Collaborate Disseminate
Aviation startup Boom Supersonic has unveiled a fully assembled version of its demonstrator aircraft, taking an important step forward in its efforts to build the world’s fastest airliner. The company’s XB-1 is a sleek, one-third-scale prototype of its… Continue reading Boom Supersonic reveals XB-1 plane built to break the sound barrier
Richard Browning’s Jet Suit may have a lock on cool, but now it’s looking for practical applications. Britain’s Great North Air Ambulance Service (GNAAS) has collaborated with Gravity Industries on a test flight at the Langdale Pikes in the Lake Distri… Continue reading Jet Suit flight test raises prospect of flying “Iron Man” paramedics
Richard Browning’s Jet Suit may have a lock on cool, but now it’s looking for practical applications. Britain’s Great North Air Ambulance Service (GNAAS) has collaborated with Gravity Industries on a test flight at the Langdale Pikes in the Lake Distri… Continue reading Jet Suit flight test raises prospect of flying “Iron Man” paramedics
No matter what they’re flying, good pilots have a “feel” for their aircraft. They know instantly when something is wrong, whether by hearing a strange sound or a feeling a telltale vibration. Developing this sixth sense is sometimes critical to the goal of keeping the number of takeoff equal to …read more
Continue reading Custom Strain Gauges Help Keep Paraglider Aloft
For garden variety daily computing tasks, the floppy disk has thankfully been a thing of the past for quite some time. Slow, limited in storage and easily corrupted, few yearn for the format to return, even if there is some lingering nostalgia for the disks. As it turns out, though, …read more
Continue reading Floppy Disks Still Used To Update 747 Flight Software
They say that drummers make the best helicopter pilots, because to master the controls of rotary-wing aircraft, you really need to be able to do something different with each limb and still have all the motions coordinate with each other. The control complexity is due to the mechanical complexity of …read more
Continue reading Building and Flying a Helicopter With a Virtual Swashplate
The unmanned Mars Helicopter drone may be scheduled to launch soon, but it’s still just a single aircraft that will be useless if it conks out. With that in mind, scientists are now looking into an eventual alternative – fleets of tiny, cheap “Nanocard… Continue reading Cheap, simple “Nanocardboard Flyers” could take to Martian skies
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) has announced that one of its MQ-9 Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) has completed its first ferry flight. On January 8, 2020, the unmanned prop-driven craft flew from GA-ASI’s Flight Operations Center … Continue reading First ferry flight for General Avionics’ MQ-9 Predator
A staple of today’s remote-controlled flight is the so-called FPV transmitter, allowing the pilot of a multirotor or other craft to see the world from onboard, as a pilot might do. It’s accessible enough that it can be found on toy multirotors starting at not much more than pocket money …read more
Ordinarily on a helicopter, the main (top) rotor is mechanically linked to the tail rotor, so the spinning of the former causes the latter to do likewise. An experimental new system replaces the tail rotor with four electric fans, however, potentially … Continue reading Bell’s EDAT system – are four fans better than one tail rotor?