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Onera is developing a propeller designed to reduce the noise from light aircraft without sacrificing performance or safety. Flight tests are planned for February 2008.

April 27, 2005: The A380 Super jumbo makes first flight. December 19, 2000: the production stage began for the Airbus A380, the world's largest passenger plane, which will also have the lowest per-passenger and per-kilometer operating costs for high load capacity aircrafts.

This picture was taken in Onera's R5Ch blow down windtunnel at Meudon. The hypersonic flow, coming from the left side, is Mach 10 (~1.5 km/s).

Faced with ever stricter noise regulations around the airports, the aeronautics industry has become increasingly concerned with aircrafts'aeroacoustics over the last few years. Great progress has been achieved in noise reduction of the engines over the past decades, so the aerodynamic noise is not negligible anymore, particularly in landing configuration.

In aeronautics, the most widespread propulsion system is the jet engine. The weight of the motor, its fuel consumption and the thrust available for the aircraft are partly determined by the compressor's ability to give the fluid the maximum of energy per compression stage.

During the cruise phase of flight, the flow around the fuselage and wings is transonic, i.e. there are areas where the Mach number is higher than 1 and others where it is lower.

Which instrument is able to measure data for climatology, analyze the forces exercised on an orbiting satellite and test Einstein’s theories of relativity? It is called an accelerometer, a tool developed more than twenty years ago, and which today is capable of an incredible degree of accuracy.

Drones are not just for the exclusive use of the military and they can also be of great use for civil surveillance, for example in the battle against forest fires. Onera is taking part in a research program in collaboration with industrial partners to define what these flying devices could look like.

According to information provided by public databases in the United States, there are over 8,000 man-made objects in orbit around the Earth (excluding American military satellites, which is very confidential information). A number of these spacecraft fly over France every day, providing a potential danger to national security. It is therefore vital that the position of these orbiting objects should be known. ONERA's teams have designed and developed the GRAVES space surveillance system to establish and maintain a database of satellites flying over France at altitudes of less than 1,000 kilometers.