Dreaming the day away

So once in a blue moon I do something interesting enough to deserve a blog post. So here we go!

First will be the brief update from down south. I am nearing the end of the first half of my last summer semester! Graduation is in a little under six months! As you can tell from my two exclamations points I am excited. So what have I been up to? I am glad you asked. Besides the mundane day to day bits of class and work, I have been finishing up my multi instrument commercial rating. This means that I will be allowed to fly an airplane with more than one engine, get paid to do so, and fly in lousy weather/clouds. Since this includes the Commercial rating, the FAA decided that I have to do a long cross country flight. One leg has to be over 250 nautical miles. So last Friday I flew down to the Florida Keys and back. It only took me five hours. I would have taken more pictures, but I was busy with flying and there was not much to take pictures of, but I did grab a quick picture of the plane I flew after we landed at Marathon to refuel and get lunch. I took it with my phone, so the pictures later on will blow it away.

Despite being long and really early in the morning (I had to be up at 4am to get everything ready) it was a very fun flight.

The interesting stuff is this next part. Yesterday I got to tour the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The Boeing test team was going to Bolivia for some reason and needed a port of departure and entry for their international flight plan (I can explain that much better at the end of the summer after I have taken the International navigation class) so they decided to use Daytona and let all the Riddle students tour the airplane. Anyway I waited in line for 45 minutes in the sun, and got to go through the airplane. It was really cool and worth the wait. They would not let us take pictures inside, because it is one of their test airplanes and they had all their computers and sensors set up. Even still the interior is really nice, and very spacious. They had a number of water tanks spaced along the cabin so they could change the weight around and placement to check how the airplane behaves with a center of gravity that changes during the flight. Anyway, on to pictures (I brought my good camera for these)

As you can tell it is a pretty big airplane. 

This is the main landing gear on the left side.

This is the wheel well of the left side main landing gear. As you can see there are all sorts of fun bits and pieces and wires going everywhere. 

You could see the "Experimental" placard on the other side too, but part was covered up by their "Do not take pictures inside" poster. Airplanes are marked as Experimental when they are not certified by the FAA yet. This one still has that on it probably because it is a test aircraft. As a general rule I would not really want to fly any experimental aircraft because there is a good chance someone built it in their garage. However this one is one that I would fly any day.

This is the nose landing gear. You can see the landing/taxi lights and the steering bits.

Looking into the GEnx engine you can see the cool shaped fan and compressor blades. The fan blades (the big ones on the outside) are Carbon Fiber and titanium. 

The scalloped rear of the engine cowling is to help improve the noise suppression of the engines. Basically how the Turbofan engines work is there is a small turbine engine in the middle, (that is the metal part, with the blue cone coming out of it)  which then turns the fan blades up front. Those create a good portion of the thrust as well as blanketing the hot exhaust from the core, which also makes it quieter.

If you look between the blades you can see where the actual engine starts, which is about half way in.
 

Wooooo! 787! They had the APU (auxiliary power unit) running to keep the A/C going. The metal cone on the end is the exhaust for it. APUs are generally small turboshaft jet engines that just run a generator or something.

And that is all I can think of right now. If you have any questions feel free to ask!

~Dan