All Transportation Technology & Automotive Articles
  • Singapore’s Seletar Airport gets ready for passengers

    Matt Falcus Transportation Technology & Automotive

    Pressure will soon be relieved on Singapore’s Changi Airport, as plans to open a new passenger terminal at the smaller Seletar Airport in the north of the city-state are on track. The structure is due to open later this year. Seletar is 19 miles north of Changi. Built as a Royal Air Force station in 1928, it saw action during World War II and can claim to be Singapore’s first international airport. Today, the airport is a busy general aviation facility, with flight training establishments and a number of maintenance operators providing heavy engineering services from the single-runway site.

  • What would Boeing’s hypersonic jet mean for travel?

    Bambi Majumdar Transportation Technology & Automotive

    Boeing has announced a futuristic, hypersonic jet that promises to change travel. On this plane, one could travel from Los Angeles to Tokyo in three hours or from New York to London in two. The design was unveiled at American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ (AIAA) AVIATION Forum, which was held in Atlanta from June 25-29. Though it is still in a conceptual stage and could be decades away from being built, the idea has created quite a buzz.

  • Porsche, Bernhard smash ‘Ring record, but will it stand the test…

    Ross Lancaster Transportation Technology & Automotive

    Germany’s Stefan Bellof had a great chance to be the country's first Formula 1 World Champion had he not been killed in a vicious accident at the Spa-Francorchamps circuit in 1985. However, despite his untimely passing at age 27, Bellof’s legacy was immortalized thanks to his record lap at the Nürburgring Nordschleife in a Porsche 956 in 1983, completed in 6 minutes, 11.13 seconds — a thought-to-be everlasting monument to speed at one of the world’s longest and most dangerous circuits. After all, the record couldn’t be possibly topped, because Formula 1 stopped racing at the Nordschleife after 1976 and sports car prototypes departed after the 1000-kilometer race that accompanied Bellof’s record lap in 1983.

  • A cerebral misfire — Using an aftermarket part on my Porsche

    Pablo Deferrari Transportation Technology & Automotive

    Ripping through the gears of my Porsche 968 out of the Exit 14 tolls off the New Jersey Turnpike, I was about 15 miles from home when I caught a whiff of coolant. "That can’t be me…impossible; it’s the car up ahead," I said to myself. But my gut knew the inevitable was about to happen. The orange needle minding the temperature was at 7 o’clock then it slowly crept to second white bar at 9 o’clock, stayed there for a bit before sinking back to where it’d been.

  • Are airports relying on security breaches simply not happening?

    Matt Falcus Transportation Technology & Automotive

    An incident at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport on June 27 highlighted how a security breach can happen at an airport, when a man scaled the perimeter fence and ran towards a Delta airliner before climbing on the wing and terrorizing passengers aboard the aircraft who watched through the windows in fear. If this can happen at the world’s busiest airport, with its 2,000 closed-circuit TV cameras, then surely it can happen anywhere. Can such an invasion realistically be stopped?

  • Tariff torment: China’s retaliation on US trade

    Delany Martinez Manufacturing

    The escalation of tariff tension between the United States and its allies is reaching a fever pitch, with a growing tit-for-tat list on both the Chinese and American sides of a very public disagreement. The Trump administration’s steel tariff mandate — a hefty 25 percent on imported steel — earlier this year appears to be the proverbial spark that landed on a powder keg of inter-country trade issues. Canada became one of the first allies to make its displeasure known, but China wasn't far behind.

  • Looking both ways at the significant dangers to pedestrians in wheelchairs

    Dr. Denise A. Valenti Transportation Technology & Automotive

    A recent report from the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) estimated that close to 6,000 pedestrians were killed in motor vehicle crashes in 2017. The report discusses factors contributing to the increasing numbers of fatal pedestrian injuries, including the legalization of marijuana and growth in the use of smartphones as contributors. Those pedestrians using wheelchairs suffer fatal injury when hit by a vehicle at a rate that is close to 40 percent greater than the general population. More than half of fatal injuries to wheelchair users occur in intersections.

  • Automotive lightweighting technologies from NAIAS 2018

    Don Rosato Engineering

    The North American International Automotive Show (NAIAS) is an annual, 6-day automotive trade show in Detroit focusing on the latest mobility innovations, including industry-shaping announcements, global reveals, and policy and industry conversation on an autonomous future. Many plastics technologies build forward and evolve out of this annual, early-year event. Let’s take a look and highlight some emerging plastics and related competitive to plastics technologies from the recent NAIAS 2018.

  • A long road ahead for Heathrow expansion, despite optimism

    Matt Falcus Transportation Technology & Automotive

    If anyone needed convincing on just how full London Heathrow airport is, the month of May saw a staggering 6.7 million travelers pass through, thanks mostly to a royal wedding and the start of the summer tourist season. So, when the U.K. government gave almost unanimous support for expansion on June 5, most of those who have to use the airport gave a sigh of relief. Yet, this 20-years-in-the-making saga has only taken a small step forward, and more agonizing hurdles could still blight the airport’s bid to expand and keep pace with its rivals in continental Europe.

  • New apps, services move smart business travel forward

    Bambi Majumdar Travel, Hospitality & Event Management

    Corporate travel is a necessity, but the cost associated with it has become a significant issue. The U.S. Travel Association's latest Travel Trends Index (TTI) shows that domestic business travel grew for a fourth consecutive month in April 2018 and will continue to do so at a brisk pace for the rest of the year. Those in charge of corporate pocketbooks, however, are looking at various ways to cut costs without undermining the comfort of their employees. Meanwhile, employees are looking for less complicated processes that will ease their travel woes.