Aerospace

Ten milestones on the road to hypersonics, from the first aero-engines to the wedge-shaped lifting body.

Airplane speeds rocketed ahead in the first 60 years of flight, but today most of the world’s fastest aircraft are in museums. How did that happen?

Since launching the Leap program, GE-Snecma joint venture CFM has added more engines to support Airbus, Boeing and Comac, partly to reduce risk as production begins.

General Electric is targeting the general aviation and business turboprop market with an engine using an integrated gas generator and propeller control.

Tough lessons from Afghanistan fuel next-generation virtual training targets.

PowerPoint and whiteboards don’t cut it for teaching the new generation to fly, crew and maintain aircraft. This is what the military and civilian aviation worlds are doing about it.

As insurgents use drones for tactical missions, counter-drone systems deploy to neutralize them.

New students will soon be able to learn with a virtual instructor in an immersive environment as part of a new private-pilot curriculum soon to be released by Redbird Flight.

Wing-morphing adaptive-control surfaces have the potential to boost airfoil performance over a wide range of angles of attack, indicated airspeeds and Mach numbers.

GE's advanced turboprop represents an all-out assault on the Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6's dominance of the business and general aviation turboprop market, and it builds on the bridgehead established with the smaller H80 engine.

Darpa program takes commercial tablets, digital communications and high-performance computing and enables air and ground forces to coordinate close air support using shared situational awareness.

Ten years in the making, Cobalt’s five-seat Co50 emerges first as an experimental aircraft with a plan for certification by 2017.

Insitu launches UAV from UAV; Airbus flies diesel helo; 3-D printing a fast-jet UAV; NASA explores Prandtl’s wing; XTI takes crowdfunding step.

Google X executive sets 2017 as the target date to begin commercial deliveries by unmanned aircraft, but will the technology and the airspace be ready by then?

Works in the Atlantic Council’s War Stories From the Future depict “how emerging antagonists, disruptive technologies, and novel warfighting concepts may animate tomorrow’s conflicts.”

Mathematically proving software that does only what it is supposed to provides a route to eliminating cybervulnerabilities in airborne systems, Darpa’s Hacms program demonstrates.

Pipistrel pioneers cloud-based CFD; navigation by pulsar; NASA’s Ptera UAV is a flying lab; aviation fuel from gas tested; Aeryon gets equity boost for small UAVs.

China boasts a first in flying a regeneratively cooled, kerosene-fueled scramjet engine, but this feat seemingly repeats what the U.S. achieved in 2010-13 with the hypersonic X-51A.

Lockheed Martin/Kaman unmanned K-Max shows off its ability to U.S. wildland firefighters by day and night, through smoke and other hazards.

A student at MIT’s CSAIL, has developed an obstacle detection system that allows UAS to build a map of its surroundings in real-time.

JAXA quiets sonic boom; Italy studies hybrid engine; ScanEagle UAV inspects railway; Darpa’s DyNamo boosts networks; Clean Sky 2 gains partners.

Saritsu project develops a wing that can tell you how it feels and what it wants you to do about it.

A 1926 letter from the magazine's founder describes the ‘aeronautical celebrities’ who played an important part in the founding of Aviation Week in 1916.

BAE Systems is partnering with air-breathing rocket developer Reaction Engines as part of an agreement under which BAE will acquire a 20% share of the U.K.-based company for £20.6 million.

A capsule that would eject carrying passengers is seen as way to increase the safety of hypersonic airliners with complex propulsion systems.