Hasta La Gadget!

Fans of the 787 Dreamliner haven’t had much reason to cheer for the past few weeks when the FAA grounded all US jets over concerns of battery failures. While there’s no update on the reported fix, Boeing can at least say that the 787 is clear to fly again. Sort of. The FAA has given permission to Boeing to conduct flight tests under certain conditions. The company has to conduct battery- and insulation-related pre-flight inspections, watch battery behavior like a hawk, use only its own pilots and fly over unpopulated areas. Harsh terms to be sure, although we won’t have to wait for the dry runs to see the 787 airborne once again: the FAA also gave Boeing clearance to ferry one of the airliners from Fort Worth, Texas to Everett, Washington after some paint work. It went off without a hitch, as you’d infer from the photo above. We’re still some distance away from once again hopping on Dreamliners for long-haul flights, but the aircraft will at least have a chance to flex their muscles before they resume their main duties.

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Source: Reuters (Twitter), Puget Sound Business Journal

After claiming the kill of an attack helicopter a few days ago, Syrian rebel forces have posted this video showing a MiG-23 being shot down over Al Muhassan, a small town near Dayr az-Zawr, 280 miles northeast of the capital Damascus and west of the country’s Iraqi border. More »

For this epic LEGO project, a team of people from Rolls-Royce the built an incredible 675-pound replica of the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 jet engine. The LEGO jet engine you see here took 152,455 bricks to build and is accurate all the way from the fins of the intake fan to the combustion chambers were jet fuel would be burned. The LEGO engine is nearly 5 feet long making it 4 feet shy of the real thing.

The actual Trent 1000 engine, which is used on the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner, is 9 feet long and weighs about 12,710 pounds. The entire LEGO engine consists of 160 separate engine parts and took a team of four people about eight weeks to build. The entire project is amazing, and the builders made the individual components from actual CAD drawings of the real parts.

The blades on the intake fan are so thin it’s hard to imagine them staying together. Rolls-Royce Chief Scientific Officer Paul Stein said the company built the engine to inspire the younger generation. “We are very pleased some of our own graduates and apprentices have contributed to building it, ensuring it is as realistic as possible,” Stein said in a statement. “We hope that this representation of our technology will help to enthuse and inspire the potential scientists and engineers of the future about the career opportunities they could pursue.”

Or maybe they just did it because it’s fun to play with LEGO bricks.

[via Wired]