Will the Boom Overture supersonic jet take off now that United Airlines has placed a future order? Can Boom succeed where Aerion recently failed? The Boeing MQ-25 drone recently refueled an F-18, a first in aviation. Plus, the Ehang 216 takes flight and Joby announces their new, simple flight controls: are they are a game-changer?

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Transcript - EP57 Boom Supersonic, Boeing MQ-25 Refueling Drone Plus Ehang & Joby EVTOL News

0:00This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard. We support design engineers and make lightning protection easy.

0:14You're listening to the struck podcast. I'm Dan Blewett. I'm Allen Hall. And here on strike we talk about everything aviation, aerospace engineering and lightning protection.

0:30Alright, welcome back to the struck podcast. I'm your co host, Dan Blewett. On today's show, we're going to talk about a new contract between bombard a Learjet and the US Air Force looks like it's worth about almost half a billion dollars, so exciting for them. We'll talk a little bit about more about supersonic jets. So obviously aireon collapse, we'll talk a little bit more about that. There's been some interesting news stories that have come out. And then we'll also talk about boom, announcing a partnership with United united wants to buy a bunch of planes. So we'll see if that comes to fruition. Obviously, that's going to be quite a long game. In our engineering segment, we'll talk about a Boeing mq 25 drone, refueling and FA t fa 18 in flight. So pretty exciting. First time a drone has refueled manned aircraft. And we'll also talk a little bit about airships, and why one maker is betting that passengers will choose comfort over speed. Lastly, in our E VTOL segment, we'll talk about ehang. And some interesting news about flight controls from Joby. So, let's start with mrda. They've got a $464.8 million contract for bombarding a global 6000 aircraft with their Air Force. what's notable about this aircraft, it's just a thing of it as a midsize business jet, which makes the tube section

1:54decently sized. So you can put some humans in it and put equipment in it. So if you're running a special missions aircraft, where you want to put a couple of control centers, in it, monitoring stations, those kind of things, you can, you can fit that all that infrastructure into the aircraft, you have room to do it, there's places to mount all that hardware. And then typically what those aircraft will have is sensors mounted on the top of the aircraft on the fuselage and on the belly to look left or right, up and down and communicate satellite data back to whoever they want to send it to. So there's a you just need a certain amount of size aircraft to do all that and the global 6000 is sort of is really a nice platform for that and that's they've been doing a lot of work in Wichita Learjet, they're on modding and doing military support aircraft for a long time. I mean, I think I can revert back into the early 2000s. They were doing some back then I worked on a couple of those. And I think the the bonus here is that Wichita as a city has been really getting hammered on terms of not having any really new projects going on.