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Boeing 100th C-17 Badge

Technical Information

Catalogue No: C1585
Category: Corporate/Business
Object Type: Medal/Badge
Object Name: Boeing 100th C-17 Badge
Part No: None
Serial No: None
Manufacturer: Boeing
Division: Unknown
Platform(s):
Year of Manufacture: 2002
Dimensions: Width (mm): 32
Height (mm): 24
Depth (mm): 9
Weight (g): 5
Location: Pin-On Badges Box in Cupboard CK (Display 6) [Main Store]
Inscription(s):

100 Aircraft
'We made it happen'
C17
Boeing

Notes:

This rectangular badge commemorates the 100th C-17 heavy lift aircraft for which the Company supplied two high integrity Head-Up Displays per aircraft. The RAA has one of these badges.

The Company in common with most organisations has a wide range of items promoting the Company name as a form of advertising. The range extends from  'cheap and cheeful'; the sort of thing that would be on the Stand at an Exhibition like the SBAC Farnborough Show. The young visitors love collecting these items along with pictures and Brochures. Such items would include the following:

Stickers, Carrier Bags, Furry Bugs, simple aircraft assembly kits, Cardboard Head Up Display, Drinks Mats. Sometimes a collection of items is put together in something like a Pouch or presentation bag.

A more up-market offering, of better quality, might include:

Mugs, Pens, Key Fobs, Tape Dispensers, Magnifying Glasses, Model cars or the Hybrid Bus, Penknife and Pens.

The top range gifts are usually presented to important visitors or taken on visits to customers and these might include:

Executive Toys, Paperweights, Business Card Holders, Wallets, Clocks, Calculators, Engraved glasses and Glass blocks with a contained model and legend (BAE Systems liked to produce glass Globes to illustrate the global reach of the company). A rather special gift has been a Hologram of a coin.

Ties have been a regular gift in the days when they were regularly worn and were presented as recognition of achievement or membership of a group or ‘club as well as being a promotional gift. Employees for example will be encouraged to wear a T-Shirt with a Corporate Logo which gives a corporate identity. 

The RAA includes items of this type acquired from Suppliers and visits to Customers.

 

 In November 2002 Boeing delivered its 100th C-17 Globemaster III airlifter to the U.S. Air Force in a ceremony at its Long Beach, Calif., facility. "The 100th C-17 milestone creates an opportunity for us to celebrate along with our key suppliers and supporters. We are having a series of events recognizing each of the teams that have a role in building the C-17, culminating in a major celebration when we deliver the finished airplane." The advanced airlifters, delivered at a rate of 15 per year, are pressed into service as quickly as they join the growing Air Force fleet of C-17s. Aircraft 100 departed at the end of the ceremony for its new home at Charleston Air Force Base, S.C. With four C-17s operated by the Royal Air Force added to three early flight test models, the  93rd production aircraft for the U.S. Air Force brings the combined fleet to the century mark. Boeing, which merged with McDonnell Douglas in the 1990s, continued to manufacture C-17s for export customers following the end of deliveries to the U.S. Air Force.

 BAE Systems supplies the twin Head Up Displays which are a unique high integrity design.

In August 1984 Stafford Ellis invented a slimline optical system which involved placing a prism in the middle of the optical path in order to reduce the height of the Pilot’s Display Unit. 

 In 1985 the Company commenced the design of a HUD with the patented shallow optical relay. A few HUD's were built for the US Navy A-6 but this order did not materialise however a variant of the design was used for the HUD for the C-17 transport. The Request for Proposal was sent to Pilkington Electro-Optical Division in June 1985. An attachment to this RFQ from Dave Steward shows how difficult the design was to achieve the customer’s procurement specification with the space constraints of the HUD envelope, over nose line and windshield clearance. The top lens element had to be modified from the planned single element because of unacceptable coma and chromatic aberrations. Although the optics is fairly conventional the HUD achieves a Total FoV of 30deg x 24deg with an instantaneous Field of View in the C-17 of 25deg in azimuth and 22deg in elevation. This shallow optical design allows the HUD to be mounted on the cockpit coaming although the penalty is that the prism is heavy; the all up weight of the unit is 54lbs and the prism block is expensive. The dual Combiner assembly has neutral density coatings but has 80% transmission and the coatings are graded to transfer the image between the two glasses. Unusually the Combiner assembly folds down flat onto the exit lens housing to allow cross cockpit visibility. The parallel motion mechanism was patented as it has to collapse both glasses and when they are restored a very high accuracy must be reproduced and performance maintained over the environment.

The HUD for the C-17 was claimed to be the world's first HUD designed as a critical flight instrument. With the ever-increasing miniaturisation of circuit devices: hybrids and ASICs, it was feasible to construct a HUD with twin integral MIL-STD-1750A processors, the 1553B interface and waveform generator in a single box, the electronics being built into the optical unit rather than being separate. Parallel processing is used to feed back the commanded deflections to compare them to the input and this in part achieves an integrity of 10^(-6) critical failures per hour (i.e. one failure per million hours). Another feature of the single Line Replaceable Unit is that it is air cooled even though the power consumption is only around 100W. Most HUDs are fitted into a tray which has mechanical adjustments to align the unit to the aircraft axes but there is sufficient adjustment on the deflection system and CRT to permit electronic boresighting. Finally, the C-17 HUD was designed to allow growth to display raster video from EO sensors with flight symbology overwritten in stroke.

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