A&P Assistant Position

I was recently contacted by a site visitor from Boston with an opportunity for the right person. He has hired a highly experienced A&P to rebuild a Mooney aircraft in Dallas, and he is seeking an assistant who might like to work under the guidance of the A&P while preparing the wet wing tanks to be sealed. They are now 85% clean, and this would be faily light work, but requires time and patience. This would be part-time work. If you are interested, or know someone who is, contact me and I'll put you together.

Fly like a fly

Slashdot reports the Discovery Channel piece, Tiny Flyer Navigates Like Fly which describes an ultralight autonomous aircraft "that mimics the navigational abilities of a fly could one day become a real fly on the wall."

"The 10-gram microflyer..." developed by a team of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology "has a 36-centimeter (14-inch) wingspan. But it could one day be shrunk to insect size and used for search and rescue."

Dario Floreano, the team lead, refers to these as "Bioinspired Vision-based Microflyers" that take "inspiration from biological systems to enhance navigational autonomy of ultra-light indoor flying robots."

"The goal of this project... is to develop neuromorphic chips and control architectures for autonomous microflyers capable of navigating within houses or small built environments using vision as main source of information."

The link above itself contains links to other bio-inspired vision-based flying robots, other miniature and slow flying robots (flapping-wings and rotorcraft), other indoor flying robots, and biological studies of flying insects.

This all comes from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems which seeks "to understand and replicate the principles that allow living and artificial systems to self-organize, adapt, and remain operational in changing and unknown environments."

These are the same folks who bring us swarm-bots, "self-assembling, self-organising... robotic systems."

Makes your job seem boring, I bet.

Silent Auction

The Division Five Coordinator for the Air Force Sergeants Association, a nonprofit service organization, wrote to say the annual Division Silent Auction will be held in May at the membership convention. They are trying to get some items of merchandise to use as auction items to raise money for their projects.

If your company could donate a small item, they would really appreciate anything that you can do to help out. Some of the convention attendees are active duty military members who have served in Iraq as well as Veterans of other wars. Names of all donor companies will be displayed.

Division Five is made up of folks that have been involved with the Air Force as well as active duty and reserve Air Force families that have settled in Florida. They provide local community service projects, legislative awareness, help veteran and military families, and promote patriotism.

If you need more information, or would like to make a donation please e-mail the Division Five Coordinator at swaldrop@aol.com.

Airline News Focus

AIR Aviation Information Resources bills themselves as "an internet-based publishing and editorial services company." They "provide a broad range of editorial and research services designed to meet the needs of the commercial aviation industry worldwide."

One of their publications is "Airline News Focus," a recently started, twice-monthly newsletter that arrives as a PDF file.

It contains news shorts, longer (couple of paragraphs) airline news, financial and traffic news, people in the news, technology and production news, MRO news, route news, fleet news and orders, organization and associations news, and accidents and incidents. A recent issue was 13 pages.

It's not a bad source for airline news, although it doesn't have a truly unique look. Take a peek.