Originally Recorded: 2023.09.21

Availablity: CASI Members and Meeting Attendees

with Jim MacLeod, NRC Aerospace Research Centre

Certification of engines for operation in natural icing conditions has been a requirement for all aircraft since the beginning of flight. Icing is one of the most significant threats to aviation safety, and today’s modern engines are even more vulnerable than the previous generation of gas turbines. This presentation will show the evolution of engine icing certification from the 1940’s through to the present and illustrate the issues facing future engines.

Originally broadcast 2023.05.03

Avro Canada completed and flew five prototypes of the CF-105 Arrow supersonic interceptor before the program was terminated by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker on February 20, 1959. Known ever since as Black Friday, on that day over 14,000 employees lost their jobs and the Canadian aerospace industry changed forever, never again to produce a state-of-the-art military aircraft. One of the most advanced fighter aircraft in the world at the time, the Arrow was an almost inconceivable achievement by a company that only 13 years earlier was manufacturing Lancaster bombers under license during World War II. To this day an aura of conspiracy surrounds the demise of the aircraft, fostered by the Canadian government’s subsequent order that all completed and partially completed Arrows be cut up and sold for scrap. This talk will discuss the development of the Arrow from the genesis of Avro Canada during World War II to the political and military pressures that led to its cancellation.

Walter Gordon worked as an engineer in Western New York from 1979 to 2020 at four different aerospace firms, retiring recently as a business development manager in the Moog Space and Defense Group. He is also retired from a parallel 30-year career in the Air Force Reserve, serving as commander of the 328th Airlift Squadron and 914th Airlift Wing in Niagara Falls, New York. Walter Gordon is a veteran of Operations Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom and has over 2,000 hours flying time in the C-130.

Walter has a long time interest in aerospace and aerospace history, joining AIAA at age 17 and currently serving as chairman of the Niagara Frontier Section (western NY, eastern Ontario and Quebec) and member of the History Committee. He is also the chairman of the Niagara Frontier Aviation and Space Hall of Fame nominating committee and a past president of the Niagara Aerospace Museum and Aero Club of Buffalo. He has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University at Buffalo and an M.S. in Strategic Studies from the U.S. Air Force Air War College.

Originally recorded: 2022.01.26

Come and hear Col. (ret'd) Al Conrad recount important lessons learned during a storied adventure through engineering and the aerospace community, where education, experience and teamwork make all the difference!

See how and why CASI and other traditional and evolving aspects of our community can make your participation valuable and rewarding.

Originally recorded: 2022.11.23

For decades, the ILS (Instrument Landing System) has guided pilots to safe landings in low visibility. Captain Doug Morris will discuss the components and intricacies of the ILS. It is the approach of choice with reluctance to adapt to new GPS (Global Positioning System) technology. Learn about autoland, what it takes to get airborne in low visibility and how pilots keep current. Take-offs in low visibility conditions will also be discussed.

Captain Morris flies the Boeing 787 Dreamliner worldwide for Air Canada, having amassed 26,000 flight hours. He is a certified meteorologist and the author of four books and has been writing for Air Canada’s inflight magazine for 24 years. Doug is a flight and weather instructor and recently obtained his Masters in Aviation and Aerospace Management from Purdue University (Indiana).

CASI Award Presentations:

2021 Alouette Award | Mr. Richard Boudreault

2022 Alouette Award | Spacecraft Reverberant Acoustic Chamber Facility Team - NRC

2022 McCurdy Award | Dr. John Moores

2022 Trans-Canada (McKee) Trophy | Canadian Forces Aerospace Engineering Test Establishment, Represented by Col. Brian Payan

Originally recorded 2022.10.17

Hybrid Electric Aircraft Testbed (HEAT) Presentation

The Hybrid Electric Aircraft Testbed (HEAT) is a Cessna 337 Skymaster with the aft piston engine replaced by an equivalent power/thrust Electric Propulsion System (EPS). Members of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) team who carried it out will present the project and show the aircraft in the Flight Research Laboratory (FRL) hangar.

Originally Recorded 2022.05.30

Presenter: Eric Choi, Director of Business Development GHGSat Inc.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with 80 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years after release. A quarter of today’s global temperature increases are caused by anthropogenic methane. Reducing methane emissions 45% over the next five years would have the same 20 year climate benefit as closing 1,300 coal-fired power plants.

Canadian space technology is addressing the growing need for global transparency in methane emissions. A number of past (e.g. SCIAMACHY), current (e.g. Sentinel-5P/TROPOMI) and future (e.g. GeoCarb) space agency missions provide methane data on regional and global scales. An exciting development is the emergence in Canada and abroad of commercial remote sensing companies like GHGSat that are pushing the boundaries with innovative and complementary Earth observation capabilities that would otherwise not be possible with either a space agency or private sector mission alone.

GHGSat’s satellites enable the quantification of facility-level methane emissions and provide data and analytics for stakeholders in the energy, resource, power generation, agricultural, waste management, and sustainability sectors to make informed environmental decisions. There are currently three GHGSat satellites in orbit, with the next three satellites scheduled for launch this summer and three more satellites now under construction towards the goal of a ten satellite constellation by the end of 2023. No other government or commercial satellite mission is currently capable of quantifying methane emissions from point sources as small as individual oil and gas wells.

This presentation will include a short history of satellite-based methane monitoring, a summary of GHGSat’s satellites and their capabilities, a description of how GHGSat’s high-resolution satellites work synergistically with regional-scale data from space agency missions, and conclude with some examples of recent observations from GHGSat’s satellites.

Our Speaker
Eric Choi is director of business development at GHGSat. Over the course of his career, he has held positions of increasing technical and managerial responsibility in both the aviation and space sectors, the latter including work on QEYSSat (Quantum Encryption and Science Satellite), the Meteorology (MET) payload on the NASA Phoenix Mars Lander, the Canadarm2 on the International Space Station, the RADARSAT-1 Earth-observation satellite, and the MOPITT (Measurements of Pollution on the Troposphere) instrument. He holds a B.A.Sc in engineering science and an M.A.Sc in aerospace engineering, both from the University of Toronto, and an MBA from York University.

Originally broadcast 2022.04.27

Presenter: Pervez Canteenwalla

Program Lead, NRC Low Emission Aviation Program

Researcher, NRC Gas Turbine Lab

Aviation is transitioning towards a “net-zero” future in order to reduce its impact on climate change. This talk will give a highlight of some of the past, present and future work at the NRC to accelerate this transition through work in novel aircraft configurations, sustainable fuels, electrification, and hydrogen aircraft.

NRC Low Emission Aviation Program (LEAP) - CASI Ottawa.pdf

Originally Recorded 2022.02.24

Presenter: Dr. Neil Rowlands
Engineering Fellow at Honeywell Ottawa

Sponsored with: Carleton University Mechanical and Aerospace Society

The Canadian contribution to the Webb Space Telescope is the largest space science project ever undertaken by the Canadian Space Agency. This contribution consists of flight hardware: the Fine Guidance Sensor and the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrometer, operations support and support to the Canadian astronomy community for science utilization of the Observatory. Planning for this contribution started at the very beginning of this major international venture in 1996.  

The presentation will summarize the major FGS/NIRISS development milestones leading to the successful launch of the Observatory on Christmas Day 2021. Testing a cryogenic space instrument presents some challenges and key test results from the ground test campaigns at CSA’s David Florida Laboratories and at NASA’s facilities will be reviewed. Some highlights from the early deployments and checkout of Observatory systems will be presented. Plans for the scientific utilization of the NIRISS instrument will also be summarized.  

Speaker

Neil Rowlands obtained his B.Sc. (Engineering Physics) from the University of Alberta in 1985 and his Ph.D. (Astronomy) from Cornell University in 1991. At Cornell, he participated in the construction and use of infrared instrumentation for the Kuiper Airborne Observatory and the 5m Hale telescope at Mt. Palomar. After post-doctoral fellowships at the Université de Montréal, and at the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing where he worked with infrared instrumentation, he joined CAL Corporation (Ottawa, ON), now Honeywell Aerospace, as an electro-optical engineer.

Since 1995 he has been developing space-borne scientific instrumentation for the space physics, atmospheric sciences and astronomy communities. He is currently an Engineering Fellow at Honeywell in Ottawa. He has been working on the Canadian contribution to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project, the Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS/NIRISS), since 1997.

Originally Recorded 2022.01.27

CEOS System of Systems

Presenter: Ivan Petiteville | Committee on Earth Observation Satellites

Special Guest Speaker: Éric Laliberté | Director General, Space Utilization,

Canadian Space AgecyThe Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) was established in 1984 in response to a recommendation from a Panel of Experts on Remote Sensing from Space and set up under the aegis of the G7 Economic Summit of Industrial Nations Working Group on Growth, Technology, and Employment. This Panel recognized the multidisciplinary nature of space-based Earth observations and the value of coordinating international Earth observation efforts to benefit society.

Accordingly, the original function of CEOS was to coordinate and harmonize Earth observations to make it easier for the user community to access and use data. CEOS initially focused on interoperability, common data formats, the inter-calibration of instruments, and common validation and inter-comparison of products. However, over time, the circumstances surrounding the collection and use of space-based Earth observations have changed.

This presentation provides an overview of CEOS and shows some examples of the numerous CEOS achievements, thanks to the scientific and technological cooperation of the major space agencies in the world, and the interoperability of their assets.