Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Photo: NTV

Starting this Saturday, a new kind of train will start rolling on Italian rails. It’s called NTV, and it’s Europe’s only privately owned high-speed train, and it counts among its founders Ferrari chairman Luca Cordero di Montezemolo.

Of course, the trains are painted bright red.

Montezemolo is one the founding investors in NTV, which stands for Nuovo Transporti Viaggiatori. It’s a challenge to Italy’s state-run Trenitalia monopoly, which controls both regional and high-speed routes. NTV is hoping that faster speeds and a better level of on-board service will entice customers to use their trains when traveling between Italy’s major cities.

It’s a $1.3 billion venture, according to Reuters, and Montezemolo is at the helm. While the majority of the company is controlled by individual and institutional private investors, a 20 percent stake is owned by France’s state-owned railway, SNCF. The French national railway also provides technical and operational assistance.

NTV’s AGV trains are made by Alstom, seat 450 passengers and operate at speeds up to 186 mph. (They can go faster, but local laws won’t allow it.) Uniquely, the trains don’t use locomotives, instead relying on individual engines underneath each car. That allows for more passenger space and increases the flexibility of how many cars each train carries.

We recently had the chance to sample Trenitalia’s offerings and found the Frecciarossa between Florence and Rome to be on-time, clean and quick – and light years ahead of Amtrak. But the NTV promises first-run movies, high-end meals from Eataly and an upscale business class product in addition to low-cost off-peak fares in standard-class cars.

There’s also a greater emphasis on style. For instance, the interiors are decked out in Italian Poltrona Frau leather – the same stuff that upholsters Ferrari and Maserati cars. Instead of a prancing horse or a trident, though, the NTV wears a leaping hare insignia.

Image: Bell Helicopter

Bell Helicopter unveiled its largest commercial helicopter ever, and the 16-passenger aircraft is getting as much attention for its fly-by-wire system as its ability to carry, say, a crew of oil workers to an offshore drilling rig.

A pair of 1,800-horsepower General Electric turbine engines will allow the Bell 525 to carry a work crew (or a few VIPs) 400 miles at 140 knots (161 miles per hour). When it comes to quickly moving heavy loads, brute power remains key. But to control that power, Bell Helicopter will use fly-by-wire technology for the first time. Although such tech has been common in airplanes for many years, it remains rare in the rotary-wing world.

Bell plans to join the small club of fly-by-wire helicopters, a move that will dramatically change the cockpit for the 525 pilot. The helicopter will be flown via two small joysticks rather than the large control stick and lever that has dominated helicopter cockpits since the early days of rotary-wing flight. The extra room will open up the view for the massive touchscreen displays.

The new cockpit of the Bell 525 featuring joysticks (with armrests) for both the cyclic and collective controls. The seats have been left out of the image. Image: Bell Helicopter

It’s been more than 66 years since Bell first flew the Model 47, the bubble-canopy helicopter everyone knows from the opening sequence of M*A*S*H. (Yes, the Army actually flew the H-13 Sioux.) The company cemented its iconic status more than 55 years ago with the UH-1 “Huey.” But in today’s world, a growing part of the industry is focused on ever-bigger helicopters that can carry work crews long distances, often to oil rigs in the middle of an ocean or mining camps in the middle of nowhere.

Bell has been late to the game of producing a model for the new class of “medium lift” helicopters. Civilian variants of its Huey were for decades a big player in the offshore industry, but it was left behind as Eurocopter, Sikorsky, AgustaWestland and others offered faster, more capable models.

Bell’s latest is aimed squarely at reclaiming lost ground. The fly-by-wire control system, and the paperless cockpit dominated by four large touchscreens, put it a step beyond the competition from a technological viewpoint.

The fly-by-wire system on the 525 is similar to that of the Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey, and a triple-redundant system ensures a measure of safety. Pilots will have to get used to flying through a computer rather than direct mechanical linkage. For the uninitiated, fly-by-wire essentially means the pilot tells the computer what to do, and the computer determines how best to fulfill the instruction. There are times when the computer can override the pilot if it determines the person at the controls is asking for something unsafe.

Of course, the potential disconnect between pilot and computer has led to problems and occasional disasters like the crash of Air France Flight 447.

Bell Helicopter’s Larry Roberts told Vertical that the flight control computer on the 525 should not limit the pilot’s capabilities and the helicopter “will provide an impressively wide range of maneuvering capability and not require the need, or, for that matter, the ability, to override.”

According to Vertical, the launch customer for the 525 is PHI Inc., one of the biggest players in the offshore oil transportation business. But the company also sees potential sales in search and rescue as well as other markets.

The Bell 525 Relentless is expected to make its first flight in 2014.

Airlines flying in Europe are finding different ways for handling the new emission trading scheme that took effect at the beginning of the year. While many airlines in North American and Asia continue to question the validity of the requirements to purchase carbon credits, several European carriers are developing plans for buying and trading carbon credits.

Germany’s Lufthansa told Reuters it has been continuously buying up credits on the open market. Currently carbon credits in Europe are at bargain prices. The price is about half of what it was in 2010 at roughly 7 Euros per ton of carbon. The requirement to buy carbon credits is effectively a tax to provide an economic incentive to minimize emissions of C02 by the airlines.

As of January 1, airlines flying to and from EU airports must have enough carbon credits to cover the emissions from their flights. The airlines join power and industrial plants in the EU that have been submitting carbon credits since 2005. Under the plan the airlines are given a number of free carbon credits to cover some of their operations, they must acquire the remaining credits either through trade or purchase.

Members of the Star Alliance group which includes United and Lufthansa told Reuters they will likely use a broker to help members buy credits on the open market at discounted rates. Airlines in the rival SkyTeam including Air France and Delta are expected to trade internally with members of the airline group to acquire some of the needed credits, purchasing the rest on the market.

Some United States carriers have already said they will be adding a surcharge to cover the cost of the credits.

A representative of Air France told Reuters the fleet will receive a free allocation of about 12.6 million tons of credit, but it expects to emit between 16-17 million tons for 2012.

Both Air France and Lufthansa say they are buying credits directly from a Paris based exchange known as BlueNext.

In the coming  years airlines are expected to begin hedging and trading carbon credits in much the same way they do with jet fuel today. Buying and trading of carbon credits is expected to pick up dramatically this year as the airlines will be required to submit their credits against the free allocations.

Photo: Lufthansa

Airline passengers will face the long lines, interminable delays and frustrating backups that come with holiday travel. Through it all, they’ll also have to decide whether to submit to one of the 500-plus x-ray or radio wave scanners found in airports nationwide and wonder about their safety.

Much of the debate surrounding the increasingly common security scanners revolves around their effectiveness and privacy. But the health implications are coming to the fore as the European Union bans x-ray scanners because of health concerns. Many EU nations will instead use millimeter-wave, lower frequency scanners.

Both types use a beam of electromagnetic energy to create an image of a passenger — sans clothing — in an effort to detect weapons and other contraband. Millimeter wave scanners use a portion of the spectrum close to microwaves, while x-ray scanners, of course, use the higher frequency x-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Both devices collect the scattered waves that reflect off the body to create an image.

The dose of radiation from the x-ray scanners is very low. But whether it is low enough to be harmless remains a lingering question.

A recent report by ProPublica and PBS uncovered concerns over the level of radiation passengers are exposed to. Although the dose is very low, the scanners still violate “a longstanding fundamental principle of radiation safety — that humans shouldn’t be x-rayed unless there is a medical benefit,” the report states. There also is the concern that repeated exposure to even low doses of radiation could be a problem.

According to the story, research suggests “anywhere from six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the x-ray backscatter machines,” based on roughly 100 million passengers flying annually. The report also questions why the decision to deploy x-ray scanners was made by the Transportation Security Administration, not the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates drugs and medical devices that can affect public health.

The TSA argues the radiation poses very little threat to human health compared to the security provided by the devices.

“It’s a really, really small amount relative to the security benefit you’re going to get,” Robin Kane, the agency’s assistant administrator for security technology, told ProPublica.

In response to the ProPublica/PBS report, the FDA said the risk of getting cancer is just 1 in 400 million. The agency also clarified several points made in the story.

And as our colleagues at Threat Level noted, Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory analyzed the Rapiscan 1000 x-ray scanner and published the leading and most often-cited study (.pdf) in October 2010. The 49-page report, released in a redacted form, says the machines leak virtually no radiation to TSA staff and nearby passengers and expose the person being scanned to a fraction of the maximum exposure level deemed medically safe.

“You would have to go through the scanner 1,000 times to equate to one medical x-ray,” said Peter Kant, Rapiscan’s executive vice president, summarizing the study. “You get twice as much radiation when eating a banana than when going through the scanner.”

But critics note the mechanical beam’s intensity level has not been published, making it impossible to evaluate the safety claims. Moreover, medical x-ray machines disperse radiation throughout the body, whereas the airport scanners penetrate to about skin level. That means there is a high concentration of radiation on a single organ — the skin.

Questions remain regarding the safety of the scanners and whether such tests were bungled, the manner in which they were placed into widespread use and just how effective they are. There also have been questions about the connection between Rapiscan, which produces the scanners, and former TSA boss Michael Chertoff. Chertoff’s consulting firm had done work for Rapiscan. Both companies deny anything inappropriate occurred.

Beyond the health concerns and the EU ban on x-ray scanners, France and Germany stopped using millimeter wave radio scanners because of numerous false positive results.

According to a separate story about the effectiveness of the scanners, of all the passengers singled out for closer scrutiny after being scanned by millimeter wave machines, pat-down searches revealed more than half of them posed no threat at all. The most mundane things, like sweat and folds in clothing, were among the things contributing to false positives.

Several tests of both types of scanners have shown they are effective at detecting items like guns and knives, but no more so than much cheaper metal detectors already in use. Other tests have shown explosives can be hidden on the body in a manner unlikely to be detected by those monitoring images generated by the scanners.

Passengers do not have a choice whether they are being scanned in a millimeter wave scanner, which resembles a phone booth with glass walls, or an x-ray scanner in which they stand between two large boxes. Airports often have one or the other, but they typically are not used for every security line.

There are roughly 250 x-ray machines and 260 millimeter wave machines in use nationwide. The TSA plans to deploy a total of 1,800 scanners by 2014.