Land
Big Trees, Little Park
New York, having pretty much run out of space many decades ago, decided to build their newest park out over the river - and like any New York park, it has a large number of trees. Trees that are surprisingly big and mature considering they weren't there a few years ago.
Moving trees around is tough business, especially when they're this big, and the article goes into a little about the logistics needed to make that happen (and make sure the trees stay happy - big trees are not really known for being particular fans of being moved around).
Unfortunately the park - Little Island - is one of the new breed of semi-public parks that close a bit too much and require reservations some of the time. Still, it looks fun, and I'll definitely drop in when I'm next in New York.
Combine Harvester But No Combine Constructor?
Brian Potter discusses an interesting contrast over on the Construction Physics Substack - two industries that used to be dominated by requiring huge amounts of manual labour, agriculture and construction, that could now not be more different in their employment patterns.
It covers some interesting points - such as the type of work and the nuances with specific kinds of agriculture and construction that go against the norm - to cover some of the reasoning behind where we are and what might lie ahead. A great read.
Sea
Seriously, Ekranoplans Might Actually Be Coming Back
We covered the plight of the ekranoplan back in our first issue, but back then I was not terribly confident it would go anywhere, based on past attempts. Now it looks like the English Channel might actually have a chance of seeing some in future, though from a different company to the one we covered before.
The Channel is a popular place to try and make fast crossings - being relatively narrow and between two quite populous countries - and hovercraft used to be the vehicle of choice for a while (versus the one-hour, more standard ferry). However, hovercraft can't operate in rough sea conditions, and as anyone who has lived in that part of the world can tell you, they are far from uncommon.
Ekranoplans are both better at rough seas, and wonderfully fast, so this could be a good use of them. Time will tell if that letter of intent turns into actual working vehicles, though.
Sky
Well, You See, Part Of The Front Fell Off
In a picture that literally made my airplane mechanic partner cringe when he saw it, a British Airways 787 has had a rather unfortunate day over at Heathrow Airport as its nose gear collapsed, and, well, that's not normally a great thing for anyone involved.
Among other things, the entire front of the plane will need some rebuilding and then a thorough reinspection, because hitting the ground hard is not really a thing it's designed to do, and there's a lot of important stuff under there.
Last I heard, it was caused by a test of the gear retraction solenoid being done with the gear securing pin in the wrong hole. You might want to rush to blame the mechanic here, but Virgin Airlines installed a modification that stops this even being possible, while BA decided to save themselves a bit of money and leave the pin able to go in the wrong hole. Looks like that cost-cutting measure really, uh, saved them some money - though we'll know the full story once the AAIB report is out.
The Empire Of The Air
London Reconnections, always an excellent resource for public transport analysis, have a wonderful mini-article-series going about the mostly-forgotten British airship programme, back in the time when the Empire was a going concern rather than a piece of history used to rile up patriotism.
It's a fantastic long read, covering the strategy they were chasing with the airship programme, the technical achievements and advances made, the journeys they made, and some of the problems they started to face. Airships were so promising once - and as you read through, you can start to really see why.
I'm A Proper Fan
You've probably seen planes with turbofans (normal "jet engines") and maybe turboprops (big propeller, what spin very fast), but you've likely never seen the fabled propfan - because they don't really exist. Yet. GE are apparently the latest in a series of people trying to make a commercially viable one.
See, turbofans are great at high altitude, and nice and quiet, but are less efficient at low altitude. Turboprops are great at low altitude, but noisy. The propfan is an engine that tries to combine both of the good qualities, with less of the bad (though they're still supposedly noisy).
Of course, there's quite a few problems to overcome - like the fact that there's no nacelle to contain any blade separation, so every engine failure is, as we say in the industry, uncontained - but it's also about time we had some advances in engine tech, so curious to see if they can pull it off.
Space
Hubble's In Trouble
The Hubble Space Telescope, one of those spacecraft that apparently just keeps on going way past its design life, is starting to really show its age now - one of its payload computers has gone kaput, and NASA are trying to switch over to the backup so that they can keep using it for just a bit longer.
The computer in question was designed in the 1980s and has a whopping 64KB of RAM - if you're curious, its computing power is now beaten significantly by an IKEA smart light bulb, though I imagine the light bulb is significantly less rad-hardened.
Hubble really started having issues when the Space Shuttle - pretty much the only spacecraft that could service it - was taken out of service, and they could no longer pop up there and strap corrective bits onto it. Meanwhile, its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is still grounded and might hopefully, finally, get to launch at the end of the year. Fingers crossed.
Tianhe Has People Now
China are on a roll with spaceflight achievements this year - after landing a rover on Mars, they've now sent their first three taikonauts to the new Chinese space station - in its earliest form, the Tinahe living module.
Much like the ISS (which China is banned from, hence they're making their own), the new Chinese station will be built up of modules launched over many flights. There's also talk of cooperation with some other nations, including Russia, who have been slowly backing out of the ISS program over the years.
It remains to be seen what will happen with the ISS as it gets closer to the end of its design life - but more space stations seems like nothing but a good thing, and who knows, we might even get Lunar Gateway soon.
And Finally
Welcome To... Perth?
In what is assuredly a world-class troll, an enterprising building owner near Sydney Airport has painted "Welcome To Perth" on the roof of a building on the approach path to the airport, causing some consternation amongst arriving passengers.
I'm not sure if there's anything that can really be done - and of all the countries, I feel Australians are best-placed to take a joke - but it's not the first time this has happened. Milwaukee Airport has had a similar Welcome To Cleveland sign under its approach since the 1970s.