Mr. Dave asked us to build for him a Piper Commanche, and here’s what he had to say when he saw it:

“WOW! Unbelievable how beautiful the model turned out.”

We’re very pleased to hear this, for at TMC Pacific Modelworks we always strive for customer satisfaction! We only deliver the finished product when it has been approved by the customer. If you have a custom model as well, please don’t hesitate to contact us and tell us what you think about it!

On this day in 1996, the Sea Empress supertanker runs aground near Wales, spilling 70,000 tons of crude oil. Though the oil spill did not take any human lives, it damaged several bird sanctuaries.

The Sea Empress slammed into some underwater rocks and ran to the ground. The 28-meter Russian crew worked feverishly to re-float the tanker, while attempting to move the oil to undamaged holding areas. The foul weather reduced the effectiveness of these measures.

After some time, the crew of the ship was pulled off the Sea Empress by Royal Air Force helicopters. High winds prevented most salvage operations and the only measure officials could take was to drop detergent and chemicals over the growing oil spill. The 70,000 tons of oil spilled caused a 12-mile long oil slick. Beaches were covered with slimy oil, resulting in the deaths of thousands of seabirds.

Skomer and Skokholm islands suffered severe damage that was repaired 10 years later. For about a week, the Sea Empress was finally pulled in to port.

Japan have invented “origami”, the art of paper folding. But this time Japanese scientists are planning to launch paper plane in outer space. Japanese scientists are trying to figure out whether it is possible to make spacecraft out of paper. Out of Paper? Yes paper. A professor of aerospace engineering named Shinji Suzuki says that paper planes are extremely light so they slow down when the air is thin and can gradually descend. Suzuki adds, “If the said paper planes land safely into space, the paper technology could one day be used to build a new generation of unmanned spacecraft.”

They tested small paper planes in wind tunnels, exposing them to temperatures of up to 250°C and winds up to 7 times the speed of sound. The little paper aircrafts survived the tests without any major scratches. So for their next step, a Japanese astronaut in the International Space Station has to launch a number of paper planes made from paper chemically treated to resist heat and water, from the space station towards Earth.

It is been assumed that these paper planes will take several months for the planes to reach the ground, and it is impossible to tell where they will land exactly. With three quarters of the globe covered with water, there would be a very small chance for any of the little flyers to land on dry soil. But the scientists plan to have some kind of message written on the planes, encouraging anyone who finds them to contact them. This sounds something like sending the Voyager space probe into outer space with messages for any alien life forms it may encounter out there, but in this case hoping to be re-united with the human beings that made it.

Oxfordshire-based Reaction Engines has designed a hypersonic airplane that could one day fly passengers between Europe and Australia in less than five hours. The company says that the A2 could be operating within 25 years. It would carry 300 passengers and is capable of sustained travel at Mach 5 (3,800 mph), more than twice the speed of the Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde.

At 143 meters long, the A2 is roughly twice the size of the biggest current jumbo jets. It runs on a liquid hydrogen Scimitar engine being developed by Reaction Engines that is based on existing technology.

The LAPCAT (Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologies) project is being funded by the European Space Agency (ESA). The ESA wants to encourage companies to push the boundaries of commercial air travel using technology more commonly associated with space travel.

The ESA’s website states that hypersonic flight is generally considered to begin at Mach 5. The first man-made object to reach hypersonic speeds was the two-stage US “Bumper” rocket, assembled from a captured German V-2 rocket in 1949. While hypersonic flight is not new, current research is focusing on sustained hypersonic flight within the Earth’s atmosphere.