AOG Unlimited Blog

Actuators are essential for all aircraft, serving to control doors, retractable landing gear, position engine vanes and thrust reversers, and adjust parts like the elevator, rudder, ailerons, slats, spoilers, flaps, and all other flight control surfaces. Critical for helping an aircraft remain in flight, it is essential for parts like an actuator to continuously provide reliability and integrity for improved aircraft efficiency. To better understand the importance of actuators and their role within aircraft, we will navigate through their history and how they are capable of making aircraft faster, easier to maneuver, and more cost-effective.

Electricity has radically changed how humans live, defining how many of us spend our time at home, working, and more. While highly beneficial, electricity is also a volatile force that can be dangerous if not managed properly. Safety devices are electrical equipment that are highly beneficial for electrical distribution, often implemented to ensure that faults and overload conditions are prevented from flowing freely through a power system. By stopping the flow of a fault, such equipment can mitigate damage to electrical devices, components, and individuals. The switchgear is a common part of an electrical power system, consisting of disconnect switches, fuses, circuit breaker equipment, and more. Such apparatuses are important for de-energizing equipment, isolating zones for work or for clearing faults.

While engineers will often discuss how various metals and composites are crucial for the integrity and overall functionality of an aircraft, many other materials also play large roles in standard operations and construction. Rubber in particular is a material that is beneficial to many applications due to its water resistance, heat resistance, strength, and resiliency. For aircraft in particular, rubber material components can be produced to act as adhesives, sealants, heat shields, and many other part types. In this blog, we will provide a brief overview of how various natural rubber and synthetic rubber materials are used in aircraft and how their characteristics benefit such applications.

There are many applications that require electrical connectors to be installed in areas where they are out of sight and reach. For example, if your desk is placed up against the wall, blocking access to the wall outlet, how are you supposed to plug in a new printer, desk lamp, or other electrical device? If you can’t see or reach the connector components, you run the risk of making an incorrect and potentially dangerous attempt at connecting. For such situations, blind mate connectors can provide an ideal solution. In this blog, we will discuss blind mate connectors, their uses, and their benefits.

Unlike birds and various flying animals that regularly travel the sky, human beings are unable to innately sense the rate at which they sink and rise in altitude. Having such information is crucial for the safety of piloting an aircraft as operators will need to know their positioning, rate of change, and altitude at all times for a safe and efficient flight. With a flight instrument known as a variometer or vertical speed indicator, pilots can track their rate of descent or climb in a measurement of meters, feet, or knots depending on the country and the aircraft. As the variometer may be used for many procedures such as gliding, having an understanding of how such instruments work and how they may be used is paramount for any pilot.

A strain insulator is an electrical insulator designed to work in mechanical tension or strain to withstand the pull of a suspended electrical wire or cable. Strain insulators provide support to transmission lines, radio antennas, and other types of electrical wiring. They are used between two wires to electrically separate them from one another, or where a wire attaches to a pole or tower to transmit the pull of the wire to the support while keeping it electrically insulated.

The aircraft exhaust system is a crucial aspect of flight operations, providing the ability to expel spent gases after combustion. Similar to all aircraft parts and assemblies, the exhaust system requires regular maintenance and inspection in order to maintain optimal operations and extend the service lives of parts. Due to the role that the exhaust system plays for the aircraft engine, severe damage and failure can occur very quickly if issues are left unchecked for long periods of time.

The speed of ground vehicles like cars is easy to measure, as they use only one type of speed. However, once you take flight, factors such as air density and wind come into play and must be accounted for. The quantifying of these factors is what necessitated the creation of four different measurements of airspeed. When someone mentions airspeed, they are referring to one of the following: indicated airspeed, true airspeed, ground speed, and calibrated airspeed. This blog will explain each of the four types and what they measure.

The aircraft fuel system is highly advanced, ensuring that engines are always supplied with a constant flow of fuel during a flight operation regardless of changes in altitude, speed, pressure, and more. To achieve this, a series of fuel tanks, selector valves, pumps, carburetors, and other components work together to efficiently transport fuel from the tanks to the engine for combustion. In this blog, we will discuss the main components of the aircraft fuel system, allowing you to better understand their functionalities.

Airplane tires are not at all like regular vehicle tires because they need to withstand a staggeringly wide extent of temperatures that go from short 60 degrees Celsius at a height of 10,000 meters to exceptionally high temperatures while showing up on the ground. It is thus ten times more important that plane tires are treated with considerably more care than your standard vehicle tires. Plane tires are tubeless, have a load of around 12 to 18 bar bearing weight, and are stacked up with nitrogen as opposed to just air. Right when all of these components are collected, the result is that plane tires should be changed after every 120 to 400 intervals relying on the plane model and factors (for instance, the runway, the atmosphere, and the pilot. These are just a few things you can do to take care of your tires (like checking your anti skid systems, aircraft brakes, hydraulic fluids, and aircraft engines), but for more information, see the article below.

Hydraulic systems are common on many commercial aircraft, allowing for the pilot to easily adjust and actuate systems such as the landing gear, brakes, and flaps. Hydraulic systems are highly beneficial as their fluids are effectively incompressible, and they are able to transmit high pressures with ease. Despite their great benefits to aircraft, hydraulics are prone to failure just like all other systems. When hydraulic systems fail, it is important to quickly identify and address the problem, ensuring that your aircraft can return to operation as soon as possible. In this blog, we will discuss some of the common causes of hydraulic system failure, allowing you to monitor and prevent issues before they occur.

The current world in which we operate is filled with sensors. There are various types that you can find throughout your home, homes, offices, cars etc. Their function is to make lives run more smoothly and efficiently by way of either turning on the lights by detecting our presence, altering the room temperature, detecting smoke or fire, making delicious coffee, opening garage doors as soon as the car is near the door and for many other tasks. These are just a few examples of automation that you can find. All these and many other automation tasks are possible because of sensors. If you want to learn more about sensors, read the article below for details on different sensor types, particularly on aircraft type sensors.

Solenoids are basic segments that can be utilized for different applications. The name solenoid is derived from the Greek word "Solen" which implies a channel or a funnel. Solenoids are utilized in both household and mechanical supplies, they are accessible in different plans, every one of them has their own particular applications. In its basic form, a solenoid is a long bit of wire which is twisted looking like a loop. At the point when the electric flow goes through the loop it makes a generally uniform attractive field inside the curl. The solenoid can make an attractive field from electric flow and this attractive field can be utilized to create a straight movement with the assistance of a metal center. This basic gadget can be utilized as an electromagnet, as an inductor or as a scaled down remote accepting reception apparatus in a circuit.

Frequently disregarded just like a less glamorous piece of any airplane, floor boards or the floor panels of an aircraft have a significant, though often undermined or forgotten role on any aircraft. They are an essential part of the airplane structure, as their use and implementation ensures the general wellbeing of an airplane during ordinary activities, crisis arrivals and fast decompression occasions. Modern aircraft floor panels also incorporate an added usefulness that can benefit the plane’s conductivity and lodge setup adaptability.

The transmission of a car is critical for the operation of a vehicle. A vehicular transmission is a machine that connects the power of the engine to the wheels of the car. This allows for the transmission to utilize engine power to spin wheels at a certain rate of revolution. Transmissions are often specifically designed with the vehicle in mind, and there may be many parts that assemble together to provide the basic functions needed for driving. In this blog, we will discuss the common components of the transmission, such as those within FSC 2520 Vehicular Power Transmission Components, and how they each function.

When transporting an aircraft around the airport runway, the towbar is an essential tool to have and maintain. The towbar allows for attachment to the nose landing gear or wheel of the aircraft, and then is pulled by hand or a tractor. For smaller aircraft, this prevents damage that may be caused if the aircraft is pulled by the propellers, and provides the possibility to move larger aircraft in general. While some aircraft have the capability of reverse thrust, this can present issues such as waste of fuel, damage to nearby hangers, gates, and equipment, as well as cause sand and debris to get into the engine. As a result, the towbar proves to be the most efficient and safe method for a towing operation. In this blog, we will discuss how to safely operate a towbar and each aircraft towbar part to be aware of during checks and procedures.

Even if you’re unfamiliar with common nuts and bolts, chances are that you’ve come across a few wing nuts in your workplace. Wing nuts are named after their appearance, a small nut with two “winged” protrusions coming from the head. The wings provide a grip that makes it easier for you to screw or unscrew the nut by hand. These types of nuts are designed to be used without spanners or any other fastening tool. For more information on wing nuts and wing nut parts, read on below to learn about their application and durability.

Aerospace is an industry in which painstaking care must be taken to ensure the safety of mechanics, crews, pilots, and passengers alike. Practicing safe work habits while operating ground support equipment (GSE) is no different. GSE is the equipment found at an airport’s servicing area by the terminal. It is used to service aircraft in between flights as well as support the operations of the aircraft while on the ground. Many airlines subcontract handling of GSE to a handling agent or even another airline. Regardless of who is using ground support equipment, they must do so with care. Responsible use of ground support equipment is imperative not only to safety, but also the success and continued growth of business. There are three main reasons why safe GSE operation is so important.

Printed circuit boards, or PCBs, are physical boards designed to interconnect various electronic components through the use of conductive copper strips attached to a non-conductive substrate. PCBs are a basic building block of any electronic component. By themselves, they may not hold much function, but when components are attached and they are connected with other PCBs, they have the possibility of becoming single board computers, system host boards, or any other electronic system you can conceive. Backplane connectors are the key to PCBs becoming a more complex system. Backplane connectors, or sometimes just referred to as “backplanes”, are a type of connector that enables coupling of PCBs with each other.

Although passenger planes operate anywhere from 31,000 to 38,000 feet during flight, the relative elevation within the cabin in regards to pressure is nowhere near that level. As anyone who has travelled up a mountainside too quickly can attest to, altitude sickness is never pleasant. Altitude sickness is often caused by rapid ascension, and it can result in discomfort and sickness, especially at elevations higher than 8,000 feet. This is why most passenger planes operate with a cabin pressure that is at or below pressure experienced at 8,000 feet, as well as ensure that this level is slowly and gradually reached for the comfort and safety of passengers.