As a passionate hobby pilot, with unfortunately far too little time, I can very well understand what Andreas Späth of Süddeutschland experienced as a co-pilot in an aerobatic pilot, with the exception of the spit bag. The aerobatics brings man (or woman) and material sometimes to the limits of the load capacity.

As a mechanical engineer, I am not only fascinated by flying itself, but also by the technical question of materials. After all, the physical stresses that a turbine blade in a passenger jet, for example, has to withstand are enormous: an ambient temperature of around 1,200° and, in addition, a lot of aggressive dust that hits the blade at high speed. How to grind such components economically and precisely from materials that are particularly difficult to machine (Super Alloys, Inconel, Titanium, etc.) is something we at Haas Schleifmaschinen have been working on for quite some time.

And we are now showing this live for the first time at the Paris Air Show 2009, where everything of importance in the aviation industry meets. The manufacturers of airplanes and helicopters, the suppliers like Haas Schleifmaschinen and of course a lot of people like me for whom flying is still perhaps the most beautiful minor matter in the world.

Thomas Bader