To the Editor: I am a senior mechanical engineer from Brazil and yesterday I visited the Mechanical Engineering Online site for the first time.

I would like to congratulate you for the high quality of this magazine. It has a rich content that I'm sure is very useful, and it is able to keep me updated.

Plane Facts
Charles Zabinski LeRoy, N.Y.

To the Editor: The November 2006 News and Notes section had an article titled the "The Airplane in the Garage" about the Terrafugia Transition.

The flying car concept is daunting, to say the least, with all the tradeoffs which must be made to get a safe vehicle that won't kill the operator.

My guess is that the semi-canard design shown was chosen for safety. The front airfoil stalls before the main wing and thus is supposedly safer than a conventional design. However, the need to put wheels on the car makes for dirty airflow and drag, which might make the vehicle tricky to fly and land.

The folded wings would make for a lot of flat area on the side of the vehicle when in the highway mode. Even at a top speed of 50 mph, the flying car would be very prone to cross wind forces.

As a licensed glider pilot, I am aware of the relative simplicity of gliders in relation to powered aircraft. Even with that relative simplicity, there are tradeoffs made for portability and ease of use. The wings on all modern gliders are easily removable for portability. A safe glider design is much easier to achieve because there are fewer tradeoffs to be made. Even with the relative simplicity of a glider, they presently cost between $60,000 and $100,000.

I would love to see the Terrafugia Transition succeed. It was a boyhood dream 60 years ago to own a flying car, but I'm not counting on seeing one in my driveway in the next 10 years.

To the Editor: The spirited exchange of views in the May Letters column regarding the technology employed in designing the Wilson Turbopower recuperative heat exchangers demonstrates once again the unique value of this column as an engineering forum. Mr. Kress's credentials as a specialist in this field appear obviously impeccable, as do Mr. Wilson's. And yet, they disagree. Whose opinion are we to accept?

As an engineer who is decidedly not a specialist in this field, I would respectfully suggest that Mr. Kress's expertise represents the state of the art prevalent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It would appear, from Mr. Wilson's rebuttal, that the design limitations of that period have since been overcome, drastically altering the rules of the game.

I hope to see more of this kind of meaningful debate in future issues.

To the Editor: I have been a member since 1948 and many times in previous years I would scan the magazine and not find anything that I really wanted to read in detail. Many times, the content of articles was outside my fields of interest and, frankly, beyond my capacity to appreciate the significance of the presentation.

I am not a Fellow and never will be, but I spent over 50 years as an active mechanical engineer either on the board, in the field, or as a manager of other ME's. Never progressed beyond that.

But for the last year or so, I pick up the magazine and skim through it, then go back and actually read and digest almost every article. I loved July's Technology Focus. It doesn't require a doctor's degree to understand.

Also in the July issue, the "Greenhorns, Green Choices" feature was good even though I don't dig high-tech business plans or inductors and capacitors. But I read it with real interest because it was people-oriented. Even though I'm beyond any career changes (I'm 82), I enjoyed the cogent analysis of today's career changes in the new worldwide marketplace where young engineers find themselves.

You saved the best for last-good old Second Law and Sadi Carnot. I graduated with a 2.8 gpa in 1947 and the only less-than-satisfactory grade in three years was thermo-a big D. But years later, I did a little toward a master's and aced Thermo 500.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the new look in Mechanical Engineering.

To the Editor: As a former international student, I really enjoyed reading Alan S. Brown's article on the brain drain (May). While he has written the article as a professional, I am going to write a note as a former job seeker. First, I have to mention that I am an Iranian-born aerospace engineer who lives in Oklahoma, but my comment is not about being an Iranian in the U.S. It's more about being a foreign engineer here.

Professionals and scholars used to rush into this amazing country. Fairly easy immigration rules, a great higher-level education system, and funding organizations like the National Science Foundation were proper reasons for young scholars to come to the U.S. and stay. While American students were choosing law majors in the '80s and business disciplines in the '90s, Asian students were taking care of the hard, nasty engineering.

And then, September 11 happened.

The U.S. started to close the doors to educated people. Obtaining the student visa became harder and harder and the cap for an H1B work visa was brought down by Congress. While the U.S. was closing the doors to the scholars and professionals, other countries like Canada and Australia opened their doors. Outsourcing of services to India and manufacturing to China made a bright market for bright graduates.

Many of my Indian friends in the schools migrated to Canada and Australia since the immigration process takes just one year for graduates with a master's degree. I always have this question in my mind: We send our Social Security numbers over the phone to India to be processed; why don't we bring some of their talents back in return?

To the Editor: Why does the road not taken have to be a road? (Feature article, April.) Why are we fiddling with the faraway impracticalities of expecting Joe Sixpack to handle hydrogen fuel, or wasting our precious time with hybrid or alcohol-fueled Band-Aids for our bursting transportation arteries, when a perfect solution is at our fingertips right now?

Put the traffic on rails. Not only are you saving energy per ton or passenger-mile, but driving such vehicles by electricity is an engineering problem that has been solved, solved, and solved again. Of course, there's still room for engineers to fine-tune it. I realize this isn't terribly exciting for some of us, but I do believe that tax money has better uses than the entertainment of us techies.

"But Americans won't use public transit." Ha. If the auto companies can still sell us our warped rubber-tired dream when it costs $35 to fill my dinky car's tank, and that open-road "freedom" in their ads translates to three daily hours in a tin box, well, Madison Ave. can sell anything.

A lot of us Yanks do use public transit. I ride the city bus to work about three days a week. If it could be a more pleasant ride-and with effort and a bit of cash, it surely could-imagine how many more would ride it.

Let's not forget that freight railroads already carry huge quantities of traffic. Let's do all we can to increase that, and to give this country a real passenger rail system. We can do it. We built that Interstate system when national defense required it.

We engineers need to resist the dazzling lure of high-tech panaceas. Forget the road not taken, and use the railroad we've avoided taking. Build 140-mph electric trains, like those Japan has had since, oh, 1965, between all major cities, and watch the energy savings pile up.

Engineering: It's about using what you have.

To the Editor: Your article "A Major in Robots" (Computing, March) claims that Worcester Polytechnic Institute has developed the first robotic engineering degree in the United States.

If this is the case, then engineering degrees in the U.S. are well behind the times, because in the rest of the world the discipline of mechatronics engineering is quite common.

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