Virtual reality. Crowd-sourcing weather data. Co-pilots on the ground. Changes are coming to flight operations, maintenance and training. Executive Editor Jim Asker and Avionics and Safety Editor John Croft discuss the next-generation hardware and new techniques that will boost safety and save money.
The Office of Naval Research’s Laser Weapon System Demonstrator will be designed to protect the U.S. Navy’s DDG-51 Flight 2 destroyers from unmanned aircraft and swarming small boats.
Humans remain at the heart of the Pentagon’s evolving strategy to restore U.S. conventional deterrence, but machines will play a key and increasing role from intelligence analysis to combat operations.
Military customers focus on upgrades in the absence of clarity and funding for new programs, while the civil market races ahead in technology and numbers, but remains relatively small in value.
How can manufacturers extend the reach of intellectual property to keep cost and price margins strong, while at the same time, manage it with greater control?
Rolls and other aeroengine OEMs need two types of critical mass: scale in gas turbines to fund ongoing R&D and corporate critical mass to ride business ebbs and flows
Saab ships laminar wing Section as Airbus A340-300 moves toward 2017 flight tests; NASA fires 3-D-sprinted rocket motor; Clean Sky tests of advanced business-jet design; Sea-Tac RFP for biofuel study; U.K. pushes out R&D commitment to 2026.
Rapid advances in commercial smallsat launch technology, plus an explosion-prone energetic propellant, cause research agency to drop plans to flight-test air-launched smallsat booster.
Northrop Grumman wind-tunnel tests and tail-sitter VTOL concept for Darpa’s Tern program and hopes for a contract to build a demonstrator for seaborne flight trails
Talent and technology innovation have shaped society’s past, and they will surely shape its future. But all stakeholders must understand what spawns innovation.
The six-nation UCAV demonstrator completed an initial phase in November 2015, but will continue flight trials in 2016 and potentially beyond. In a parallel effort, Britain has just completed a third round of flight tests of its Taranis UCAV demonstrator. And a four-nation effort, led by Germany, is to begin designing an unmanned ISR platform in the spring of 2016.
UP Aerospace takes its experience building and operating low-cost suborbital sounding rockets and applies it to a dedicated launch vehicle for tiny cubesats.
Jails fear UAV smuggling; France leads UAV smallsat launcher; Darpa aims for ubiquitous lidar; Roke takes cellular to high altitude; Airbus Perlan glider moves to new test phase.
Maturing hybrid laminar flow control, active flow control, noise reduction and vibration prediction and mitigation technologies are the focuses of Europe’s AFloNext research program.
