Matt Hall is a pilot at the Red Bull Air Race and a professional aerobatics/air show pilot, and in this episode we talk about both. We start out with how Matt got into flying through gliders and ultralights. We then discuss competition aerobatics and air show flying, and the difference between the two. We continue with air racing and take a look at his MXS-R airplane, which, at the time of recording, was at the DG factory in Bruchsal, where we met for the recording. We conclude the episode with a brief discussion of his military flying, which included the F-18 for the RAAF and the F-15E on exchange with the USAF.

How do scientists uncover phenomena and explain their connections? How do engineers design machines, methods and infrastructure? At omega tau, experts give detailed answers. Over the last ten years, we have produced over 350 episodes in which we dug deeper, until we ran out of questions. Join us on our journey through the world of science and engineering: the closer you look and listen, the more interesting things get.

Megaprojects can be identified by their size -- in the Billions -- and also by the fact that most of them are considered a failure in terms of cost overrun, delay or the benefit delivered. Why do over 90% of such projects fail? Professor Bent Flyvbjerg of the Said Business School at Oxford University has spent his career finding out. Together with his teams he has collected lots of data about successful and unsuccessful megaprojects, and has also developed tools to help such projects increase the likelihood of success. In this episode, Bent gives us an insight into his important research.

How do scientists uncover phenomena and explain their connections? How do engineers design machines, methods and infrastructure? At omega tau, experts give detailed answers. Over the last ten years, we have produced over 350 episodes in which we dug deeper, until we ran out of questions. Join us on our journey through the world of science and engineering: the closer you look and listen, the more interesting things get.

The Gemini programme of the mid-sixties is relatively unknown, even though it was an important stepping stone in the Apollo moon programme: Gemini is where NASA learned to fly in space. In this episode we cover Gemini with our two guests David Woods (who has been on the show talking about Apollo) and David Harland. Together they wrote a book on Gemini that serves as the rough outline of this conversation. We talk about the Gemini spacecraft itself, the launch vehicles, some of the achievements and learnings of the programme as well as some of the specifics of some of the missions.

How do scientists uncover phenomena and explain their connections? How do engineers design machines, methods and infrastructure? At omega tau, experts give detailed answers. Over the last ten years, we have produced over 350 episodes in which we dug deeper, until we ran out of questions. Join us on our journey through the world of science and engineering: the closer you look and listen, the more interesting things get.

In this episode we talk with Peter Sollich of King's College, London about disordered systems, statistical mechanics and complexity. In particular, we discuss the difference between quenched and annealing disorder, the relation to entropy, complexity and chaos, the formalisms used to tackle such systems as well as a whole lot of examples from physics and other sciences.

Stem cells are an important part of today's medical practice, and their importance will grow in the future based on research conducted today. One of the researchers in Derrick Rossi of Harvard and the Boston Children's Hospital. In the episode we introduce the different kinds of stem cells and their role in the body and in medical treatments. We then discuss some clinical use cases as well as current research (in general and in Derrick's group).

In this episode we talk to former RAF pilot Nick Anderson about his time flying the F-4 Phantom II in the cold war. We start out by describing the Phantom itself, the specific of the British Phantoms, and how it flew from a pilot's perspective. We then discuss flying in the cold war and walk through a typical intercept mission. We close with a Nick's personal perspective on the time and his flying, as well as with a quick view on the recent intercepts of Russian bombers in Europe. Nick has also kindly provided us with captioned images, which you can if you click through to the episode page.

In this episode we talk about the design, engineering and testing of race cars. I have visited Toyota Motorsport earlier this year and talked with Alastair Moffitt and a few of his colleagues. We start out with an introduction to TMG (Alastair Moffitt), then talk about component and full-car testing (Marco Gehlen), and then discuss wind tunnels and aerodynamics (Antonio Pavesi and Rene Hilhorst). We also cover design trade-offs, team/driver integration, the role of the driver during development, the cockpit, the elements on the steering wheel as well as testing. We close with a look at additive manufacturing (3D Printing) in TMG's work.