I was privileged to spend a day at ITPS in London Ontario. Giorgio Clementi and his family are old friends and ITPS is a true family business with his wife Bev and all his sons involved.  If you get a chance to tour the facility you should. As well as the wildly diverse fleet of aircraft they have extensively […]

Towards the end of 2021 I connected with Eugene Pik on Linkedin. Eugene is an interesting guy – raised in Soviet Belarus, moved to Israel and has been running his business in Canada for many years. He wanted to produce a eVTOL aircraft that would serve the medical evacuation (medevac) market better than the helicopters […]

A version of this article recently appeared in our free newsletter, to subscribe click here. OK – upfront, the data for the Wright Flier I am using is taken from the Wright Flier Model B wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_Model_B).This was the last iteration of the original Wright Flier configuration and was sold in 1910. Their famous first […]

A version of this article first appeared in our free newsletter, to subscribe click here. All the numbers used in this article are Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) numbers. Nothing nuanced here – just back of the napkin numbers. If you disagree with my assessment let me know, send me your numbers and I will publish […]

We have permanently disabled our Patreon page and have no plans to return to Patreon or use their service in the future. We have made this assessment and are taking this action based on the integrity of the Pateron organization and their inability to formulate, communicate and adhere to their own company policies. Patreon has […]

It is important for an engineer to understand that things do go wrong. Not often, but they do. Understanding the root cause of failure is the only way to consciously avoid the same situation.

A version of this article first appeared in the September 2018 edition of our free newsletter, to subscribe click here At the end of August I spent a couple of hours with Sam Bousfield and Senior Engineer Dana Beebe at their Prineville hangar. We had a wide ranging technical conversation and I was impressed with the level of detail and […]

A version of this article first appeared in the July 2018 edition of our free newsletter, to subscribe click here In the last couple of years there have been a number of new aircraft projects in the UK. I Have been involved with some of them and it has been interesting to see the progress and […]

A version of this article first appeared in the July 2018 edition of our free newsletter, to subscribe click here We have been invited to participate in a working group in the Cayman Islands to examine using the airport at Cayman Brac as a unrestricted UAV test cell. Over the last year, as we have had […]

A version of this article first appeared in the July 2018 edition of our free newsletter, to subscribe click here I was asked this question this month “Where would you certify an aircraft if you had a choice?”. My answer was instinctively “Brazil”. We have done studies to determine what factors make aircraft programs successful. In […]

A version of this article first appeared in the June 2018 edition of our free newsletter, to subscribe click here This month I have been doing some work on the manned aerospace market. For those of us with an involvement in the market it is interesting to go through the numbers. There is good data […]

We have developed a tool for risk analysis for Aerial Urban Mobility Concepts and have ranked the Top 5 design concepts using this unique risk analysis method. The spreadsheet tool and white paper are made freely available from our website here. This is an extract from the white paper: At the start of any technological […]

This article first appeared in the December 2017 edition of our free newsletter, to subscribe click here   In December I flew to Redmond Oregon to spend some quality time with the Stratos Aircraft project. Nirav Shukla and I have worked on the production version of the wing for the Stratos 714 jet and the wing test article has been […]

This article first appeared in the November 2017 edition of our free newsletter, to subscribe click here   In the last few years there has been a proliferation of unique electric vehicles and flying cars. Blue sky thinking and disruptive technology are the order of the day and I can see that there will be a […]

As some of you may know by now, one of my focus areas is program cost – especially on composite aircraft programs. We see many programs and while many aspects and details are project specific, there are some universal rules. This is one – this is my wording but I am sure that the sentiment […]

Last year I wrote a few posts on the part 23 update: http://www.abbottaerospace.com/faa-part-23-revamp-good-or-bad http://www.abbottaerospace.com/further-thoughts-on-the-astm-part-23-update http://www.abbottaerospace.com/final-thoughts-on-the-astm-part-23-update I submitted a letter to the FAA as part of the consultation process: http://www.abbottaerospace.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/AA-FAA-2016-001.pdf The new set of regulations was established as a ‘final rule’ at the end of 2016: https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/rulemaking/recently_published/media/Part23_FinalRule_2120-AK65_WebCopy.pdf I have not has time to read the entire […]

You can read the original post here. There is customer service and then there is Microsoft customer service. Following on from the inability of Microsoft to transfer an Office 365 account between countries I received an email notice from Microsoft regarding the old and now delinquent account. This is the account that we had let slide into […]

I love Diamond Aircraft – the company and the product. I used to work for Diamond Canada and there are great people working at all levels of the company. They are led by Christian Dries, a very reclusive, very wealthy and very generous individual who created and driven the company for over 20 years. He has […]

On the 21 November 2016 the Stratos 714 took to the sky. We are proud to have played a part in this program and give our congratulations to CEO Michael Lemaire, CTO Carsten Sundin and the rest of the team. I am the structures manager for the program (with more than able assistance from the in-house Stratos engineers […]

I was privileged to attend the roll-out of the Boom Aero technology demonstrator on Tuesday night in Denver. To give complete disclosure, we had some input early in the program just as Blake was getting started and we did some very preliminary layouts for the production version. In no way can we claim credit for any […]