Meredith Cohn of the Baltimore Sun reported, “The first-ever organ delivered by drone was transplanted into a patient with kidney failure at the University of Maryland Medical Center, capping more than three years of work to show unmanned aircraft can safely transport life-saving organs and tissue.” Note one doctor in the video, making a homage to Apollo 11: “One small hop for a drone, one major leap for medicine.” Note the cheers of waiting personnel when the drone lands successfully. As reported in Aero-News Network, “On Friday, April 19th, at approximately 12:30 am, a human donor kidney was loaded onto the UMMC drone. The flight, led by the University of Maryland UAS Test Site at St. Mary’s County, commenced at 1:00 am. The vehicle traveled 2.6 miles and flew for approximately 10 minutes. The human kidney was successfully delivered to University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC) and was scheduled to be used for a transplant surgery at 5:00 am.” Cohn reports …
Al Bowers and the Bell-Shaped Curve
Al Bowers has promoted a different kind of lift distribution curve for wings in his talks at the Experimental Soaring Association’s Western workshop, held every Labor Day weekend at Mountain Valley Airport in Tehachapi, California. Most aerodynamics textbooks model the elliptical lift distribution as an ideal to be achieved in wing design. R. J. Mitchell, designer of the classic Spitfire fighter, incorporated an elliptical planform, which serendipitously allowed room for the Browning machine guns in the capacious inboard sections. What could be wrong with that when the finest sailplanes exploit that same theory in their slender spans? Albion Bowers is retiring Chief Scientist at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center, Edwards Air Force Base. His experiments with an alternative way of spreading the lift across a wing have inspired several large models of how a wing with a bell-shaped lift distribution curve might appear – and perform. Two years ago, he and Erich Chase, a well-known builder of high-end boats, brought …