From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, this is the Real Economy Report.

Aeronautical engineering company Marenco Engineering Technologies Africa recently completed a flight simulator to assist with the accuracy of various flight projects. Anine Vermeulen has the story.

Anine Vermeulen:
Marenco Engineering Technologies Africa’s aeronautical engineer, James Reeves, was involved in the written specifications of the software for the flight simulator. He advised that the helicopter controls be replaced with a joystick, where the use of text to command the model is now fed directly through the joystick.  The model has been adjusted so that it runs in real time in order to create a complete physical model of the helicopter being flown by a pilot, which increases learning capability.

Marenco Engineering Technologies Africa aeronautical engineer James Reeves:
“It is based on software called Flightlab which is a commercial flight software and helicopter package that we use for designing the Marenco Swiss helicopter and it’s very powerful. We can model the blades and finite elements and put proper aerodynamics on it. We can model the engine, the controls and the tail rotor, so its really complete and we use that for giving the Swiss feedback on loads and tweaking the design of the helicopter.”

Anine Vermeulen:
The company has also constructed a wind tunnel on its premises, where various aircraft components are tested under strict scientific conditions.

James Reeves:
“We started building this a year ago and we finished it very recently and we like to do a lot of CFD here, which is computation of fluid dynamics.  We have a famous saying that is ‘knowing the answer improves any calculation’ so the only way to know the answer is to do a physical test. So we built a wind tunnel to test the things we design.  At the moment it has a tail rotor in it, which I designed using CFD a few years ago and now we are checking to see that the results are we expected them to be. Turns out it was really good.”

Shannon de Ryhove:
Other news making headlines this week: Socialism leads to poor investments that deprive citizens of services, says Russian defector Yuri Maltsev.

US Carthage College professor Yuri Maltsev says socialism leads to poor investment of public funds, depriving the most vulnerable people of valuable services.

Carthage College professor Yuri Maltsev:
"Why central planning cannot work? Well, it cannot work on theoretical kind of … for theoretical reasons, that you cannot centralise information. To have central planning, you need to cenralise information. Planning by itself is not bad. I mean, you plan your time, I plan my time, everybody is planning something …
… And then, to replace all those decisions with central planning decisions, that means to deprive you of choices and then impose choices of the central planner on you."

That’s Creamer Media’s Real Economy Report. Join us again next week for more news and insight into South Africa’s real economy.