NASA Tests Flying Airbag 118
coondoggie writes "NASA is looking to reduce the deadly impact of helicopter crashes on their pilots and passengers with what the agency calls a high-tech honeycomb airbag known as a deployable energy absorber. So in order to test out its technology NASA dropped a small helicopter from a height of 35 feet to see whether its deployable energy absorber, made up of an expandable honeycomb cushion, could handle the stress. The test crash hit the ground at about 54MPH at a 33 degree angle, what NASA called a relatively severe helicopter crash."
Anonymous Coward (Score:2, Funny)
Thought you meant throwing a Senator out the window...
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Informative)
No, that would be a flying douchebag.
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The term you were thinking of is "windbag".
A flying airbag is whatcha get... (Score:5, Funny)
... when you strap my mother-in-law to a turbine engine. The rest of the plane is optional.
He'll be here the rest of the week (Score:2)
Isn't he a riot! Stop in often, tell your friends to come!
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I was hoping to be the one to put the politician in the cannon to create a "flying airbag".
Wait... that would be a flying douchebag.
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Especially if it's Hilary Clinton or Sarah Palin?
*ducks*
This is a great development (Score:1)
One of the main hindrances (the primary hindrance?) to adopting widespread flying cars or other airborne vehicles is safety, and helping to keep people from killing themselves in spectacularly Youtube-worthy ways. The development of an advanced "airbag" like this will really help accelerate the dawn of "highways in the sky", IMO. (Disclaimer: I work for NASA, albeit as an IT geek)
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Re:This is a great development (Score:4, Funny)
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My father had that 30 years ago. It’s called Afghanistan! ^^
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So, does the airbag deploy during the initial 100+ mph head-on collision 100 feet up in the air, or does it wait for the subsequent collision with the ground 20 seconds later?
The safety issues the would worry me are those of incompetent or incapacitated drivers not following the proper flight paths.
Also, consider how difficult it is to consistently and coherently mark a 2D surface of limited width (roads) and get people to understand and obey those markings; how would you mark a traffic path in the air? The
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Mercedes and BMW are both heavily investing in stuff that will make the autonomous vehicle a reality in a few years. Some things are already making it
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So, does the airbag deploy during the initial 100+ mph head-on collision 100 feet up in the air, or does it wait for the subsequent collision with the ground 20 seconds later?
What gravity well do you live in that it takes 20 seconds to fall 100ft?
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Sorry, I didn't do the math. It was meant as a concept example, not a rigorous proof, How about this instead?
Does the airbag deploy during the initial 100+ mph head-on collision X feet up in the air, or does it wait for the subsequent collision with the ground Y seconds later?
You can fill in the X and Y with appropriate numbers.
Be sure to consider that the vehicles may still have some lift capability remaining after the crash, so the fall may not be at maximum free-fall (accounting for altitude, initial vel
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"The development of an advanced "airbag" like this will really help accelerate the dawn of "highways in the sky","
There is no need for energy-wasting mass adoption of light aircraft,and no airbag/drogue chute/etc will solve the problems of midair collisions and running into expensive stuff such as buildings. Most people should not be trusted with an airplane of any sort because they are simple, easily distracted, and not very intelligent.
The best thing about general aviation is the high barrier to entry.
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***The development of an advanced "airbag" like this will really help accelerate the dawn of "highways in the sky"***
Five car bombs in Baghdad yesterday. 127 dead. 500 Injured. And that's despite checkpoints and vehicle inspections.
You want to try to implement building security in a world with several hundred million flying vehicles that are easily converted to DIY cruise missiles? Think about it. ... Really think about it.
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I don't think safety is a primary hinderance at this stage, yeah light aircraft are a bit more dangerous than cars but not insanely so.
At some point if light air traffic were to increase hugely then we would need some kind of highways in the sky system for light planes but I personally don't see us getting to the point for other reasons.
You don't define flying car so lets consider a few categories of personal air vehicle and thier problems (ordered from most currently practical to least currently practical)
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oops I pasted something in the wrong place, the corrected version of the list is below
conventional light aircraft: cramped (depending on just how much you are willing to spend), fairly expensive to buy and maintain (but less so than other options here), needs to be stored at an airport (adds cost) which you must return to to pick it up again.
roadable aircraft: cramped , regulatory issues with trying to get approved as both a car and a plane, special mechanisms needed for conversion between flight and road c
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I think the main hindrance is that air vehicles, while relatively easy to control, are still harder to control than cars.
If that is the case then why is it that planes such as UAVs routinely fly themselves, but cars are no where near that level of capability?
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Big sky theory. This of course stops as soon as you fill the air with flying cars.
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Where do you think they got the idea for the Salad Shooter?
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Where do you think they got the idea for the Salad Shooter?
Here? [aviastar.org]
An interesting detail was the fact that the entire crew of the helicopter had ejector seats.
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Demolition Man (Score:2)
Re:Demolition Man (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's my question, which I also found myself thinking after watching Iron Man. Sure enough, the foam or the super exoskeleton or whatever can protect the outside of your body and the bones from harm when undergoing a sudden deceleration, such as crashing or whatnot, but what about all of the soft things sloshing around inside your body, like your brain, your viscera, etc? Surely they are going to, well, *slosh* around violently upon a sudden stop like that. I think boxers have proved that point very well over the years.
Yes, they are fiction and I treat them accordingly, but such egregious fact-ignoring is a bit scary sometimes.
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The advantage of foam is that it spreads the impact out evenly over every square inch of the portion of your body facing the impact. There's still a speed at which hitting something is going to cause internal damage and/or death, but it's EXTREMELY high compared to having the entire impact absorbed over a smaller space (such as a seatbelt, which isn't a lot of square inches of coverage, really, but is sufficient to save your life during a very impressive crash).
Isolate the entire body from relative movemen
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Spreading the impact is great for reducing trauma forces on the outside of your body, but doesn't protect your brain from smashing into your skull when the skull (and your body) decelerates quickly.
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Presumably the foam would be able to decelerate your body over a long enough distance to keep you from being seriously injured. The Iron Man suit simply doesn't have enough room to allow that even with the Stark Industries super-shock-absorbing padding.
Of course in the context of the Iron Man movie, Tony Stark got the mandatory supernatural-durability upgrade that all heroes get even if they supposedly have no supernatural abilities. He survived crashing into the desert in his original suit which had zero
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Tony Stark got the mandatory supernatural-durability upgrade that all heroes get even if they supposedly have no supernatural abilities. He survived crashing into the desert in his original suit which had zero padding and would have actually made the landing far more deadly, and then survived rocketing full speed and spine-first into the ceiling.
Hey, if Indiana Jones can survive being flung a mile by an atomic bomb inside an old Frigidaire, Tony Stark can survive all that.
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Indeed, no one like liver puree, less so when it's their liver. If my crashing helicopter was going to deploy an airbag, I'd like it to be one of the pontoon boat sized ones that are used for movie stunt work... Given the volume of one of those and the speed required for useful deployment, I'd be a bit concerned about flying around with all that airbag propellant (it's explosives, really) right under my ass.
Personally, I'd like to see something that locks (or jettisons) the rotor and then deploys a whole cr
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Personally, I'd like to see something that locks (or jettisons) the rotor
I'm pretty sure that the poor schmuck watching on the ground would prefer your rotor to lock rather than jettison. Imagine a giant ninja start flying at your head.
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Stupid giant ninja's always starting things.
I'd rather have the rotor still spinning, causing drag that slows my descent. See autorotation [wikipedia.org] for a description of this phenomenon.
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Sure enough, the foam or the super exoskeleton or whatever can protect the outside of your body and the bones from harm when undergoing a sudden deceleration, such as crashing or whatnot, but what about all of the soft things sloshing around inside your body, like your brain, your viscera, etc? Surely they are going to, well, *slosh* around violently upon a sudden stop like that.
This does happen, but humans are able to survive such effects of rapid deceleration in car crashes that occur on speeds higher than a typical terminal velocity of a crashing helicopter (if we believe the figure quoted in TFS).
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Your Brain can take a frontal impact pretty well, but when you are hit from the side, the lobes are pressed together, and it's the connecting 'tissue' that takes the damage of the compression.
Falling vertically and hitting the ground does not tend to involve these side on impacts, and any flying machine can be designed to fall like an arrow, if dropping out of the sky without power.
If you were to hit the ground at 55mph it is no different to ploughing into a wall with a car at 55mph. If simple airbags + sea
No fair! I thought of it first! (Score:2)
When I was young I used to wonder whether they couldn't wrap people in a stiff rubber like material that would just bounce off the ground if the plane crashed.
Of course, it would take some time to find you after your superball bounced around the country 23 times.
Re:No fair! I thought of it first! (Score:5, Insightful)
Basic physics: the forces involved in a bouncy collision are *greater* than the forces involved in an identical "smooshy" collision. Why? Because the crash has to not just bring you to a stop, but throw you back away again.
What you want is a smooshy collision that takes place over a long time. Thus, airbags.
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Basic physics: the forces involved in a bouncy collision are *greater* than the forces involved in an identical "smooshy" collision. Why? Because the crash has to not just bring you to a stop, but throw you back away again.
What you want is a smooshy collision that takes place over a long time. Thus, airbags.
Reminds me of Hollywood physics, where it's the "ground" that kills, not the "stop". The protagonist is always saved by a safety rope, even if it stops him instantly 1m from the ground after a 1000m fall.
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Yeah, I'm sure climbers and bungee jumpers never thought of that.
A safety rope DOESN'T stop you instantly. A good safety rope is designed to stretch and absorb much of the energy of your fall, and stop your fall over a comparatively long period of time.
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Yeah, I'm sure climbers and bungee jumpers never thought of that.
A safety rope DOESN'T stop you instantly.
But in Hollywood they do. And don't just think ropes, think Spiderman plucking you from the air as you fall (thus not only causing an immediate upward acceleration to break your fall, but a sideways one so you swing away).
Even worse is when the rope instantly stops the person just before they hit the ground, but the rope isn't attached to a harness but around their ankle (so the near-hit is made even m
Not really (Score:2)
And? (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing hit the ground, and what happened? Worst. summary. ever. From nasa: "Engineers say the MD-500 survived relatively intact as a result of the honeycomb cushion. "
Deficient summaries (Score:2)
"The test crash hit the ground at about 54MPH at a 33 degree angle, what NASA called a relatively severe helicopter crash."
I agree. Unless it hits at 300,000 Km/s, let's say a crash is 'relatively severe'.
Re:Severe Crash? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Auto-rotation may not help if you are flying too low and slow. Or if you don't have a good place to land.
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If you're flying too slow and low to the ground, there is less time to recover and perform an autorotation. In a heli's flight envelope, this is often referred to as the dead man's curve [wikipedia.org].
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how many helicopters are generating zero lift when they hit the ground? What's important is not the height of helicopter crashes, but the speed. I can certainly imagine worse accidents than 53mph at 33 degrees, but I'm willing to take NASA's word for it that this is "relatively severe."
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how many helicopters are generating zero lift when they hit the ground?
All of them. As a matter of fact, that's one reason why helicopter crashes are so much more often fatal than regular fixed-wing airplane crashes. A plane gets most of its lift from the wing, and the engine merely provides the propulsion (which is needed to reach the speeds at which you get good lift, of course). An airplane that has all engines failing is still airworthy and will still glide to a degree -- quite frequently well enough such as to allow for an emergency landing. As you have seen many times o
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A helicopter produces lift as long as the rotor is spinning, do you think that all helicopter crashes result from main engine or rotor failure?
Helicopter crashes are more deadly than plane crashes because helicopters do more dangerous things, like flying around cities at a couple hundred feet.
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wrong.
Unless the rotors are blown off somehow, they will continue to rotate and generate lift at any speed. Meanwhile, a fixed wing aircraft will stall at sufficiently low speeds and the only way to regain lift is to dive towards the ground at high speed, this places a high minimum velocity for fixed wing air crashes under most circumstances.
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Wrong again. You can land a helicopter with a stalled engine. It is called "autorotation" and the parent mentioned it. The blades will continue to rotate and actually act as brakes while providing some lift.
This is why NASA is looking into airbags. People do walk away from helicopter crashes, but the forces are just right around the survivability limit. This is why a cushion makes sense.
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Yeah one killer is their very crap lift/drag ratio. In a fixed wing aircraft you can trade speed for altitude and look for a spot to land. In a helicopter you are going straight down into that junk yard or river, whatever is right below you.
Makes me wonder if a backup engine of sorts could be used to stretch autorotation. Possibly just something to give the rotors more momentum so you can better pull up in ground effect.
There are three helipads on the Yarra river close to where I work. A couple of years ago
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you should keep reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation_(helicopter) [wikipedia.org] Helicopter has the same capability of forward controlled flight with Auto-rotation, assuming you can still have control of the blade pitch, except it also has the additional ability of going straight down slowly, a plane doesn't.
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Hmmm. Interesting.
Several factors affect the rate of descent in autorotation; density altitude, gross weight, rotor rpm, and airspeed. The pilot's primary control of the rate of descent is airspeed. Higher or lower airspeeds are obtained with the cyclic pitch control just as in normal flight. Rate of descent is high at zero airspeed and decreases to a minimum at approximately 50 to 60 knots, depending upon the particular helicopter and the factors previously mentioned. As the airspeed increases beyond that which gives minimum rate of descent, the rate of descent increases again.
...I expected the best sink rate to be at zero forward speed, which would make vertical landings easy. But if the rate of descent increases at low forward speed you might have to touch down with forward velocity, which doesn't sound good in a helo.
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That depends on if you screw up the landing during an auto-rotation. Which may be beyond your control if you have limited landing sites. No point in keeping enough energy for a smooth landing if doing so will set you down on a forest canopy.
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This is the only thing keeping me... (Score:4, Informative)
C'MON NASA!!!
how often would this actually help? (Score:2)
I can't say I've studied helicopter accidents very much, but every one that I've seen video of involved a main rotor or tail rotor failure. The airbag seems like a good idea if the craft can autorotate down to the ground, but if the rotors are compromised you probably aren't going to hit belly first.
Perhaps there is a selection effect? I wouldn't likely see many successful autorotate landings of helicopters since they aren't sensational enough to make it onto the nightly news.
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every one that I've seen video of involved a main rotor or tail rotor failure
The more spectacular helicopter crashes happen this way, but loss of power events are more common. The most severe of these occur at low altitudes as there isn't enough time to successfully autorotate. So this type of device should improve survivability in the most common crash/hard landing scenarios.
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Autorotation after damage in combat is common. The air bag is a natural safety measure for helos at low height with little/no forward speed over a landing zone.
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I thought the lines had emergency releases.
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That's funny, the only time I've been on board a helicopter was with BH. I was blissfully unaware of their recent unscheduled landings until you mentioned it. But the flight I was on was awesome and we had no problems.
Well... what happened?!? (Score:1)
On a related note (Score:2, Funny)
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On a related note, I think final car safety tests should be performed with the CEOs of the car company inside the car.
The inadequate suspension of the Chevy Corvair killed one of a Cadillac General Managers sons (pretty sure that was Cal Verner)... Didn't help as much as you'd think, still all spin and coverup.
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When romans inaugurated their bridges, the architect was below them. They lasted two thousand years.
Video (Score:4, Informative)
I hope they make it deployable (Score:2)
This is hard (Score:1)
Must...resist...Rush...Limbaugh...joke...
Somewhat pointless (Score:2)
I'm all for using science and research to improve safety, but this seems a little pointless to me. All helicopter crashes can be generally lumped into two categories: those in which control is lost at a relatively high altitude, and those in which control is lost only a short
distance from the ground.
In the former case, no one survives. Once a helicopter pilot loses control of the machine, it has all the aerodynamics of a grand piano and will collide with the ground with much the same effect.
In the latter ca
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Helicopers can regain quite a bit of control and actually perform a propper landing if they loose power high enough. They can dive and autogyro to get the rotors spinning, then level out at the last second for an emergency landing.
Not something I'd want to experience though.
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The issue with air crashes... (Score:1)
"Relatively Intact"? (Score:3, Informative)
Where's the kaboom? (Score:1)
It's not proper collisions testing unless MythBusters does it. Preferably with big explosions somewhere in the process.
Video link and more details (Score:1)
Very interesting (Score:1)
This could be incredible useful for automobiles. In order to increase efficiency you need to drop weight (as in, stop having SUV-like weight). The problem is that that weight creates a certain amount of crash safety (for the SUV driver to some extent - not so much thought, and not at all for anyone driving a smaller car). Given that, being able to use a light-weight energy absorption system like this could solve that problem and allow cars to have weights below 1000 lbs yet still have excellent crash sa
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The fact that it hit at a 33* angle suggests that the 54MPH was either groundspeed or total impact velocity, not just the vertical component.
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Re:Apparently NASA does not obey the laws of physi (Score:5, Informative)
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Perhaps you need to go back and study some more physics.
(preferrably this time using the metric, international-except-some-countries-dontaskmewhy, system) .
In earth gravity of 32ft/s^2
, or equivalently 23.123 elbows/alittlewhiles^2.
I really appreciated when you translated the 64ft/s to 43mph, it really makes it much more intuitive for the rest of the world.
Please don't be offended
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Re:Apparently NASA does not obey the laws of physi (Score:5, Funny)
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Funny, but adding weight *would* increase the energy of the impact as an alternative to going faster. But as others have said, 54MPH is apparently appropriate for simulating a severe crash.
The joke that keeps giving. . . (Score:2)
Yeah, that headline is the joke that keeps on giving. Just insert your favorite talking head: Michael Moore, Rush Limbaugh, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, or whoever. . . the list goes on and on - and that's just the U.S. I'm sure people in any country on Earth can find someone to insert into the punchline.
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We don't normally let people like this onto TV and give them an audience, we usually stick them into mental institutions and ignore them.
Sorry but this problem is fairly unique to Ameri