La Organización Mundial del Turismo nos insta a viajar, disfrutar y respetar.
Madrid, 27 de septiembre de 2017
Hoy, 27 de septiembre, es el día mundial del Turismo. Este año se hace especial hincapié en promover el Turismo Sostenible, social y ambientalmente. Por ello, la Organización Mundial de Turismo, bajo el lema “Viaja, disfruta, respeta”, nos invita a todos, empresas y turistas, a ser responsables.
Iberia se ha sumado a esta iniciativa y presenta hoy su proyecto más innovador en materia de gestión de residuos, mediante la creación de un modelo de gestión sostenible: Zero Cabin Waste.
En un vuelo se generan 1,43 kg (IATA) de residuos de media por pasajero. ¿Qué se hace con ellos? Iberia, Ecoembes, Gate Gourmet, Ferrovial Servicios, Biogas Fuel Cell y ESCI-UPF se han unido en este proyecto pionero de larga duración –está previsto que finalice en diciembre de 2019- para crear este modelo de gestión sostenible para los residuos de catering generados en los aviones.
El objetivo del proyecto es reducir en un 5% los residuos generados a bordo y reciclar 4.500 toneladas de residuos, lo que permitiría evitar emitir alrededor de 4.340 toneladas de emisiones de CO2 al año, el equivalente a 340 vuelos entre Madrid y Barcelona.
Juntos conseguiremos unos vuelos más sostenibles y un planeta más feliz.
“Keeping warfighters safe from small unmanned air systems requires knowing that one or more is coming and removing their potential as a threat while they’re still at a safe distance,” Jean-Charles Ledé, a program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office (TTO), said. “This RFI aims to help DARPA stay abreast of the latest technologies that could provide those capabilities, and integrate some of the most promising ones into an eventual MFP technology demonstration system.”
DJI, the leader in unmanned technology, outlined its regulatory approach to ensuring the safe growth of drone traffic in two white papers delivered Saturday at the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Drone Enable conference in Montreal.
Theresa May is “bitterly disappointed” by a US decision to impose a punitive tariff on exports of passenger jets built by one of Northern Ireland’s biggest employers, Downing Street said.
Clean Sky’s Breakthrough Laminar Aircraft Demonstrator in Europe (BLADE), led by Airbus, was flight-tested today between Tarbes and Toulouse. The Demonstrator aims at bringing about a 50% reduction of wing friction and up to five percent lower CO2 emission. It is the first test aircraft in the world combining a transonic laminar wing profile with a standard aircraft internal primary structure.
BLADE is part of Clean Sky’s Smart Fixed Wing Aircraft programme within the EU Horizon 2020 research & innovation vision.
Airbus Press Release:
Aiming to bring a 50% reduction of wing friction and up to five percent lower CO2 emission
First test aircraft in the world combining a transonic laminar wing profile with a standard aircraft internal primary structure
Airbus’ A340 laminar-flow “BLADE” test demonstrator aircraft (A340-300 MSN001) has made its successful maiden flight for the EU-sponsored Clean Sky “Blade” project. The aircraft, dubbed “Flight Lab”, took off from the Tarbes aerodrome in southern France at local time 11:00, and after a series of successful tests it landed at Airbus’ facilities in Toulouse Blagnac. The overall flight time was 3hrs/38mins.
The BLADE project – which stands for “Breakthrough Laminar Aircraft Demonstrator in Europe” – is tasked with assessing the feasibility of introducing the technology for commercial aviation. It aims to improve aviation’s ecological footprint, bringing with it a 50% reduction of wing friction and up to five percent lower CO2 emission. Airbus’ A340 Flight Lab is the first test aircraft in the world to combine a transonic laminar wing profile with a true internal primary structure.
On the outside the aircraft is fitted with two representative transonic laminar outer-wings, while inside the cabin a highly complex specialist flight-test-instrumentation (FTI) station has been installed. The extensive modifications to the A340-300 test-bed aircraft took place during the course of a 16-month working party in Tarbes, with the support of numerous industrial partners across Europe. Today’s first-flight marks the kick-off of the Blade flight-test campaign to explore the wing’s characteristics in flight.
“We began by opening the flight envelope to check that the aircraft was handling correctly,” explains Airbus Flight-Test Engineer, Philippe Seve, who was on board the flight. “We achieved our objective to fly at the design Mach number, at a reasonable altitude and check everything was fine. We also checked that the FTI was working as expected, to identify further fine-tuning for the next flights.”
In the run-up to the start of this flight-testing phase, a small team of 10 specially trained pilots, test engineers and flight test engineers had prepared for this milestone for several months, spending time in a simulator and familiarising themselves with the FTI systems to be installed on the Airbus flight-test aircraft. Moreover, on equipment installation side, a working party of 70 people performed the FTI installation inside the aircraft, while teams from Bremen, Germany and Broughton, UK worked externally on the outer wings, with a team from Stade Germany, installing a pod containing infrared cameras on the fin.
On the wings, there are hundreds of points to measure the waviness of the surface to help Airbus’ engineers ascertain its influence on the laminarity – which is the first time that Airbus has used such a testing method on an aircraft. Other ‘firsts’ are the use of infrared cameras inside the pod to measure wing temperature and the acoustic generator which measures the influence of acoustics on laminarity. In addition, there is also an innovative reflectometry system, which measures overall deformation in real-time during flight.
A key goal of Blade is to be able to measure the tolerances and imperfections which can be present and still sustain laminarity. To this end, Airbus will simulate every type of imperfection in a controlled manner, so that at the end of the campaign the tolerances for building a laminar wing will be fully known. The flight Lab will perform around 150 flight hours in the coming months.
