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 We have had the good fortune to work on many programs when they are in the early stages of development. This involves working on the prototype design and build. I have touched on this subject in previous articles but […]

This article first appeared in the December 2017 edition of our free newsletter, to subscribe click here So we flew back from Canada to Cayman after Christmas. I travel a lot; to and from the US, Canada, Europe and the Caribbean. Airports suffer from greater and lesser degrees of design and operational competence in their layout […]

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 […]

Since the relaunch of our website last year, we have clocked half a million downloads from the technical library. We are especially happy because from the time we relaunched the website we had to ‘start from scratch’ and establish all of our search engine rankings and external links. We now have typical mid-week downloads of […]

This article first appeared in the September 2017 edition of our free newsletter, to subscribe click here In the last months, I have spoken to 3 programs concerning investment and investor relations for the prototype phase of their aircraft program. We have been involved with prototype development for startup companies since we formed Abbott Aerospace in […]

We have corrected and updated our translational and rotational mass balance spreadsheet here. The way the additional force component due to the rotation was being calculated was not correct. We have also added a cumulative moment calculation and moment diagram. Enjoy!

We have taken a copy of the Part 23 regulations as they were on the 25th August 2017 and have reproduced them below: All of the regulations are included in the same page. You can use ‘find’ or ‘search text’ to find the information you want. To the best of our knowledge the ‘old’ part […]

Thanks to the hard work of our esteemed technical librarian – Kenan Stewart – we have reached the milestone of 15000 unique items in our free technical library. We are building towards our aim of being the premier online aerospace technical reference library. We now average between 1500 and 2000 downloads per day from all over […]

Many thanks to one of our diligent readers for finding the following error in our free textbook. On page 83 of our textbook, there is a method for the pull-through strength of a bolt in a composite laminate. This contains an error with regard to the definition of the parameter ‘D’. A corrected version of […]

On the evening of Tuesday, the 11th July 2017 in their hangar at Redmond Airport, Stratos held the official public unveiling of the Stratos 714 Jet. The 714 Jet is the only VLJ single that can fly at 41000ft. It has the best performance of any VLJ Single. The 714 can carry 4 people 1500nm and […]

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 […]

As the owner of a small engineering service company, one of our major costs is software. This represents an investment cost and of course the ongoing cost of that most honorable of all con games – software maintenance fees. This was thrown into sharp relief in the last couple of years as we relocated to […]

Over the last couple of weeks I had to generate some circle segment and sector section properties – this spreadsheet calculates the area and the position of the centroid of circular segments and sectors. You can download it here We have created some other useful geometric property calculators (other than the typical section properties in this spreadsheet) AA-SM-210 […]

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 […]

It seems that once a month I end up writing some rant about a piece of software. Believe me, this is not my intention but once a month something essentially stupid happens with a piece of technology. This month it is microsoft’s turn. I joke about other companies turning into Microsoft as, in some aspects, […]

These methods are only applicable to simple, traditional aircraft configurations. Part 23 Appendix A should be read in its entirety to fully understand the context of these loads methods.

Weight and thickness of sheet metal, standard thickness of sheet metal and wire. Material Specifications for Steel Sheet Metal: A366: Cold Rolled Commercial Quality A569: :Hot Rolled Commercial Quality A570: Hot Rolled Structural Quality A526: Zinc Coated (Galvanized) Steel A526/A527: Galvanneal A591: Electrolytically Zinc Plated