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1. [verwijderd] 12 december 2002 19:24

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   Honda hopes to get jet line off the ground BY NORIHIKO SHIROUZU THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Honda Motor Co., the Japanese automaker that has been a leader in efficiency and dependability, is getting serious about cracking America’s personal-jet market. Takeo Fukui, president of Honda’s research-and-development arm and a senior managing director, says Honda wants to build a "Honda Civic of the sky." The company is working on a small, four- to five-passenger, twin-engine jet that it hopes will have far better fuel economy than existing planes. Although Fukui says, "Honda has no immediate business plans for the jet," he is unabashed in touting the prototype’s features: improved aerodynamics, lightweight composite materials for the fuselage and an engine that would deliver a 20 percent improvement in fuel economy over a conventional small jet. About the size of a typical twin-engine Cessna Citation, Honda’s jet would fly well above 33,000 feet (above most inclement weather), which means a more comfortable ride. The plane could fly three hours before having to refuel, the company says. If the Honda jet ultimately is certified by the Federal Aviation Administration and proves to be 20 percent more fuel efficient than conventional jets, "That would make Honda hugely competitive," says Sandy Munro, head of the aviation consulting firm Munro & Associates in Troy, Mich. The small-jet engine industry is full of aging engines, Munro noted, and "nobody’s really developing a small jet engine" except for Williams International, the Walled Lake, Mich., supplier of engines to several jet makers. The Honda engine has the potential to become "the only real game in town," he said. Fukui says Honda’s prototype could "upend the industry, which is full of fuel-guzzling aircraft, and such a feat would" open a whole new opportunity" for the company. Honda’s development has been a long time in coming. The aircraft is the product of a little-known project in Tokyo and in the United States since the mid-1980s. Currently being tested and assembled in a rented hangar at the Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro, N. C., Honda’s plane isn’t expected to make its first test flight until next year. During the years of development, Honda devised two generations of what it has dubbed its HFX jet engine. And in joint ventures with U.S. aerospace specialists, including those at Mississippi State University’s well-known aircraftengineering program, Honda has created two versions of a lightweight composite fuselage. To date, the engines and fuselage have been tested separately. The moment of truth comes next summer when the engines and fuselage will be combined for the test flight. If the airplane passes these "proof-of-concept" tests, it will undergo more than a year of rigorous certification testing by the FAA, Fukui said. Besides meeting FAA standards, Honda faces daunting marketing hurdles in an increasingly crowded small-jet industry. Fukui says the Honda jet could cost $2 million to $3 million if it were made today. Meanwhile, Eclipse Aviation Corp., a high-profile startup, hopes to deliver as early as 2004 a sleek business jet costing less than $1 million. But Eclipse ended its contract with the company supplying the jet’s engines because of a delay in development, and Eclipse’s top official says its certification and delivery "time line may be impacted." Also, a company called Adam Aircraft announced last month that it plans to build the Adam A700, a four-passenger jet costing about $2 million. Adam Aircraft expects to make its first customer deliveries by late 2004. Cessna Aircraft Co., a unit of Textron Inc. in Providence, R. I., says it will design and deliver by 2006 a small five-passenger jet, priced at $2.3 million, to compete with the likes of the Adam A700 or the Eclipse jet. Safire Aircraft Co. of West Palm Beach, Fla., is developing a four-passenger business jet with a price tag of about $1 million, which the company says is expected to be certified by the FAA in 2004. More prototype planes fail than succeed in going from concept to market. In Japan, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. learned how tough it was for a newcomer to sell aircraft in the United States during the two decades through the mid-1980s when it failed to make a dent with its MU-2 twin-propeller plane and the MU-300 business jet. Because of mounting losses, the company discontinued both planes in 1986 after selling 700 MU-2s and 100 Mu-300s. It wasn’t that the planes weren’t good technologically, analysts said, but Mitsubishi didn’t market them properly. Fukui also says Honda is acutely aware that its jet project may be seen as an "invasion" into one of America’s most-important industries. One way to prevent that, he says, would be to forgo selling the entire airplane and, instead, peddle pieces of its technology — either the turbofan engine or the fuselage — to an existing engine or aircraft company to manufacture and market. Earlier this year, another Japanese carmaker, Toyota Motor Corp., successfully tested a prototype of a four-seat, singlepropeller-engine aircraft. The headline accompanying an article posted after the flight on an aviation Web site called AVweb screamed: "This Is War: Toyota Plans to Seize the World GA [general aviation] Market." To avoid such a reaction, some Toyota officials say that, for now, it has given up developing its own airplane engine and will use an existing engine from a third-party maker for its prototype plane. Honda would probably seek a partner among existing aircraft-engine and fuselage makers if it were to launch its aviation technologies. "We have no intention of going it alone," Fukui said. That is the right approach to take in entering America’s general-aviation market, consultant Munro said. He predicts that, if the FAA certifies them, Honda would first try to sell its jet engines to existing general-aviation aircraft companies, such as Cessna and Raytheon Aircraft Co. "Once they’ve got a few hundred thousand hours on their engine with the help of the competition, then they would put it on their own fuselage and put everybody else out of business," Munro said.
2. [verwijderd] 12 december 2002 19:50

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   Géén toeval? Antonov patent in de vliegtuig industrie mondial2 - 10-12-02, 15:01 (449121) United States Patent 6,491,148 Rodrigues December 10, 2002 Manual override device, in particular for aircraft flight control Abstract An override device is presented having a manual control, an inlet gear, and an outlet gear, which are mounted to rotate about the same axis. The inlet gear rotates the outlet gear. The manual control has a cam which, in co-operation with an intermediate part suitable for following the cam, serves to disengage the rotation of the inlet gear under torque exerted on the manual control. The manual control drives the outlet gear. The Inlet gear rotates by having a set of friction disks and spring part suitable for exerting a force to compress the disks against one another. The intermediate part carries at least one pusher-forming element, which at the end of a displacement exerts force opposing that of the spring part and relaxes the friction force on at least some of the disks. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Inventors: Rodrigues; Fernand (7, impasse des Troenes, 95230 Montmorency Sous Bois, FR) Appl. No.: 728355 Filed: December 1, 2000 Foreign Application Priority Data -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dec 02, 1999[FR] 99 15308 Current U.S. Class: 192/48.5; 74/625; 192/48.9; 192/8.21; 192/107M; 244/197 Intern'l Class: B64C 013/00 Field of Search: 192/48.5,48.9,70.23,89.21,107 M 244/197 74/625 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- References Cited [Referenced By] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- U.S. Patent Documents 2570585 Oct., 1951 Murphy. 3091316 May., 1963 Huffman. 3099338 Jul., 1963 Urquhart 74/625. 4022309 May., 1977 Denkowski et al. 192/48. 4393965 Jul., 1983 Zouzoulas 74/625. 4429591 Feb., 1984 Zuch et al. 74/625. 4474078 Oct., 1984 Denkowski et al. 74/625. 5769362 Jun., 1998 Greene et al. 5860890 Jan., 1999 Antonov 192/107. 6231113 May., 2001 Armbruster et al. 192/89. Primary Examiner: Bonck; Rodney H. Attorney, Agent or Firm: Blakely Sokoloff Taylor & Zafman -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Se...