t happen anymore. What systems into the aircraft didn’t leak fuel everywhere, which is a tremendous bonus,
Dan: right? All right. Well, that’ll do it for today’s episode of struck. If you’re new to the show.
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