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🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft

The Giffard dirigible or Giffard airship was an airship built in France in 1852 by Henri Giffard, the first powered and steerable (French: dirigeable – "directable") airship to fly. The craft featured an elongated hydrogen-filled envelope that tapered to a point at each end. From this was suspended a long beam with a triangular, sail-like rudder at its aft end, and beneath the beam a platform for the pilot and steam engine. Due to the highly flammable nature of the lift gas, special precautions were taken to minimise the potential for the envelope to be ignited by the engine beneath it. The engine's exhaust was diverted downwards to a long pipe projecting below the platform, and the area surrounding the boiler's stoke hole was surrounded by wire gauze. On 24 September 1852, Giffard flew the airship from the hippodrome at Place de l'Etoile to Élancourt, covering the 27 km (17 mi) in around 3 hours, demonstrating maneuvering along the way. The engine, however, was not sufficiently powerful to allow Giffard to fly against the wind to make a return journey.

🔗 United States 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Rocketry

The Lockheed Martin X-33 was an uncrewed, sub-scale technology demonstrator suborbital spaceplane developed in the 1990s under the U.S. government–funded Space Launch Initiative program. The X-33 was a technology demonstrator for the VentureStar orbital spaceplane, which was planned to be a next-generation, commercially operated reusable launch vehicle. The X-33 would flight-test a range of technologies that NASA believed it needed for single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch vehicles (SSTO RLVs), such as metallic thermal protection systems, composite cryogenic fuel tanks for liquid hydrogen, the aerospike engine, autonomous (uncrewed) flight control, rapid flight turn-around times through streamlined operations, and its lifting body aerodynamics.

Failures of its 21-meter wingspan and multi-lobed, composite-material fuel tank during pressure testing ultimately led to the withdrawal of federal support for the program in early 2001. Lockheed Martin has conducted unrelated testing, and has had a single success after a string of failures as recently as 2009 using a 2-meter scale model.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 Syria

Syrian Air Flight 9218 was a cargo flight operated by Syrian Air that disappeared from flight tracking near Homs while flying out of Damascus International Airport on December 8, 2024.