Sep 30 2002
From The Space Library
NASA awarded contracts to four companies to develop technology to prevent the flammability of airliner fuel tanks. The research plan was a response to the National Transportation Safety Board's (NTSB's) findings concerning the problem of flammability and explosiveness in the center wing tanks of airplanes, a vulnerability that had destroyed airliners such as TWA Flight 800. NASA's GRC awarded the contracts to Creare Engineering, Essex Cryogenics, Honeywell Environmental Controls Systems, and Valcor Engineering, stipulating that the companies research how they might replace the oxygen in fuel tanks with a noncombustible gas. The companies would determine the feasibility of improving the methods of on-board systems of inert gas generation and of on-board oxygen generation. If the researchers found potential means of improving the systems, the awardees would fabricate and test hardware during the contract's second phase. (NASA, “Studies Aim to Reduce Airliner Fuel Tank Flammability,” news release 02-186, 30 September 2002.)
The FAA released an enhanced version of the Emissions and Dispersion Modeling System (EDMS), a computer program that the FAA had developed in the mid-1980s to assess the effects of aircraft, ground-support equipment, and other sources of airport emissions on air quality. The new version, referred to as EDMS 4.1, included a number of features enabling analysts better to examine local concentrations of pollutants, including diagrams of specific airports and mathematical models of aircraft-exhaust dispersion. (Federal Aviation Administration's R&D Review, Spring 2003, 14, http://www.airtech.tc.faa.gov/RD/2003_spring.pdf (accessed 3 March 2009); FAA, “EDMS Reference Manual Supplement~ Model Changes between EDMS 4.05 and EDMS 4.1” (manual, Washington, DC, September 30, 2002), http://www.faa.gov/about/ofice_org/headquarters_ofices/aep/models/edms_model/previous_edms/media/410-sup_rev.pdf (accessed 3 March 2009).)
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