Balancing an aircraft with symmetrically deflected split elevator and rudder during short landing run

This article investigates methods for balancing aircraft during short straight-line landing run realized by employing split rudder and elevator as air-brakes after touchdown. For standard atmospheric and runway conditions, directional and longitudinal balance equations for aircraft of conventional configuration such as Il-86 are presented. Methods depend on operational and mechanical approaches, where the first requires manual or automatic trim of shortly peaking small pitching, yawing, and rolling moments using dynamic forces while the second suggest some re-design of elevator and rudder control channels to limit deflection angles. The paper describes in detail each method disadvantages and suggests the adoption of automatic operational approach due to less required system modifications and piloting skills

A Novel Approach for Missing Combat Support Aircraft Search Acceleration using VTOL UAS

In this paper, an approach to accelerate search operations for a missing combat support aircraft using a portable waterproof autonomous vertical takeoff and landing unmanned aerial system called “flying locator beacon” is described. The latter is connected with both flight data and cockpit voice recorders with a parallel bus and may be deployed from the empennage during extreme emergency scenarios, which is detected when few flight parameters are overrun leading to an air crash stimulating behavior. Landing of the flying locator beacon strictly takes place on global latitude and longitude coordinates only of integer values enabling significant minimization of search time and cost

Socializing One Health: an innovative strategy to investigate social and behavioral risks of emerging viral threats

In an effort to strengthen global capacity to prevent, detect, and control infectious diseases in animals and people, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT project funded development of regional, national, and local One Health capacities for early disease detection, rapid response, disease control, and risk reduction. From the outset, the EPT approach was inclusive of social science research methods designed to understand the contexts and behaviors of communities living and working at human-animal-environment interfaces considered high-risk for virus emergence. Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, PREDICT behavioral research aimed to identify and assess a range of socio-cultural behaviors that could be influential in zoonotic disease emergence, amplification, and transmission. This broad approach to behavioral risk characterization enabled us to identify and characterize human activities that could be linked to the transmission dynamics of new and emerging viruses. This paper provides a discussion of implementation of a social science approach within a zoonotic surveillance framework. We conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews and focus groups to better understand the individual- and community-level knowledge, attitudes, and practices that potentially put participants at risk for zoonotic disease transmission from the animals they live and work with, across 6 interface domains. When we asked highly-exposed individuals (ie. bushmeat hunters, wildlife or guano farmers) about the risk they perceived in their occupational activities, most did not perceive it to be risky, whether because it was normalized by years (or generations) of doing such an activity, or due to lack of information about potential risks. Integrating the social sciences allows investigations of the specific human activities that are hypothesized to drive disease emergence, amplification, and transmission, in order to better substantiate behavioral disease drivers, along with the social dimensions of infection and transmission dynamics. Understanding these dynamics is critical to achieving health security--the protection from threats to health-- which requires investments in both collective and individual health security. Involving behavioral sciences into zoonotic disease surveillance allowed us to push toward fuller community integration and engagement and toward dialogue and implementation of recommendations for disease prevention and improved health security

Data-Driven Analysis of Aircraft Touchdown Patterns on Airport Runways using Satellite Image Processing Techniques

This paper presents an image processing-based method for analyzing satellite scans taken from 24 airports and runways different in size and location to detect and understand variations in landing behaviors by extracting aircraft wheels rubber spots deposited in runway touchdown zones. The analysis establishes a clear correlation between the observed rubber material distributions and the locally or globally governing operational constraints, showing for instance the effect of the ongoing pandemic or noise abatement procedures on the change of landing behaviors in some European airports. Statistical generalizations are also suggested and combined with an explanatory Monte Carlo model under Gaussian Processes considerations. In addition, the identified change in landing manners is correlated with runway landing operations efficiency in the short and long terms. The paper also provides examples of the proposed method applications that may be of potential value for both aircraft and airport operators

Rheem: Enabling Multi-Platform Task Execution

International audienceMany emerging applications, from domains such as healthcare and oil & gas, require several data processing systems for complex analytics. This demo paper showcases system, a framework that provides multi-platform task execution for such applications. It features a three-layer data processing abstraction and a new query optimization approach for multi-platform settings. We will demonstrate the strengths of system by using real-world scenarios from three different applications, namely, machine learning, data cleaning, and data fusion