The next time you need to fly to Burbank or Las Vegas, consider trying the semi-private carrier called JetSuiteX.

Here’s what you need to know if you’re thinking about booking a flight to Burbank, Las Vegas or a couple of other destinations on the semi-private airline JetSuiteX. 

JetSuiteX has managed to return civility to air travel.  One of its great appeals is that you don’t need to show up hours early to check in and pass through long security lines. You can arrive 20 minutes before takeoff at one of their private terminals in Oakland or Concord.

Simply step up to the counter to check in, keep on your shoes and forget about TSA rules on liquids and plastic bags. The whole process is a breeze, because there are only 30 passengers on a JetSuiteX plane. You get to check two bags for free. 

From there, walk out to the tarmac and board like a rockstar. 

Once onboard the sleek Embraer 135, every seat is roomy like you business class on a typical commercial airline. The leather seats have a minimum of 36 inches of legroom. 

There are complimentary snacks and drink in the lounge and cabin. Plus, there’s free wifi and an electrical outlet at every seat so you can charge your phone. 

JetSuiteX officials say they started the airline to bridge the gap between private and commercial aviation at competitive prices. One way fares can be as low as $59, but locking in those rates requires booking early. Even when prices are twice as high, travelers are getting the private jet experience at a great price. 

You’ll find your luggage on the tarmac pronto when you step off the plane in Burbank. 

One drawback is the rather limited schedule, but JetSuiteX is in expansion mode in 2019. For the first time this year, they are offering service to the big Coachella Music Festival with flights from Oakland to Thermal, southeast of Palm Springs. 

A Mavic Pro drone is flown on Jan. 18 in Bridgend, Wales. The U.K. government has moved to give police further authority to tackle illegal use of drones, including powers to land, seize and search drones, following a drone incursion at Gatwick airport in December. (Photo by Matthew Horwood/Getty Images)Getty

Gatwick, Heathrow, Newark, Dubai and today, Dublin: Each of these airports has been in the news recently when flights were halted or delayed by sightings of what were believed to be drones in the area.

So how big a threat is this? Are drones a danger to manned aircraft?

With 1.3 million drones now registered with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), up from about 470,000 in 2016 when drone registration was first required, anyone can see that there are more drones in the air than ever before. While a small percentage of these drones are operated for commercial purposes by FAA-certified remote pilots, the vast majority are operated by hobbyists for fun and recreation. Hobbyist pilots are required to fly under the safety guidance of a model aircraft organization, like the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), and they have to keep their drones in sight, below 400 feet, and out of airspace meant for passenger-carrying airplanes. Commercial drone pilots have to know and abide by similar rules, but unlike hobbyists, they have to take an FAA test to prove it.

Because there is currently no test for recreational drone pilots, the FAA, the AMA, and a regular alphabet soup of companies and organizations have tried to make sure that drone operators know the rules before they fly. DJI, the market leader in consumer drones, has included a knowledge quiz that pilots must take before they can unlock their new drones and fly. Predictably, the answers are on YouTube, but operators still have to read and answer the questions. But as anyone who has slowed down when seeing a police car knows, knowing the rules doesn’t mean always obeying them. Drone manufacturers are aware of this, and try to use software solutions to keep drones away from the areas they don’t belong. DJI and other companies uses ‘geofences’, which alert pilots if their drones are in areas that are off-limits. In some cases, the geofences prevent drones from flying at all. AirMap is testing a new geofence system that will provide pilots with real-time audio and visual alerts if they are closing in on airspace that is geofenced. But geofences don’t always correspond to the airspace the FAA wants to protect, and users can often override or disable them.

So despite education and technological solutions, drones are sometimes found in places they do not belong. A recent study by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University looked at drone flights over a two week period around Daytona Beach International Airport.  The results showed that 7% of drone flights tracked exceeded 400 feet, and 21% exceeded the recommended maximum altitude for the area in which they were operating. In one case, a drone was detected at an altitude of 90 feet within a quarter mile of the approach path to an active runway. In total, 8 drones were detected within one mile of the center of the airport.

For perspective, in that same time period, there were about 11,500 aircraft takeoffs or landings at that airport. By comparison, 8 drones isn’t much. On the other hand, that’s a lot of airplanes in the sky and a lot of potential conflicts.

How big people think the risk is depends on who you ask. Many drone operators have expressed skepticism that the Newark sightings were actually drones at all. Several cases have occurred in which objects reported as drones turned out not to be drones after all. Drone operators and airport personnel alike agree that drone sighting reports can be suspect. To be sure, drones are difficult to identify from the cockpit of an aircraft. In fact, they are difficult to detect at all. One study from Oklahoma State University found that even when they were looking for drones, the pilots of small aircraft detected drones only when they were a tenth of a mile away on average. But this might actually be cause for greater concern. Maybe it’s what pilots are not seeing that should worry us.

To find other manned aircraft, pilots no longer have to rely on just their eyeballs or air traffic control.  There are automated systems that help airplanes communicate with each other and alert pilots about potential conflicts.  Could something similar work for drones?  Yes and no.  Eventually, some form of identification and tracking will be required, but it will have to be a different system from what aircraft use now, or we risk overwhelming pilots and air traffic controllers with information and clutter.

If a drone was in the wrong place, your pilots didn’t see it, and your aircraft hit it, what would happen?  That question is not as easy to answer as you might think. Damage from a collision depends upon the mass of the object being hit and the impact velocity, but also the density of the object, the angle of impact, and the frangibility of the object, or how easily it breaks up.  That’s a lot of variables, but clearly the greatest damage would occur from a 90 degree impact of a heavy drone when the aircraft is moving at high speed.

Commercial airplanes are already required to withstand impacts from another airborne hazard – birds.  Specifically, transport aircraft have to be able to withstand impacts with birds weighing 4-8 pounds on the airframe at cruising speed, and ingested into the engine at takeoff power.  Admittedly, 4-8 pounds isn’t much, when you can legally fly a drone up to 55 pounds without any special permissions (as long as you abide by altitude and airspace restrictions). The good news is that the vast majority of consumer drones weigh much less than that, with the most popular models weighing in below ten pounds. But a series of studies performed at Virginia Tech suggest that the concentrated mass of drones compared to birds makes impact with a drone more damaging than that with a bird of a similar weight.  Given the unknowns, the best option is clearly not to hit a drone at all, but as we’ve seen, that’s not so easy to guarantee.

The ‘big sky, little airplane’ theory of keeping drones and airplanes apart breaks down when you put more and more aircraft in the sky, no matter how little they are. Whether you are a drone enthusiast who is tired of being blamed for everything, or a private citizen who is wary of the noise, nuisance, and potential privacy threats from drones, we all can agree that this technology has huge potential to improve our lives in a thousand different ways we can hardly yet imagine. Missing those opportunities because we let something tragic happen would be a loss for all.

And whatever our opinions are about drones, the truth is that in aviation, we don’t make decisions based on opinion. We make them based on facts. This data-driven, risk-based approach has created the safest transportation system the world has ever known. So what do we need? More data. We need to know where drones are operating, how they are being used, where the threats are, and how bad it is when you hit them. Only with more information can we really understand the threat from drones accidentally encountering aircraft.

As for drones that purposely want to interfere with aircraft, well, that’s another story.

A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Ram Narain Agarwal, S. Srinivasan, and Kalpana Chawla all have something in common apart from being Indians who have brought glory to the country. In addition to serving as the President of India, Directors of DRDO, and an astronaut respectively, they are renowned aerospace engineers.

Aerospace engineering is a challenging and coveted branch, that includes the design, construction, testing, and maintenance of air and space crafts. The development of new technology in aeronautical and astronautical fields is also under the aegis of aerospace engineering.

Aerospace engineers work in teams to design, assemble, and test the performance of air crafts and space crafts.

Some duties of an aerospace engineer include:

• Modify design to incorporate safety features and new functions.
• Perform ground and in-flight tests on prototypes.
• Estimate the feasibility and production time of civil and military aircraft and missiles.
• Conduct reliability studies, operations research, and cost analysis.
• Study impact of atmospheric stress and behaviour of loads and weights under different atmospheric conditions.
• Assess the quality of materials used for the manufacture of aircrafts.
• Collaborate with clients and technical team to ensure the right product specification and performance.

If you are interested and driven towards building a career in this discipline, you can start working towards it right after you pass class XII. There are Bachelor’s, Masters, and Ph.D. programmes in aerospace engineering that you can enrol in. Having a strong interest and grasp over physics and maths is an advantage as both subjects have significant applications in this field.

The academic aspect of aerospace engineering covers in-depth study of modules like fluid mathematics, thermodynamics, design optimisation, and flight testing.

Mushrooming opportunities

Some significant developments within this sector have taken place in India with the ground-breaking work of DRDO, HAL, and ISRO along with private initiatives by Airbus and Boeing, putting India in the league of global aeronautical greats. These notable achievements aside, aerospace is a still growing sector in India offering vast potential to budding engineers to build dynamic careers in this industry.

The government has supplemented this progress by implementing a number of liberal economic reforms which have sky-rocketed the scope of aerospace engineering in India. With an increase in foreign direct investment resulting in greater interest by multinationals, more engineers have the opportunity to work in collaboration with them on joint projects. The government is also investing in research and development of indigenous aerospace products thereby attracting leading companies from across the world.

The demand for aerospace engineers is high in both government and private sectors. These engineers are required in a number of roles in the air force, airlines, corporate research companies, defence ministry, aviation companies, aeronautical laboratories, aircraft manufacturers, and government-owned air services among many others. Abundant opportunities also await thermal design engineers, mechanical design engineers, aerospace technologists, aircraft production managers, consultants, assistant technical officers, and aerospace design checker.

Top recruiters in the aerospace industry include Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), Defence Research and Development Laboratories (DRDO), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Civil Aviation Department, and Air India.

Large private and government-controlled companies are dedicating resources to develop new technologies to improve the quality of human life. Such initiatives along with the rising popularity of air travel and space exploration which require aeronautical expertise, are fuelling the demand for aerospace engineers making this the best time to launch your dream career.

The writer is Chancellor, Alliance University, Bengaluru.

The launch of the Green New Deal resolution sparked significant criticism for supposedly proposing that high-speed trains could be used to replace air travel and its carbon pollution.

House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) claimed the Green New Deal — a plan to rapidly decarbonize the entire economy — would “outlaw plane travel.”

But while the resolution, introduced this month by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), makes no such claim, it does fail to consider a game-changing technology for cutting the carbon pollution caused by air travel while still traveling by air: electric planes.

As one of its major goals, the resolution proposes “overhauling transportation systems… to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as much as is technologically feasible, including through investment in” zero-emission vehicles, mass transit, and “high-speed rail.”

It’s true that a “frequently asked questions” document that was briefly posted on Ocasio-Cortez’s website contained language suggesting bullet trains could ultimately replace domestic air travel. But the document was quickly removed, and Ocasio-Cortez said it was a “draft” that never should have been posted.

Still, that was enough for conservative commentators to seize upon when criticizing the resolution. New York Times columnist David Brooks, for instance, wrote that “the authors of the Green New Deal assume that technocratic planners can master the movements of 328 million Americans and design a transportation system so that ‘air travel stops becoming necessary.’”

He then quipped, “This is from people who couldn’t even organize the successful release of their own background document.”

But if we’re going to criticize the Green New Deal it should be for failing to recognize that the battery advances that jump-started the electric car revolution in the last several years have also turned the ignition on electric air travel.

Battery packs are rapidly getting both cheaper and smaller. As a result, there were “130 publicly known electrically propelled aircraft programs as of October 2018,” according to consulting firm Roland Berger.

In June, Norway tested a two-seat electric plane and anticipates starting passenger flights on electric planes by 2025. The country, also a leader in the use of electric vehicles, is aiming for all short-haul air travel to be completely electric by 2040.

Seattle-based airplane manufacturer Zunum Aero, which is backed by both Boeing and JetBlue, is developing a six to 12 seat, 700-mile range hybrid-electric aircraft to begin selling in 2020. Zunum Aero also plans to create a 50-seat 1,000-mile aircraft for the mid-2020s, and then a 100-seat, 1,500 mile aircraft (capable of over 500 miles per hour) by 2030.

Airbus itself is pursuing a hybrid-electric aircraft that can carry 100 passengers 600 miles — from New York City to Detroit — by 2030, the BBC reported last year.

Hybrid systems have both electric motors that run off of batteries and combustion engines that burn fossil fuels. In a hybrid airplane system, the electric drive allows the combustion turbines to be smaller and operated near their maximum efficiency all the time (which is quite similar to the role the electric drive plays in a hybrid car like the Prius). Reliance on these types of driving systems during takeoff and landing helps make the airplane much quieter.

While the hybrid-electric drives on airplanes can reduce fuel use by one quarter, the plan is to introduce better and smaller lithium-ion batteries as the technology improves, leading to full electrification of aircraft. And the next generation of batteries that could be available by the mid-2020s hold the promise of carrying two and a half times the energy of existing batteries — at one third the cost.

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Zunum’s CEO and founder Ashish Kumar says their “roadmap would place aviation on path to eliminate all short-haul emissions by 2040, equating to 50 percent of all emissions from the sector, aligned with the goal set by Norway.”

High-speed rail is definitely worth investing in, but whatever Green New Deal legislation ultimately emerges should be placing a very large bet on electrifying air travel as well.

Feb 5: A Virgin Atlantic flight comes in for a landing above other taxiing aircraft, Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2019, at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Seattle.  (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

A Virgin Atlantic flight from Los Angeles to London reached the ground speed of 801 mph with the help of strong winds, according to reports.

The blistering speed was reached while at 35,000 feet above Pennsylvania. The Boeing 787 twin-jet aircraft was given a boost by a furious jet stream, the high-altitude air current along which storms travel.

“[N]ever ever seen this kind of tailwind in my life as a commercial pilot,” tweeted Peter James, a jet captain.

Monday’s record was above the speed of sound– which is 767 mph– however, whether air travel breaks the sound barrier is dependent on its airspeed, not ground speed. Commercial aircraft are not designed to fly at supersonic speeds.

The Virgin Atlantic flight arrived in London 48 minutes early. The Boeing 787 airliner has reached top speeds of 776 mph before and has a cruising speed of around 561 mph, the Washington Post reported.

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Several other high speeds were recorded Monday. A flight from Los Angeles to New York City hit 678 mph at 39,000 feet over Ohio, while a 737 aircraft en route from Chicago to New York passed 700 mph Tuesday morning.

The jet stream was so strong, flight times from Dallas to Boston dipped below three hours.