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Musical Wings Reduce Aircraft Stall Risk 235

Posted by samzenpus from the fake-plastic-airlines dept.
notwrong writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that a Qantas engineer has found a way to help small aircraft avoid stalling at low speeds: pumping sound through the wings. He found that music also works, having tested Spiderbait and Radiohead (nice choices; Spiderbait apparently works better)."
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Musical Wings Reduce Aircraft Stall Risk More

Musical Wings Reduce Aircraft Stall Risk

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  • Other bands to test... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20, 2005 @04:22AM (#13360830)
    I would think that playing the B-52's, U2, Eagles, Foo Fighters, a Flock of Seagulls, or Jefferson Airplane would be more appropriate, then again, who am I to say...

  • From the article (Score:3, Funny)

    by BillsPetMonkey ( 654200 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @04:28AM (#13360842)
    "All we can say is that Spiderbait performs better than Radiohead," said Mr Salmon.

    Only for the typical Auzzie who thinks tie-dying is fashionable.

  • Just hope.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by metricmusic ( 766303 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @04:28AM (#13360843) Homepage Journal
    they don't play 'Crash and Burn' by Savage Garden.

  • Mr. Qantas aerospace engineer.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by lightyear4 ( 852813 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @04:29AM (#13360846)
    ... you are the wind beneath my wings.

  • new business model for the RIAA (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20, 2005 @04:37AM (#13360863)
    From now on, every small aircarft owner must pay royalties to the RIAA. Otherwise RIAAAF rules of engagement will not apply.

  • I dunno... (Score:5, Funny)

    by darkov ( 261309 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @04:49AM (#13360883)
    filling wings with rock doesn't seem like such a good idea.

  • Maybe taking this too far? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MiniMike ( 234881 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @04:52AM (#13360888)
    It looks like they're thinking of building planes which rely on this technology:

    Mr Salmon said that if they could make small aircraft perform better at low speed, it should be possible to build planes with smaller wings, which would be lighter, less thirsty, and thus cheaper to fly.

    I can see the headlines already- "Airplane crashes due to smudged CD"

    More seriously, have they done studies comparing the frequency of the sound vs air pressure/density? It's possible that other bands would perform better at altitude- maybe they could finally find an appropriate place to play Wings cd's...

    • I reckon that the CDs provided enough of 'chaotic' sound pattern to test the idea out and it was quicker to put together than a piece of software to do the same job. This would probably also suggest more regular sounds waves, like sin-waves, just didn't achieve the expected results. The next step would be looking at the wave signals and understanding why one group works better than the other. Of course this is supisition based on the available information.

  • Next time I go flying (Score:5, Funny)

    by LupeSpywalper ( 713932 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @05:01AM (#13360909) Journal
    I'll bring my air guitar.

  • Hmm... (Score:5, Funny)

    by YeEntrancemperium ( 869619 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @05:15AM (#13360928)
    Will the plane explode if you blast some Necrophagist, Psycroptic, or Nile?
  • Thats why the helicoptors played Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now, it was to stop them stalling! You see, them yanks come up with all the best stuff. Except for sliced bread [about.com] cuz that was invented here in good ol'Blighty.
    • Qantas == Australian Airline Company != Yankee Arline Company
    • Actually, when you look at it, the only discernable things that an American actually invented was Condensed Milk, everything else was just commercialised by them. Light bulb, radio, telephone, killing stuff with guns - all foreign inventions that were brought to commercial success in the US...
      • Peanut Butter!

        And these tiny little transitors things that computer geeks always talk about.

  • Isn't this just an example of dither? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kjoonlee ( 226243 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @05:32AM (#13360965)
    If added noise makes the flight smoother, isn't this dither?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither [wikipedia.org]

  • So take (Score:3, Funny)

    by batkiwi ( 137781 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @05:46AM (#13360995)
    These broken wings
    And learn to fly again, learn to live so free

  • Just like birds? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by psoriac ( 81188 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @05:56AM (#13361006)
    I may be talking out of my ass here, but don't bird wings do the same thing when their feathers ruffle as air passes over them? Wouldn't this ruffling be the same as the vibration described in the article?

    • Vortex Generators (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Nick Driver ( 238034 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @10:52AM (#13361663)
      A popular aftermarket wing mod is vortex generators... little pieces of metal or plastic carefully positioned at stretegic intervals along the top of the wing skin [avweb.com], usually just a little ways aft of the leading edge. This induces vortices in the airflow to help keep the boundary layer across the top of the wing from separating off from the surface, and thus lowers the stalling speed by some small amount.

      I am a pilot who flies my own small plane and prefer to simply keep my airspeed up to avoid stalling the wings, and keep the music in my headsets. An iAudio X5 mp3 player [cowonamerica.com] fed thru a set of Lightspeed Thirty 3G ANR headsets [anrheadsets.com] while you're flying is a great experience. ...and yes one of the very first times I took off with music playing just had to be with Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride, as I was haulin' ass down the runway thru rotation and climb-out (ST:First Contact reference).

      • Hmm, I remember that lots of expensive reasearch was done to Remove vortexes from the wing surface, by drilling little holes in the wings and sucking the unstable air away, in order to improve laminar flow. Obviously it didn't work so well, if people are now going the other way.
        • The reason some planes have Vortex Generators is to make the air turbulent rather than in the boundary layer. As the air goes down the wing, at some point it's going to become turbulent, no matter how smooth you make the wing. You can't make it perfect, and the imperfections add up at some point to turbulence. At the point on the wing that this happens, you have the "boundary layer", which is the boundary between laminar and turbulent flow. The problem is that air in the boundary layer produces more dra
      • David Clarke's Forever! At least, if you don't want noise cancelation. It is easier to execute a proper loop or roll when you can hear the engine. ^_^

  • Musical wings (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jcater ( 209358 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @05:59AM (#13361014)
    This is a well known phenomenon. The question is how much energy is being used to get this reduction in drag?

    Where does this energy come from? Either APUs, or more powerful main engines... which are heavier... which means bigger wings...

    • Re:Musical wings (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thesupraman ( 179040 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @07:00AM (#13361106)
      >This is a well known phenomenon. The question is how much energy is being used to get this reduction in drag?
      >Where does this energy come from? Either APUs, or more powerful main engines... which are heavier... which means bigger wings...

      Of course, if the effect they were discussing was a reduction in drag you may well have a point, since reducing the low speed stall of the wing was the actual effect I guess you missed the mark a little.

      But of course, this is a well know effect. The sound produces surface turbulence in the zone where the laminar flow breaks down, and helps to keep the flow attached to a slightly higher angle of attack.
      Generally 'tripwires', surface steps, and small turbulator fins are used for this effect, however they operate at fixed positions. This system is a little more general, although comes at an energy (and indeed drag) cost.

      An interesting approach would be to detect the development of stall and hit the vibration generators then, which would work great except it is very hard to re-attach flow once it breaks down, and very hard to detect stall before the flow detaches.

      All in all, someone with a media connection has decided to ride a bit of common knowledge, good on them.
  • How about Pigs on the Wing?

  • Probably a similar phenomenon (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jubedgy ( 319420 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @06:59AM (#13361103)
    Probably a similar phenomenon to adding air blowers on wings. By blowing air out of the top of the wings and into air flowing over them you can have the flow stay attached on the wing much, much longer. This reduces the cross-sectional area of the turbulence and greatly reduces the induced drag.

    I suspect that both methods work by adding kinetic energy to the flow, but IANAAE.
    • I am very curious if they played white noise instead of music, if the results would have been similar.

      Could it be as simple as rerouting engine noise back to perturb or dither the airflow on the wings be sufficient?

      Or maybe one would have to tune the spectral content of the noise for the flight condition of the moment?

      Interesting observation, but I am not one to wanna make anything more complicated than it needs to be.

    • Blowers aren't half as good as vacuum pumps. If you microperforate the upper leading edge and attach a vacuum pump underneath that section of wing, you can get a wing performance boost as high as 50%. Still experimental, but don't be surprised if you see it before too long.

      The significance of this has nothing to do with adding kinetic energy to the flow, and everything to do with adding small-scale irregularities to it. It's the same reason why golf balls are dimples, why putting a little sand in the top
    • Cool! When you land, you can then play air hockey on the wings!
  • Yes, it seems music may get us to the stars after all!

  • Prior art. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20, 2005 @07:59AM (#13361207)
    My cousin had a similar idea 20 years ago. We attached bees to a plane's wings and the buzz really helps.

    Besides, with enough bees we could even get VTOL.

    The only problem is making all bees fly in one direction. We are trying to tame them and teach them to act like eskimo dogs, but it's been hard.

    The flower-ahead-of-the-plane trick works for some time, but they get bored real fast. OTOH, when my cousin walks ahead of the plane, they fly it for hours trying to get to him.

    Maybe it's like that duckling thing they made a film about. Oh, it's so cute!
  • I never heard of Spiderbait until just now, because I suspect that at the age of 33 that I've unwittingly moved underneath a rock, but thanks to some... um... research, I find that they are pretty good!

    Any other examples of small-aircraft-saving music that you guys enjoy?

  • smaller wings? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by planetary gear ( 833255 )
    heh, in one breath they say how it could improve safety by making current plane designs have a larger margin for error under stall conditions. But then at the end they suggest that with this technology installed a plane might need smaller wings. If you make the wings smaller then you remove that larger safety margin and get a plane no safer than they are now. Like any new safety tech, once people start to expect it to work it stops improving safety. Like anti-lock brakes. Saved many lives when people stil
    • What are you talking about? If you pump the brakes (like you should've been doing before anti-lock) you lose all the anti-lock goodness. If anything they're getting safer now that people are unlearning the bad habits from before.

      But what's wrong with taking something that's been established at an acceptable level of safety and achieving that same level of safety a different way that allows an improvement in performance? Would you rather we go back to rail travel at the same speed as it used to be when tr

  • Instead of sound in the wings... (Score:3, Funny)

    by FlyByPC ( 841016 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @10:23AM (#13361542) Homepage
    ...how about an improved stall-onset-warning device that hits the pilot upside the head and yells "AIRSPEED, YA FOOL!" in his/her ear?

  • Iron Butterfly (Score:4, Funny)

    by warthog442 ( 894132 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @10:26AM (#13361554)
    We tried this years ago, but the plane would only stay up for 17 minutes and 2 seconds, wierd...

  • Speaking as a pilot (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stinky wizzleteats ( 552063 ) on Saturday August 20, 2005 @12:06PM (#13362039) Homepage Journal
    This is very impractical (surprise!). What if you are in a region of flight where only the generated sound was keeping your plane in the air? Then you have an electrical failure. You fall like a brick. The ignition systems are already isolated from the main electrical system and fully end-to-end redundant specifically because of concern over electrical failures.

    Also, it would pose engineering problems. Aircraft like the C172 I fly have wings that are specifically designed to stall in a very particular way. It's wings stall from the inside out, so that aileron control is maintained as long as possible. In fact, despite my repeated attempts, I've never been able to get into a stall deep enough for the ailerons to stop working. The point is that sound transducers would change all of this high precision engineering. What would happen if a single speaker went out? Would the plane go into an irrecoverable barrel roll?

    Also, stalls really aren't that big a deal if you know your ass from a hole in the ground. The people who get into trouble with stalls are idiot doctors who bought their fancy Cirruses and flying lessons at the same time and never give flying the respect it truly deserves. But that is another story.
    • Um... glide ratios? The only time I ever see a Cessna fall like a ton of bricks is with 40 degrees of flaps.
    • Aircraft like the C172 I fly have wings that are specifically designed to stall in a very particular way... high precision engineering...

      Very funny. Any roughly rectangular wing will stall from the inside out. It's only when the wing is tapered more strongly than an ellipse that you risk stalling at the tips first. To further minimize the risk of the tips stalling, the wingtips are usually angled down (washed out) a couple degrees (compared to the rest of the wing) or they incorporate a different airfoil

    • Would not a reduction in stall speed improve short-field handling if needed? And your comment about high precision engineering also seems problematic. It's entirely possible that the handling characteristics would be almost identical, abet simply at a slightly slower speed.
      • Would not a reduction in stall speed improve short-field handling if needed?

        Actually that would be the very worst situation for that kind of technology from a safety standpoint. Transducer gives out, and you suddenly find yourself in a departure stall. A departure stall will KILL you. No altitude, no airspeed, just about the time you are supposed to be clearing the trees at the end of the strip.
  • Why do you think you hear the humming when the flying saucers come down?
  • Now I am all about playing games at parties but the thought of playing musical wings seems too dangerous.

    "Hey where's Tommy?"
    "He got sucked into the turbines during the last round."

  • Now we know why all the flying saucers have that bizarre humming noise! Outstanding!

  • Uhm, maybe not, watching the Corrs is not likely to stall anything...might even speed it up to the discomfort of your "wing man"...

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