On March 15, the US Navy launched a torpedo-shaped robot into the Persian Gulf from the back of a helicopter. The robot was a Slocum glider, an uncrewed sensing tool that can collect data on ocean conditions below the surface. Dropping it from a helicopter was a proof of concept, a test towards expanding the array of vehicles that can put the robots into the water. As the US Navy seeks to know more about the waterways it patrols, distributing data collection tools can provide a more complete image of the ocean without straining the existing pool of sailors.

The US Navy helicopter, part of Helicopter Mine Countermeasures Squadron (HM) 15, delivered the glider by flying low and slow over the sea surface. The glider, held between railings facing seaward, slid forward, diving but not tumbling into the water. The setup enabled smooth entry into the water, keeping the robot from falling aft over teakettle.

“We are excited to be a part of another series of firsts! In this instance, the first launch from a helicopter and the first-ever successful glider deployment from an aircraft,” Thomas Altshuler, a senior VP at Teledyne, said in a release. While the test took place in March, it was only recently announced by both the Navy and Teledyne, makers of the Slocum glider. “Teledyne Marine​ takes pride in our continued innovation and support of the U.S. Navy as it expands the operational envelope of underwater gliders.”

This is what that entry looked like:

A second video, which appears to be recorded by the phone camera of one of the sailors standing next to the rail, offers a different angle on the descent. The mechanics of the rail mount are clearer, from the horseshoe-shaped brace holding the glider in place, to the mechanism of release. When the glider hits water, it makes a splash, big at the moment then imperceptible in the wake of the rotor wash on the ocean surface.

For this operation, Teledyne says the glider was outfitted with “Littoral Battlespace Sensing – Glider (LBS-G) mine countermeasures (MCM) sensors.” In plain language, that means sensors designed to work near the shore, and to collect information about the conditions of the sea where the Navy is operating. This data is used by both the Navy for informing day-to-day operation and by the Naval Oceanographic Office, for understanding ocean conditions and informing both present and future operations.

[Related: What it’s like to rescue someone at sea from a Coast Guard helicopter]

In addition to HM 15, the test was coordinated with the aforementioned Naval Oceanographic Office, which regularly uses glider robots to collect and share oceanographic data. The Slocum glider is electrically powered, with range and endurance dependent upon battery type. At a minimum, that means the glider can travel 217 miles over 15 days, powerlessly gliding at an average speed of a little over 1 mph. (Optional thruster power doubles the speed to 2 mph.) With the most extensive power, Teledyne boasts that the gliders can range over 8,000 miles under water, stay in operation for 18 months, and work from shallows of 13 feet to depths of 3,280 feet.

“Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command directs and oversees more than 2,500 globally-distributed military and civilian personnel who collect, process, and exploit environmental information to assist Fleet and Joint Commanders in all warfare areas to make better decisions faster than the adversary,” notes the Navy description of the test.

Communicating that data from an underwater robot to the rest of the Navy is done through radio signals, satellite uplink, and acoustic communication, among other methods. These methods allow the glider to transmit data and receive commands from remote human operators. 

“The invention of gliders addressed a long-standing problem in physical oceanography: how do you measure changes in the ocean over long periods of time?” reads an Office of Navy Research history of the program. The Slocum gliders themselves date back to a concept floated in 1989, where speculative fiction imagined hundreds of autonomous floats surveying the ocean by 2021. The prototype glider was first developed in 1991, had sea trials in 1998, and today according to that report,the Naval Oceanographic Office alone operates more than 150 gliders.

This information is useful generally, as it builds a comprehensive picture of the vast seas on which fleets operate. It is also specifically useful, as listening for acoustics underwater can help detect other ships and submarines. Undersea mines, hidden from the surface, can be found through sensing the sea, and revealing their location protects Navy ships, sailors, and commercial ocean traffic, too.

Releasing the gliders from helicopters expands how and where these exploratory machines can start operations, hastening deployment for the undersea watchers. When oceans are battlefields, knowing the condition of the waters first can make all the difference.

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In April, the Air Force took its Angry Kitten out for a spin in the skies above Nevada. The feline-monikered system is a tool of electronic warfare, developed originally to simulate enemy systems in testing and training. Now, the Air Force is exploring using the system as an offensive tool, and as a weapon it can bring to future fights. This testing included putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone.

Electronic warfare is an increasingly important part of how modern militaries fight. The systems generally operate on the electromagnetic spectrum outside the range of visible light, making their actions perceived primarily by their resulting negative effects on an adversary, like lost signals or incorrect sensor information. What makes Angry Kitten especially valuable as a training tool, and as a future weapon, is that it uses a software-defined radio to adjust frequencies, perceiving and then mimicking other aircraft, and overall making a fussy mess of their signals.

“Electronic Attack on the MQ-9 is a compelling capability,” said Michael Chmielewski, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron commander, in a release. “15 hours of persistent noise integrated with a large force package will affect an adversary, require them to take some form of scalable action to honor it, and gets at the heart of strategic deterrence.”

In other words, putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone means that the jamming system can be airborne for a long time, as Reapers are long-endurance drones. Any hostile air force looking to get around the jamming will need to attack the Reaper, which as an uncrewed plane is more expendable than a crewed fighter. Or, it means they will need to route around the jammed area, letting the Air Force dictate the terms of where and how a fight takes place.

Reapers were developed for and widely used during the long counter-insurgency wars waged by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars saw the drones’ long endurance, slow speed, and ability to loiter over an area as valuable assets, especially since the drones rarely had to contend with any anti-air missiles. They were operating in, to use Pentagon parlance, “uncontested” skies. As the Pentagon looks to the future, one in which it may be called upon to use existing equipment in a war against nations with fighter jets and sophisticated anti-air systems, it’d be easy to see Reapers sidelined as too slow, vulnerable, or irrelevant for the task.

Putting an Angry Kitten on a Reaper is a way to make the drone relevant again for other kinds of war.

[Related: The Air Force wants to start using its ‘Angry Kitten’ system in combat]

“The goal is to expand the mission sets the MQ-9 can accomplish,” said Aaron Aguilar, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron assistant director of operations, in the same release. “The proliferation and persistence of MQ-9s in theater allows us to fill traditional platform capability gaps that may be present. Our goal is to augment assets that already fill this role so they can focus and prioritize efforts in areas they are best suited for.”

Putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper turns a counter-insurgency hunter-killer into a conventional-war surveillance platform and jammer. It emphasizes what the tool on hand can already do well, while giving it a different set of ways to interact with a different expected array of foes. 

An earlier exercise this spring saw the Air National Guard test landing and launching a Reaper from a highway in Wyoming, expanding how and where it can operate. The ability to quickly deploy, refuel, rearm, and relaunch Reapers, from found runways as well as established bases, can expand how the drones are used.

In addition to testing the Angry Kitten with Reapers, the Air Force tested the Angry Kitten in Alaska on F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Thunderbolts, both older planes originally designed for warfare against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In the decades since, Fighting Falcons—known more colloquially as vipers—have expanded to become a widely used versatile fighter in the arsenal of the US and a range of nations. Meanwhile, the Air Force has long worked to retire the A-10s, arguing that they lack protection against modern weapons. That process began in earnest this spring, with the oldest models selected for the boneyard.

In the meantime, putting the Angry Kitten on drones and planes still in service means expanding not just what those planes can do, but potentially how effective they can be against sophisticated weapons. Targeting systems, from those used by planes to find targets to those used by missiles to track them, can be disrupted or fooled by malicious signals. An old plane may not be able to survive a hit from a modern missile, but jamming a missile so that misses its mark is better protection than any armor.

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In the desert plain south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and just north of the Isleta Pueblo reservation, the Air Force defeated a swarm of drones with THOR, a powerful microwave weapon. THOR, or the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, is designed to defend against drone swarms, frying electronics at scale in a way that could protect against many flying robots at once.

THOR has been in the works for years, with a successful demonstration in February 2021 at Kirtland Air Force Base, south of Albuquerque. From 2021 to 2022, THOR was also tested overseas. 

This latest demonstration, which took place on April 5, saw the microwave face off against a swarm of multiple flying uncrewed aerial vehicles. The event took place at the Chestnut Range, short for “Conventional High Explosives & Simulation Test,” which has long been used by the Air Force Research Lab for testing.

“The THOR team flew numerous drones at the THOR system to simulate a real-world swarm attack,” said Adrian Lucero, THOR program manager at AFRL’s Directed Energy Directorate, in a release earlier this month. “THOR has never been tested against these types of drones before, but this did not stop the system from dropping the targets out of the sky with its non-kinetic, speed-of-light High-Power Microwave, or HPM pulses,” he said.

Crucial to THOR’s concept and operation is that the weapon disables and defeats drones without employing explosive or concussive power, the kind derived from rockets, missiles, bombs, and bullets. The military lumps these technologies together as “kinetics,” and they make up the bread and butter of how the military uses force. Against drones, which can cost mere hundreds or even thousands of dollars per vehicle, missiles represent an expensive form of ammunition. While the bullets used in existing counter-rocket weapons are much cheaper than missiles, they still create the problem of dangerous debris everywhere they don’t hit. Using microwaves means that only the damaged drone itself becomes a falling danger, without an added risk from the tools used to shoot it down.

“THOR was extremely efficient with a near continuous firing of the system during the swarm engagement,” Capt. Tylar Hanson, THOR deputy program manager, said in a release. “It is an early demonstrator, and we are confident we can take this same technology and make it more effective to protect our personnel around the world.”

The THOR system fits into a broader package of directed energy countermeasures being used to take on small, cheap, and effective drones. Another directed energy weapon explored for this purpose is lasers, which can burn through a drone’s hull and circuitry, but that approach takes time to hold focus on and melt a target.

“The system uses high power microwaves to cause a counter electronic effect. A target is identified, the silent weapon discharges in a nanosecond and the impact is instantaneous,” reads an Air Force fact sheet about the weapon. In a video from AFRL, THOR is described as a “low cost per shot, speed of light solution,” which uses “a focused beam of energy to defeat drones at a large target area.”

An April 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office is much more straightforward: A High Power Microwave uses “energy to affect electronics by overwhelming critical components intended to carry electrical currents such as circuit boards, power systems, or sensors. HPM systems engage targets over an area within its wider beam and can penetrate solid objects.”

Against commercial or cheaply produced drones, the kind most likely to see use on the battlefield in great numbers today, microwaves may prove to be especially effective. While THOR is still a ways from development into a fieldable weapon, the use of low-cost drones on the battlefield has expanded tremendously since the system started development. A report from RUSI, a British think tank, found that in its fight against Russia’s invasion, “Ukrainian UAV losses remain at approximately 10,000 per month.”

While that illustrates the limits of existing drone models, it also highlights the scale of drones seeing use in regular warfare. As drone technology improves, and militaries move from adapting commercial drones to dedicated military models made close to commercial cost and scale, countering those drones en masse will likely be a greater priority for militaries. In that, weapons like THOR offer an alternative to existing countermeasures, one that promises greater effects at scale.

Watch a video about THOR, which also garnered a Best of What’s New award from PopSci in 2021, from the Air Force Research Laboratory, below:

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Wing, Google parent company Alphabet’s drone-delivery subsidiary, pulled off a fun demonstration delivery earlier this month: one of its drones delivered beer and peanuts to Coors Field, the Colorado Rockies’ stadium in the middle of Denver. While this novel first comes with a heavy dose of caveats, it still gives a nice glimpse of how far some drone delivery operations have come over the past few years. 

What are the caveats? According to Wing, the drone delivered a small package of beer (“Coors of course”) and peanuts to the outfield area of Coors Field during the opening party for the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s (AIVSI) annual autonomous systems conference. There were apparently 1,000 people in the stands, though as you can see in the video, it was no game day crowd. Crucially, Wing wasn’t using its drones to deliver beers and peanuts on demand—this was purely a demonstration flight to show the drone operating in a downtown urban environment. 

“Our drones will never match the experience of flagging down a vendor and having them toss peanuts to you from 20 seats away. Nor do we think delivering during game day is a particularly compelling use-case for our technology,” writes Jonathan Bass, Wing’s head of marketing and communications in the blog post announcing the feat. “We’re more focused on supplementing existing methods of ground-based delivery to move small packages more efficiently across miles, not feet.”

And Coors Field was a suitable environment to show just how capable its drones have become. Over the past few years, the former moonshot has progressed from delivering to rural farms and lightly populated suburbs to flying packages around denser suburbs and large metro areas like Dallas-Forth Worth in Texas. As Bass explains it, despite Wing having done 1,000 deliveries on some days in one of its Australian bases of operations, the company is still regularly asked if drone delivery could work in “dense, urban environments”.

“We chose Coors Field because it’s a particularly challenging environment,” writes Bass. “Coors Field sits in the middle of Denver, Colorado—one of the fastest growing cities in America. Any professional sports stadium—with stadium seating, jumbotrons, and the like—makes for a fun challenge.”

The demonstration is all part of Wing’s plans to massively expand where it operates over the next while. Earlier this year, it announced the Wing Delivery Network. Drones in this program would work more like ride-sharing vehicles that picked up and dropped off packages as needed instead of operating from a single store or base. To make this possible, Wing unveiled a device called the AutoLoader. It sits in a parking spot outside a store and enables to staff to leave a package for a drone to autonomously collect. 

While things seem to be taking off for Wing, the scene is a bit more turbulent across the drone delivery industry. In particular, Amazon’s Prime Air is really struggling to launch. Despite first being unveiled almost a decade ago, Prime Air has now completed a total of “100 deliveries in two small US markets,” according to a report earlier this month by CNBC. The company apparently intended to reach 10,000 deliveries this year, but has had to revise those projections. It probably doesn’t help that a significant number of workers were laid off earlier this year.

Other companies are having more success. Zipline, best known for delivering medical supplies by parachute in rural Africa from catapult-launched fixed-wing drones, recently showcased a new platform that would allow it to deliver more typical packages—like a Sweetgreen salad—by lowering them on a tether from a hover-capable drone. It, along with DroneUp and Flytrex, have partnered with Walmart and collectively completed more than 6,000 deliveries last year. The big question consumers have: Are delivery drones going to be everywhere in the next few years? Probably not, but they are likely to be more present. 

Watch the drone in action below:

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On May 18, the United States Department of the Air Force announced that it is looking to award a contract for the Next Generation Air Dominance Platform in 2024. The name, shortened to NGAD, is a jumble of Pentagon concepts, obscuring what is actually sought: a novel fighter jet representing the newest era of military aircraft—a sixth-generation fighter. 

“The NGAD Platform is a vital element of the Air Dominance family of systems which represents a generational leap in technology over the F-22, which it will replace,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in a release. “NGAD will include attributes such as enhanced lethality and the ability to survive, persist, interoperate, and adapt in the air domain, all within highly contested operational environments. No one does this better than the U.S. Air Force, but we will lose that edge if we don’t move forward now.”

The solicitation to industry for the NGAD is classified, making the details of what, exactly, the Air Force wants hard to know at this time. But jet fighters have, for decades, been classified into generations. So what makes a fighter generation, and what makes a sixth-generation fighter?

“In calling NGAD a sixth-generation fighter, that’s an important signal that it’s moving into a new level of capability, and it has to, because the threats are really evolving,” says Caitlin Lee, senior fellow at Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Aircraft generations, explained

Fighter planes date to the first World War as a distinct concept, and ever since that time observers have grouped fighters into generations, or models built at similar times around similar technologies. Fighter evolution in war happened rapidly, as the first exchanges of pistol-fire between the pilots of scout planes gave way to aircraft built for combat, with dedicated machine guns firing first around and then even through propellers. As hostile planes got better, new aircraft were built to let pilots win fights. Once enough of these changes were accumulated in new models of planes, those aircraft could be grouped by sets of features into different generations.

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

This is true for the earliest fixed-wing and biplane fighters, up through the piston-powered patrollers of World War II and into the jet era. In October 1954, Popular Science showed off four fighter generations flying in formation for ceremonies at an Air Force gunnery competition. This snapshot of generations captured two propeller-driven planes: the SPAD biplane from World War I and the F-51 fighter from World War II. They are joined by two distinct jet fighters: the F-86 Sabre, a type which saw action in the Korean War, and F-100 Super Sabre, a model that would go on to see action in the Vietnam War.

The attributes that go into an aircraft generation

What separates fighter generations, broadly, is their speed, weapons, sensors, and other new features as they become part of the overall composition of a plane. Sticking to jets, fighters with that method of propulsion have gone from straight-wing planes flying at top speeds below the sound barrier, with guns, unguided rockets, and bombs, all the way to sensor-rich stealth jets capable of carrying a range of anti-air and anti-ground missiles.

There is no one agreed-to definition of exactly what fighter generations are, though jet fighters are generally grouped separately from propeller predecessors. Historian Richard Hallion expressed a version, published in the Airpower Journal’s Winter 1990 issue, that outlines six generations as defined primarily by speed and maneuverability. Hallion’s definitions precede not just the Next Generation Air Dominance plane, but also the F-35 and F-22, which have become widely accepted as definitive fifth-generation fighters.

First generation

• Feature: The propulsion comes from jet engines. Weapons, wing shapes, and sensors are similar to preceding and contemporary propeller-driven plane designs.
• Models: Germany’s Me 262, which saw action in World War II. The P-80 Shooting Star, flown by the United States from 1945 to 1959.

Second generation

• Features: The wings are swept backwards, planes are now equipped with onboard radar, and they are armed with missiles.
• Models: The F-86 Sabre, flown by the US in Korea, and the MiG-15, flown by China and North Korea in the Korean War.

Third generation

• Features: The jets can now achieve supersonic speed for short bursts and are equipped with missiles that could hit targets beyond line of sight.
• Models: The MiG-21, designed by the USSR and still in service today, and the F-4 Phantom, developed for the US Navy and still in service with a few countries today.

Fourth generation

• Features: These jets have reduced radar signatures, better radars, and even more advanced missiles.
• Models: France’s Mirage 2000, a delta-wing fighter still in service today, and the F/A-18, used by the US Navy and Marine Corps. Plus, the US Air Force’s F-15 and F-16.

Fifth generation

• Features: Jets are built for stealth, use internal weapons bays, fly with high maneuverability, have better sensors, and have the ability to sustain cruise at supersonic speeds.
• Models: The F-22 and F-35 family developed by the US, and the J-20 made by China and the Su-57 developed by Russia.

Tirpak defined a fifth-generation fighter as having “All-aspect stealth with internal weapons, extreme agility, full-sensor fusion, integrated avionics, some or full supercruise,” and pointed to the F-22 and F-35 as examples. 

To unpack the jargon above, “stealth” is a set of technologies, from the coating of the plane to the shape it takes, that make it hard to detect, especially with radar. Sensor fusion combines information from a plane’s sensors, like targeting cameras and radar, as well as other avionics, to create a fuller picture of the environment around the aircraft. “Supercruise” is flight at above supersonic speed, for sustained time, without having to dump extra fuel into the engines, a previous way of achieving supersonic bursts.

[Related: How fast is supersonic flight? Fast enough to bring the booms.]

All of these changes are responses to the new threat environment encountered by previous fighters. Stealth is one way for plane design to mitigate the risk from advanced anti-air missiles. Enhanced sensors are a way to allow fighters to see further and better than rival aircraft, and rival air-defense radars. Fighter design is about both building with the threats of the day, while anticipating the threats of the future, and ensuring the plane is still capable of surviving them.

One way to think of this is that the NGAD will be one among several kinds of aircraft the Air Force intends to use in the future, the way it might use wings of fighters today. This could include fighting alongside the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a combat drone the Air Force plans as part of its Next Generation operations model.

“What’s next-generation about CCA is that they will have more autonomy than the current UAVs in the Air Force inventory like Reaper. And the question is how much more autonomy will they actually have,” says Lee. “And I think what the Air Force is interested in is starting with having that manned fighter aircraft, whether it’s NGAD or something else, be able to provide inputs and certainly oversee the operations of the CCA.”

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Pilots can experience forces while flying that punish their bodies, and they can also find themselves in disorienting situations. A military pilot in a fighter jet will endure G-forces as they maneuver, resulting in a crushing sensation that causes the blood to drain downwards in their bodies, away from the brain. And someone at the controls of a plane or helicopter, even in more routine flights, can have their senses become discombobulated. One of the causes of the crash that killed Kobe Bryant in 2020 was “spatial disorientation” on the pilot’s part, according to the NTSB. 

Then there’s being launched in a rocket up into space. One astronaut recalled to PopSci that when flying in the space shuttle, the engines shut down, as planned, 8.5 minutes after launch. “It felt like the shuttle stopped, and I went straight through it,” he said. “I got a tremendous tumbling sensation.” Another astronaut noted in a recent NASA press release that he felt like he “was on a merry-go-round as my body hunted for what was up, down, left, and right,” in the shuttle as well.

And of course, anyone down on Earth who has ever experienced vertigo, a sensation of spinning, or nausea, knows that those are miserable, even frightening sensations. 

To better understand all the uncanny effects that being up in the air or in space has on humans, NASA is going to employ a Navy machine called the Kraken, which is also fittingly called the Disorientation Research Device—a supersized contraption that cost $19 million and weighs 245,000 pounds. Pity the poor person who climbs into the Kraken, who could experience three Gs of force and be spun around every which way. NASA notes that the machine, which is located in Ohio, “can spin occupants like laundry churning in a washing machine.” It can hold two people within its tumbling chamber. As tortuous as it sounds, the machine provides a way to study spatial disorientation—a phenomenon that can be deadly or challenging in the air or in space—safely down on dry land. 

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

The NASA plan calls for two dozen members of the military to spend an hour in the Kraken, which will be using “a spaceflight setting” for this study. After doing so, half of them, the space agency says, “will perform prescribed head turns and tilts while wearing video goggles that track their head and eye movements.” The other half will not. All of them will carry out certain exercises afterwards, like balancing on foam. Perhaps, NASA thinks, the head movements can help. “Tests with the Kraken will allow us to rigorously determine what head movements, if any, help astronauts to quickly recover their sense of balance,” Michael Schubert, an expert on vestibular disorders at Johns Hopkins University and the lead researcher on this new study, said in the NASA release on the topic.

The study will also involve civilians who have pre-existing balance challenges (due to having had tumors surgically removed), who thankfully won’t have to endure the Kraken. They will also perform the head movements and carry out the same balance exercises. The goal of all this research is to discover if these head movement techniques work, so that “astronauts could adopt specific protocols to help them quickly adapt to gravitational changes during spaceflight,” NASA says. 

Additionally, the same techniques could help regular people who aren’t going to be launched into space but do struggle with balance or dizziness down on Earth. Watch a video about the Kraken, below. 

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On April 30, an MQ-9 Reaper drone landed on Highway 287, north of Rawlins, Wyoming. The landing was planned; it was a part of Exercise Agile Chariot, which drew a range of aircraft and saw ground support provided by the Kentucky Air National Guard. While US aircraft have landed on highways before, this was the first time such a landing had been undertaken by a Reaper, and it demonstrates the continued viability of adapting roads into runways as the need arises. 

In a video showing the landing released by the Air Force, the Reaper’s slow approach is visible against the snow-streaked rolling hills and pale-blue sky of Wyoming in spring. The landing zone is inconspicuous, a stretch of highway that could be anywhere, except for the assembled crowds and vehicles marking this particular stretch of road as an impromptu staging ground for air operations. 

“The MQ-9 can now operate around the world via satellite launch and recovery without traditional launch and recovery landing sites and maintenance packages,” said Lt. Col. Brian Flanigan, 2nd Special Operations Squadron director of operations, in a release. “Agile Chariot showed once again the leash is off the MQ-9 as the mission transitions to global strategic competition.”

When Flanigan describes the Reaper as transitioning to “global strategic competition,” that’s alluding to the comparatively narrower role Reapers had over the last 15 years, in which they were a tool used almost exclusively for the counter-insurgency warfare engaged in by the United States over Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as elsewhere, like Somalia and Yemen. Reapers’ advantages shine in counter-insurgency: The drones can fly high over long periods of time, watch in precise detail and detect small movements below, and drone pilots can pick targets as the opportunity arises.

But Reapers have hard limits that make their future uncertain in wars against militaries with substantial anti-air weapons, to say nothing of flying against fighter jets. Reapers are slow, propeller-driven planes, built for endurance not speed, and could be picked out of the sky or, worse, destroyed on a runway by a skilled enemy with dedicated anti-plane weaponry.

In March, a Reaper flying over the Black Sea was sprayed by fuel released from a Russian jet, an incident that led it to crash. While Wyoming’s Highway 287 is dangerous for cars, for planes it has the virtue of being entirely in friendly air space. 

Putting a Reaper into action in a war against a larger military, which in Pentagon terms often means against Russia or China, means finding a way to make the Reaper useful despite those threats. Such a mission would have to take advantage of the Reaper’s long endurance flight time, surveillance tools, and precision strike abilities, without leaving it overly vulnerable to attack. Operating on highways as runways is one way to overcome that limit, letting the drone fly from whenever there is road. 

“An adversary that may be able to deny use of a military base or an airfield, is going to have a nearly impossible time trying to defend every single linear mile of roads. It’s just too much territory for them to cover and that gives us access in places and areas that they can’t possibly defend,” Lt. Col. Dave Meyer, Deputy Mission Commander for Exercise Agile Chariot, said in a release.

Alongside the Reaper, the exercise showcased MC-130Js, A-10 Warthogs, and MH-6M Little Bird helicopters. With soldiers first establishing landing zones along the highway, the exercise then demonstrated landing the C-130 cargo aircraft to use as a refueling and resupply point for the A-10s, which also operated from the highway. Having the ability to not just land on an existing road, but bring more fuel and spare ammunition to launch new missions from the same road, makes it hard for an adversary to permanently ground planes, as resupply is also air-mobile and can use the same improvised runways.

Part of the exercise took place on Highway 789, which forks off 287 between Lander and Riverton, as the setting for trial search and rescue missions. “On the second day of operations, they repeated the procedure of preparing a landing zone for an MC-130. Once the aircraft landed, the team boarded MH-6 Little Birds that had been offloaded from the cargo plane by Soldiers from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The special tactics troops then performed combat search-and-rescue missions to find simulated injured pilots and extract them from the landing zone on Highway 789,” described the Kentucky Air National Guard, in a statement.

With simulated casualties on cleared roads, the Air Force rehearsed for the tragedy of future war. As volunteers outfitted in prosthetic injuries were transported back to the care and safety of landed transports, the highways in Wyoming were home to the full spectrum of simulated war from runways. Watch a video of the landing, below.

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Early in the morning of May 3, local Moscow time, a pair of explosions occurred above the Kremlin. Videos of the incident appeared to show two small drones detonating—ultramodern tech lit up against the venerable citadel. The incident was exclusively the domain of Russian social media for half a day, before Russian President Vladimir Putin declared it a failed assassination attempt.

What actually happened in the night sky above the Russian capital? It is a task being pieced together in public and in secret. Open-source analysts, examining the information available in the public, have constructed a picture of the event and video release, forming a good starting point.

Writing at Radio Liberty, a US-government-funded Russian-language outlet, reporters Sergei Dobrynin and Mark Krutov point out that a video showing smoke above the Kremlin was published around 3:30 am local time on a Moscow Telegram channel. Twelve hours later, Putin released a statement on the attack, and then, write Dobrynin and Krutov, “several other videos of the night attack appeared, according to which Radio Liberty established that two drones actually exploded in the area of ​​​​the dome of the Senate Palace with an interval of about 16 minutes, arriving from opposite directions. The first caused a small fire on the roof of the building, the second exploded in the air.”

That the drones exploded outside a symbolic target, without reaching a practical one, could be by design, or it could owe to the nature of Kremlin air defense, which may have shot the drones down at the last moment before they became more threatening. 

Other investigations into the origin, nature, and means of the drone incident are likely being carried out behind the closed doors and covert channels of intelligence services. Without being privy to those conversations, and aware that information released by governments is only a selective portion of what is collected, it’s possible to instead answer a different set of questions: could drones do this? And why would someone use a drone for an attack like this?

To answer both, it is important to understand gimmick drones.

What’s a gimmick drone?

Drones, especially the models able to carry a small payload and fly long enough to travel a practical distance, can be useful tools for a variety of real functions. Those can include real-estate photography, crop surveying, creating videos, and even carrying small explosives in war. But drones can also carry less-useful payloads, and be used as a way to advertise something other than the drone itself, like coffee delivery, beer vending, or returning shirts from a dry cleaner. For a certain part of the 2010s, attaching a product to a drone video was a good way to get the media to write about it. 

What stands out about gimmick drones is not that they were doing something only a drone could do, but instead that the people behind the stunt were using a drone as a publicity technique for something else. In 2018, a commercial drone was allegedly used in an assassination attempt against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, in which drones flew at Maduro and then exploded in the sky, away from people and without reports of injury. 

As I noted at the time about gimmick drones, “In every case, the drone is the entry point to a sales pitch about something else, a prelude to an ad for sunblock or holiday specials at a casual restaurant. The drone was always part of the theater, a robotic pitchman, an unmanned MC. What mattered was the spectacle, the hook, to get people to listen to whatever was said afterwards.”

Drones are a hard weapon to use for precision assassination. Compared to firearms, poisoning, explosives in cars or buildings, or a host of other attacks, drones represent a clumsy and difficult method. Wind can blow the drones off course, they can be intercepted before they get close, and the flight time of a commercial drone laden with explosives is in minutes, not hours.

What a drone can do, though, is explode in a high-profile manner.

Why fly explosive-laden drones at the  Kremlin?

Without knowing the exact type of drone or the motives of the drone operator (or operators), it is hard to say exactly why one was flown at and blown up above one of Russia’s most iconic edifices of state power. Russia’s government initially blamed Ukraine, before moving on to attribute the attack to the United States. The United States denied involvement in the attack, and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said to take any Russian claims with “a very large shaker of salt.”

Asked about the news, Ukraine’s President Zelensky said the country fights Russia on its own territory, not through direct attacks on Putin or Moscow. The war has seen successful attacks on Putin-aligned figures and war proponents in Russia, as well as the family of Putin allies, though attribution for these attacks remains at least somewhat contested, with the United States attributing at least one of them to Ukrainian efforts.

Some war commentators in the US have floated the possibility that the attack was staged by Russia against Russia, as a way to rally support for the government’s invasion. However, that would demonstrate that Russian air defenses and security services are inept enough to miss two explosive-laden drones flying over the capital and would be an unusual way to argue that the country is powerful and strong. 

Ultimately, the drone attackers may have not conducted this operation to achieve any direct kill or material victory, but as a proof of concept, showing that such attacks are possible. It would also show that claims of inviolability of Russian airspace are, at least for small enough flying machines and covert enough operatives, a myth. 

In that sense, the May 3 drone incident has a lot in common with the May 1987 flight of Mathias Rust, an amateur pilot in Germany who safely flew a private plane into Moscow and landed it in Red Square, right near the Kremlin. Rust’s flight ended without bloodshed or explosions, and took place in a peacetime environment, but it demonstrated the hollowness of the fortress state whose skies he flew through.

The post Stunt or sinister: The Kremlin drone incident, unpacked appeared first on Popular Science.

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LIFE IS RARELY WORRY-FREE, but unprecedented angst has become a constant. Beyond the regular challenges of everyday existence—chaotic households, traffic jams, overbearing bosses—the looming presence of a deadly virus over the past three years has made even mundane decisions feel fraught.

Any number of things can spark stress, but they all share a common origin. “It’s when the demands on somebody outstrip the resources they have,” says Lynn Bufka, a senior director at the American Psychological Association (APA). The results of that are rarely good. Face a difficult situation, unrealistic expectation, or sudden conflict without the right skills or tools, and you risk melting down or freezing up. That danger increases when you are pressed for time or cannot influence a challenging variable. “The feeling of not having control is anxiety-provoking,” Bufka says. “It’s pretty overwhelming.”

Most people had no experience dealing with the kind of prolonged pressure that came along with the pandemic. But for those with some of the world’s most intense occupations, it’s all just part of the job. Losing their cool is simply not an option. The strategies they employ to keep calm while facing a classroom, saving a life, or defusing a bomb just might help the rest of us deal with whatever’s pushing us to the edge of reason.

The fishing boat captain

THE STRESSORS: In 2021, the people bringing in Dungeness crab, black cod, and other bounties of the earth—the workers in America’s fishing and hunting industries—had the second deadliest job in the United States, coming in just behind loggers, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. “It is extremely hazardous,” says Richard Ogg, captain of the troller Karen Jeanne, which is based in Bodega Bay, California. The gale-force dangers he and his crew face include rough seas, miserable weather, and sleep deprivation. Pulling in a catch big enough to earn the money they need weighs heavily on his mind too. Above all else, though, Ogg feels a sense of guardianship over his team, and finds the biggest challenge can be coping with conflicts that arise among a crew corralled on a 54.5-foot boat miles from shore. That’s no easy feat when dealing with workers who don’t necessarily respect the hazards, the gear, or each other.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Effective communication is essential to keeping cool. Ogg tends to be egalitarian, even if he as the captain has the final say and will pull rank if he must. He often discusses problems or disagreements with everyone aboard, seeks their perspectives, and considers their viewpoints to zero in on the best solution. He finds that this approach, and accepting that things sometimes go sideways despite his best efforts, helps everyone stay on an even keel whenever things get choppy.

The air traffic controller

THE STRESSORS: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport hosted nearly 2,000 flights on average every day in 2022, making it the busiest hub in the world last year. “Almost every bit of airspace that we have, there’s going to be planes there,” says air traffic controller Nichole Surunis. Shepherding those thousands of passengers in and out safely requires tremendous concentration and the ability to process information quickly. Variables like bad weather or an unexpected move by a pilot can make an already challenging task even more dynamic at a second’s notice. There’s no time to dwell on what’s at stake. “You have to focus on all these pilots you’re talking to, with all these people on these planes,” Surunis says. In total, there are about 2.9 million travelers who fly into or out of the United States on a given day—and costly delays add to the strain of those minding the traffic. It’s only after the craft are safe that a controller might notice their racing heart and realize just how tense they were.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Training and experience are key to handling rapidly shifting situations, and Surunis, like all controllers, has lots of both. “You have your Plan A—but you also must have a Plan B and Plan C,” she says. The occupation requires practicing self-care too. Stepping away from her workstation is essential, and mandated: Controllers typically aren’t allowed to go more than two hours without a break. Surunis doesn’t hesitate to tap a union-run support service after an especially grueling day, and she makes a point of unwinding by making time for hobbies like baking. That helps ensure she’s rested and ready to focus on keeping the sky safe.

The trauma surgeon

THE STRESSORS: Doctors who specialize in emergency care rarely have two days that are alike. A routine case like a ruptured appendix can end up on their table as readily as massive trauma. “They can be injured all over their body,” says Daniel Hagler, a critical care surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens Hospital in New York. “What you do within seconds or minutes of them arriving can be the difference between life and death.” The tension ramps up if he must handle many patients simultaneously. Over time, the strain takes a toll: A study published in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that nearly one-quarter of doctors in Hagler’s shoes experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Keeping it together requires the ability to triage, focus on what’s important, and put lesser priorities aside. Hagler employs “deliberate and algorithmic thinking”: If you see this, do that. Trust your intuition, using past experience to guide you to the best decision—while accepting that you may be wrong. “Take a step to just ready yourself and settle your nerves, and do what needs to be done,” he says.

The bomb tech

THE STRESSORS: Pipe bombs are the most common homemade explosive devices on American soil, according to the Department of Homeland Security, but the people who specialize in preventing them from blowing up are rare. Techs like Carl Makins, formerly of the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina, often face incendiaries crudely fashioned in someone’s kitchen or basement, so the safest way of deactivating them isn’t always clear. It doesn’t help that the gear includes 85 pounds of hot, uncomfortable Kevlar, making it hard to move. But the biggest source of anxiety is not knowing if someone tampered with the suspicious package or tried to move it in an effort to be helpful before he arrived. “What did you do to it?” Makins often found himself wondering. “Did you make it mad?”

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Makins always tried to compartmentalize his feelings. “You can’t get angry,” he says. “That limits your ability to see everything that you need to see.” He also used humor to help defuse tense situations—pointing out that, say, handling a bomb next to that shiny new pickup might not end well for the truck. He also remained mindful of his limits. If he was too tired, too tense, or just not up to the task, he’d say so and let someone else on the team step in to do the job. “You just tap out,” he says.

The teacher

THE STRESSORS: Teachers—despite diminishing resources, growing technological distractions, and students who often want to be anywhere but the classroom—are nevertheless saddled with the responsibility of shaping the future. That’s a lot of pressure, which explains why Gallup polls put teaching in a dead heat with nursing for the most stressful profession in the country, and why a RAND Corporation survey shows stress is the number one reason educators quit. And that was before COVID-19 compounded their challenges. When Teresa BlackCloud’s high school students in West Fargo, North Dakota, began taking turns attending class in person and learning from home in the fall of 2020, for example, she had to divide her attention between the pupils in front of her and the “online kids” who might need tech support. “I felt like my brain was split in two,” she says. “If only there were two Miss BlackClouds.” Like many educators, she had to quickly pivot between helping the teens in the classroom and assisting those working remotely.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Setting clear boundaries is key to handling trying circumstances. BlackCloud had to put the kibosh on responding to pings from kids at all hours because it limited her ability to recharge. “I had to get really good at setting boundaries,” she says. She strives to practice mindfulness and sets aside specific parts of her day for mentally wandering into stressy places. “While I’m brushing my teeth is my time to worry about things,” she says.

The Alaska rescue pilot

THE STRESSORS: Flying a rescue helicopter in Alaska is so intense the Coast Guard requires pilots to complete a tour elsewhere before they can get the gig. The assignment often demands they travel long distances—​Air Station Kodiak monitors 4 million square miles of land and sea, an area larger than the entire lower 48 states—in the dark and through extreme conditions. Due to the environs, the Last Frontier has an aviation accident rate more than twice that of the rest of the country. “It is very challenging,” says Lt. Cmdr. Jared Carbajal, who flies MH-60 Jayhawks and often dons night-vision goggles to navigate the inky sky. The haste of operations compounds the tension: Pilots must be airborne within 30 minutes of getting the call to pull someone out of danger. That leaves little time to prepare and sometimes gives Carbajal scant knowledge of what he’ll find when he arrives at the scene. (Carbajal now flies out of US Coast Guard Air Station Sitka, also in Alaska.)

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Managing complex and uncertain scenarios requires focusing only on what you can control. Everything else is a distraction. Carbajal concentrates on one task at a time—​calculating flight distance, estimating how much fuel he’ll need, requesting the necessary gear, and so on—​that he tackles systematically. He avoids looking too far ahead on his to-do list or fixating on situations he cannot influence, like unusually turbulent waves. “If there’s something that you can’t make a contingency plan for, don’t even waste your time on it,” he says.

An earlier version of this article appeared on popsci.com in January 2021, and this feature first appeared in the Spring 2021 issue. It has been updated since that time.

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Europe’s fourth busiest airport wants to ground private jet setters for good, making an unprecedented move that could set a new industry benchmark in tackling global travel emissions. In order to achieve the high-profile goal, however, Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport has a very bumpy journey ahead of it.

Per Bloomberg, the Netherlands’ largest air hub first made headlines last month when it announced plans to shutter all night flights and private jets from its runways beginning in 2026. Schiphol is overseen by the Royal Schiphol Group, a Dutch government majority-owned company whose interim CEO said at the time they “realize that our choices may have significant implications for the aviation industry, but they are necessary. This shows we mean business.”

[Related: The FAA just made East Coast flights shorter.]

On Tuesday, Schiphol Airport representatives explained to Bloomberg that 30 and 50 percent of all its private jet flights are to holiday locales such as Cannes and Ibiza. Additionally, around 17,000 private flights passed through Schiphol last year, “causing a disproportionate amount of noise and generating 20 times more carbon dioxide emissions per passenger than commercial flights.”

A private jet can emit as much as two metric tons of CO2 during one hour of flight. And while private flights make up only four percent of global aviation carbon emissions, the richer half of humanity is still behind roughly 90 percent of all air travel pollution. Factor in the dramatic rise in private air travel, particularly since the onset of the COVID–19 pandemic, and it’s easy to see why public sentiment is turning against the notion of wealthy getaways and exclusive business jaunts.

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

Many in the industry, however, aren’t thrilled by Schiphol’s new goals. One private jet charter company CEO argued to Bloomberg that their customers’ flights were mostly for “business,” while other critics argued passengers will simply transition to nearby alternative airports. The Royal Schiphol Group informed Bloomberg its closest neighbor, Rotterdam The Hague Airport, cannot accommodate the displaced flights, nor does the company plan to transfer flights elsewhere.

Royal Schiphol Group could face an uphill battle in accomplishing its goals, however. Most of its impending green goals require discussions with the company’s stakeholders—such as Delta Air Lines and France-KLM, who previously sued the Dutch government regarding caps on flights. Then there’s Transavia Airlines BV, who oversee the majority of night flights out of Schiphol. Regardless of the final outcomes, Royal Schiphol Group is still setting a very public example when it comes to raising awareness regarding air travel’s exorbitant effects on the planet, and the importance of finding solutions to these issues before it’s too late.

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Best overall		DJI FPV drone		SEE IT	It flies fast and far with DJI’s proven technologies.
Best for video		DJI Avata		SEE IT	The 4K camera offers exceptional stabilization for stunning shots.
Best budget		Ryze Tello		SEE IT	Get up in the air without spending a sky high amount of cash.

If you’ve seen incredible aerobatic video footage lately, there’s a good chance it was created with an FPV drone. Short for “first-person view,” FPV drones stream a live video feed back to a pilot’s headset, so it looks like they’re actually in a tiny cockpit. This view offers unprecedented control and enables high-performance feats like drone racing or truly harrowing video capture. In doing so, these FPV drones allow you to experience the world around you in ways you may never have thought possible, except perhaps in a video game. While the drone world has grown significantly in recent years, we’ve narrowed down this list of the best FPV drones to get you airborne with minimal fuss.

• Best overall: DJI FPV combo
• Best for beginners: BetaFPV Cetus Pro 
• Best for kids: DEERC D20 Mini Drone for Kids 
• Best for video: DJI Avata 
• Best budget: Ryze Tello

How we chose the best FPV drone

Although one of the key brands in the drone market has been DJI, which is also true of FPV drones as well, we just didn’t limit our search to DJI FPV drones. We studied models from other brands as well. One characteristic we looked for from all models was if the drone was easy to use. We also tried to select models that were relatively durable. However, for some, like those racing FPV drones, there might not be many models that can last a long time in that environment. But by and large, we looked for models that could survive a few crashes. Another factor in selecting the models was considering the drone’s overall design, including its structural design and ergonomics and how it operated with its mobile app and other accessories. 

The best FPV drones: Reviews & Recommendations

Drones have a rather large price range. Some more toy-like FPV drones can cost less than $100, while others can cost well over $1,000. That means you’ll want to find out not only how much money you want to spend but also what features are important to you and how you intend to be using the FPV drone. 

Best overall: DJI FPV combo

DJI

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: Its mix of advanced features and ease of use make it the best pick for those who don’t mind spending some money upfront.

Specs

• Dimensions: 12.2 x 10 x 5 inches
• Weight: 1.8 lbs. 
• Video Recording Modes: 1080p resolution at 120/fps; 4K resolution at 60/fps
• Camera Resolution: 12 megapixels
• Maximum Flying Time: 20 minutes 

Pros

• Fast: Can fly as fast as 87 mph 
• Fun, easy to use, and versatile
• Shoots good quality video and photos
• Nice selection of safety features

Cons

• For the price, battery life could be better
• Not as durably constructed as some other models 

The first thing some drone races look for when buying a racing drone is its top speed. And this model clearly stands out among FPV drones as it can fly as fast as 87 mph. But the DJI FPV stands out in other ways, too. For instance, take the price: This new kit from DJI provides everything you need to start flying in truly FPV fashion: In addition to the drone, you also get the DJI FPV goggles V2 (which are comfortable to wear and use), a remote control and the new motion controller, and more. That offers you a lot of value for the money. In addition, it can fly in three different flight modes, depending on your skill level, and also comes with a number of useful safety features, including the emergency “brake and hover” mode. Simply press a button on the controller. The drone will stop and hover stably within a few seconds.

The imaging and video specs are also quite good: You can shoot video with 4K resolution (at 60 fps) or 1080 resolution (at 120 fps, which can be useful for slow-motion video) at a very wide 150° field of view. You can also shoot 12-megapixel resolution photos. Plus, the done system includes collision technology to prevent it from crashing. Overall, this DJI combo kit provides a powerful immersive experience. 

Best for beginners: BetaFPV Cetus Pro 

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: This is a great model to learn the basics of flying an FPV drone.

Specs

• Dimensions: 4.6 x 4.6 x 1.3 inches
• Weight: 0.1 lbs. 
• Video Recording Modes: N/A 
• Camera Resolution: N/A
• Maximum Flying Time: 4-5 minutes 

Pros

• A great FPV drone to learn on
• Easy to use
• It has a sturdy design yet is lightweight
• Comes with clever features to keep you flying 

Cons

• The included VR02 FPV goggles do not support video record function. 

Although this model is meant for beginners, it includes all the necessary elements for learning how to use an FPV drone: The Cetus Pro FPV kit includes the brushless quadcopter and a LiteRadio2 SE transmitter and VR02 FPV goggles. It’s lightweight but sturdy, and it also has an emergency battery and low-battery feature to avoid crashing the drone. Plus, there’s an altitude hold function, which lets that drone auto-hover. It even has a “turtle mode.” If the FPV drone has fallen to the ground and is now upside down, you can activate the “turtle mode” via the LiteRadio2 SE transmitter, and it will flip the Cetus Pro FPV back over to allow you to resume flying. Comes with three flight modes and flies at three different speeds.

One downside is that included VR02 FPV goggles do not support video record function. However, if you want to pay more, you can buy the VR03 FPV goggles, which do support video record function. Both the resolution for VR02 and VR03 FPV goggles are 480p.

Best for kids: DEERC D20 Mini Drone for Kids 

Deerc

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: A very inexpensive and fun FPV drone.

Specs

• Dimensions: 7 x 4.7 x 1.7 inches
• Weight: 0.1 lbs. 
• Video Recording Modes: 720p 
• Camera Resolution: 1 megapixel
• Maximum Flying Time: 10 minutes 

Pros

• Very inexpensive 
• Includes gesture control and voice commands

Cons

• Low-resolution video and photos
• Doesn’t connect with a pair of goggles 

If you’re looking for an inexpensive drone for an older child or teenager, consider this model. This mini drone comes with some useful features to help kids learn how to fly drones: It can auto-hover with its altitude hold system, and it’s easy to use with its one-key start/stop function. It also comes with 3-speed modes.  

However, some of the imaging features aren’t incredibly robust. Nevertheless, your kids might find them fun to play with. For instance, the onboard camera (which connects wirelessly to your smartphone and is where you see the streaming video) has only 720p HD video resolution. The photos are only 1280 x 720 resolution images, which is barely a 1-megapixel photo. But what is fun is that you can take photos and video clips via gesture control—if you make a victory or “V” sign with your fingers, the drone will capture a photo or video. It also has voice control: You can say “take off” or “landing” and the drone will respond accordingly.

Best for video: DJI Avata

DJI

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: When you’re looking for a FPV drone that will take better quality videos and photos 

Specs

• Dimensions: 7.1 x 7.1 x 3.1 inches
• Weight: 0.9 lbs. 
• Video Recording Modes: 2.7K resolution at 120/fps; 4K resolution at 60/fps
• Camera Resolution: 48 megapixels
• Maximum Flying Time: 18 minutes 

Pros

• Sturdy, compact construction 
• A larger sensor and more megapixels for better quality video and photos
• Includes image stabilization
• Nice selection of safety features

Cons

• Can’t fly as fast as the DJI FPV

An important question you’ll need to answer before you buy an FPV drone is what are you buying a drone for? If it’s to buy the fastest consumer FPV drone, then you’ll want to buy the DJI FPV drone. The Avata’s top speed is 60 mph, which is fast but not quite as fast as the DJI FPV, which can fly up to 87 mph. But if you’re looking to buy a drone that shoots much better video quality as well as photo quality, then the DJI Avata is the model you’ll want to consider: The Avata comes with a large, 48-megapixel 1/1.7-inch sensor, which is one of the reasons you get better quality photos and video. The lens has an f/2.8 aperture and shoots with a wide 155-degree field of view. The Avata also captures 4K video at up to 60fps or 2.7k video at up to 120fps if you want slow-motion video. 

Best budget: Ryze Tello

Tello

SEE IT

Why it made the cut: For an easy-to-use, inexpensive FPV drone that’s less than $100 

Specs

• Dimensions: 3.7 x 3.7 x 1.6 inches 
• Weight: 0.2 lbs. 
• Video Recording Modes: 720p resolution video
• Camera Resolution: 5 megapixels
• Maximum Flying Time: 13 minutes 

Pros

• Very inexpensive
• Easy to use
• Compatible with VR headsets
• Uses hand gestures

Cons

• Controller costs extra
• Imaging resolution is a bit on the low side

For those on a budget, this model might fit the bill. It’s powered with technology by DJI, so it’s still pretty full-featured for such a low-priced drone. However, it doesn’t come with a controller, which is one reason it’s so inexpensive. But you can connect it to your phone using the mobile app or a supported Bluetooth remote controller (connected to the mobile app). It’s also compatible with VR headsets. Also, if you’re interested in learning how to code, or if you’d like to have your kids learn how to code, this drone can be programmed using Scratch–MIT’s coding system for kids to learn on. However, it would be nice if it had slightly high video and still photo resolution. 

Things to consider when shopping for the best FPV drones

There are many features to consider when buying an FPV drone. But you may find it helpful to start by asking yourself some questions: Are you experienced in flying drones or FPV drones? Are you buying this drone for a beginner or a teenager? Will you use them for racing, or are you more interested in shooting video or photos? 

Controls

One key area to consider when comparing drones is figuring out how easy it is to use the controls and the drone system. Some work by connecting to your smartphone, while others come with dedicated controllers. Do some research to see which one might be the best for you. If you’re doing serious flying, a dedicated controller is an absolute must. Higher-end models allow for controller customization to fit your specific flight style.

Camera

There are also big differences in how they record and capture video or photos. Some, like the BetaFPV Cetus Pro FPV drone, are meant for you to learn how to fly these drones. In other words, it doesn’t include the capability of recording video or capturing photos, since it was designed for beginners to learn on. But other pricier models give you the ability to capture 4K resolution video and 48mm still photos. Some custom models allow for swappable camera systems so that you can attach your own GoPro or another action camera to it.

FAQs

Final thoughts when buying the best FPV drones

• Best overall: DJI FPV combo
• Best for beginners: BetaFPV Cetus Pro 
• Best for kids: DEERC D20 Mini Drone for Kids 
• Best for video: DJI Avata 
• Best budget: Ryze Tello

Have you ever wondered if you could get motion sickness, which could make you feel lightheaded or even nauseous, from using goggles with an FPV drone? The answer to this question is “Yes!” The effect is similar to what you might experience when watching a VR experience through a VR headset. One of the theories about this sickness is that it’s a fairly common side effect caused by the brain’s struggle to square what you see with what you feel—your brain might think you’re flying like Superman over a building. Still, you’re just standing in the middle of your living room. If you experience motion sickness when using an FPV drone, consider taking a break from using the goggles for 15 or 20 minutes before you try using them again.  

Why trust us

Popular Science started writing about technology more than 150 years ago. There was no such thing as “gadget writing” when we published our first issue in 1872, but if there was, our mission to demystify the world of innovation for everyday readers means we would have been all over it. Here in the present, PopSci is fully committed to helping readers navigate the increasingly intimidating array of devices on the market right now.

Our writers and editors have combined decades of experience covering and reviewing consumer electronics. We each have our own obsessive specialties—from high-end audio to video games to cameras and beyond—but when we’re reviewing devices outside of our immediate wheelhouses, we do our best to seek out trustworthy voices and opinions to help guide people to the very best recommendations. We know we don’t know everything, but we’re excited to live through the analysis paralysis that internet shopping can spur so readers don’t have to.

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To fly at supersonic speeds is to punch through an invisible threshold in the sky. Rocketing through the air at a rate faster than sound waves can travel through it means surpassing a specific airspeed, but that exact airspeed varies. On Mars, the speed of sound is different from the speed of sound on Earth. And on Earth, the speed of sound varies depending on the temperature of the air an aircraft is traveling through. 

Breaking the so-called sound barrier in 1947 made Chuck Yeager famous. But today, if a person in a military jet flies faster than the speed of sound, it’s not a significant or even noticeable moment, at least from the perspective of the occupants of the aircraft. “Man, in the airplane you feel nothing,” says Jessica Peterson, a flight test engineer for the US Air Force’s Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. People on the ground may beg to differ, depending on how close they are to the plane. 

Here’s what to know about the speed of supersonic flight, a type of travel that’s been inaccessible to civilians who want to experience it in an aircraft ever since the Concorde stopped flying in 2003. 

Ripples in the water, shockwaves in the air 

Traveling at supersonic speed involves cruising “faster than the sound waves can move out of the way,” says Edward Haering, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center who has been researching sonic booms since the 1990s.

One way to think about the topic is to picture a boat in the water. “If you’re in a rowboat, sitting on a lake, not moving, there might be some ripples that come out, but you’re not going any faster than the ripples are,” he says. “But if you’re in a motorboat or a sailboat, you’ll start to see a V-wake coming off the nose of your boat, because you’re going faster than those ripples can get out of the way.” That’s like a plane flying faster than the speed of sound.

But, he adds, a supersonic plane pushes through those ripples in three-dimensional space. “You have a cone of these disturbances that you’re pushing through,” he says. 

The temperature of the air determines how fast sound waves move through it. In a zone of the atmosphere on Earth between about 36,000 feet up to around 65,600 feet, the temperature is consistent enough that the speed of sound theoretically stays about the same. And in that zone, on a typical day, the speed of sound is about 660 mph. That’s also referred to as Mach 1. Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound, would be about 1,320 mph in that altitude range. However, since a real-world day will likely be different from what’s considered standard, your actual speed when attempting to fly supersonic may vary.

[Related: How high do planes fly? It depends on if they’re going east or west.]

If you wanted to fly a plane at supersonic speeds at lower altitudes, the speed of sound is faster in that warmer air. At 10,000 feet, supersonic flight begins at 735 mph, NASA says. The thicker air takes more work to fly through at those speeds, though.

For the record books: the first supersonic flight

Chuck Yeager became the first documented person to fly at supersonic speeds on October 14, 1947. He recalled in his autobiography, Yeager, that he was at 42,000 feet flying at 0.96 Mach on that autumn day. “I noted that the faster I got, the smoother the ride,” he wrote. 

“Suddenly the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to .965 Mach—then tipped right off the scale,” he recalled. “I thought I was seeing things! We were flying supersonic!” He learned afterwards that he had been going 700 mph, or 1.07 Mach. 

Over the radio, from below, Yeagar wrote that people in a “tracking van interrupted to report that they heard what sounded like a distant rumble of thunder: my sonic boom!” 

Sonic booms happen thanks to shock waves forming off different features on the aircraft. For example, the canopy of a fighter jet, or the inlet for its engine, can produce them. The problem occurs because of the way those various shock waves join up, coalescing into two. “When they combine, they just get higher and higher pressure,” says Haering. The way they combine is for one shock wave to come from the front of the plane, and one from the rear. People on the ground will detect a “boom, boom,” Haering says. 

Interestingly, the length of the aircraft matters in this case, affecting how far apart those booms are in time. The space shuttle, for example, measured more than 100 feet long. In that case, people would notice a “boom… boom,” Haering says. “And a very short plane, it’s booboom. And if it’s really short, and really far away, sometimes the time between those two booms [is] so short, you can’t really tell that there’s two distinct booms, so you just hear boom.” 

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

The issue with these booms is leading NASA to develop a new experimental aircraft, along with Lockheed Martin, called the X-59. Its goal is to fly faster than the speed of sound, but in a quieter way than a typical supersonic plane would. Remarkably, instead of a canopy for the pilot to see the scene in front of them, the aviator will rely on an external vision system—a monitor on the inside that shows what’s in front of the plane. NASA said that the testing wrapped up in 2021 for this design, which helps keep the aircraft sleek. The ultimate goal is to manage any shock waves coming off that aircraft through its design. “On the X-59, from the tip of the nose to the back of the tail, everything is tailored to try to keep those shock waves separated,” Haering says. 

NASA says they plan to fly it this year, with the goal of seeing how much noise it makes and how people react to its sound signature. The X-59 could make a noise that’s “a lot like if your neighbor across the street slams their car door,” Haering speculates. “If you’re engaged in conversation, you probably wouldn’t even notice it.” But actual flights will be the test of that hypothesis.

The X-59 has a goal of flying at Mach 1.4, at an altitude of around 55,000 feet. Translated into miles per hour, that rate is 924 mph. Then imagine that the aircraft has a tailwind, and its ground speed could surpass 1,000 mph. (Note that winds in the atmosphere will affect a plane’s ground speed—the speed the plane is moving compared to the ground below. A tailwind will make it faster and a headwind will make it slower.) 

Supersonic corridors 

At Edwards Air Force Base in California, supersonic corridors permit pilots to fly at Mach 1 or faster above certain altitudes. In one corridor, the aircraft must be at 30,000 feet or higher. In another, the Black Mountain Supersonic Corridor, the aircraft can be as low as 500 feet. Remember, the speed to fly supersonic will be higher at a low altitude than it will be at high altitudes, and it will take more effort to push through the denser air.

“From a flight-test perspective—so that’s what we do here at Edwards, and we’re focusing on testing the new aircraft, testing the new systems—we regularly go supersonic,” says Peterson, the flight test engineer at the US Air Force’s Test Pilot School. 

[Related: Let’s talk about how planes fly]

The fact that one of the supersonic corridors is over the base means that sonic booms are audible there, although the aircraft has to be above 30,000 feet. “We can boom the base, and we hear it all the time,” she adds. 

She notes that in a recent flight in a T-38, when she broke the sound barrier at 32,000 feet, her aircraft had a ground speed of 665 mph. But at 14,000 feet, she was supersonic at a ground speed of 734 mph.

But there’s a difference between flying at supersonic speeds in a test scenario and doing it for operational reasons. Corey Florendo, a pilot and instructor also at the US Air Force Test Pilot School, notes that he’d do it “only as often as I need to,” during a real-world mission.

“When I go supersonic, I’m using a lot of gas,” he adds. 

Supersonic flight thus remains available to the military in certain scenarios when they’re willing to burn the fuel, but not so for regular travelers. A Boeing 787, for example, is designed to cruise at 85 percent the speed of sound. However, one company, called Boom Supersonic, aims to bring that type of flight back for commercial travel; their aircraft, which they call Overture, could fly in tests in 2027. You may not want to hold your breath. 

Joe Jewell, an associate professor at Purdue University’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, reflects that supersonic flight still has a “mystique” to it. 

“It’s still kind of a rare and special thing because the challenges that we collectively referred to as the sound barrier still are there, physically,” Jewell says. Pressure waves still accrue in front of the aircraft as it pushes through the air. “It’s still there, just the same as it was in 1947, we just know how to deal with it now.”

In the video below, watch an F-16 overtake a T-38; both aircraft are flying at supersonic speeds, and a subtle rocking motion is the only indication that shock waves are interacting with the aircraft. Courtesy Jessica Peterson and the US Air Force Test Pilot School.

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The Federal Aviation Administration announced the launch of 169 new flight routes along the East Coast on Monday. These new flight paths are estimated to annually trim 6,000 minutes and 40,000 miles from US plane travel. The revamped trajectories, some of which extend into the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, come after seven years of collaborative industry review, and primarily pertain to planes traveling at cruising altitude above 18,000 feet.

“These significant improvements to our national airspace system… will help travelers get to their destinations more efficiently,” Tim Arel, COO of the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization, said in the statement.  “The new routes will reduce complexity and redistribute volume across all available airspace.”

[RELATED: How high do planes fly? It depends on if they’re going east or west.]

The legacy pathways prone to zigzagging were designed when most planes relied upon ground-based radar systems. With modern aircraft utilizing GPS navigation, the FAA’s revamped maps can provide more direct travel that shaves off time and, importantly, saves on fuel; air travel has long been one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions.

Although long planned by human dispatchers, artificial intelligence is playing an increasing role in the formulation of new, efficient flight routes for pilots. In 2021, for example, Alaska Airlines began enlisting an AI system from Airspace Intelligence to help develop potential routes. According to Alaska at the time, the AI pathways saved an average 5.3 minutes in flight time, alongside nearly half a million gallons of fuel during a prior trial period.

US-based companies such as American Airlines are already chiming in on the announcement, saying the revisions are a welcome update as traveling begins to ramp up for the summer. “American has long been a proponent of unlocking additional high-altitude routes along the East Coast and we are optimistic they will have significant benefits for our customers and team members,” American Airlines COO David Seymore said via email to CNBC on Monday. 

[Related: Let’s talk about how planes fly.]

The revised routes are long overdue for a crowded, frequently problematic skyscape. According to flight tracking website FlightAware 1.7 million (around 20 percent) of all US-operated airline flights were delayed in 2022—up four percent from 2019’s pre-pandemic numbers. Around 22 percent of 2023’s US flights have already been delayed. During the 2022 holiday season, Southwest Airlines experienced a wave of massive, unprecedented delays and cancellations stemming from outdated internal employee scheduling software.

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On April 11, the Department of Defense announced that it was allocating just over $8 million for 21 new delivery drones. These flying machines, officially called the TRV-150C Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aircraft Systems, are made by Survice Engineering in partnership with Malloy Aeronautics. 

The TRV-150C is a four-limbed drone that looks like a quadcopter on stilts. Its tall landing legs allow it to take off with a load of up to 150 pounds of cargo slung underneath. The drone’s four limbs each mount two rotors, making the vehicle more of an octocopter than a quadcopter. 

The TRV drone family also represents the successful evolution of a long-running drone development program, one that a decade ago promised hoverbikes for humans and today is instead delivering uncrewed delivery drones.

The contract award is through the Navy and Marine Corps Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems program office, which is focused on ensuring the people doing the actual fighting on the edge of combat or action get the exact robotic assistance they need. For Marines, this idea has been put into practice and not just theorized, with an exercise involving drone resupply taking place at Quantico, Virginia, at the end of March.

The Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aircraft System (TRUAS), as the TRV-150C is referred to in use, “is designed to provide rapid and assured, highly automated aerial distribution to small units operating in contested environments; thereby enabling flexible and rapid emergency resupply, routine distribution, and a constant push and pull of material in order to ensure a constant state of supply availability,” said Master Sergeant Chris Genualdi in a release about the event. Genualdi already works in the field of airborne and air delivery, so the delivery drone became an additional tool to meet familiar problems.

Malloy Aeronautics boasts that the drone has a range of over 43 miles; in the Marines’ summary from Quantico, the drone is given a range of 9 miles for resupply missions. Both numbers can be accurate: Survice gives the unencumbered range of the TRV-150 at 45 miles, while carrying 150 pounds of cargo that range is reduced to 8 miles. 

With a speed of about 67 mph and a flight process that is largely automated, the TRV-150C is a tool that can get meaningful quantities of vital supplies where they are needed, when they are needed. Malloy also boasts that drones in the TRV-150 family have batteries that can be easily swapped, allowing for greater operational tempo as the drones themselves do not have to wait for a recharge before being sent on their next mission.

These delivery drones use “waypoint navigation for mission planning, which uses programmed coordinates to direct the aircraft’s flight pattern,” the Marines said in a release, with Genualdi noting “that the simplicity of operating the TRUAS is such that a Marine with no experience with unmanned aircraft systems can be trained to operate and conduct field level maintenance on it in just five training days.”

Reducing the complexity of the drone to essentially a flying cart that can autonomously deliver gear where needed is huge. The kinds of supplies needed in battle are all straightforward—vital tools like more bullets, more meals, or even more blood and medical equipment—so attempts at life-saving can be made even if it’s unsafe for the soldiers to move towards friendly lines for more elaborate care.

Getting the drone down to just a functional delivery vehicle comes after years of work. In 2014, Malloy debuted a video of a reduced scale hoverbike designed for a human to ride on, using four rotors and a rectangular body. En route to becoming the basis for the delivery drone seen today, the hoverbike was explored by the US Army as a novel way to fly scouts around. This scout ultimately moved to become a resupply tool, which the Army tested in January 2017.

In 2020, the US Navy held a competition for a range of delivery drones at the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona. The entry by Malloy and Survice came in first place, and cemented the TRV series as the drones to watch for battlefield delivery. In 2021, British forces used TRV drones in an exercise, with the drones tasked with delivering blood to the wounded. 

“This award represents a success story in the transition of technology from U.S. research laboratories into the hands of our warfighters,” said Mark Butkiewicz, a vice president at SURVICE Engineering, in a release. “We started with an established and proven product from Malloy Aeronautics and integrated the necessary tech to provide additional tactical functionality for the US warfighter. We then worked with research labs to conduct field experiments with warfighters to refine the use of autonomous unmanned multirotor drones to augment logistical operations at the forward most edge of the battlefield.”

The 21 drones awarded by the initial contract will provide a better start, alongside the drones already used for training, in teaching the Marines how to rely on robots doing resupply missions in combat. Genualdi expects the Marines to create a special specialty to support the use of drones, with commanders dispatching members to learn how to work alongside the drone.

The drones could also see life as exportation and rescue tools, flying through small gaps in trees, buildings, and rubble in order to get people the aid they need. In both peace and wartime uses, the drone’s merit is its ability to get cargo where it is needed without putting additional humans at risk of catching a bullet. 

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When entering into disaster scenarios, robots still have a major downside—their inability to recover when they inevitably crash into things. Scientists, however, have taken a page out of biology’s playbook, as they often do, to create a drone that can bounce back when met with various obstacles. 

Think of a bird landing on a tree branch—in order to do so, they likely have to collide with a few smaller branches or leaves in the process of touching down. But, their joints and soft tissues cushion these bumps along the way, and their feet are built precisely to lock themselves in place without straining a muscle. When a drone opts for a similar route, taking on a bunch of collisions on the way to their destination, it’s a little bit more dramatic. “They don’t recover; they crash,” Wenlong Zhang, an associate professor and robotics expert at Arizona State University said in a release. 

“We see drones used to assess damage from high in the sky, but they can’t really navigate through collapsed buildings,” Zhang added. “Their rigid frames compromise resilience to collision, so bumping into posts, beams, pipes or cables in a wrecked structure is often catastrophic.” 

Zhang is an author of a recent paper published in Soft Robotics wherein a team of scientists designed and tested a quadrotor drone with an inflatable frame, apparently the first of its kind. The inflatable frame acts almost like a blow-up suit, protecting the drone from any harsh consequences of banging into a wall or another obstacle. It also provides the kind of soft tissue absorption necessary for perching—the team’s next task.

[Related: Watch this bird-like robot make a graceful landing on its perch.]

After studying how birds land and grip onto branches with their taloned feet, the team developed a fabric-based bistable grasper for the inflatable drone. The grasper had two unpowered “resting states,” meaning it can remain open or closed without using energy, and reacts to impact of landing by closing its little feet and gripping hard onto a nearby object.

“It can perch on pretty much anything. Also, the bistable material means it doesn’t need an actuator to provide power to hold its perch. It just closes and stays like that without consuming any energy,” Zhang said in the release. “Then when needed, the gripper can be pneumatically retracted and the drone can just take off.”

A more resilient type of drone is crucial for search and rescue scenarios when the path forward may be filled with debris, but the authors could also see this kind of creation being useful in monitoring forest fires or even exploration on other planets.

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A worm’s brain may be teeny tiny, but that small organ has inspired researchers to design better software for drones. Using liquid neural networks, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have trained a drone to identify and navigate toward objects in varying environments. 

Liquid neural networks, a type of artificial intelligence tool, are unique. They can extrapolate and apply previous data to new environments. In other words, “they can generalize to situations that they have never seen,” Ramin Hasani, a research affiliate at MIT and one of the co-authors on a new study on the topic, says. The study was published in the journal Science Robotics on April 19. 

Neural networks are software inspired by how neurons interact in the brain. The type of neural network examined in this study, liquid neural networks, can adapt flexibly in real-time when given new information—hence the name “liquid.” 

[Related: This tiny AI-powered robot is learning to explore the ocean on its own]

The researchers’ network was modeled after a 2-millimeter-long worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. Naturally, it has a small brain: 302 neurons and 8,000 synaptic connections, allowing researchers to understand the intricacies of neural connections. A human brain, by contrast, has an estimated 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses. 

“We wanted to model the dynamics of neurons, how they perform, how they release information, one neuron to another,” Hasani says.

These robust networks enable the drone to adapt in real-time, even after initial training, allowing it to identify a target object despite changes in their environment. The liquid neural networks yielded a success rate of over 90 percent in reaching their target in varying environments and demonstrated flexible decision-making.

Using this technology, people might be able to accomplish tasks such as automating wildlife monitoring and search and rescue missions, according to the researchers. 

Researchers first taught the software to identify and fly towards a red chair. After the drone—a DJI quadcopter—proved this ability from 10 meters (about 33 feet) away, researchers incrementally increased the start distance. To their surprise, the drone slowly approached the target chair from distances as far as 45 meters (about 145 feet).

“I think that was the first time I thought, ‘this actually might be pretty powerful stuff’ because I’d never seen [the network piloting the drone] from this distance, and it did it consistently,” Makram Chahine, co-author and graduate researcher at MIT, says, “So that was pretty impressive to me.”

After the drone successfully flew toward objects at various distances, they tested its ability to identify the red chair from other chairs in an urban patio. Being able to correctly distinguish the chair from similar stimuli proved that the system could understand the actual task, rather than solely navigating towards an image of red pixels against a background.

For example, instead of a red chair, drones could be trained to identify whales against the image of an ocean, or humans left behind following a natural disaster. 

“Once we verified that the liquid networks were capable of at least replicating the task behavior, we then tried to look at their out-of-domain performance,” Patrick Kao, co-author and undergraduate researcher at MIT, says. They tested the drone’s ability to identify a red chair in both urban and wooded environments, in different seasons and lighting conditions. The network still proved successful, displaying versatile use in diverse surroundings.

[Related: Birders behold: Cornell’s Merlin app is now a one-stop shop for bird identification]

They tested two liquid neural networks against four non-liquid neural networks, and found that the liquid networks outperformed others in every area. It’s too early to declare exactly what allows liquid neural networks to be so successful. Researchers say one hypothesis might have something to do with the ability to understand causality, or cause-and-effect relationships, allowing the liquid network to focus on the target chair and navigate toward it regardless of the surrounding environment. 

The system is complex enough to complete tasks such as identifying an object and then moving itself towards it, but not too complex to prevent researchers from understanding its underlying processes. “We want to create something that is understandable, controllable, and [artificial general intelligence], that’s the future thing that we want to achieve,” Hasani says. “But right now we are far away from that.”

AI systems have been the subject of recent controversy, with concerns about safety and over-automation, but completely understanding the capabilities of their technology isn’t just a priority, it’s a purpose, researchers say.

“Everything that we do as a robotics and machine learning lab is [for] all-around safety and deployment of AI in a safe and ethical way in our society, and we really want to stick to this mission and vision that we have,” Hasani says.

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After more than 50 years, NASA is going back to the moon. If all goes as planned, the Artemis III mission will see two astronauts stepping foot on the lunar surface sometime in 2025. Subsequent Artemis missions involving the construction of a lunar space station and a permanent base on the lunar south pole could follow every one to two years, funding permitting.

But before the 21st-century moon landing, NASA wants to ensure its astronauts’ ride, the Orion spacecraft, is up to the task. The successful, uncrewed Artemis I put the new Orion space capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s propulsion and navigation systems to the test. The recently announced crew of four astronauts for Artemis II, scheduled for November 2024, will take the next leap by giving Orion a full shakedown of its manual flight and life support systems.

“We’ll be the first humans to fly on the spacecraft,” says Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman. “We need to make sure our vehicle can keep us alive when we go into deep space.”

That makes the Artemis II mission unique, in that its primary focus is not exploration nor science experiments, but technical preparation for the astronauts on subsequent Artemis exploits. “Our focus is on what we can do to enable our co-workers to operate in the lunar environment, whether it’s on the Gateway outpost [a space station NASA plans to build in lunar orbit beginning in 2024] or the lunar surface,” Wiseman says.

To achieve that goal, Wiseman and his crewmates, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Victor Glover, as well as Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will kick off their 10-day flight with a series of highly elliptical orbits around the Earth. These rounds are designed to give them about 24 hours to test out their spacecraft and allow for an easy mission abort path to return home if any problems arise.

“That first 24 hours is really going to be intense. Looking at the crew timeline, you can barely fit everything in,” Wisemans says of all the spacecraft testing his team will conduct. “And then when we get finished with all of that, our reward is translunar injection,” the engine firing maneuver that will set the spacecraft on a course out of Earth’s orbit and toward the moon.

[Related: NASA’s uncrewed Orion spacecraft will get a hand from a Star Trek-inspired comms system]

About 40 minutes after launching from the Kennedy Space Center, the upper stage of the SLS rocket known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) will boost Orion into an ellipse that will carry the crew about 1,800 miles above the Earth at its highest point, and about 115 miles at its lowest.

After initial checks during that roughly 90-minute first orbit, the ICPS will fire again to boost the spacecraft into a much higher ellipse around the planet, this time reaching as high as 46,000 miles above it—far outstripping the 250-mile altitude where the International Space Station usually flies. This second orbit will take nearly 24 hours and is where the crew will do the most serious assessments on Orion’s systems.

“We’re gonna try to test out every manual capability that we have on Orion: manual maneuvering, manual targeting, manual communications set up,” Wiseman says. In effect, they’ll be simulating what it takes to prepare the capsule for a lunar landing—but in the Earth’s orbit, not the moon’s.

A crucial part of the testing will involve what NASA calls a ”proximity operations demonstration.” Orion and the European-built service module, which carries life support, power, and propulsion systems, will detach from the ICPS as the crew practices manual maneuvering to align their spacecraft with the discarded upper stage of the rocket. While they will not actually dock with the ICPS, they will run the systems that future Artemis crews need to dock with a lunar lander or the Lunar Gateway before journeying to the moon’s surface.  

Next, the crew will conduct support and communications checks to ensure the Orion spacecraft is ready to head into deep space. If given the go-ahead by mission control, they will use the Orion spacecraft’s main engines to conduct a translunar injection burn designed to carry the spacecraft on a looping path around the moon, reaching a peak distance of about 230,000 miles from Earth. It will take about four days just to travel to and from the moon.

Artemis II stands out from the other missions in its series in that the Orion main engine will carry out the translunar injection burn, rather than the ICPS, which will have used up its fuel boosting the capsule into the high elliptical orbit around the Earth for testing. And because Artemis II will not involve landing on the moon, the crew doesn’t have to perform an orbital insertion burn, and will instead simply loop around the moon, ultimately passing around the far side of the satellite at about 6,400 miles altitude, relying on Earth’s gravity to pull the spacecraft home without the need for another engine burn.      

The crew will have plenty of other tests during the long lunar tour to keep them occupied, according to Wiseman. While the exact science packages for the mission have yet to be announced, the astronauts’ bodies will serve as mini laboratories over the course of the flight—and after.

[Related: Artemis I’s solar panels harvested a lot more energy than expected]

“As a human explorer, there’s going to be a load of science on us, like radiation and how we handle the deep space environment,” Wiseman says. “We know a lot about humans operating in space on the International Space Station; we don’t know as much about humans operating in deep space.”

The crew leader says he is honored to be commanding Artemis II, even if that means he may not fly on Artemis III or subsequent missions. “Personally, what I really want to do is I want to go fly Artemis II, I want to come back, and I want to help my crewmates train for their missions,” he explains. “Then I want to be the largest voice in the crowd cheering for them when they get assigned to Artemis III or IV.”

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In the future, the US Air Force may employ drones that can accompany advanced fighter jets like the F-35, cruising along as fellow travelers. The vision for these drones is that they would be robotic wingmates, with perhaps two assigned to one F-35, a jet that’s operated by a single pilot. They would act as force multipliers for the aircraft that has a human in it, and would be able to execute tasks like dogfighting. The official term for these uncrewed machines is Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and the Air Force is thinking about acquiring them in bulk: It has said it would like to have 1,000 of them. 

To develop uncrewed aircraft like these, though, the military needs to be able to rely on autonomy software that can operate a combat drone just as effectively as a human would pilot a fighter jet, if not more so. A stepping stone to get there is an initiative called VENOM, and it will involve converting around a half dozen F-16s to be able to operate autonomously, albeit with a human in the cockpit as a supervisor. 

VENOM, of course, is an acronym. It stands for Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model, with “Viper” being a common nickname for the F-16 Fighting Falcon, a highly maneuverable fighter jet.  

The VENOM program is about testing out autonomy on an F-16 that is “combat capable,” says Lt. Col. Robert Waller, the commander of the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

“We’re taking a combat F-16 and converting that into an autonomy flying testbed,” Waller adds. “We want to do what we call combat autonomy, and that is the air vehicle with associated weapons systems—radar, advanced electronic warfare capabilities, and the ability to integrate weapons—so you loop all of that together into one flying testbed.” 

The program builds on other efforts. A notable related initiative involved a special aircraft called VISTA, or the X-62A. Last year, AI algorithms from both DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory took the controls of that unique F-16D, which is a flying testbed with space for two aviators in it. 

[Related: Why DARPA put AI at the controls of a fighter jet]

The VENOM program will involve testing “additional capabilities that you cannot test on VISTA,” Waller says. “We now want to actually transition that [work from VISTA] to platforms with real combat capabilities, to see how those autonomy agents now operate with real systems instead of simulated systems.” 

At a recent panel discussion at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies that touched on this topic, Air Force Maj. Gen. Evan Dertien said that VENOM is “the next evolution into scaling up what autonomy can do,” building on VISTA. Popular Science sibling website The War Zone reported on this topic last month. 

The project will see them using “about six” aircraft to test out the autonomy features, Waller tells PopSci, although the exact number hasn’t been determined, and neither has the exact model F-16 to get the autonomy features. “If we want the most cutting-edge radar or [electronic warfare] capabilities, then those will need to be integrated to an F-16C,” Waller says, referring to an F-16 model that seats just one person. 

The role of the human aviator in the cockpit of an F-16 that is testing out these autonomous capabilities is two-fold, Waller explains. The first is to be a “safety observer to ensure that the airplanes always return home, and that the autonomy agent doesn’t do anything unintended,” he notes. The second piece is to be “evaluating system performance.” In other words, to check out if the autonomy agent is doing a good job. 

Waller stresses that the human will have veto power over what the plane does. “These platforms, as flying testbeds, can and will let an autonomy agent fly the aircraft, and execute combat-related skills,” he says. “That pilot is in total control of the air vehicle, with the ability to turn off everything, to include the autonomy agent from flying anything, or executing anything.” 

Defense News notes that the Air Force is proposing almost $50 million for this project for the fiscal year 2024. 

“These airplanes will generally fly without combat loads—so no missiles, no bullets—[and] most, if not all of this, will be simulated capabilities, with a human that can turn off that capability at any time,” Waller says. 

Ultimately, the plan is not to develop F-16s that can fly themselves in combat without a human on board, but instead to keep developing the autonomy technology so it could someday operate a drone that can act like a fighter jet and accompany other aircraft piloted by people. 

Hear more about VENOM below, beginning around the 42 minute mark:

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Earlier this month, a new kind of electric boat was demonstrated in Colombia. The uncrewed COTEnergy Boat debuted at the Colombiamar 2023 business and industrial exhibition, held from March 8 to 10 in Cartagena. It is likely a useful tool for navies, and was on display as a potential product for other nations to adopt. 

While much of the attention in uncrewed sea vehicles has understandably focused on the ocean-ranging craft built for massive nations like the United States and China, the introduction of small drone ships for regional powers and routine patrol work shows just far this technology has come, and how widespread it is likely to be in the future.

“The Colombian Navy (ARC) intends to deploy the new electric unmanned surface vehicle (USV) CotEnergy Boat in April,” Janes reports, citing Admiral Francisco Cubides. 

The boat is made from aluminum and has a compact, light body. (See it on Instagram here.) Just 28.5 feet long and under 8 feet wide, the boat is powered by a 50 hp electric motor; its power is sustained in part by solar panels mounted on the top of the deck. Those solar panels can provide up to 1.1 kilowatts at peak power, which is enough to sustain its autonomous operation for just shy of an hour.

The vessel was made by Atomo Tech and Colombia’s state-owned naval enterprise company, COTECMAR. The company says the boat’s lightweight form allows it to take on different payloads, making it suitable for “intelligence and reconnaissance missions, port surveillance and control missions, support in communications link missions, among others.”

Putting sensors on small, autonomous and electric vessels is a recurring theme in navies that employ drone boats. Even a part of the ocean that seems small, like a harbor, represents a big job to watch. By putting sensors and communications links onto an uncrewed vessel, a navy can effectively extend the range of what can be seen by human operators. 

In January, the US Navy used Saildrones for this kind of work in the Persian Gulf. Equipped with cameras and processing power, the Saildrones identified and tracked ships in an exercise as they spotted them, making that information available to human operators on crewed vessels and ultimately useful to naval commanders. 

Another reason to turn to uncrewed vessels for this work is that they are easier to run on fully  electric power, as opposed to a diesel or gasoline. COTECMAR’s video description notes that the COTEEnergy Boat is being “incorporated into the offer of sustainable technological solutions that we are designing for the energy transition.” Making patrol craft solar powered and electric starts the vessels sustainable.

While developed as a military tool, the COTENERGY boat can also have a role in scientific and research expeditions. It could serve as a communications link between other ships, or between ships and other uncrewed vessels, ensuring reliable operation and data collection. Putting in sensors designed to look under the water’s surface could aid with oceanic mapping and observation. As a platform for sensors, the COTEnergy Boat is limited by what its adaptable frame can carry and power, although its load capacity is 880 pounds.

Not much more is known about the COTEnergy Boat at this point. But what is compelling about the vessel is how it fits into similar plans of other navies. Fielding small useful autonomous scouts or patrol craft, if successful, could become a routine part of naval and coastal operations.

With these new kinds of boat come new challenges. Because uncrewed ships lack humans, it can make them easier targets for other navies or possibly maritime criminal groups, like pirates. The same kind of Saildrones used by the US Navy to scout the Persian Gulf have also been detained, if briefly, by the Iranian Navy. With such detentions comes the risk that data on the ship is compromised, and data collection tools figured out, making it easier for hostile forces to fool or evade the sensors in the future.

Still, the benefits of having a flexible, solar-powered robot ship outweigh such risks. Inspection of ports is routine until it isn’t, and with a robotic vessel there to scout first, humans can wait to act until they are needed, safely removed from their remote robotic companions.

Watch a little video of the COTEnergy Boat below:

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Earlier this month, Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries showed off a new tool for fighting against drones. With an enclosed cabin on top of a four-wheel ATV frame, the system mounts a high-energy laser in the back, alongside the power needed to make it work. It is part of the growing arsenal of counter-drone weapons, and one that fits into the expanded role and arsenal of Japan’s modern military.

The laser and ATV combination was on display at the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) Japan conference, which ran from March 15 through 17 outside Tokyo. The exhibition is a place for various arms makers from around the world to gather and showcase their wares to interested collaborators or governments. This year’s conference, the second Japan-hosted iteration, had 66 countries and 178 companies represented.

The system, while funded by Kawasaki, was made at the request of Japan’s Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Agency (ATLA), a rough analog of DARPA that looks to integrate new tech into Japan’s self-defense forces. On display, the laser system included a tracker, a high-energy laser, a gimbal to balance and hold the laser’s focus, and a 2 kilowatt power source. It has a range of just 100 meters or 328 feet for destroying drones, though it can track targets at up to 300 meters, or 984 feet. It was mounted on a Mule Pro-FX, a three-seat all terrain vehicle that retails for $15,000.

“The system tracks targets with an infrared camera, and laser beams cause instantaneous damage to UAVs and mortar shells. ATLA and Kawasaki have been testing it for this purpose, plus they are researching whether it can also intercept missiles,” reports Shephard Media.

A 2019 document from the Ministry of Defense outlined Japan’s vision for how to use new technology to improve its defense forces. Lasers, or directed energy weapons, are mentioned as a tool to intercept incoming missiles through precise targeting. These weapons are seen as part of a comprehensive suite of tools that utilize the electro-magnetic spectrum, a category that includes sensors for watching enemy signals, as well as jammers and high-powered microwaves that can interfere with or harm enemy electronics.

“High-power directed energy weapons must be realized from the standpoint of low reaction time countermeasures for accelerated aircraft and missiles as well as low cost countermeasures for miniature unmanned aircraft, mortar shells, and other large-scale, low cost threats,” reads a 2020 strategy document from ATLA. This document explicitly argues for the damage and destruction by high-powered lasers as their most salient points. Against missiles, uncrewed ships, and drones, especially smaller cheaper drones, lasers can be an invaluable asset.

What sets Kawasaki’s displayed laser vehicle apart from others is the power level. At just 2 kilowatts, the vehicle is attempting to fry drones with an amount of power roughly comparable to what it takes to run a dishwasher. Raytheon’s counter-drone laser, which Popular Science got to fire first-hand in October 2022, fires a 10 kilowatt beam. Other laser weapons, designed to quickly burn through incoming artillery rounds or missiles, can use power in the tens or even low hundreds of kilowatts.

Drones, especially the commercial kind that have become an essential part of how armies in Ukraine fight, are small, weak targets. A laser does not necessarily need a ton of power if it is going to burn through the more vulnerable parts of a quadcopter. Tracking tools, which let lasers stay focused on a target, can let a lower-powered laser burn through plastic and metal in the same time as a more powerful but less locked-on laser might.

While the laser at DSEI was displayed on the back of an ATV, it could be mounted on other vehicles, a situation where its power requirements could be an added bonus. As a tool for hunting down drones, limited range and power hinder function, but as a defensive system mounted on vehicles that might come under attack by drone, a smaller laser that sips power could be enough to disable a drone. Drones can be deadly threats on their own by dropping bombs, but they are also used as spotters for other weapons, like artillery. If the spotter is incapacitated and the convoy moves on, artillery are left to fire at where they think the vehicles are, rather than where they know their targets to be. 

“Japan will also reinforce the capability to respond to small UAVs with weapons including directed-energy weapons,” reads a defense strategy published December 2022. “By approximately ten years from now, Japan will reinforce its integrated air and missile defense capabilities by further introducing research on capability to respond to hypersonic weapons in the gliding phase and interception by non-kinetic means to deal with assets such as small UAVs.”

Lasers like this are the start of an effective counter-drone strategy, one explicitly framed as a beginning approach while developing more and different powerful systems. These could include high-powered lasers and high-powered microwaves. As the threat from small drones has expanded, so too are the tools explored by countries to stop all manner of aerial threat, including small drones.

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A jet engine is a highly complex piece of equipment with a straightforward job: to give an airplane the thrust it needs to fly. Anyone who has felt themselves pushed back slightly in their seat as an aircraft speeds down the runway and then takes to the sky can likely intuitively sense what’s happening. The turbofan engines beneath each wing are inhaling the air, and accelerating it out the back, producing thrust.

While the high-level description might sound simple, the process within the engine itself is both complex and fascinating. Here’s what to know about an engine’s inner workings, where air is compressed, fuel is ignited, and temperatures become extremely hot. 

“There’s a big fan on the front—that actually provides about 90 percent of the thrust,” says Christopher Lorence, the chief engineer at GE Aerospace. 

Consider a GE90 engine, which hangs below the wings of planes like the Boeing 777. The company says that one of those will suck in about 3,600 pounds of air every second when a plane is taking off. 

The fan slurps in the air, and as the air travels through the engine, a proportionally smaller amount travels down one path through the center of the machine—its core. But most of the air bypasses the core, skipping it and going straight out the back. It’s the air that does not go through the core that does most of the work when it comes to propelling the aircraft. 

The difference between the volume of air that bypasses the core versus the air that goes through the core is known as the engine’s bypass ratio. Engine makers want the ratio to be high for peak efficiency. “The most efficient way to do it is to take a lot of air and increase the pressure a little,” says Lorence. “The early engines had a very low bypass ratio—and so what they were doing is, most of the air was going through the core, a limited [amount of] air was going through the bypass, and it was going through it at pretty high velocity.” But today, turbofan engines have very high bypass ratios.

[Related: Let’s talk about how planes fly]

An exception here are the jet engines on military aircraft, like fighter jets, which lack the large bypass ratios that engines on commercial planes have. These aircraft have other priorities besides pure fuel efficiency—like the ability to be highly maneuverable, hit supersonic speeds, and keep a low profile—and their engines, which are closely integrated with the body of the aircraft, can also make use of afterburners. 

The first part of the core is the compressor stage, where the air is—you guessed it—compressed. The air becomes more dense, and it heats up. “There’s many stages of compressor blades, which are rotating, and compressor vanes, which are static, and the air is sort of progressively squeezed and squeezed and squeezed as those compressor blades get smaller and smaller and smaller,” says Booth. 

[Related: The illuminating tech inside night vision goggles, explained]

The air, of course, doesn’t want to be compressed; it takes work to make that happen. “It’s basically like you’re trying to brush water uphill,” Booth explains. 

Then, after the compressor stage, comes the combustor. Jet fuel ignites and heats up the air even more. GE’s Lorence says that if the temperature of the air is around 1,200 to 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit at the tail end of the compressor, it could get as hot as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit or so after going through the combustor. For comparison, lava from a volcano in Hawaii tends to be in the neighborhood of 2,140 degrees. 

The scorching air that departs the combustor is, amazingly, “higher than the melting point of the turbine blades that follow it,” says Lorence. “We actually have to pump air through those blades to keep them from melting.” That relatively cooler air comes from the compressor stage. Rolls-Royce also does something similar to prevent the blades in its turbine from melting.  

[Related: How high do planes fly? It depends on if they’re going east or west.]

And just like engine makers want a large bypass ratio, they also want the engine to be very hot inside. “The hotter you make that temperature, the more efficient that core operates,” Lorence says. 

Turbines in the core harvest energy

After the air is superheated, it has an important job to do before it can clock out for the weekend and relax: spin some turbines. In a General Electric engine, there are two turbines—a high-pressure turbine and a low-pressure turbine. “You have a bunch of air that’s got a lot of energy in it,” says Lorence. “The reason you’ve done all that is so that the energy can be released through these turbine stages.” 

Each of those two turbines has a specific task. First, the high-pressure turbine “takes that energy and spins the compressor, which basically runs the core,” says Lorence. “And then in the low-pressure turbine, it takes that energy and spins that shaft, which spins the fan [in the front of the engine].”

In Roll-Royce’s Trent engines, like those on Airbus A350s, there’s also an intermediate-pressure turbine, in between the high- and low-pressure turbines. In that case, those first two turbines make the compressor work, and the final one powers the large fan blades in the front. 

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On March 8, in the ocean between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, the US Navy tested out a new drone. Called the Aerovel Flexrotor, it rests on a splayed tail, and boasts a powerful rotor just below the neck of its bulbous front-facing camera pod. The tail-sitting drone needs very little deck space for takeoff or landing, and once in the sky, it pivots and flies like a typical fixed-wing plane. It joins a growing arsenal of tools that are especially useful in the confined launch zones of smaller ship decks or unimproved runways.

The March flights took place as part of the International Maritime Exercise 2023, billed as a multinational undertaking involving 7,000 people from across 50 nations. Activities in the exercise include working on following orders together, maritime patrol, countering naval mines, testing the integration of drones and artificial intelligence, and work related to global health. It is a hodgepodge of missions, capturing the multitude of tasks that navies can be called upon to perform.

This deployment is at least the second time the Flexrotor has been brought to the Persian Gulf by the US Navy. In December 2022, a Coast Guard ship operating as part of a Naval task force in the region launched a Flexrotor. This flight was part of an event called Digital Horizon, aimed at integrating drones and AI into Navy operations, and it included 10 systems not yet used in the region.

“The Flexrotor can support intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions day and night using a daylight or infrared camera to provide a real-time video feed,” read a 2022 release from US Central Command. The release continued: “In addition to providing ISR capability, UAVs like the Flexrotor enable Task Force 59 to enhance a resilient communications network used by unmanned systems to relay video footage, pictures and other data to command centers ashore and at sea.”

Putting drones on ships is hardly new. ScanEagles, a scout-drone used by the US Navy since 2005, can be launched from a rail and landed by net or skyhook. What sets the Flexrotor apart is not that it is a drone on a ship, but the fact that it requires a minimum of infrastructure to make it usable. This is because the drone is a tail-sitter.

What is a tail-sitter?

There are two basic ways to move a heavier-than-air vehicle from the ground to the sky: generate lift from spinning rotors, or generate lift from forward thrust and fixed wings. Helicopters have many advantages, needing only landing pads instead of runways, and they can easily hover in flight. But helicopters’ aerodynamics limit cruising and maximum speeds, even as advances continue to be made. 

Fixed wings, in turn, need to build speed and lift off on runways, or find another way to get into the sky. For rail-launched drones like the ScanEagle, this is done with a rail, though other methods have been explored.

Between helicopters and fixed-wing craft sit tiltrotors and jump-jets, where the the thrust (from either rotors/propellers or ducted jets) changes as the plane stays level in flight, allowing vertical landings and short takeoffs. This is part of what DARPA is exploring through the SPRINT program.

Tail-sitters, instead, involve the entire plane pivoting in flight. In effect, they look almost like a rocket upon launch, narrow bodies pointed to pierce the sky, before leveling out in flight and letting the efficiency of lift from fixed wings extend flight time and range. (Remember the space shuttle? It was positioned like a tail-sitter when it blasted off, but landed like an airplane, albeit without engines.) Early tail-sitters suffered because they had to accommodate a human pilot through all those transitions. Modern tail-sitter drones, like the Flexrotor or Australia’s STRIX, instead have human operators guiding the craft remotely from a control station. Another example is Bell’s APT 70.

The advantage to a tail-sitting drone is that it only needs a clearing or open deck space as large as its widest dimension. In the case of the Flexrotor, that means a rotor diameter of 7.2 feet, with at least one part of the launching surface wide enough for the drone’s nearly 10-foot wingspan. By contrast, the Seahawk helicopters used by the US Navy have a rotor diameter of over 53 feet. Ships that can already accommodate helicopters can likely easily add tail-sitter drones, and ships that couldn’t possibly fit a full-sized crewed helicopter might be able to take on and operate a drone scout.

In use, the Flexrotor boasts a cruising speed of 53 mph, a top speed of 87 mph, and potentially more than 30 hours of continuous operation. After takeoff, the Flexrotor pivots to fixed-wing flight, and the splayed tail retracts into a normal tail shape, allowing the craft to operate like a regular fixed-wing plane in the sky. Long endurance drones like these allow crews to pilot them in shifts, reducing pilot fatigue without having to land the drone to switch operators. Aerovel claims that Flexrotors have a range of over 1,265 miles at cruising speeds. In the air, the drone can serve as a scout with daylight and infrared cameras, and it can also work as a communications relay node, especially valuable if fleets are dispersed and other communications are limited.

As the Navy looks to expand what it can see and respond to, adding scouts that can be stowed away and then launched from cleared deck space expands the perception of ships. By improving scouting on the ocean, the drones make the vastness of the sea a little more knowable.

Watch a video below:

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Ikea announced a new company milestone last week—100 drones tasked with stock inventory responsibilities are now buzzing around its European warehouses during store off-hours. The iconic home furnishing giant first revealed its partnership with the indoor drone fleet developer Verity in 2020.  The duo initially deployed aerial workers in a handful of Switzerland locales, to self-described “great” results. Now, however, the drones can also be found in 16 locations across the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Slovenia, Croatia, and Belgium.

[Related: New robot moves Amazon towards increased warehouse automation.]

According to Ingka, the legal entity overseeing most Ikea locations, the drones help improve stock accuracy and maintain up-to-date item availability for both physical and online retail. At night and while locations are closed, the Verity drones take off from their charging stations to sweep warehouse pallets, capturing video, images, and even 3D depth scans of items at near-perfect accuracy. They then return to charging stations, and download the data for managers to review. In theory, their existence in the workplace provides a more ergonomic environment for the drones’ human co-workers, since it decreases the need for them to manually confirm each pallet of products. Watch a video of the branded blue-and-yellow drones in action below:

Verity was founded in 2014 by Raffaello D’Andrea around two years after Amazon acquired his previous tech company, Kiva Systems, for $775 million. Kiva was promptly renamed to Amazon Robotics, and provided the foundation for the retail empire’s ongoing automation efforts across its massive warehouse landscape—efforts which critics argue have eradicated human job opportunities. Verity has also provided drone fleets to companies like Samsung, DSV Transport, and Maersk.

As The Verge also noted on Monday, Ikea hasn’t limited their high-tech approaches to just drones. Previously, the company began experimenting with an automated racking system to eliminate the “majority” of a California location’s forklifts. Elsewhere, everyone from massive companies like Google, to smaller startups are attempting to bring commercial drones into their everyday ecosystems.

[Related: Drones and droids could make deliveries from the sky.]

“Introducing drones and other advanced tools – such as, for example, robots for picking up goods – is a genuine win-win for everybody. It improves our co-workers’ wellbeing, lowers operational costs, and allows us to become more affordable and convenient for our customers,” Tolga Öncu, Head of Retail at Ingka, said in their announcement last week.

In a statement provided to PopSci via email, an Ikea spokesperson explained the drones allow human workers “to have more time to meet our customers on the shopfloor instead of tracking inventory manually.” When asked if these drones could eventually replace human labor, they explained that employees are still needed to review the fleets’ collected data. “As we embrace automation in many areas of our business, we are committed to do it responsibly and always take care of our co-workers,” they wrote.

If nothing else, their drones provide more concrete advancements than, say, locking oneself away in a Martian landscape simulator to help spur new furniture designs.

Updated with a statement from Ikea.

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The Air Force is asking Congress for 1,000 new combat drones to accompany planes into battle. The announcement, from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, came March 7, as part of a broader push for Air Force modernization. It fits into a broader plan to combine crewed fighters, like F-35s and new designs, with drone escorts, thus expanding the scope of what the Air Force can do without similarly increasing the demand for new pilots.

Kendall spoke at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. The speech focused on what the Air Force can and must do to remain competitive with China, which Kendall referred to as “our packing challenge.” While the Air Force can outline its expectations and desires in a budget, it is ultimately up to Congress to set the funding sought by the military. That means Kendall’s call for 1,000 drones isn’t just an ask, it has to be a sales pitch.

“The [Department of the Air Force] is moving forward with a family of systems for the next generation of air dominance, that will include both the NGAD platform and the introduction of uncrewed collaborative aircraft to provide affordable mass and dramatically increased cost-effectiveness,” said Kendall. By NGAD (Next Generation Air Dominance), Kendall was referring to a concept for future fighter planning, where a new crewed fighter plane heads a family of systems that includes escort drones. One of these potential drone escorts is called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA.

This Collaborative Combat Aircraft fits with the broader plans of the Air Force to augment and expand the number of aircraft it has by having drones fly as escorts and accessories to crewed and piloted fighters. These fighters include the existing and expanding inventory of F-35A stealth jets, as well as the next generation of planes planned for the future.

Kendall broke down the math like this: “[General Charles Q. Brown] and I have recently given our planners a nominal quantity of collaborative combat aircraft to assume for planning purposes. That planning assumption is 1,000 CCAs,” said Kendall. “This figure was derived from an assumed two CCAs per 200 NGAD platforms [equalling 400 drones], an additional two for each of 300 F-35s, for a total of a thousand.” 

One reason for the Air Force to pursue drone escorts is because they can expand what the planes can do, without requiring another expensive craft of a vulnerable pilot. Stealth on an F-35A jet fighter protects the pilot and the $78 million plane. If a drone can fly alongside a plane, help it on missions, and costs a fraction of the crewed fighter, then it may make more sense for the drones to be, if not disposable, somewhat more expendable.

Previously, the Air Force referred to this as “attritable,” a term coined to suggest the drones could be lost to combat (attrition), without emphasizing that the drones were built specifically to be lost. In Kendall’s remarks on March 7, he instead used the term “affordable mass,” which emphasizes the way these drones will increase the numbers of aircraft an enemy has to defeat in order to stop an aerial attack.

“One way to think of CCAs is as remotely controlled versions of the charting pods, electronic warfare pods, or weapons now carried under the wings of our crude aircraft. CCAs will dramatically improve the performance of our crude aircraft and significantly reduce the risk to our pilots,” said Kendall.

In this way, a drone escort flying alongside a fighter is just an extra set of bombs, cameras, missiles, or jammers, all in a detached body flying as an escort to the fighter. In 2017, the Air Force announced an attritable drone escort, using the Valkyrie built for the task by target drone maker Kratos. 

The first Valkyrie is already a museum piece, but it represents a rough overview of the kind of cost and functions the Air Force may want in a Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Priced at around $2 million, a Valkyrie is not cheap, but it is much cheaper than the fighters it would fly alongside. As designed, it can fly for up to 3,400 miles, with a top speed of 650 mph. That would make it capable of operating in theater with a fighter, with escorts likely delivered to bases by ground transport and then synched up with the fighters before missions.

Getting drones to fly alongside crewed planes has been part of the Air Force’s Loyal Wingman program, which shifts the burden of flying onto onboard systems in the drone. Presently, drones used by the US, like the MQ-9 Reaper that crashed into the Black Sea, are labor-intensive, crewed by multiple shifts of remote pilots. To make drones labor-saving, they will need to work similar to a human compassion, receiving commands from a squad leader but independent enough to execute those commands without human hands on the controls. The Air Force is experimenting with AI piloting of jets, including having artificial intelligence fly a crewed F-16 in December.

Whatever shape these loyal wingmates end up taking, by asking for them in bulk, Kendall is making a clear bid. The age of fighter pilots in the Air Force may not be over, but for the wars of the future, they will be joined by robots as allies.

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For years, a drone company called Zipline has made deliveries using a fairly traditional approach: An uncrewed aircraft with an 11-foot wingspan drops off a package with a parachute, and it descends to the ground thanks to the predictable presence of gravity. Today, the company announced that they’re working on a new system for drone delivery that’s a bit more tech-forward: They plan to use what they refer to as a “droid” to place a package directly on a target, like a table in a customer’s backyard. 

The goal of using this so-called droid—more on how it all works in a moment—is to be able deposit the delivery in a precise way, even if there’s wind. The company refers to this new approach as platform two. (Platform one refers to the parachute approach, which uses a plane that can fly forward but cannot hover in place.) Perhaps, speculates the company’s head of engineering, Jo Mardall, the arrival of a package with this new system will even be a surprise to a customer. 

“The core of platform two is really to enable ultra-precise, silent delivery to homes,” Mardall, a former Tesla engineering director, tells PopSci. “I like to think, for platform two, that I might be standing at my back door, turn around to chat to my kids for a second in the kitchen, and I turn back around and there’s a package that’s been delivered to my deck behind me, and I don’t know how it got there.”

During an event today, the company’s CEO, Keller Cliffton, said that the objective for this new home delivery system is for the item to arrive in a way that feels “like teleportation.” 

The way the new airborne system works is a bit like a flying mechanical turducken—that infamous culinary creation that involves a chicken within a duck within a turkey. In this case, the package being delivered (the metaphorical chicken) is within the droid unit (the duck), which is nestled into the aircraft itself (the turkey). 

The new aircraft has four small rotors and a propeller in the back that can tilt to help it hover. The aircraft makes the delivery from some 300 feet, hovering above the target area. Then, the droid lowers on a tether towards, say, a picnic table. “It lands very briefly—for a second or two,” Mardall says. During that brief landing, doors on the belly of the droid open to deposit the package. 

After the delivery, the droid winches back up to the main drone, which is waiting above, and then the aircraft continues on its journey. The aspect of this new approach that is designed to allow for better precision, even during windy days, are thrusters on the droid itself. These thrusters—one electric fan in the rear, and two additional ones in other locations—can blow air to help the mini-drone, which Mardall says is about the size of a gym bag, maneuver. 

[Related: Getting rescued by helicopter has risks. This gadget could make it safer.]

“When [it’s] coming down on the winch, if it’s a windy day, we need to have a system to control the location of that droid,” he says. That’s where the three thrusters come into play. “Those thrusters mean that the Zip [the drone mothership above] is just carrying the weight, it’s not having to set the position.”

He adds that because the main drone remains at 300 feet above the target, the whole system is quiet. “This thing is barely audible—just sounds like the rustling of leaves in the trees,” he says. 

Aviation engineering typically involves tradeoffs, and this new system is no exception. Their gen-one drones, which resemble small airplanes with a wing, a v-shaped tail, and propellers in the back, have a range of about 50 miles. The new aircraft have the ability to hover and lower a droid, but unlike their predecessors, they have a range of just about 10 miles out and 10 miles back for dropping off an item and then returning from the same place it launched. Or, if the new drone is going on a one-way trip, traveling to a location where it can land and then charge, the range is 24 miles. “You don’t get to cheat the physics here—when you have to hover, hovering is more expensive from an energy point of view,” he says. 

The packages this new system can carry can weigh anywhere between 6 and 8 pounds. Mardall says that this year they will be testing the new system in California, and 2024 will see “a pilot delivering to real customers.” They’re aiming for it to be able to deliver items like meals-to-order, meaning that a Sweetgreen salad could theoretically arrive by droid onto a picnic table in someone’s backyard at some point in the future. The company also unveiled a logistics system that can be incorporated into the side of a building, allowing the drones to dock on the outside, and the droid to enter and exit through a small door for loading. 

Zipline isn’t alone in the market of delivering items from the sky. One competitor, Wing—from Google’s parent company, Alphabet—just announced a new AutoLoader system and what they’re calling the Wing Delivery Network. Wing’s drones also employ a tether to load and deliver the package, but they do not have a droid. 

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This post has been updated on March 16 to include video of the incident released by the US Department of Defense. The story was originally published on March 14, 2022.

At 7:03 am Central European Time on March 14, one of a pair of Russian Su-27 fighter jets flying over the Black Sea struck the propeller of an MQ-9 reaper drone piloted by the United States. According to US European Command, the strike against the propeller required the drone’s remote pilots to bring it down into international water. It is hardly the first takedown of a Reaper drone, nor is it even the first time Russian forces have caused the destruction of such a plane, but any confrontation between military aircraft of the world’s two foremost nuclear-armed states can understandably feel tense.

Since 2021, the United States has based MQ-9 Reaper drones in Romania, a NATO ally that borders both Ukraine and the Black Sea. These Reapers, as well as Reapers flown from elsewhere, were part of the overall aerial surveillance mission undertaken by the United States and NATO on the eve of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

What happened over the Black Sea?

The basics of the incident are as follows: “Our MQ-9 aircraft was conducting routine operations in international airspace when it was intercepted and hit by a Russian aircraft, resulting in a crash and complete loss of the MQ-9,” said US Air Force general James B. Hecker, commander of US Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa, in a statement about the incident published by US European Command. “In fact, this unsafe and unprofessional act by the Russians nearly caused both aircraft to crash. US and Allied aircraft will continue to operate in international airspace and we call on the Russians to conduct themselves professionally and safely.” (Watch video of the incident here.)

This is language that emphasizes the incident as a mistake or malfeasance by the two Russian Su-27 pilots. It is not, notably, a demand that the loss of a Reaper be met with more direct confrontation between the United States and Russia, even as the US backs Ukraine with supplies and, often, intelligence as it fights against the continued Russia invasion. In the years prior to Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine, Russian jets have harassed US aircraft over the Black Sea. It is a common enough occurrence that the think tank RAND has even published a study on what kind of signals Russia intends to send when it intercepts aircraft near but not in Russian airspace.

“Several times before the collision,” according to European Command, “the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner.”

Russia’s Ministry of Defence also released a statement on the incident, claiming that the Reaper was flying without a transponder turned on, that the Reaper was headed for Russian borders, and that the plane crashed of its own accord, without any contact with Russian jets.

In a press briefing the afternoon of March 14, Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder noted that the Russian pilots were flying near the drone for 30 to 40 minutes before the collision that damaged the Reaper. Asked if the drone was near Crimea, a peninsula on the Black Sea that was part of Ukraine until Russia occupied it in 2014, Ryder said only that the flight was in international waters and well clear of any territory of Ukraine. Ryder also did not clarify when asked about whether or not the Reaper was armed, saying instead that it was conducting an ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) mission.

The New York Times reported that the drone was not armed, citing a military official.

What is an MQ-9 Reaper?

The Reaper is an uncrewed aerial vehicle, propelled by a pusher prop. It is made by General Atomics, and is an evolution of the Predator drone, which started as an unarmed scout before being adapted into a lightly armed bomber. The Reaper entered operational service in October 2007, and it was designed from the start to carry weapons. It can wield nearly 4,000 pounds of explosives, like laser guided bombs, or up to eight Hellfire missiles.

They measure 36 feet from tip to tail and have a wingspan of 66 feet, and in 2020 cost about $18 million apiece. 

To guide remote pilots for takeoff and landing, Reapers have a forward-facing camera, mounted at the front of their match-shaped airframes. To perceive the world below, and offer useful real-time video and imaging, a sensor pod complete with laser target designator, infrared camera, and electro-optical cameras pivots underneath the front of the drone, operated by a second crew member on the ground: the sensor operator. 

Reapers can stay airborne at altitudes of up to 50,000 feet for up to 24 hours, with remote crews guiding the plane in shifts and trading off mid-flight. The Reaper’s long endurance, not just hours in the sky but its ability to operate up to 1,150 miles away from where it took off, lets it watch vast areas, looking for relevant movement below. This was a crucial part of how the US fought the counter insurgency in Iraq and especially Afghanistan, where armed Reapers watched for suspected enemies proved an enduring feature of the war, to mixed results.

While Reapers have been used for well over a decade, they have mostly seen action in skies relatively clear of hostile threats. A Reaper’s top speed is just 276 mph, and while its radar can see other aircraft, the Su-27 air superiority fighter can run laps around it at Mach 2.35. In seeking a future replacement for Reapers, the US Air Force has stated an intention that these planes be able to defend themselves against other aircraft.

Have drones like the Reaper been shot down before?

The most famous incident of a US drone shoot-down is the destruction of an RQ-4 Global Hawk by Iran in June 2019. This unarmed surveillance drone was operating in the Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz, a highly trafficked waterway that borders Iran on one side and the Arabian Peninsula on the other. Iran claimed the Global Hawk was shot down within Iran’s territorial waters; the United States argued instead that the drone was operating in international waters. While the crisis did not escalate beyond the destruction of the drone, it was unclear at the time that this incident would end calmly.

Reapers have been shot down by militaries including the US Air Force. In 2009, US pilots lost control of an MQ-9 Reaper over Afghanistan, so a crewed fighter shot it down proactively before it crashed into another country.

In 2017 and again in 2019, Houthi insurgent forces in Yemen shot down US Reapers flying over the country. Reapers have also been lost to jamming, when the signals between operators and drone were obstructed or cut, as plausibly happened to a Reaper operated by the Italian military over Libya in 2019.

Ultimately, the March 14 takedown of the Reaper by Russian fighters appears to be part of the larger new normal of drones as a part of regular military patrols. Like with the US destruction of a surveillance balloon in the Atlantic, the most interesting lesson is less what happened between aircraft in the sky, and more what is discovered by whoever gets to the wrecked aircraft in the water first.

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DARPA is inviting designers to reimagine aircraft that can fly fast and take off and land without runways. Earlier this month, DARPA announced an upcoming “Proposers Day,” to be held on March 23, when the Pentagon’s blue sky projects wing will offer information to designers and companies about an initiative it calls SPRINT, which stands for the SPeed and Runway INdependent Technologies (SPRINT) X-Plane Demonstrator program. In 42 months, or three and a half years, DARPA hopes to have a demonstration flight of a new plane through the program.

As the name suggests, SPRINT is looking for a fast aircraft, or at least a plane capable of going fast over short stretches. The program is specifically seeking to develop an aircraft that can cruise at 400 knots, or 460 mph. That’s well below the cruising speed of a fighter like the F-16, though it’s much faster than the cruising speed of Black Hawk helicopters, which might be the more relevant consideration. That’s because the other aspect of SPRINT is that the aircraft should be able to hover in austere environments, like fields or deserts, without the specific paved infrastructure of a runway or a helipad.

“The objective of the SPRINT program is to design, build, certify and fly an X-plane to demonstrate enabling technologies and integrated concepts necessary for a transformational combination of aircraft speed and runway independence for the next generation of air mobility platforms,” reads DARPA’s announcement.

While the open sky is vast, runways remain one of the more demanding parts of the infrastructure of flight. Once built, a runway is relatively easy to repair after an attack, provided no planes were destroyed at the time of incoming bombs and missiles. But clearing the space for a runway and hangars, as well as maintaining crew and planes, creates a durable target visible from space. As the United States war planners explore options should a war break out in the Pacific region, the known and fixed locations of existing runways could leave aircraft vulnerable to surprise attack. Even without the surprise, once planes are in the air, they will need a runway to land, and losing that surface can lead to, at best, harsh landings on unprepared ground, which damage the plane and risk the pilot.

[Related: Bell wants to soup up tilt-rotor aircraft by adding jet engines]

DARPA announced SPRINT on March 1. The shape of the new vehicle is undetermined, reported Patrick Tucker of Defense One. “It could be a new form of helicopter, or perhaps a vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft that might fly even faster.” Tucker also noted that the director of DARPA “deliberately avoided calling the program a vertical-lift effort, and an accompanying slide displayed two artist’s concepts that were decidedly unhelicopter-like.”

Helicopters, of course, have long been the most reliable form of vertical takeoff, though their design comes with major constraints on speed and efficiency. Matching the runway independence of a helicopter with the speed and endurance of fixed-wing flight is a problem the military has tried to solve for decades. The most successful variants have followed one of two paths. There’s tilt-rotor planes, like the V-22 Osprey and upcoming V-280 Valor, which have high-mounted wings, and rotors that pivot parallel to the ground to take off, before turning to a different angle for forward flight. The Osprey can land in austere environments, provided there is clearance for the rotors, though in normal conditions the planes are flown and landed at dedicated pads on military bases.

The other path, seen in the Harrier Jump Jet and the F-35B stealth fighter, uses ducted exhaust from a jet engine to lift the plane into the sky, before pivoting to forward thrust. This tremendous amount of heat and power have caused speculation, especially in the development of the F-35, that the engine would destroy all but the most specially prepared landing pads. 

Neither of the designs shown by DARPA commit to these traditional Vertical Takeoff or Landing (VTOL) approaches. One, a silver-glossy image of a plane with jet-like ducts and folded blades on nacelles, has wings positioned like a tiltrotor. In the high-flight concept art, the engines used for vertical lift are drawn dormant, letting even more powerful systems propel the plane through the sky. The V-22 Osprey has a cruising speed of 310 knots, while the V-280 Valor has one just over 280 knots. Both planes have higher top speeds for, er, sprints, but getting to faster cruising speeds likely means ditching rotor engines as the primary form of propulsion, even if they can tilt.

In DARPA’s other concept drawing, the image appears as a rendering of a flying wing, reminiscent of the B-2 or B-21 bombers, but with a V-shaped tail. The engines are even more suggested than shown here, with space for ducted fans or rotors to provide vertical lift in the vehicle’s body, while jet intakes suggest means of forward propulsion. 

Such concept art is a type of vision board for what DARPA is trying to accomplish. Getting a new kind of plane that can fly without runways, helipads, or other external infrastructure could expand where planes operate. Ensuring that the plane flies fast could make it useful for more tasks than those already performed by helicopters, expanding the scope of what the military might do. And, ultimately, DARPA’s mission is not to design finished products—it is to explore new spaces, trusting that once the hurdle of technological demonstration is accomplished, others will figure out how to bend that new technology into useful form.

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Wing, the drone-delivery subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has just revealed a new device called the AutoLoader that brings the company a step closer to its vision of wide-spread, affordable, drone-powered, last-mile delivery. The AutoLoader will allow delivery drones to collect packages from an automated curb-side device that can be situated in an unused parking spot. The device, which enables a drone to collect a package without landing or much human intervention, will mean that drones no longer have to return to a central hub after each trip as part of the company’s new Wing Delivery Network.

Over the past few years, Wing has proved to be one of Alphabet’s most interesting moonshots. It now operates commercial drone delivery services in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in Texas, as well as in Finland and Australia, where customers can order small products, groceries, and take-away food from local shops using an app. According to Wing, it has “moved as many as one thousand packages per day in a delivery region of more than 100,000 people.”

While an impressive feat, Wing is limited by how it currently operates. When a customer orders something, a package is prepared by staff and loaded onto a drone waiting outside on a charging pad. It then flies to the customer at speeds of up to 65 mph, giving it a six-mile range and maximum of six-minute delivery time, before dropping off its package using a tether and returning to its base. It works as a proof of concept, but as a system, it doesn’t offer a lot of opportunity for growth or scale. 

Wing’s AutoLoader and Wing Delivery Network aim to solve these problems. The AutoLoader is designed to work with a store’s existing curb-side pickup workflow, and means that packages don’t have to come from a single drone-supported location. Instead, staff at the store will be able to load a package into the AutoLoader where one of Wing’s aircraft can collect it using its tether and drop it to a customer. Then, as long as it has enough battery life, the drone can collect another package from a different store, and so on and so on, until it needs to return to base to land and recharge. In a video introducing the setup, Wing CEO Adam Woodworth likened it to ride-sharing apps like Uber. In other words, instead of a hub-and-spoke model, this approach aims to link multiple stops together.

[Related: Check out Wing’s new delivery drone prototypes]

The AutoLoader and Wing Delivery Network are both part of Wing’s aim to have a delivery system capable of delivering millions of packages to millions of customers by mid-2024—and at a lower cost per delivery than ground transport, like cars, bikes, and scooters, can do for the fast delivery of small packages.

“The discussion in this industry has often been about building a great drone delivery service, but it hasn’t really been about building a delivery service,” Woodworth explains by Zoom. To him, “the drone part is the least important part.” 

If Wing is to succeed, it needs to go beyond the novelty of flying packages around and become a meaningful delivery business. On the same call, Jonathan Bass, head of Wing’s marketing and communications, says, “It’s not replacing ground delivery, but we strongly believe that, as part of a multimodal delivery environment, [Wing] can play a significant role in the fast delivery of small packages.”

And according to Woodworth, things are looking good. “We are now at the place where the technology is largely ready. [Wing’s] demonstrations in the different markets have shown that these are viable options and that people want to actually use the service, and the regulatory environments are at a place where that sort of scale and that sort of growth is feasible,” he says. “This is the time to go and push it over the finish line.”

The AutoLoader will likely roll out in Australia first, according to Woodworth, where Wing has its most mature commercial market. If it works there, Wing plans to scale and replicate it around the world. If it can do that, it might get its millions of packages to millions of customers.

Watch a short video about the new approach, below.

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Last week in Washington state, an airplane that appeared perfectly normal from the outside made a brief flight. On the left side of the plane was a standard engine, burning jet fuel. But on the right side was something radically different: an electric motor that got its power not from batteries, but from hydrogen stored inside the aircraft. 

While burning jet fuel creates carbon emissions and particulate matter pollution, in this case the hydrogen system produces water vapor and heat. It’s just one way that aircraft makers are trying to make flying less bad for the planet: companies are working on planes that run off batteries, they are creating synthetic aviation fuel, and in this case, they are leveraging hydrogen fuel cells. 

“This is certainly the biggest aircraft to have ever flown on hydrogen fuel cells,” boasts Mark Cousin, the chief technical officer of Universal Hydrogen, the company behind the experimental aircraft. 

Here’s how the system works: While the left side of the plane stored its jet fuel in the wing like a typical aircraft, the hydrogen for the electric motor on the right wing was stored in tanks, in a gaseous form, in the back of the plane. “You simply can’t fit hydrogen in the wing of an airplane,” Cousin says. “It was taking up probably about a third of the fuselage length.” 

[Related: Watch this sleek electric plane ace its high-speed ground test]

The hydrogen travels up to the right wing, which is where the magic happens. There, in the nacelle hanging off the wing where the motor is, the hydrogen combines with compressed air (the air enters the equation thanks to the two inlets you can see near the motor on the right wing) in stacks of fuel cells. The system uses six stacks of fuel cells, each of which is made up of hundreds of individual fuel cells. Those fuel cell stacks create the electricity that the motor needs to run. “A fuel cell is a passive device—it has no moving parts,” Cousin says. The juice it creates comes in DC form, so it needs to go through inverters to become the AC power the motor requires. 

When the plane flew last week, it was a type of hybrid: a regular engine burning jet fuel in the wing on the left side, and the electric motor on the right running off that hydrogen and air. “Once we hit cruise, we throttled back and we flew almost exclusively on the right-hand engine,” the pilot said, according to The Seattle Times. “It was silent.”

Usually holding around 50 people, the aircraft, a modified Dash 8-300, in this case had just three aboard for the test flight, which had a duration of some 15 minutes. It flew at an altitude of about 2,300 feet above the ground. “The aircraft did a couple loops around the airfield,” Cousin says. Then eventually it made a “very, very smooth landing.” 

While the aircraft stored its hydrogen in gaseous form in the tanks in the back, the company has plans to switch to a method that stores the hydrogen as a liquid, which occupies less space than the gaseous assembly and doesn’t weigh as much. Those tanks must be kept at very cold temperatures, and the liquid needs to be converted to a gas before it can be used in the fuel cells. While this type of liquid hydrogen setup still takes up more space than regular jet fuel does, it’s a better solution than storing hydrogen in gaseous form, he says. Their plan is to switch the same plane that just flew over to a liquid hydrogen system this year. 

In terms of trying to decarbonize the aviation industry—after all, it’s a sizable producer of carbon dioxide emissions—Cousin argues that hydrogen is the best approach. “We think that hydrogen fuel is really the only viable solution for short- and medium-range airplanes,” he says. It’s certainly not the only approach, though. In September of last year, a battery powered plane called Alice also made a first flight in Washington state, and other companies, like Joby Aviation and Beta Technologies, are working on small aircraft that are also battery electric. 

Universal Hydrogen isn’t alone in pursuing hydrogen as a means of propelling aircraft. In February of last year, Airbus said that it would use a special, giant A380 aircraft to test out hydrogen technology, and in November, unveiled plans for an electric engine that also runs off hydrogen fuel cells.

Watch a short video about the recent flight, below.

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Before the jet fuel that powers an aircraft’s engines can be burned, it begins its life in the ground as a fossil fuel. But the US military is exploring new ways of producing that fuel, synthetically, and on site, where it needs to be used. They’ve just announced a contract for as much as $65 million to Air Company, a Brooklyn-based company that has developed a synthetic fuel that doesn’t take its starting materials from the ground. 

In announcing the contract, the Department of Defense notes that it has an eye on both security concerns and the environment. Getting airplane fuel where it needs to go, the DoD notes, “often involves a combination of ships, tanker planes, and convoys.” And these same transport mechanisms, the military adds, can “become extremely vulnerable.” 

Here’s how the fuel works, why the military is interested, and what the benefits and drawbacks are of this type of approach. 

The chemistry of synthetic jet fuel 

This DOD initiative is called Project SynCE, which is pronounced “sense,” and clunkily stands for Synthetic Fuel for the Contested Environment. By contested environment, the military is referring to a space, like a battlefield, where a conflict can occur.

The building blocks of the fuel from Air Company involve hydrogen and carbon, and the process demands energy. “We start with renewable electricity,” says Stafford Sheehan, the CTO and co-founder of Air Company. That electricity, he adds, is used “to split water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, so we get green hydrogen.” 

But fuel requires carbon, too, so the company needs carbon dioxide to get that element. “For Project SynCE specifically, we’re looking at on-site direct-air capture, or direct ocean-capture technologies,” he says. But more generally, he adds, “We capture carbon dioxide from a variety of sources.” Currently, he notes, their source is CO2 “that was a byproduct of biofuel production.” 

So the recipe’s ingredients call for carbon dioxide, plus the hydrogen that came from water. Those elements are combined in a fixed bed flow reactor, which is “a fancy way of saying a bunch of tubes with catalysts,” or, even more simply, “tubes with rocks in them,” Sheehan says. 

[Related: Sustainable jet fuel is taking off with commercial airlines]

Jet fuel itself primarily consists of molecules—known as paraffins—made of carbon and hydrogen. For example, some of those paraffins are called normal paraffins, which is a straight line of carbons with hydrogens attached to them. There are also hydrocarbons present called aromatic compounds. 

“You need to have those aromatic compounds in order to make a jet fuel that’s identical to what you get from fossil fuels,” he says, “and it’s very important to be identical to what you get from fossil fuels, because all of the engines are designed to run on what you get from fossil fuels.”  

Okay, enough chemistry. The point is that this fuel is synthetically made, didn’t come out of the ground, and can be a direct substitute for the refined dinosaur juice typically used in aircraft. “You can actually make jet fuel with our process that burns cleaner as well, so it has fewer contrails,” he says. It will still emit carbon when burned, though.

Why the Department of Defense is interested 

This project involves a few government entities, including the Air Force and the Defense Innovation Unit, which acts as a kind of bridge between the military and the commercial sector. So where will they start cooking up this new fuel? “We plan to pair this technology with the other renewable energy projects at several joint bases, which include solar, geothermal, and nuclear,” says Jack Ryan, a project manager for the DIU, via email. “While we can’t share exact locations yet, this project will initially be based in the Continental US and then over time, we expect the decreasing size of the machinery will allow for the system to be modularized and used in operational settings.” 

Having a way to produce fuel in an operational setting, as Ryan describes it, could be helpful in a future conflict, because ground vehicles like tanker trucks can be targets. For example, on April 9, 2004, in Iraq, an attack known as the Good Friday Ambush resulted in multiple deaths; a large US convoy was carrying out an “emergency delivery of jet fuel to the airport” in Baghdad, Iraq, as The Los Angeles Times noted in a lengthy article on the incident in 2007. 

“By developing and deploying on-site fuel production technology, our Joint Force will be more resilient and sustainable,” Ryan says.

[Related: All your burning questions about sustainable aviation fuel, answered]

Nikita Pavlenko, a program lead at the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit organization, says that he is excited about the news. “It’s also likely something that’s still quite a ways away,” he adds. “Air Company is still in the very, very initial stages of commercialization.” 

These types of fuels, called e-fuels, for electrofuels, don’t come in large amounts, nor cheaply. “I expect that the economics and the availability are going to be big constraints,” he says. “Just based off the underlying costs of green hydrogen [and] CO2, you’re probably going to end up with something much more expensive than conventional fuel.” In terms of how much fuel they’ll be able to make synthetically, Ryan, of the DIU, says, “It will be smaller quantities to begin with, providing resiliency to existing fuel supply and base microgrids,” and then will grow from there. 

[Related: Airbus just flew its biggest plane yet using sustainable aviation fuel]

But these types of fuels do carry environmental benefits, Pavlenko says, although it’s important that the hydrogen they use is created through green means—from renewable energy, for example. The fuel still emits carbon when burned, but the benefits come because the fuel was created by taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the first place, or preventing it from leaving a smokestack. Even that smokestack scenario is environmentally appealing to Pavlenko, because “you’re just kind of borrowing that CO2 from the atmosphere—just delaying before it goes out in the atmosphere, rather than taking something that’s been underground for millions of years and releasing it.” (One caveat is down the line, there ideally aren’t smokestacks belching carbon dioxide that could be captured in the first place.) 

For its part, the Defense Innovation Unit says that they’re interested in multiple different ways of obtaining the carbon dioxide, but are most enthused about getting it from the air or ocean. That’s because those two methods “serve the dual purpose of drawing down CO2 from the air/water while also providing a feedstock to the synthetic fuel process,” says Matt Palumbo, a project manager with the DIU, via email. Palumbo also notes that he expects this period of the contract to last about two to five years, and thinks the endeavor will continue from there.

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A striking photo released on February 22 by the Department of Defense reveals a unique aerial scene: The image shows the Chinese surveillance balloon as seen from the cockpit of a U-2 spy plane on February 3, along with the pilot’s helmet, the aircraft’s wing, and even the shadow of the plane itself on the balloon. 

While the subject of the photo is the balloon, which was later shot down by an F-22, the aircraft that made the image possible is referenced in the image’s simple title: “U-2 Pilot over Central Continental United States.” Here’s a brief primer on that aircraft, a high-flying spy plane with a reputation for being tough to operate and land.  

The U-2 aircraft is designed to operate at “over 70,000 feet,” according to an Air Force fact sheet. That very high altitude means that it flies way higher than commercial jet aircraft, which tend to cruise at a maximum altitude in the lower end of the 40,000-foot range. 

The U-2’s ability to climb above 70,000 feet in altitude “makes it, I believe, the highest flying aircraft that we know about in the Air Force inventory,” says Todd Harrison, a defense analyst with Metrea, a firm formerly known as Meta Aerospace. “That becomes important for a mission like this, where the balloon was operating around 60,000 feet.”

[Related: Why the US might be finding more unidentified flying objects]

The plane features wings that stretch to a width of 105 feet, which is about three times longer than the wingspan of an F-16. “It is designed for very high altitude flight, and it has a very efficient wing—[a] very high aspect ratio wing, so that makes it very long and slender,” Harrison says. Long, slender wings are indeed more efficient than shorter, stubbier ones, which is one of the reasons NASA and Boeing are planning to have truss-supported skinny wings on an experimental commercial aircraft called the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator that would be more fuel efficient than existing models. 

On the U-2, those long wings, which are an asset in the sky, make for a real challenge when trying to get it back down on the ground. “This jet does not want to be on the ground, and that’s a real problem when it comes to landing it,” Matt Nauman, a U-2 pilot, said at an Air Force event in 2019 that Popular Science attended. To land it, “we’ll actually slow down, and that nose will continue to come up until the plane essentially falls out of the sky,” at just about two feet off the ground.  

[Related: Biden says flying objects likely not ‘related to China’s spy balloon program’]

A few other aspects figure into the landing. One is that the aircraft has what’s known as bicycle-style landing gear, as opposed to the tricycle-style landing gear of a regular commercial plane. In other words: It has just two landing gear legs, not three, so is tippy, side-to-side, as it touches down. To help with those landings, a chase car literally follows the plane down the runway as it’s coming in to land, with its driver—a U-2 pilot as well—in radio contact with the pilot in the plane to help them get the bird on the tarmac. This video shows that process. 

Because the plane is designed to fly at such high altitudes, the pilot dons a heavy space suit like this daredevil wore in 2012, while the cockpit is pressured to an altitude of about 14,000 or 15,000 feet. Having that gear on makes landing the plane even more challenging, as another U-2 pilot said in 2019, reflecting: “You’re effectively wearing a fishbowl on your head.” But having the suit means the pilot is protected from the thin atmosphere if the plane were to have a problem or the pilot had to eject.  

[Related: Everything you could ever want to know about flying the U-2 spy plane]

The point of the aircraft is to gather information. “It is used to spy, and collect intelligence on others,” says Harrison. “It has been upgraded and modernized over the years, with airframe modernization, obviously the sensors have gotten better and better.” The U-2 famously used to shoot photographs using old-school wet film with what’s called the Optical Bar Camera, and stopped doing so only in the summer of 2022. 

As for the recent photo of the surveillance balloon from the U-2, a reporter for NPR speculates that it was taken specifically “just south of Bellflower” Missouri, as did a Twitter user with the handle @obretix. 

“It’s a pretty incredible photo,” Harrison reflects. “It does show that the US was actively surveilling this balloon up close throughout its transit of the United States. It’s interesting that the U-2 pilot was actually able to capture a selfie like that while flying at that altitude.”

On February 6, a Popular Science sibling website, the War Zone, reported that the US had employed U-2 aircraft to keep tabs on the balloon. And on February 8, CNN reported before this photo’s official release that a “pilot took a selfie in the cockpit that shows both the pilot and the surveillance balloon itself,” citing US officials.

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Today, President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced that the country would suspend participation in New START, the last standing major arms control treaty between the country and the United States. Putin clarified that the suspension was not a withdrawal—but the suspension itself represents a clear deterioration of trust and nuclear stability between the countries with the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. 

Putin’s remarks precede by a few days the anniversary of the country’s invasion of Ukraine, an entirely chosen war that has seen some concrete Russian gains, while many of Russia’s biggest advances have been repulsed and overtaken. At present, much of the fighting is in the form of grinding, static warfare along trenches and defended positions in Ukraine’s east. It is a kind of warfare akin to the bloody fronts of World War I, though the presence of drones and long-range precision artillery lend it an undeniably modern character.

Those modern weapons, and the coming influx of heavy tanks from the United States and other countries to Ukraine, put Putin’s remarks in some more immediate context. While New START is specifically an agreement between the United States and Russia over nuclear arsenals, the decision to suspend participation comes against the backdrop of the entirely conventional war being fought by Russia against Ukraine, with US weapons bolstering the Ukrainian war effort.

A follow-up statement from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified that the country would still notify the United States about any launches of Intercontinental or Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs and SLBMs), and would expect the same in reverse, in accordance with a 1988 agreement between the US and the USSR. That suggests there is at least some ongoing effort to not turn a suspension of enforcement into an immediate crisis.

To understand why the suspension matters, and what future there is for arms control, it helps to understand the agreement as it stands.

What is New START?

New START is an agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation, which carries a clunky formal name: The Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. The short-form name, which is not really a true acronym, is instead a reference to START 1, or the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, was in effect from 1991 to 2009, and which New START replaced in 2011. New START is set to expire in 2026, unless it is renewed by both countries.

New START is the latest of a series of agreements limiting the overall size of the US and Russian (first Soviet) nuclear arsenals, which at one point each measured in the tens of thousands of warheads. Today, thanks largely to mutual disarmament agreements and the limits outlined by New START, the US and Russia have arsenals of roughly 5,400 and 6,000 warheads, respectively. Of those, the US is estimated to have 1,644 deployed strategic weapons, a term that means nuclear warheads on ICBMs or at heavy bomber bases, presumably ready to launch at a moment’s notice. Russia is estimated to have around 1,588 deployed strategic weapons.

As the Start Department outlines, the treaty limits both countries to 700 total deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. (Bombers are counted under the treaty in the same way as a missile with one warhead, though nuclear-capable bombers like the B-52, B-2, and soon to be B-21 can carry multiple warheads.) In addition, the treaty sets a limit of 1,550 nuclear warheads on deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments, as well as 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments

In its follow-up statement to the suspension of New START, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified it would stick to the overall cap on warheads and launch systems as outlined in the treaty.

What will change is the end of inspections, which have been central to the “trust but verify” structure of arms control agreements between the US and Russia for decades. The terms of New START allow both countries to inspect deployed and non-deployed strategic systems (like missiles or bombers) up to 10 times a year, as well as non-deployed systems up to eight times a year. These on-site inspections were halted in April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and their resumption is the most likely act threatened by this change in posture.

It is unclear, yet, if this suspension means the end of the treaty forever, though Putin taking such a step certainly doesn’t bode well for its continued viability. Should New START formally end, some analysts fear it may usher in a new era of nuclear weapons production, and a rapid expansion of nuclear arsenals.

While that remains a possibility, the hard limits of nuclear production, as well as decades of faded production expertise in both Russia and the United States, mean such a restart may be more intensive, in time and resources, than immediately feared. Both nations have spent the last 30 years working on production of conventional forces. Ending an arms control treaty over nuclear weapons would be a gamble, suggesting nuclear weapons are the only tool that can provide security where conventional arms have failed. 

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In December, a special fighter jet made multiple flights out of Edwards Air Force Base in California. The orange, white, and blue aircraft, which is based on an F-16, seats two people. A fighter jet taking to the skies with a human or two on board is not remarkable, but what is indeed remarkable about those December flights is that for periods of time, artificial intelligence flew the jet. 

As the exploits of generative AI like ChatGPT grip the public consciousness, artificial intelligence has also quietly slipped into the military cockpit—at least in these December tests.  

The excursions were part of a DARPA program called ACE, which stands for Air Combat Evolution. The AI algorithms came from different sources, including a company called Shield AI as well as the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Broadly speaking, the tests represent the Pentagon exploring just how effective AI can be at carrying out tasks in planes typically done by people, such as dogfighting. 

“In total, ACE algorithms were flown on several flights with each sortie lasting approximately an hour and a half,” Lt. Col. Ryan Hefron, the DARPA program manager for ACE, notes to PopSci via email. “In addition to each performer team controlling the aircraft during dogfighting scenarios, portions of each sortie were dedicated to system checkout.”

The flights didn’t come out of nowhere. In August of 2020, DARPA put artificial intelligence algorithms through their paces in an event called the AlphaDogfight Trials. That competition didn’t involve any actual aircraft flying through the skies, but it did conclude with an AI agent defeating a human flying a digital F-16. The late 2022 flights show that software agents that can make decisions and dogfight have been given a chance to actually fly a real fighter jet. “This is the first time that AI has controlled a fighter jet performing within visual range (WVR) maneuvering,” Hefron notes.

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

So how did it go? “We didn’t run into any major issues but did encounter some differences compared to simulation-based results, which is to be expected when transitioning from virtual to live,” Hefron said in a DARPA press release. 

Andrew Metrick, a fellow in the defense program at the Center for New American Security, says that he is “often quite skeptical of the applications of AI in the military domain,” with that skepticism focused on just how much practical use these systems will have. But in this case—an artificial intelligence algorithm in the cockpit—he says he’s more of a believer. “This is one of those areas where I think there’s actually a lot of promise for AI systems,” he says. 

The December flights represent “a pretty big step,” he adds. “Getting these things integrated into a piece of flying hardware is non-trivial. It’s one thing to do it in a synthetic environment—it’s another thing to do it on real hardware.” 

Not all of the flights were part of the DARPA program. All told, the Department of Defense says that a dozen sorties took place, with some of them run by DARPA and others run by a program out of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). The DOD notes that the DARPA tests were focused more on close aerial combat, while the other tests from AFRL involved situations in which the AI was competing against “a simulated adversary” in a “beyond-vision-range” scenario. In other words, the two programs were exploring how the AI did in different types of aerial contests or situations. 

Breaking Defense reported earlier this year that the flights kicked off December 9. The jet flown by the AI is based on an F-16D, and is called VISTA; it has space for two people. “The front seat pilot conducted the test points,” Hefron explains via email, “while the backseater acted as a safety pilot who maintained broader situational awareness to ensure the safety of the aircraft and crew.”

One of the algorithms that flew the jet came from a company called Shield AI. In the AlphaDogfight trials of 2020, the leading AI agent was made by Heron Systems, which Shield AI acquired in 2021. Shield’s CEO, Ryan Tseng, is bullish on the promise of AI to outshine humans in the cockpit. “I do not believe that there’s an air combat mission where AI pilots should not be decisively better than their human counterparts, for much of the mission profile,” he says. That said, he notes that “I believe the best teams will be a combination of AI and people.” 

One such future for teaming between a person and AI could involve AI-powered fighter-jet-like drones such as the Ghost Bat working with a crewed aircraft like an F-35, for example. 

It’s still early days for the technology. Metrick, of the Center for New American Security, wonders how the AI agent would be able to handle a situation in which the jet does not respond as expected, like if the aircraft stalls or experiences some other type of glitch. “Can the AI recover from that?” he wonders. A human may be able to handle “an edge case” like that more easily than software.

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Since February 4, United States aircraft have shot down four objects passing over North American skies. The first of these, a massive high-altitude surveillance balloon traced to China, meandered over the country for four days before becoming the first air-to-air kill for the high-end F-22 stealth jet fighter. The other three, however, have not yet been identified, except for their size, altitude, and ability to stay aloft seemingly on wind power alone.

President Joe Biden addressed the topic in remarks delivered today. “Last week, in the immediate aftermath of the incursion by China’s high altitude balloon, our military, through the North American Aerospace Defense command, so called NORAD, closely scrutinized our airspace, including enhancing our radar to pick up more slow-moving objects above our country and around the world,” he said. “In doing so they tracked three unidentified objects—one in Alaska, Canada, and over Lake Huron in the Midwest.” 

“They acted in accordance with established parameters for determining how to deal with unidentified aerial objects in US airspace,” he added. “At their recommendation, I gave the order to take down the three objects, due to hazards to civilian commercial air traffic, and because we could not rule out the surveillance risk of sensitive facilities.”

[Related: How high do planes fly? It depends on if they’re going east or west.]

Given the short timeline between the tracking of China’s high altitude balloon and the following shootdowns, expanding the aperture of existing sensors was the most expected way to widen what swaths of the sky could be observed. One effect of that is suddenly detecting objects previously unobserved. Notably, Biden highlighted that the newly found objects were slow-moving. NORAD’s sensors, for decades trained to track fast moving planes and missiles, are not calibrated by default to look for balloons, which drift through the sky.

“Our military, and the Canadian military, are seeking to recover the debris so we can learn more about these three objects,” said Biden. “We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were but nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country.”

Minutes before Biden gave his remarks, Aviation Week published a plausible explanation of the objects. The story notes that the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, a hobbyist club, had tracked a high-altitude pico balloon they had launched to the coast of Alaska at just under 40,000 feet on February 10. Predicted wind direction would have brought that balloon over the Yukon on February 11.

That, notes Aviation Week, was “the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an unidentified object of a similar description and altitude in the same general area.”

“Launching high-altitude, circumnavigational pico balloons has emerged only within the past decade,” continues the story. “At any given moment, several dozen such balloons are aloft, with some circling the globe several times before they malfunction or fail for other reasons. The launch teams seldom recover their balloons.”

While Biden did not name what the downed objects were, he said that the intelligence community’s most likely estimate was that these three objects were most likely balloons with ties to private companies, recreation, or research institutions.

“I want to be clear: We don’t have any evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky, we’re now just seeing more of them partially because of the steps we’ve taken to increase our radar, and we have to keep adapting to dealing with these challenges,” he said.

While the larger surveillance balloon from China was easier to track based on its mass alone, the existence of small, potentially hobbyist or commercial balloons riding high-altitude winds appears to come as something of a surprise. 

“In the U.S., academic and commercial balloons have to include transponders that let the FAA know where they are at all times,”Jeff Jackon, a US representative from North Carolina, shared in his notes on a congressional briefing with NORAD on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). “These UAPs did not appear to have transponders, and that was also a factor in the decision to shoot them down.”

Transponders are a key tool for larger aircraft, as they make air traffic visible to people in the sky and on the ground. For something as light as a hobbyist research balloon aiming at high altitude, the weight of a transponder and the batteries to power it could strain the craft. Finding a different solution, one that allows air traffic controllers and pilots to avoid such balloons, is a likely first step to ensuring the skies remain safe and the objects don’t go unidentified. 

Transponders wouldn’t solve the problem of balloons sent with malicious intent, but it does at least allow those with purely peaceful purposes to be affirmatively identified as safe. Biden outlined a set of policies to avoid shootdowns like those experienced this month. One improvement would be an accessible inventory of objects in the airspace above the US, kept up to date. Another would be improving the ability of the US to detect uncrewed objects, like small high-altitude balloons. Changing the rules for launching and maintaining objects would also help the US get hobbyist launches, like that from the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, on its radar, metaphorically and perhaps literally. Finally, Biden suggested the US work with other countries to set out better global norms for airspace.  

“We’re not looking for a new Cold War,” said Biden. “But we will compete, and we will responsibly manage that competition so it doesn’t veer into conflict.”

In the history of high-altitude surveillance from the last Cold War, efforts to spy by balloon and plane led to crisis. The rules and norms allowing countries to share space, instead, allowed countries to keep spying on each other, while also fostering tremendous economic and scientific developments alongside the spycraft.

Watch the address, below:

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Why spend all that time building and fine tuning robots that mimic birds when you can just…stuff robots in dead birds’ bodies? It’s hardly that simple, but  a recent project courtesy of Mostafa Hassanalian and their fellow New Mexico Tech colleagues put the peculiar idea to the test.

The team, who presented their work in late January at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ SciTech Forum, designed new systems reliant on taxidermy bird parts and artificial wing setups to mirror their (formerly living) avian inspirations. As New Scientist also highlighted on Tuesday, Hassanalian’s group technically built two dead bird bots—one fusing artificial body parts with an actual pheasant’s head and feathers, as well as a mechanical body combined with real pigeon wings.

[Related: Watch this bird-like robot make a graceful landing on its perch.]

The techno-taxidermy models, perhaps unsurprisingly, lag considerably behind their living counterparts’ maneuverability, speed, and grace. Currently, however, the feathery drones can glide, hover in place, and soar higher on hot thermal currents—just don’t expect them to do anything elegantly just yet, judging from video supplied to PopSci by Hassanalian.

The uncanniness of robot birds flying arount may not be much of an issue for the new designs’ potential usages, anyway. The research team’s paper notes that future models could hypothetically be used as “spy drones for military use,” although Hassanalian makes it clear in an email that this is far from its foremost goal of “developing a nature-friendly drone concept for wildlife monitoring.” Traditional drones are often disruptive to ecosystems due to issues such as sound and unfamiliarity, so developing quieter, natural-looking alternatives could help wildlife monitoring and research.

[Related: Reverse-engineered hummingbird wings could inspire new drone designs.]

Hassanalian also notes there are potential biological discoveries to be found in mimicking bird movement. For example, figuring out  how actual birds conserve energy while flying in V-formations or the role that feather colors and patterns may affect heat absorption and airflow.

Of course, any plans will require a bit more delving into the ethics and research guidelines for using deceased birds in future tinkerings. And before you ask—don’t worry. Hassanalian’s team worked with a nearby taxidermy artist to source the drones’ natural components. No real birds were physically harmed in the making of the drones. But it remains to be seen if any living animals will suffer psychologically from potentially seeing their cyborg cousins snapping spy photos of them one day.

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Blasting off into space poses huge demands on the brain and the rest of the body. Astronauts  must face the immense g-forces–or G’s–present during blast-off, while rapidly interpreting often conflicting sensory and visual stimuli, all while controlling a very complex vehicle at extreme speeds.

All in all, it requires a lot of multitasking and is incredibly taxing. Previous research has suggested that the brain may undergo changes to the structure and function of the brain following space flight and astronaut training, also known as neural plasticity.

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly.]

To better understand how the stresses of space travel affects the body, scientists are studying fighter pilots, since they can face similar physiological stresses during flight. Fighter pilots feel G forces (one “G” is equal to the force of gravity we all feel sitting on Earth, and pilots can experience as many as 9 Gs during flight) when a jet accelerates or turns quickly. During those maneuvers, their blood can drain away from their brains. To handle these moments, fighter pilots perform an anti-G exercise and wear special compression suits that prevents blood from pooling in the legs. If they don’t manage the Gs correctly, they could pass out and crash.

In a study published February 15 in the journal Frontiers in Physiology, researchers from the University of Antwerp in Belgium examined the brains of 10 F16 fighter pilots from the Belgian Air Force to learn more about what is happening to astronauts. 

“Fighter pilots have some interesting similarities with astronauts, such as exposure to altered g-levels, and the need to interpret visual information and information coming from head movements and acceleration (vestibular information),” said study co-author Floris Wuyts and head of the Lab for Equilibrium Investigations and Aerospace (LEIA) at the University of Antwerp, in a statement. “By establishing the specific brain connectivity characteristics of fighter pilots, we can gain more insight into the condition of astronauts after spaceflight.”

They conducted MRIs of the brains of 10 fighter pilots and a control group of 10 non-pilots to look at the functional brain connectivity in fighter pilots for the first time.

The scans revealed that pilots who had more flight experience had specific brain connectivity patterns in areas related to processing sensorimotor information—this included diminished  connectivity in certain areas of the brain that process sensorimotor information. According to the team, this could indicate that the brain is adapting to cope with the extreme conditions experienced during flight and changes in the brain occur with an increased number of flight hours. 

[Related: Two fighter pilots passed out over Nevada last year. Software saved them both.]

The experienced pilots had more complicated connectivity in frontal areas of the brain that process vestibular and visual information compared to their non-flying peers. These regions are likely involved in the huge cognitive demands when flying a complicated jet, such as processing multiple and occasionally conflicting stimuli at once and to prioritize the most important stimuli, such as reading cockpit instruments. 

“By demonstrating that vestibular and visual information is processed differently in pilots compared to non-pilots, we can recommend that pilots are a suitable study group to gain more insight into the brain’s adaptations toward unusual gravitational environments, such as during spaceflight,” said study co-author Wilhelmina Radstake, a researcher at LEIA, in a statement.

The findings in this study will help researchers better understand the effects of space flight on the brain and the team hopes to use it to create better pre-flight training programs for fighter pilots or astronauts.   

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How does an airplane stay in the air? Whether you’ve pondered the question while flying or not, it remains a fascinating, complex topic. Here’s a quick look at the physics involved with an airplane’s flight, as well as a glimpse at a misconception surrounding the subject, too. 

First, picture an aircraft—a commercial airliner, such as a Boeing or Airbus transport jet—cruising in steady flight through the sky. That flight involves a delicate balance of opposing forces. “Wings produce lift, and lift counters the weight of the aircraft,” says Holger Babinsky, a professor of aerodynamics at the University of Cambridge. 

“That lift [or upward] force has to be equal to, or greater than, the weight of the airplane—that’s what keeps it in the air,” says William Crossley, the head of the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University. 

Meanwhile, the aircraft’s engines are giving it the thrust it needs to counter the drag it experiences from the friction of the air around it. “As you’re flying forward, you have to have enough thrust to at least equal the drag—it can be higher than the drag if you’re accelerating; it can be lower than the drag if you’re slowing down—but in steady, level flight, the thrust equals drag,” Crossley notes.

[Related: How high do planes fly?]

“You can clearly feel the lift force,” Babinsky says. In this straightforward scenario, the air is hitting the bottom of your hand, being deflected downward, and in a Newtonian sense (see law three), your hand is being pushed upward. 

Follow the curve 

But a wing, of course, is not shaped like your hand, and there are additional factors to consider. Two key points to keep in mind with wings are that the front of a wing—the leading edge—is curved, and overall, they also take on a shape called an airfoil when you look at them in cross-section. 

[Related: How pilots land their planes in powerful crosswinds]

The curved leading edge of a wing is important because airflow tends to “follow a curved surface,” Babinsky says. He says he likes to demonstrate this concept by pointing a hair dryer at the rounded edge of a bucket. The airflow will attach to the bucket’s curved surface and make a turn, potentially even snuffing out a candle on the other side that’s blocked by the bucket. Here’s a charming old video that appears to demonstrate the same idea. “Once the flow attaches itself to the curved surface, it likes to stay attached—[although] it will not stay attached forever,” he notes.

With a wing—and picture it angled up somewhat, like your hand out the window of the car—what happens is that the air encounters the rounded leading edge. “On the upper surface, the air will attach itself, and bend round, and actually follow that incidence, that angle of attack, very nicely,” he says. 

Keep things low-pressure

Ultimately, what happens is that the air moving over the top of the wing attaches to the curved surface and turns, or flows downward somewhat: a low-pressure area forms, and the air also travels faster. Meanwhile, the air is hitting the underside of the wing, like the wind hits your hand as it sticks out the car window, creating a high-pressure area. Voila: the wing has a low-pressure area above it, and higher pressure below. “The difference between those two pressures gives us lift,” Babinsky says. 

This video depicts the general process well:

Babinsky notes that more work is being done by that lower pressure area above the wing than the higher pressure one below the wing. You can think of the wing as deflecting the air flow downwards on both the top and bottom. On the lower surface of the wing, the deflection of the flow “is actually smaller than the flow deflection on the upper surface,” he notes. “Most airfoils, a very, very crude rule of thumb would be that two-thirds of the lift is generated there [on the top surface], sometimes even more,” Babinksy says.

Can you bring it all together for me one last time?

Sure! Gloria Yamauchi, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center, puts it this way. “So we have an airplane, flying through the air; the air approaches the wing; it is turned by the wing at the leading edge,” she says. (By “turned,” she means that it changes direction, like the way a car plowing down the road forces the air to change its direction to go around it.) “The velocity of the air changes as it goes over the wing’s surface, above and below.” 

“The velocity over the top of the wing is, in general, greater than the velocity below the wing,” she continues, “and that means the pressure above the wing is lower than the pressure below the wing, and that difference in pressure generates an upward lifting force.”

Is your head constantly spinning with outlandish, mind-burning questions? If you’ve ever wondered what the universe is made of, what would happen if you fell into a black hole, or even why not everyone can touch their toes, then you should be sure to listen and subscribe to Ask Us Anything, a podcast from the editors of Popular Science. Ask Us Anything hits Apple, Anchor, Spotify, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Tuesday and Thursday. Each episode takes a deep dive into a single query we know you’ll want to stick around for.

This story has been updated. It was originally published in July, 2022.

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A plane drawing a white contrail line across a blue sky is clearly thousands of feet above the ground, but how high is it flying exactly? It turns out that the precise altitude an airliner has at any given point in the flight has to do with a variety of factors, such as the plane’s weight, the temperature and weather, what the pilot requests, a protocol involving what direction the plane is headed, and of course what air traffic control says to do. 

When it comes to aircraft altitudes, here’s what’s up. 

On another plane

“In most cases, airliners will fly in the middle 30,000s [in terms of feet],” says John Cox, a retired commercial airline pilot who now heads a consulting firm called Safety Operating Systems. “They may be as high as 40 to 41,000, but that’s relatively rare.” 

Tom Adcock, a retired air traffic controller and now the director of safety and technology for the labor union National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), gives a similar estimate, pegging most traffic as occurring in the “upper 30s” and some of it reaching altitudes of 41,000 or 43,000. A Boeing 757 can fly as high as 42,000 and a 767 at 43,000; 747-400s can go higher. Various aircraft types have different maximum service ceilings.

[Related: The illuminating tech inside night vision goggles, explained]

Controllers take into account the compass direction an aircraft is flying in when giving a pilot an altitude. Although altitudes like 38,000 and 39,000 are both even numbers, “38” and “39” are even and odd. Westbound flights get even numbers like 38,000 feet, while eastbound flights receive odd numbers like 39,000. That way, aircraft traveling in opposite directions have a built-in amount of vertical spacing between them. Aircraft heading northeast or southeast would still travel at an odd altitude, while northwest or southwest would be even. “There are exceptions to the rule,” says Cox, noting that hypothetically, if he was heading east at night and wanted 32,000 feet, he’d still request it. “Worse they can do is say no.” 

In a way, that odd-even system mirrors a pattern on the ground far below, where interstate highways historically received numbers that reflect their directions: Interstates that run east-west got even numbers (Route 80, for example), with the lowest numbers toward the south of the country, and the north-south interstates got odd numbers, with the lowest numbers beginning in the west (Route 5). Here’s more on that road number system.

Getting a better altitude 

A number of variables go into determining the precise altitude an aircraft occupies at any given time, and Cox says generally higher altitudes are better. “You want to be pretty much as high as you can,” he says. “The jet engines are more efficient at higher altitudes, and there’s less air resistance.” A pilot is incentivized to burn less fuel because they would prefer to conclude their flight with more fuel in reserve, rather than less, to give them more options in case of delays while airborne, Cox says. 

He says that higher-is-better rule of thumb holds true on brief hops, too. “You’d be amazed—even on short flights, the most [fuel] efficient way to do it is climb the airplanes up to high altitude, pull the power back, and then start back down,” he says. “I may run up to 31,000 feet and I won’t be there five minutes.”

[Related: Let’s talk about how planes fly]

The flight management computer gives a pilot information about the plane’s optimal altitude as well as their maximum altitude, taking into account the aircraft’s weight and the temperature of the air. An aircraft can climb higher after it burns off fuel and becomes lighter. 

“Pilots will stay as close to either optimum altitude or max altitude as they can,” Cox says. The goal is smooth air, and low headwinds if flying west—and climbing high can accomplish that. Meanwhile, an air traffic controller may ask a plane to climb to a higher altitude than the aircraft can manage at that time, so the pilot will need to decline the request. 

Commercial jets aren’t the only planes in the skies. A pilot in a Cessna 172 out for a Sunday jaunt will be below 10,000 feet (the planes aren’t pressurized), perhaps puttering around at 5,000 feet or so. A commercial turboprop would be above those aircraft but below the jets—a Bombardier Q400 like Alaska Airlines flies isn’t made to fly above 25,000 feet, for example. Turboprops like those might be in the “low 20s,” says Adcock, of NATCA. 

At the tippy top are the jewelry-encrusted people in private jets, where Learjets and Gulfstreams occupy the rarefied air at around 45,000 or higher, even up to 51,000 feet.

Something special happens even higher. Cox recalls that the supersonic Concorde flew at 60,000 feet. “When you get that high, the sky gets real, real, real dark blue, and you can see the curvature of the Earth,” he says. (Space itself doesn’t technically start until you get much, much higher.) “Having been on Concorde, and been at 60,000 feet, you can see it pretty clearly there.”

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On February 4, a pilot in an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jet scored the plane’s first air-to-air kill, firing a missile at the Chinese surveillance balloon drifting off the coast of South Carolina. The shot, an AIM-9X Sidewinder fired from 58,000 feet above the ground, hit the balloon at an altitude of up to 65,000 feet, and ended a week-long incident in which the military, the public, and Congress all followed the course of the balloon with great interest.

“The balloon, which was being used by the PRC [People’s Republic of China] in an attempt to surveil strategic sites in the continental United States, was brought down above US territorial waters,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in a written statement. 

The balloon entered the sky above Montana on February 1, where it caused a halt to flights in and out of Billings International Airport. For four days, from Wednesday to Saturday, the balloon followed the wind across the US, until ultimately meeting its missile-induced end over the ocean. 

At a press conference February 2, a senior defense official noted that the US had tracked the balloon and “had custody” of it ever since it entered the country’s airspace. This includes previous fly-bys of the balloon with F-22s over Montana, although the decision was made not shoot it down then out of a concern for risk to those below.

The defense official repeatedly identified the balloon as created and operated by China, acknowledging when a reporter highlighted that Montana houses siloed nuclear ICBMs. The location of the silos is by design not secret—part of Cold War nuclear strategy that dictated the placement of the silos set them far away from dense urban centers, in part to ensure some incoming nuclear missiles would aim for the silos instead of cities. The day-to-day operation of missile silos can still contain some fresh information, so it is possible that is what was targeted by the balloon’s sensors.

[Related: The Air Force wants to modernize air refueling, but it’s been a bumpy ride]

“Our best assessment at the moment is that whatever the surveillance payload is on this balloon, it does not create significant value added over and above what the [People’s Republic of China] is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low-Earth orbit,” said the official. “But out of an abundance of caution, we have taken additional mitigation steps.  I’m not going to go into what those are.  But we know exactly where this balloon is, exactly what it is passing over. And we are taking steps to be extra vigilant so that we can mitigate any foreign intelligence risk.”

At the same briefing, the official noted that this was not the first time “that you had a balloon of this nature cross over the continental United States.  It has happened a handful of other times over the past few years, to include before this administration.”

While this event garnered widespread national fascination—it was even fodder for a skit on Saturday Night Live—the use of balloons for gathering intelligence dates back centuries. Here’s what to know about their history. 

Trial balloons

Balloons have been used in military surveillance since 1794, when revolutionary France employed them to watch movements of people and cannons from above. In the US Civil War, the Union and Confederate forces used balloons, flying as high as 1,000 feet, to document activity below. Communication with balloons then was tricky, with balloonists using either signal flags or telegraph wires to report what they observed. These balloons were tethered, allowing crews on the ground to draw the balloons back into place. In this sense, the balloons were more like deployable observation towers, rather than true scouting vehicles.

Later, World War I saw balloons used to photograph battlefields below. While film took time to develop, the long static fronts of the Great War ensured that such information was useful, or at least useful if the balloonists collecting it were not shot down by early fighter planes. In World War One, Frank Luke Jr was a US Army pilot who earned the nickname “Arizona Balloon Buster” for shooting down 18 German observation balloons. 

World War I also saw the use of dirigibles, or rigid airships, which flew as bombers as well as spotters. Airships could move under their own power and without tethers, allowing them deadly access to the skies above enemy lines. 

In World War II, Japan built high-altitude balloons that were lofted into the newly discovered jet stream, and then carried by the high-altitude wind across the pacific. More than 9,000 FuGo balloons were launched into the jet stream, complete with incendiary bombs designed to burn down cities and forests. The FuGo attacks were limited in effectiveness because they relied on winds that were strongest in November through March, when the Pacific Northwest was wet and cold, limiting the ability of fires to spread. Indeed, apart from fires, the only deaths directly attributed to FuGo attacks were that of a picnicking family, investigating a mysterious device.

Eyes floating in the sky

Long-range balloon surveillance is limited by how the balloon can be directed and what information it can communicate. Weather balloons, launched hourly, record atmospheric conditions. The famous 1947 balloon crash at Roswell, New Mexico, was of an instrument carrying acoustic sensors, designed to listen for the sounds of Soviet nuclear detonations.

[Related: Is the truth out there? Decoding the Pentagon’s latest UFO report.]

One reason to use balloons is that they can carry large payloads, as a lighter-than-air body of sufficient size floats in the sky, instead of needing to generate lift. The US general responsible for North America described the balloon as “up to 200 feet tall, with a payload the size of a jetliner.”

As for what the balloon was actually recording, that remains to be seen. It is possible that its high-altitude flight allowed for greater surveillance of radio and other wireless transmissions than can a satellite, though that is more speculative than proven.

Recovery of the downed balloon, and especially its sensor package, could prove revelatory, though it should be assumed that any sensitive information and technology taken into military possession will be classified, only parts of which may be selectively released. Given the widespread interest of other militaries in developing surveillance balloons, as well as the revelation that these overflights have happened before, it is likely that the modern balloon race is only just beginning. 

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One of the most striking aspects of the military’s much-analyzed UAP footage is some of the objects’ apparent ability to travel between air and water in the blink of an eye. Something capable of such a feat may certainly appear like some seriously extraterrestrial technology to the untrained eye, but a research team at the Chinese University of Hong Kong recently showed that, at least on a small scale, it’s not impossible to do.

As highlighted by New Scientist and soon-to-be detailed at the upcoming IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Ben Chen and their team’s small “Mirs-X” quadcopter prototype can hover about six minutes in the air, or dive as deep as three meters for a whopping 40 minutes. To accomplish the dual biome maneuvering, researchers equipped each of the drone’s four motors with a dual-speed gearbox. The motors and propellers are situated on rotating mounts capable of tilting and changing direction independent of one another, thus allowing for underwater propulsion.

[Related: Bat-like echolocation could help these robots find lost people.]

Precise propeller speed is also a vital factor for Mirs-X’s success. Given air is far less dense than water, the drone’s propellers must be able to spin incredibly fast to generate enough lift to rise and hover. Those same mechanisms can then slow down immensely once underwater to offer the appropriate thrust.

Although the Mirs-X prototype is pretty small—measuring just under 15 inches across and weighing barely 3.5 pounds—Chen’s team hopes to scale up the drone as large as 6 feet across in future experiments. They also hope to include additional abilities like grasping and carrying objects recovered underwater, although cautioned to New Scientist that further waterproofing could hamper its effectiveness.

If the hurdles could be cleared, however, such a drone could one day prove immensely useful for situations such as search and rescue operations requiring both aerial and submerged reconnaissance, or for inspecting engineering and industrial areas… perhaps a team-up with that new echolocation bot could prove interesting.

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On January 17, DARPA announced the next steps of a program to create an aircraft designed to fly entirely on control surfaces that lack the moving parts that airplanes typically use to maneuver. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, specializes in blue-sky visions, investing in research towards creating new possibilities for technology. In this program, it seeks to change how aircraft alter direction in the sky.

The program is called Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors, or CRANE. DARPA first started the program in 2019, with a request for proposals to “design, build, and flight test a new and novel aircraft that incorporates Active Flow Control (AFC) technologies as a primary design consideration.”

AFC is a kind of control paradigm that replaces moving parts like ailerons and rudder of an aircraft. Planes change their positions by redirecting airflow with ailerons attached to the wings, an elevator at the tail, and a rudder. These controls are what let planes roll side to side, pitch upwards to take off and downwards to land, as well as or yaw left to right. Extendable slats and flaps on wings can also allow planes to generate more lift at low speeds, and to slow the plane as it angles down for a landing. (Here’s more on exactly how wings generate lift.)

With “Active Flow Control,” aircraft can use plasma actuators or synthetic jet actuators to move air, instead of relying on physical surfaces. With plasma actuators, this is achieved through changing the electrical charge of air passing over the actuators mounted in the wing, in turn changing the flow of that air. Meanwhile, synthetic jets can inject air into the airflow over the wing, changing lift. In 2019, NASA patented a wing control system that combined both plasma and synthetic jet actuators, with the goal of creating actuators without any moving parts, and which were “essentially maintenance free.”

In DARPA’s 2019 call for proposals, it emphasized that this technology could lead to “elimination of moving control surfaces for stability & control,” improvements in “takeoff and landing performance, high lift flight, thick airfoil efficiency, and enhanced high altitude performance.”

With improved takeoffs and landing, such a control system could allow for “extreme short takeoff and landing” (ESTOL), where a plane or drone operates from runways even smaller than those present used for short takeoff and landing. The Department of Defense and NATO define short takeoff as being able to land on a runway 1,500 feet long, with a 50-foot obstacle at either end. 

Because these new flow controls could increase the angle of lift for takeoff and improved braking for descent, it’s possible that a plane with it could land in an even smaller area. That expands how and where such planes can operate, and matters especially with future wars and operations at sea, where the military has to bring its own runways on ships, or on small islands.

Another area where these controls can help is in making it harder for aircraft to be observed, as it reduces the number of surfaces on an aircraft that would reflect radar signals. The controls can also be quieter, minimizing detection from audio sensors, and can improve aircraft stability and lift at high altitudes. The controls also allow for thicker plane wings, which can hold more fuel.

In December, Aurora Flight Sciences (which is a part of Boeing) was awarded over $89 million for the CRANE program, or roughly the cost of a single F-35A stealth jet fighter. In Phase 1, which is already completed, Aurora created an aircraft that was able to use active flow control to demonstrate control in a wind tunnel test. Phase 2, which was announced this month, will focus on designing and developing the software and controls of an X-plane demonstrator that “can fly without traditional moving flight controls on the exterior of the wings and tail.”

Should DARPA decide to continue the contrast, there’s the option for Phase 3, in which DARPA will fly a 7,000 pound X-plane that incorporates active flow control and relies on it for controlled flight.

In starting the design from a new kind of control paradigm, DARPA hopes to spark new thinking about how planes can fly and maneuver. DARPA’s long record of X-plane design includes everything from long endurance drones to stealth aircraft to hypersonic designs, all of which have led to changes in military design and planning. The ability of aircraft to use active flow control to operate from smaller runways expands not just the areas where the military can fight, but even the size of ships that could launch long-flying drones. 

DARPA, on the innovation edge of research, has focused the project on making sure the technology can work in demonstration, first. Should it prove successful, it will be up to other parts of the military to best determine how they want to employ it.

Correction on Jan. 31, 2023: This article was updated to change “1,5000 feet long” to “1,500 feet long” and “active follow control” to “active flow control.”

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Sometime later this year—perhaps this summer, perhaps this fall—an electric aircraft from NASA, the X-57, is set to take flight in California. It’s what NASA describes as its “first all-electric experiment aircraft,” and when it does lift off the ground, it won’t look the way that NASA has been depicting the plane on its website.

Instead of a whopping 14 electric motors and propellers, the aircraft will have just two. But those two motors, powered by more than 5,000 cylindrical battery cells in the aircraft’s fuselage, should be enough to get it up in the air before 2023 is over, which is when the X-57 program is set to power down, too. 

Here’s what to know about how the plane will work, the challenges the program has faced, and how lessons from spaceflight helped inform the details of its battery system. 

Modification 2 

If the plane does indeed take flight this year as planned, it will do so in a form called Modification 2, which involves one electric motor and propeller on each wing giving the aircraft the thrust it needs to take to the skies.

While the aeronautics and space agency had hoped to fly the plane—which is based on a Tecnam P2006T—in additional configurations, known as Modifications 3 and 4, that won’t happen. Why? Because making a plane that flies safely on just electricity is hard, and the program is only funded through 2023. (IEEE Spectrum has more on the program’s original plans.)

“We’ve been learning a lot over the years, and we thought we’d be learning through flight tests—it turns out we had a lot of lessons to learn during the design and integration and airworthiness qualification steps, and so we ended up spending more time and resources on that,” says Sean Clark, the principle investigator for the X-57 program at NASA. 

“And that’s been hugely valuable,” he adds. “But it means that we’re not going to end up having resources for those Mod 4 [or 3] flights.” 

It will still fly as an all-electric plane, but in Mod 2, with two motors. 

Exploding transistors 

One glitch that the team had to iron out before the aircraft can safely take flight involves components that electricity from the batteries have to travel through before they reach the motors. The problem was with transistor modules inside the inverters, which change electricity from DC to AC. 

“We were using these modules that are several transistors in a package—they were specced to be able to tolerate the types of environments we were expecting to put it in,” says Clark. “But every time we would test them, they would fail. We would have transistors just blowing up in our environmental test chamber.” 

[Related: This ‘airliner of the future’ has a radical new wing design]

A component failure—such as a piece of equipment blowing up—is the type of issue that aircraft makers prefer to resolve on the ground. Clark says they figured it out. “We did a lot of dissection of them—after they explode, it’s hard to know what went wrong,” he notes, lightheartedly, in a manner suggesting an engineer faced with a messy problem. The solution was newer hardware and “redesigning the inverter system basically from the ground up,” he notes. 

They are now “working really well,” he adds. “We’ve put a full set through qualification, and they’ve all passed.”

Lessons from space

Traditional aircraft burn fossil fuels, an obviously flammable and explosive substance, to power their engines. Those working on electric aircraft, powered by batteries, need to ensure that the battery cells don’t spark fires, either. Last year in Kansas, for example, an FAA-sponsored test featured a pack of aviation batteries being dropped by 50 feet to ensure they could handle the impact. They did. 

In the X-57, the batteries are a model known as 18650 cells, made by Samsung. The aircraft uses 5,120 of them, divided into 16 modules of 320 cells each. An individual module, which includes both battery cells and packaging, weighs around 51 pounds, Clark says. The trick is to make sure all of these components are packaged in the right way to avoid a fire, even if one battery experiences a failure. In other words, failure was an option, but they plan to manage any failure so that it does not start a blaze. “We found that there was not an industry standard for how to package these cells into a high-voltage, high-power pack, that would also protect them against cell failures,” Clark says. 

[Related: The Air Force wants to modernize air refueling, but it’s been a bumpy ride]

Help came from higher up. “We ended up redesigning the battery pack based on a lot of input from some of the design team that works on the space station here at NASA,” he adds. He notes that lithium batteries on the International Space Station, as well as in the EVA suits astronauts use and a device called the pistol grip tool, were relevant examples in the process. The key takeaways involved the spacing between the battery cells, as well how to handle the heat if a cell did malfunction, like by experiencing a thermal runaway. “What the Johnson [Space Center] team found was one of the most effective strategies is to actually let that heat from that cell go into the aluminum structure, but also have the other cells around it absorb a little bit of heat each,” he explains.

NASA isn’t alone in exploring the frontier of electric aviation, which represents one way that the aviation industry could be greener for short flights. Others working in the space include Beta Technologies, Joby Aviation, Archer Aviation, Wisk Aero, and Eviation with a plane called Alice. One prominent company, Kitty Hawk, shuttered last year.

Sometime this year, the X-57 should fly for the first time, likely making multiple sorties. “I’m still really excited about this technology,” says Clark. “I’m looking forward to my kids being able to take short flights in electric airplanes in 10, 15 years—it’s going to be a really great step for aviation.”

Watch a brief video about the aircraft, below:

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On January 12, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs. The term “UAP,” which is largely synonymous with the original usage of Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO, is designed to be a broad category for reporting observed but unexplained sights in the sky, a kind of “see something, say something” for pilots. 

The report, mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act for 2022, includes the work of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was originally created within the Department of Defense in 2020 as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. “All domains” means the phenomena need not be flying in the sky, but could also occur at sea, in space, or on land. 

This is the second report on UAPs since the creation of the task force, following a preliminary report released in 2021. In the preliminary report from two years ago, the task force identified 144 sightings over the previous 17 years. In the new report, there are a total of 510 sightings, including those 144 already documented, 247 new ones made since the first report, and 119 reports of events prior to 2021 but that were not included in the initial assessment, for a total of 366 newly identified reports.

[Related: UFO research is stigmatized. NASA wants to change that.]

The majority of new reports come from US Navy and US Air Force “aviators and operators,” who saw the phenomena during regular operations, and then reported those sightings to the newly created appropriate channels, like the AARO. 

The official takeaway? “AARO’s initial analysis and characterization of the 366 newly-identified reports, informed by a multi-agency process, judged more than half as exhibiting unremarkable characteristics,” the document notes. Of those unremarkable reports: 26 were drones or drone-like, 163 were balloons or balloon-like, and six were clutter spotted in the sky.

That leaves 171 “uncharacterized and unattributed” remaining from the batch of newly identified reports, a group that is perhaps thought of more as unresolved than unexplainable. Of those, some “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis,” though anyone looking for that analysis in the report will be sorely disappointed.

Tracking, cataloging, and identifying unexplained—or at least not immediately explainable—phenomena is tricky work. It has created persistent problems for the military since the first panic over “flying saucers” in the summer of 1947 (more on Roswell in a moment), and it persists to this day. Part of the impetus for a task force to study UFOs, or UFOs under the UAP name, came from a series of leaked videos, later declassified by the military, showing what appear to be unusual objects in flight.

Lost in observation

One of the more famous UAP sightings this century is the “Tic Tac,” spotted by Navy pilots flying southwest of San Diego on November 14, 2004. The pilots captured video of the object, which appeared small and cylindrical, and changed direction in flight in an unusual way. This video was officially released by the Navy in 2020, but which had found its way onto the internet in 2007, and was the centerpiece of a New York Times story about UFO sightings in 2017. New documents released by the Navy on January 13 show that formal reports of the so-called Tic Tac never made it beyond the 3rd Fleet’s chain of command, effectively leaving the report stranded within part of the Navy. 

As PopSci sister publication The War Zone notes, “the Navy and other U.S. military officials have publicly acknowledged that there were serious issues in the past with the mechanisms available, or lack thereof, through which pilots could make such reports and do so without fear of being stigmatized.” The released documents show that, indeed, the pilots faced stigma for the report afterwards.

None of that explains what the object in the “Tic Tac” video is, or what other still-unidentified phenomena might actually be. But it does suggest that the existence of an office responsible for collecting such reports has made it easier for such phenomena to be collected and analyzed, rather than kept quiet by pilots afraid of ridicule or having their judgment questioned.

Everything unidentified is new again

Part of the challenge of thinking about UFOs, and now UAPs, is that by asking people to report unusual sightings, people may interpret what they see as directly related to what they are being asked to find. Tell someone to take a walk in the woods and keep their eye out for rodent sightings, and every shadow or scurrying creature becomes a possible identification. 

The Army observation balloon that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 was discovered almost a month before it was reported to local authorities. The summer of 1947, early in the Cold War between the United States and the USSR, saw a major “flying saucer” panic, as one highly publicized sighting led people across the nation to report unusual craft or objects. 

These reports eventually became the subject of study in Project Blue Book, an Air Force effort to categorize, demystify, and understand what exactly people were reporting. When the Air Force concluded Project Blue Book in 1969, it did so noting that 90 percent of UFOs were likely explainable as ordinary objects, like planets in twilight or airplanes at odd angles. 

As documents later declassified in the 1990s revealed, the military knew even more of the sightings to be explainable, such as backyard observers documenting US spy plane flights and reporting them to the government. The Roswell crash, which a military officer first identified as a flying saucer before the Army clarified a day later that it was a weather balloon, wasn’t precisely a weather balloon. The object was indeed a balloon, but it carried acoustic sensors designed to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. In other words, letting the public think an object is mysterious or unexplained is a good way of disguising something that’s explainable but should be secret.

[Related: UFO conspiracies can be more dangerous than you think]

In the decades following the conclusion of Project Blue Book, the military tried to debunk sightings, rather than catalog them. Today, the work of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office is to take the sightings seriously, and to encourage reporting, in case there are in fact important aircraft sightings that would otherwise be shrugged off. The advent of drones, stealth technologies, uncrewed sea vehicles, and advanced ways for someone to interfere with sensors all make it possible, if not always plausible, that a given UAP sighting could be a deliberate act by a hostile group or nation.

Still, as the report already attests, most sightings can be dismissed and known phenomena. Balloons, decades after Roswell, still catch light in unusual ways, and can look surreal on the ground.

One takeaway from the report hints that some of the phenomena could be due to people or sensors being mistaken or not working properly. “ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] and AARO [All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office] operate under the assumption that UAP reports are derived from the observer’s accurate recollection of the event and/or sensors that generally operate correctly and capture enough real data to allow initial assessments,” notes the report. “However, ODNI and AARO acknowledge that a select number of UAP incidents may be attributable to sensor irregularities or variances, such as operator or equipment error.”

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This article was originally featured on Task and Purpose.

Located just north of Atlanta, Georgia, Dobbins Air Reserve Base is usually home to C-130 transport planes. But for the next few weeks, the base will host an unusual guest: a white-painted jet that can fly for more than half a day at the edge of space.

The ‘Earth Resources 2’ jet is used by NASA for studying hurricanes, testing satellite systems, and a range of other scientific purposes. Military aviation observers may be more familiar with its cousin, the all-black Air Force U-2 spy plane that has collected intelligence photos for the U.S. government since the 1950s. 

Turns out, the so-called ‘Dragon Lady’ is good for more than just collecting information on enemy forces: it is also great at studying the forces of nature.

“NASA ER-2s have played an important role in Earth science research because of their ability to fly into the lower stratosphere at subsonic speeds, enabling direct stratospheric sampling as well as virtual satellite simulation missions,” NASA says of the jet. 

It makes sense that a spy plane works well as a science plane. After all, part of the reason why the U-2 is still in Air Force service 67 years after its first flight is due to its adaptability. The aircraft is basically a massive glider that can carry large payloads of sensors, cameras and other tools for gathering information.

“It’s just a glider with a big motor stuffed up its ass,” a former U-2 pilot, retired Col. Michael “Lips” Phillips, said on the Fighter Pilot Podcast in October 2020. “The reason it’s still used every single day is all the crap that we got on the most sophisticated spy satellites in the world can be put on a U-2. And the bad guys don’t know when it’s coming.”

Unlike satellites, which travel in predictable orbits around the Earth, the U-2 can fly whenever it is needed at a very high altitude. The U-2 often flies at 70,000 feet (13 miles) and above, while commercial airliners usually fly at around 31,000 and 38,000 feet (6 to 7 miles), according to Time. That high up, you can see the curve of the Earth, the movement of the night sky across the planet, and the tiny shapes of airliners beneath you, one U-2 pilot, identified only as Maj. Chris, said in 2020. 

Meanwhile, the ER-2 usually flies between 20,000 to 70,000 feet, NASA wrote. At that altitude, the ER-2 can test out the sensors that scientists want to use on satellites, which means they can find and address any bugs in the system without the cost of launching a faulty satellite into space.

The ER-2 has deployed to six continents to study everything from global warming to ozone depletion, according to NASA. That work benefits not just the space agency, but also the U.S. Forest Service, Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

The agency used to operate straight-up U-2s starting in 1971 until it acquired its first ER-2 in 1981, followed by the second in 1989. Together the U-2s and ER-2s “have flown more than 4,500 data missions and test flights in support of scientific research,” NASA wrote.

The ER-2 flies at altitudes where the air pressure is so low that an unprotected pilot’s blood would literally boil. To prevent that, ER-2 pilots wear pressurized suits that are nearly the same as the ones worn by NASA astronauts on the way to orbit and back, ER-2 pilot Donald “Stu” Broce told WIRED Magazine in 2017.

Broce, who used to land F-14 fighter jets on aircraft carriers as a Navy pilot, said flying the ER-2 is a difficult task.

“Everything about the plane is kind of hard to do,” he told WIRED. “I call it the circus, everything about the plane is unique.”

[Related: The spy agency origins of NASA’s next powerful planet-hunting observatory.]

One of the odd things about the ER-2 is the pair of wheels that keep the plane’s huge wings off the runway. When the plane takes off, the wheels are designed to fall away and not be used again until the next flight. 

Once airborne, the flight itself can last eight, 10 or even 13 hours, as Broce has experienced. To stay energized, pilots bring an edible substance similar to baby food, which they eat through a tube that connects to their suit helmet.

The suit may sound uncomfortable, but there is quite an office view.

“The views are beautiful, there is no weather, you see the curvature of the Earth,” Broce said.

The most difficult part of flying the U-2 and the ER-2 comes at the end of the long flight, where pilots have to bring the lumbering aircraft to a stop using just the two wheels arranged bicycle-style on its belly, a dicey proposition even for a former carrier pilot.

“Every plane in the world, at some point in the landing you can give up and relax and you’re done and all you have to do is roll out and use the brakes,” Broce told Flying Magazine in 2015. “The U-2 wasn’t like that at all. You have to fly the plane until it stops on the runway. And it doesn’t handle crosswinds well and it’s on bicycle gear.”

To help with the landing, a fellow U-2 or ER-2 pilot in a chase car pursues the jet down the runway, guiding the landing pilot to a halt. For the next few weeks, airmen at Dobbins will get to enjoy that sight as the ER-2 there returns from missions tracking severe weather. The ER-2 will be based there until about March 5, the base said in a press release.

Whether it is climate change, the ozone layer, the nuclear-armed Soviet military or other things that could end all life on earth, the U-2 and the ER-2 always seem to be around to keep an eye on it for the U.S. government. The aircraft will likely continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

“The handful of airplanes that we have, we’ve got about three dozen left, they fly every day,” Phillips, the retired U-2 pilot, said in 2020. “Somewhere in the world, some agency of the government needs something, and the U-2 flies all the time.”

Special thanks to The Flyby newsletter where we first learned of this story.

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If an animal passes through the forest and no one sees it, does it leave a mark? A century ago, there would be no way to pick up whatever clues were left behind. But with advancements in DNA technology, particularly environmental DNA (eDNA) detecting instruments, scientists can glean what wildlife visited an area based on genetic material in poop as well as microscopic skin and hair cells that critters shed and leave behind. For ecologists seeking to measure an ecosystem’s biodiversity as non-invasively as possible, eDNA can be a treasure trove of insight. It can capture the presence of multiple species in just one sample. 

But collecting eDNA is no easy task. Forests are large open spaces that aren’t often easily accessible (canopies, for example, are hard to reach), and eDNA could be lurking anywhere. One way to break up this big problem is to focus on a particular surface in the forest to sample eDNA from, and use a small robot to go where humans can’t. That’s the chief strategy of a team of researchers from ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, and company SPYGEN. A paper on their approach was published this week in the journal Science Robotics. 

In aquatic environments, eDNA-gathering robots sip and swim to do their jobs. But to reach the treetops, not only do researchers have to employ flying drones (which are tougher to orient and harder to protect), these drones also need to be able to perch on a variety of surfaces. 

[Related: These seawater-sipping robots use drifting genes to make ocean guest logs]

The design the Swiss team came up with looks much like a levitating basket, or maybe a miniature flying saucer. They named this 2.6-pound contraption eDrone. It has a cage-like structure made up of four arcs that extend out below the ring mainframe that measure around 17 inches in diameter. The ring and cage-like body protect it and its four propellers from obstacles, kind of like the ring around a bumper car. 

To maneuver, the eDrone uses a camera and a “haptic-based landing strategy,” according to the paper, that can perceive the position and magnitude of forces being applied to the body of the robot in order to map out the appropriate course of action. To help it grip, there are also features like non-slip material, and carbon cantilevers on the bottom of each arc. 

Once it firmly touches down, the drone uses a sticky material on each arc to peel off an eDNA sample from the tree branch and stow it away for later analysis. In a small proof-of-concept run, the eDrone was able to successfully obtain eDNA samples from seven trees across three different families. This is because different tree species have their own branch morphologies (some are cylindrical and others have more irregular branches jutting out). Different trees also host different animals and insects. 

“The physical interaction strategy is derived from a numerical model and experimentally validated with landings on mock and real branches,” the researchers wrote in the paper.  “During the outdoor landings, eDNA was successfully collected from the bark of seven different trees, enabling the identification of 21 taxa, including insects, mammals, and birds.”

Although the robot did its intended job well in these small trials, the researchers noted that there needs to be more extensive studies into how its performance may be affected by tree species beyond the ones they tested for or by changing environmental conditions like wind or overcast skies. Moreover, eDNA gathering by robot, they propose, can be an additional way to sample eDNA in forests alongside other methods like analyzing eDNA from pooled rainwater. 

“By allowing these robots to dwell in the environment, this biomonitoring paradigm would provide information on global biodiversity and potentially automate our ability to measure, understand, and predict how the biosphere responds to human activity and environmental changes,” the team wrote. 

Watch the drone in action below: 

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Step into a commercial airliner like a Boeing 737, take a seat, and look out the window: You’ll likely be able to see the wing protruding out from the lower part of the plane’s body, partly blocking your view of the ground below. 

But today, NASA announced that it will be working with Boeing to produce an experimental new aircraft demonstrator that looks radically different from the jets that passengers are used to seeing. The flying machine will feature long, skinny wings that extend from the top of the plane’s fuselage, above the windows, not below. And because these wings will be more slender and more lengthy than typical wings on commercial aircraft, they will be supported by trusses. 

The reason for creating this new plane, which will be called the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator, is simple: To find a way to make the aircraft much more fuel efficient and better for the environment. The figure that NASA is shooting for is as much as 30 percent better efficiency, although that radically better efficiency gain wouldn’t come from new wings alone. 

At a press conference in Washington, DC today, Pamela Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator, said the initiative was a “major new NASA commitment to reducing carbon emissions in the air transportation system,” which she referred to as “one of the most difficult industries to decarbonize.” 

In addition to those long, skinny wings, the aircraft will have two engines—one under each wing—and a tail in the rear shaped like a T. It will be a single-aisle aircraft like a Boeing 737 or an Airbus A320, and not a wide-body with two aisles, like a 787 or an A350. The goal is that planes like this would serve the typical, workaday flights of commercial air travel, connecting destinations like New York City with Chicago. 

The star of the show is the wing.

“We’re going to reduce as much as 30 percent the fuel consumption—with better engines, and look at this wing,” Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, said at the event. The wing is “so long and thin, it has to have a brace.” 

In addition to supporting the wings—which are what give an airplane the lift it needs to fly—the trusses, or braces, can pull off another trick. “You can actually get lift on this brace, as well as [from] the wing, [like] the old concept of the old biplanes,” Nelson added. 

Aircraft engineering is all about tradeoffs: This experimental plane needs those trusses to support the skinny wings, but there’s a good reason for the wings to be long and skinny in the first place. “It’s our plan to demonstrate this extra-long thin wing—stabilized by the braces—that will make commercial airliners much more fuel efficient by creating less drag,” he said. 

The plane’s design is technically referred to as a TTBW, which stands for Transonic Truss-Braced Wing. In May of 2020, Popular Science took a close look at NASA’s efforts regarding such an aircraft. Aerospace engineers say that the reason why long slender wings produce less drag is because they can reduce vortices at the wing tips. A NASA senior aerospace engineer, Kevin James, explained it at the time like this: “Out at the tip of the wing, where there’s no more wing beyond what the air can see, the air is very clever, and it will simply just go around the tip,” he said. But by making the wings longer, there is “more lift that we can generate, more efficiently.”

[Related: The illuminating tech inside night vision goggles, explained]

Drawbacks to configurations like this include the fact that a long, narrow wing could flutter, like a bridge or a sign blowing in strong winds, which is why a plane with these wings needs to have trusses. And of course, if aircraft with this design end up taking the place of narrowbody planes like 737s, they’ll need to fit into the gate at the airport—and long wings could make that challenging. 

NASA said today that along with Boeing, they plan to get this futuristic, more-fuel efficient bird flying by 2028, and even said that planes like this could be in service in the 2030s.

Globally, aviation represented more than 2 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in 2021 from “energy-related” sources, according to the International Energy Agency. In addition to exploring new aircraft designs like the TTBW in the form of the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator, there are other ways of trying to make aircraft greener, including running smaller planes on purely electric power to using sustainable aviation fuel. “I’m still very concerned about the carbon footprint of global air travel,” Melroy said at the beginning of the event. “The aviation sector is a giant in the global economy, and we have to take that seriously.” 

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Flights are slowly resuming across the country following the Federal Aviation Administration’s nationwide grounding of all air travel early Wednesday morning, the first of its kind since 9/11. Experts indicate there is currently no evidence of cyberterrorism, with the FAA instead pointing towards what appears to be a widespread failure of its Notices to Air Missions (NOTAM) system. The internal service for flight personnel is used to convey timely, unclassified safety information regarding issues such as facility outages, airspace restrictions, and air traffic hazards.

Although the FAA states the software glitch occurred early Wednesday, travelers have said that the problems began sometime Tuesday evening. “We were told that there was an outage that happened at 7 p.m. yesterday and they were trying to fix it then. It apparently worsened this morning,” one passenger told NBC News today.

[Related: You can blame Southwest Airlines’ holiday catastrophe on outdated software.]

As of writing, the aviation tracking website FlightAware lists over 6,700 delays within, into, and out of the US, alongside around another 2,400 cancellations. It is currently unclear to what extent the issue could affect international travel, although the ripple effects are already being felt.

While there is no evidence pointing towards cyberattacks, the Biden administration has already announced it intends to conduct an investigation into the issue. And Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg tweeted this morning that they have “directed an after-action process to determine root causes and recommend next steps.”

The news comes barely two weeks after Southwest Airlines’ logistical collapse due to an outdated internal pilot and crew scheduling system. The holiday delays and cancellations stranded thousands, and prompted stern rebukes from the Department of Transportation. Wednesday’s nationwide travel emergency, however, points towards potentially similar antiquated federal technology as the culprit.

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This article was originally featured on KHN.

In March, a Frontier Airlines flight was headed from Phoenix to Las Vegas when a female passenger stopped breathing. The flight attendant yelled in the cabin for help.

A passenger who was trained as a wilderness first responder, Seth Coley, jumped into action and found the woman was unresponsive and had a weak pulse. Coley dug through the plane’s medical kit but couldn’t find an oropharyngeal airway, a tool that was supposed to be there and that he needed to help the woman breathe. Instead, he cleared the airway by manipulating her neck.

Afterward, Coley sent a message to Denver-based Frontier Airlines via an online customer service form: “I saved somebody’s life on one of your flights,” he wrote. “I would like to speak about the medical kit you guys have on your flights. You are missing some very valuable and simple things. She almost died.”

Americans are flying at levels reaching pre-pandemic numbers. While covid-19 ushered in new health and cleaning protocols designed to make airplane travel safer, incidents like Coley’s raise questions about airlines’ readiness for medical emergencies because of incomplete or insufficient medical kits and the training of flight crews, who often rely on other passengers in emergencies.

Frontier did not respond to KHN’s requests for comment about that incident or its emergency kits. But Coley’s experience illustrates the risks travelers take every time they board a flight. For every 20,000 passengers who take a flight on a U.S.-based airline, there is one medical event — defined as any health-related incident, not only emergencies — according to estimates from airplane medical services company MedAire.

The Federal Aviation Administration requires commercial aircraft to carry at least one sealed emergency medical kit containing a minimum of 25 specified instruments and medications, plus first-aid kits and automated external defibrillators. But the FAA does not track data on the use of those kits during in-flight medical emergencies. Instead, the agency leaves it to the airlines to inspect the kits and replace them if the seals are broken.

“Ensuring complete, sealed emergency medical kits are present is part of the cabin crew’s preflight inspection,” FAA spokesperson Ian Gregor said in a statement.

But, as Coley and other passengers who have responded to an in-flight emergency have found out, an item required in a medical kit can sometimes be missing. Some items the FAA doesn’t require, such as the overdose reversal drug naloxone, are carried voluntarily by some airlines. The agency has issued guidance recommending items to add to the kits, but they are not yet mandated.

Gregor said the FAA investigates all reports of issues with medical kits and ensures any concerns are addressed. He did not respond to a KHN request for details on the number of reports investigated, their outcomes, or whether the emergencies described in this article were among those investigated.

In June, Boston surgeon Dr. Andrea Merrill was aboard a Delta Air Lines flight when she assisted in a medical emergency and found the kit fell short of what she needed.

It needs “a glucometer, epi pen, and automatic blood pressure cuffs — it’s impossible to hear with a disposable stethoscope in the air,” Merrill tweeted to Delta after the incident. “Please improve this for passenger safety!”

After Merrill’s tweet went viral, Delta followed up with her, saying it would switch to automatic blood pressure cuffs and “real” stethoscopes, as well as consider glucometers at gates. Merrill declined an interview request.

KHN asked U.S. airlines to detail their medical emergency protocols and the contents of their medical kits. Seven responded with limited information: Alaska, Allegiant, Hawaiian, JetBlue, Southwest, Sun Country, and United. All said that their kits meet or exceed FAA requirements and that they train their staff to respond to medical emergencies. Many airlines also contract with a MedAire service called MedLink that connects flight crews with a medical professional on the ground in an in-flight emergency.

Allegiant officials said passengers with medical conditions should not assume their planes will have everything they need in an emergency. “Although our crews are trained to respond to a wide array of unplanned medical emergencies, we want to remind readers who have anticipated medical needs to bring their own medical supplies in carry-on luggage and not rely on aircraft emergency equipment,” Allegiant spokesperson Andrew Porrello said in a statement.

Delta, along with American, Frontier, and Spirit, did not respond to requests for comment. A 2019 article on the Delta website said its flight attendants are given training in first aid and CPR. Additionally, Delta wrote that its medical equipment exceeds FAA requirements. The airline mentioned it uses STAT-MD, a service that lets flight crews consult with trained personnel at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

The FAA requires flight attendants to receive specific medical training, but medical professionals who have intervened as passengers during an in-flight emergency said the crew is not always quick to respond.

“Passengers believe that there are probably more safeguards in place than there actually are,” said Dr. Comilla Sasson, a Denver-area emergency physician and associate clinical professor at the University of Colorado.

Sasson was on a United Airlines flight in 2018 when a passenger passed out. When she volunteered to help, crew members asked for proof that she was a doctor as she mobilized to check the passenger’s vital signs. Sasson questioned the extent to which crew members are trained to help in medical emergencies, saying other health care providers have told her about their own experiences of aiding a passenger in need while the flight personnel stood aside.

“It’s interesting to me that the airlines really kind of depend on the kindness of strangers in a lot of ways, much more so than I would think,” Sasson said.

The goodwill of a fellow passenger is something Bay Area resident Meera Mani is thankful for after a 2011 experience. She was on a United flight from Toronto to San Francisco when her now-deceased father, then in his 80s, began showing concerning symptoms: The right side of his face and arm drooped. Worried her dad was having a stroke, Mani shouted for help but was frustrated by flight attendants’ slow response.

“And then finally, I said: ‘Is there a doctor on the flight?’” Mani recounted.

There was. The doctor used a defibrillator to stabilize her father.

“It was very clear to me that the [flight] staff were completely flummoxed,” Mani said. “They had the equipment, they took it out, they gave it to him, but the doctor took care of it.”

United helped organize an ambulance to meet Mani and her father on the ground at the San Francisco airport and later called to see if her dad was OK. He ended up being diagnosed with a condition that could lead to fainting.

MedAire, which runs the MedLink consulting service, said it covers around 70% of the U.S. market but declined to specify airlines. Dr. Paulo Alves, MedAire’s global medical director of aviation health, said 98% of medical events are managed on board and are non-life-threatening, while 2% are serious cases that might divert a flight.

Alves said his company also provides medical consultations before passengers board a flight.

“An airplane — although I love aviation — is never the best place for you to have a medical event,” Alves said. “The first line of prevention is actually preflight.”

Alves also defended the contents of airlines’ medical kits. The medically trained volunteers who step in to help fellow passengers in an emergency may expect resources available in a hospital, but “the airplane is not a hospital. You cannot carry everything,” he said.

Mani said she would like to see airlines disclose which medical emergencies they’re trained to address — potentially on flight safety cards. Sasson said it would be helpful if airlines clearly shared information about what medical supplies are available on board.

“I think the general public doesn’t realize how much of a crapshoot it is when they’re up in the air that somebody with some sort of medical training will know what to do, if something were to happen,” Sasson said.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Southwest Airlines flights are (mostly) back on schedule following a holiday week’s worth of unprecedented cancellations that stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers across the country. While many weary travelers are reportedly still waiting to reunite with their lost luggage, others continue to voice bewilderment at how such a logistical nightmare occurred within one of the nation’s most popular aviation providers.

The answer, per industry experts alongside Southwest’s own CEO—employee scheduling software that debuted around the same time as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

[Related: Watch this big battery pack drop 50 feet in an aircraft safety test.]

According to multiple recent rundowns of the debacle, Southwest’s long-running reliance on a crew scheduler program called SkySolver is largely to blame as the catalyst behind cascading failures described last week as “unacceptable” by Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Simply put, SkySolver already was nearing the “end of its life” even before winter storm Elliott arrived, and the nearly two-decade-old program couldn’t handle the scalability needed to tackle the multiple waves of cancellations and delays. This left actual Southwest employees to manually attempt matching flight crews with available planes, all while navigating strict aviation worker federal regulations.

Southwest pilots have reportedly begged company executives to update the “antiquated” systems since at least 2015, with demands for internal technology updates and labor reforms cropping up in union negotiations multiple times in 2022 alone. But despite the clear warning signs—including a similar cancellation wave last holiday season—Southwest has done little over the years aside from piecemeal updates to SkySolver’s off-the-shelf product.

From there, the crisis compounded as stranded passengers and flight crews attempted to contact Southwest representatives over the phone, resulting in estimated wait times as long as eight or more hours. Those delays exacerbated the existing delays.

[Related: How a ‘digital twin’ of an Apache helicopter could help keep these old birds flying]

As Columbia University professor Zeynep Tufekci recently explained in an op-ed for the The New York Times, this largely stems from “technical debt,” a term used in reference to a company’s gap between its existing software and its necessary updates to maintain operations. Although Tufekci recounts that airline companies were some of the first businesses to adopt automated scheduling systems, they haven’t done much to keep those systems up-to-date and scalable to handle modern needs and markets.

So, despite Southwest’s previous CEO Gary Kelly praising the airline’s “wonderful technology” in 2021, it has since experienced multiple logistical collapses due to its long-delayed adoption of alternatives such as cloud-based data systems that can handle crises as large as winter storms. Additionally, transitioning away from largely phone-reliant systems—such as what Southwest flight attendants needed to use last week for rescheduling—would east congestion points. And until companies like Southwest actually start investing in bringing their software into the modern age, travelers can continue to expect future headaches. 

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On December 12, Australia announced the name of its latest robotic submarine: the Ghost Shark. This vessel, which is being developed by both Anduril and Australia’s Navy and Defence Science and Technology Group, is designed as a large, underwater, autonomous machine, guided by artificial intelligence. The Ghost Shark will be a stealth robot, built for future wars at sea.

In picking the name, the Royal Australian Navy chose a moniker that conferred both stealth, and paid tribute to the wildlife of the continent, or in this case, just off the coast of the continent.

“Ghost Shark’s name comes about from actually an indigenous shark that’s found on our southern waters, indeed it’s found in deeper waters, so it’s quite stealthy, which is a good corollary to the stealthy extra large autonomous vehicle. It also keeps that linkage to the Ghost Bat, the MQ-28 program for the Air Force, which is also another quite stealthy autonomous system,” said Commodore Darron Kavanagh of the Royal Australian Navy. (Ghost sharks, the animals, are often consumed as part of fish and chips.)

The Ghost Bat drone fighter, or MQ-28 he referenced, is another recent initiative by Australia to augment crewed forces with robotic allies. While a jet is bound by the finite number of hours it can stay airborne, a robotic submarine, freed of crew, can endure under the sea for a long time.

“They have the capacity to remain at sea undetected for very long periods, carry various military payloads and cover very long distances,” Rear Admiral Peter Quinn said in a release. “The vessels will provide militaries with a persistent option for the delivery of underwater effects in high-risk environments, complementing our existing crewed ships and submarines, as well as other future uncrewed surface vessels.”

Pause for effect

“Effects” is a broad term that refers to all the ways a vehicle, tool, or weapon can make battle easier for one side and harder for its enemies. “Kinetic effects,” for example, are the missiles, torpedoes, and bullets that immediately come to mind when people think of war. But effects can include other tools, like electromagnetic jamming, or a smoke grenade detonating and creating a dense cloud to hide the movement of soldiers.

Underwater, those effects could be direct attack, like with torpedoes, or it could be sending misleading sonar signals, fooling enemy ships and submarines to target a robot instead of a more powerful crewed vessel.

In May, Anduril announced it was working on Extra Large Autonomous Undersea Vehicles (XL-AUVs) for the Royal Australian Navy, which is what is now known as Ghost Shark.

“It is modular, customizable and can be optimized with a variety of payloads for a wide range of military and non-military missions such as advanced intelligence, infrastructure inspection, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting,” read the announcement.

In this instance, its job could include seeing enemy vessels and movements, as well as identifying targets for weapons fired from other vehicles. One of the most consistent promises from autonomous systems is that, by using sensors and fast onboard processing, these machines will be able to discover, discern, and track enemies faster than human operators of the sensor systems. If the role of the Ghost Shark is limited, at least initially, to targeting and not firing, it lets the robot submarines bypass the difficult questions and implications of a machine making a lethal decision on its own.

At the press conference this month, Quinn told the press that adversaries will have to assume that a Ghost Shark is not only watching their movements, but “is capable of deploying a wide range of effects — including lethal ones,” reports Breaking Defense. If the Ghost Shark is to be an armed robot, it will raise difficult questions about human control of lethal autonomous machines, especially given the added difficulty of real-time communication under water.

Uncrewed underwater

The Ghost Shark is just one of a growing array of large underwater drones in development by a host of nations. In the chart below, the XL-AUV references the original name for the Ghost Shark.

Before the Ghost Shark can reach the extra-large size it’s intended to have, Anduril is developing the concept on an existing robot submarine it already makes, the smaller Dive-LD. At the naming announcement, a Dive-LD with “Ghost Shark” on the side was on display, highlighting how the program will flow from one into the other.

The Dive-LD is smaller than the XL-AUV (or Ghost Shark) will be, with its 5.8 meter length between 4 and 24 meters shorter than the final design. It still is a useful starting point for developing software, techniques, and testing payloads, all with the intent of scaling the robot up to the size needed for long lasting and deep operations.

The company boasts that these submarines can operate for up to 10 days, with room to expand that endurance, and can operate at depths of up to 6,000 meters below the surface. 

Watch a video about the Ghost Shark, from the Australian Department of Defence, below:

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Hummingbirds’ tiny frames cast a huge shadow over the drone and aerial vehicle industry—their recognizable, precise flight and hovering maneuvers long used as inspiration for artificial wings and other propellers. As influential as they are, however, much of what is understood about the birds’ movements is drawn largely from flight activity observances in both real-life and artificial environments. 

That comparatively limited knowledge has been greatly expanded upon by researchers at Penn State University recently “reverse engineered” the musculoskeletal system of hummingbird wings to provide some of the best details yet regarding the tiny avian animals’ movements. Now, a wealth of new information is becoming available for designers of the next generation of drones.

To inform their new modeling method, the team utilized a combination of preexisting anatomy literature, computational fluid dynamics simulation data, and wing movement captured via micro-CT and X-ray scans. They then combined this copious information with what’s known as a genetic algorithm, an optimization program based on evolutionary strategies, to gain novel insights into some of hummingbirds’ most delicate facets of flight.

[Related: Hummingbirds routinely hit 9Gs like it’s no big deal.]

“We can simulate the whole reconstructed motion of the hummingbird wing and then simulate all the flows and forces generated by the flapping wing, including all the pressure acting on the wing,”  Bo Cheng, professor of mechanical engineering at Penn State, said in the university’s announcement earlier this month.

One of the chief discoveries from their new modeling system is that hummingbirds’ primary muscles, known (seriously) as “flight engines,” don’t simply cause wings to flap back and forth. Instead, they actually move their wings in three different directions—up and down, back and forth, as well as a twisting or pitching motion. Researchers likened the motions to tightening one’s core muscles while working out to improve agility and stability.

“They tighten their wings in the pitch and up-down directions but keep the wing loose along the back-and-forth direction, so their wings appear to be flapping back and forth only while their power muscles, or their flight engines, are actually pulling the wings in all three directions,” Cheng explained. “In this way, the wings have very good agility in the up and down motion as well as the twist motion.”

Although additional testing validation is still required, the team is confident their observations could one day positively influence future drone technological advancements that rely on more accurate hummingbird biomimicry.

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On December 2, the Air Force revealed its first new bomber in 34 years: the B-21 Raider. The Raider most closely resembles its stealthy predecessor the B-2 Spirit, and both were built by defense giant Northrop Grumman. With only head-on views of the B-21 released and available to the press, it is hard to know all the features that distinguish it from its predecessor. Still, the head-on image is enough to identify some major changes. 

The Raider is a stealth flying wing, designed to carry an explosive arsenal deep into hostile countries while bypassing their radar systems. The B-2 could deliver deadly payloads from conventional explosives to nuclear weapons. Unlike the Spirit’s 1988 reveal, the B-21 arrived in a world with a very different geopolitical climate, one where the nuclear superpower over the horizon for the US to worry about is China, not the Soviet Union. 

The “Spirit” of the Cold War

The Spirit’s production, which the Air Force originally expected to reach 132 bombers, was stopped after just 21. This change matched the geopolitical and domestic expectations of the mid-1990s, when the dissolution of the USSR and the seemingly unchecked ascendancy of American power meant specialized aircraft to bypass advanced defenses seemed superfluous at best.

Stealth is a curious kind of protective technology. It is built into the physical form of the aircraft, with rounded shapes and smooth edges built to minimize the amount of surface that reflects radio waves back to radar receivers. That makes the shape both tremendously important as a secret during development, even if the ultimate form will be discernible by eyes and cameras. A 1988 memo from the CIA, declassified decades later, estimated that half of what the Soviet Union knew about stealth came from the public reporting on it by one Aviation Week writer in the United States.

[Related: Our first look at the Air Force’s new B-21 stealth bomber was just a careful teaser]

That was before Aviation Week pulled its biggest stunt to report on stealth aircraft. In 1988, for the B-2 rollout, the bomber was pulled by a tractor from a hangar into the open air, and then wheeled back again. Reporters with Aviation Week, knowing the location and time of the rollout, rented a Cessna plane to get photographs from overhead.

“One of the driving functions to get us into this mode was, ‘Hey, if they were going to pull this thing out of the hangar into the open, I can guarantee the Russians are going to have a satellite overhead. And if the powers that be don’t care if the Russians see the trailing edge, why should they care about the American people?’” William B. Scott, former Aviation Week editor, recalled in a recent piece.

While the Air Force and pre-merger Northrop revealed more about the B-2 over time, the stunt by Aviation Week to capture photographs of the plane’s whole outline and trailing edges was clearly remembered. The 1988 reveal took place outside a hangar, and during the daytime. The 2022 reveal of the B-21 took place at night, and it barely left the hangar.

Spot these differences

Even limited to the head-on view, there’s still striking details that stand out in the new bomber compared to the old one. The B-2 Spirit appears as two caverns and a mound arising from the flat plain of the wing. The B-21, instead, shares one generally rising approach to the middle, with a gentle slope for the narrower air inlets before a sharper incline to the peak of the cockpit. 

“Perhaps the most striking features of the B-21 are its slender, barely-there air intakes. Unlike the higher-rise, scalloped intakes on the B-2, the B-21’s are almost organically a part of its wing root,” reports Air & Space Forces Magazine. “That’s good for stealth—radar loves abrupt angles and big cavities—but the intakes are so thin and shallow, they seem hardly big enough to swallow enough air to feed the B-21’s engines.” 

The fact that it has slender inlets means that there would be less of a cavity for search radars to find. Moreover, the B-21’s engine fan blades are a huge radar reflector that are shielded from direct view. 

There are seven other notable differences spotted by Air & Space Forces, from depth of the bomber’s belly to its landing gear, color, and smoothness. Sensor technology has improved greatly in the decades since the first B-2 was introduced to the world, and protecting the bomber means stealth not just against radar, but from acoustic sensors, thermal imaging, and other detection strategies.

Many tests and, invariably, reveals are still ahead for the Raider, which has come a long way since the plane was first developed as the Long Range Strike Bomber. The Air Force also intends to roll the B-21 into full production, eventually replacing not just the existing B-2 Spirits but the B-1 Lancer bombers. It may even one day replace the still-in-service B-52 bomber, though that’s a lower priority for the Air Force.

The Air Force places to acquire at least 100 Raiders. Soon enough, observers both civilian and military will be able to catch it in the air, with its once carefully guarded form revealed against the undeniable clarity of the sky.

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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

It’s 8:00 a.m. on a sunny 29 °C Saturday at Alexandra Headland on the Sunshine Coast of southeast Queensland, Australia. Swimmers porpoise through the shimmering water, while farther offshore surfers straddle their boards in anticipation of the next big wave. If anyone is worried about a shark bite, you wouldn’t know it.

“Not really, probably should,” says 18-year-old surfer Jake Hazelwood of Cairns, a city farther to the north. “When you’re out there, you just zone everything else out.”

Hazelwood is also oblivious to the drone taking off from the beach just 20 meters away, the state government’s latest tool to help keep popular coastal areas safe for humans—and safe for sharks.

For decades, Queensland has relied on nets and baited-hook drumlines to help protect beachgoers from sharks. But that safety comes at a cost to marine life. Last year alone, that equipment caught 958 animals, including 798 sharks—70 percent of which died. Sixteen turtles also perished as unintended victims along with 10 dolphins and two dugongs, a vulnerable species in Queensland. And in 2022, 15 humpback whales were caught in shark nets, though all of them were safely removed.

The government is considering replacing its lethal measures with using camera-equipped drones to search for sharks, and Alexandra Headland is one of the locations for a trial program that is already showing success.

It’s surprisingly easy to spot sharks when you fly over them, says Rob Adsett, the chief remote pilot with the Australian Lifeguard Service. “Technology is getting better.”

The infrared-equipped drone that Adsett and his colleagues used off Alexandra Headland can fly for 20 minutes in winds above 35 kilometers per hour. The pilots fly the drone along a 400-meter route parallel to shore behind the surf break. On busy beach days, the drone zips along at up to 20 kilometers per hour, staying out of the way at an altitude of 60 meters. When pilots detect a shark, they lower the drone to 30 meters so they can identify the animal’s size and species, a task that can become more difficult when it is raining or if the water is murky or rough.

If the pilots deem the shark a danger, they can evacuate the beach while lifeguards follow in inflatable boats or personal watercraft to track the animal and monitor the threat.

During their trials in 2020 and 2021, which involved 3,669 drone flights at seven beaches, drone pilots detected 174 sharks, including 48 that were greater than two meters in length. For beach users and lifeguards, the presence of big sharks, especially white, tiger, and bull sharks, is the greatest concern, and these sightings led to four beach evacuations.

Queensland’s effort is following on the heels of a similar project that has been underway in New South Wales, the state just to the south, since 2017.

For conservationists, the switch away from nets and drumlines can’t come soon enough. Any further delay in removing the lethal deterrents “is baffling,” says Leo Guida, a shark scientist with Australian Marine Conservation Society. “They’ve got the solution on the table.”

Drones, says Guida, can also save people by dropping life-saving equipment to someone struggling in the water. “You’re more likely to save someone from drowning than interacting with a dangerous animal,” he says. “There are clear benefits across the board” to having drones at the beach.

The toll of the nets and drumlines on sharks also has to be balanced against the threat sharks actually pose to beachgoers. According to Adsett, “You’ve got more of a chance of getting hit by a car on the way to the beach than getting attacked by a shark.”

Still, shark bites do happen. Though infrequent, bite rates are increasing.

The Australia Shark Incident Database recorded 1,196 shark bites in the country over the past 231 years, from 1791 to 2022. Those bites caused 250 deaths, while 723 people suffered injuries. No one was injured in the other 223 cases, which cover incidents such as bites to surfboards.

Shark bites jumped from an average of nine per year in 1990–2000 to 22 per year in 2010–2020, in part because of the increasing human population along the coast.

But even nets and drumlines, Guida argues, are no guarantee against bites because sharks can simply swim around them. That’s what happened in 2020 when a male surfer in Queensland died after being bitten at Greenmount Beach, a stretch of coastline equipped with nets and drumlines. As for whether the nets can be replaced with drones, the Queensland government has at least seen enough to continue their trials. They’ve committed to expanding the project, which will continue through June 2025 at a cost of roughly US $1.3-million per year.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine, and is republished here with permission.

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In Kansas earlier this month, a large pack of aviation batteries plunged 50 feet from an orange-colored tower and smacked down below with a thud. The result of this test involving battery cells and gravity? The unit was ok! There was “no significant damage at the cell or pack level,” according to Beta Technologies, which supplied the pack and has created an electric aircraft that The New York Times has referred to as “the battery that flies.” 

Like jet fuel, lithium-ion batteries can be flammable, thanks to the liquid electrolyte within them as well as the fact that they store oodles of energy and can experience a fire-starting reaction called thermal runaway. And fire on an aircraft can be disastrous. 

This test, examining how a battery system holds up following a hard impact, took place at a facility called the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) in Wichita, Kansas. The FAA sponsored it. 

“This is the first time ever that anyone has run one of these 50-foot drop tests with a battery pack,” Gerardo Olivares, a senior research scientist at NIAR, said in the video of the test. “It’s going to help us define some of the future regulations and requirements for this technology.”

[Related: How a ‘digital twin’ of an Apache helicopter could help keep these old birds flying]

The 50-foot drop can mimic “emergency landing conditions,” NIAR said in a LinkedIn post yesterday, and noted that these tests are also “regulated for fuel cells and fuel tanks.”

Safer batteries that are thoroughly validated could help companies working on electric aircraft—among them Beta, Joby Aviation, Archer, Wisk Aero, and Eviation—continue to develop small flying machines that use electric motors instead of fossil fuels to transport people through the air. But the day when a regular paying passenger can climb aboard one and travel from place to place has not yet arrived. 

There’s been turbulence: In July, Bloomberg explored the incidents that have taken place among the startups working on this new aviation frontier. It highlights two battery-related fires that took place on the ground in 2020 involving Eviation and Lilium. (Other accidents include an uninhabited Joby aircraft that crashed in a test earlier this year and then experienced, as the NTSB has said in a preliminary report, a fire on the ground. There was also a 2019 crash involving an aircraft from the now-defunct Kitty Hawk, which was working on a single-seat electric aircraft.)

Beta itself, which supplied the 800-volt battery pack for this drop test, has experienced two fires with batteries on the ground. The most recent was in August, which Beta says involved a pack of batteries that was going to be tested and was not flight-approved. A Beta spokesperson notes via email: “The fire was quickly extinguished and there were no injuries or damage to our current test equipment or aircraft. We are grateful to the first responders who arrived on scene, and that the response plans and safety precautions we have in place worked effectively.”

Of course, aircraft powered by batteries, though newer, are certainly not the only type of flying machine subject to the dangers of fire or explosion. One especially tragic example is the 1996 explosion of a Boeing 747 operated by TWA, in which 230 people lost their lives. The NTSB noted last year, when announcing that they were decommissioning the reconstruction of flight 800 they had created, that “the probable cause of the crash was an explosion in the center wing fuel tank. Evidence indicated the explosion was the result of an electrical failure that ignited the flammable fuel/air mixture in the tank.”

One crucial aspect of aircraft safety is that the industry can learn from past accidents and mishaps, make changes, and move forward. 

Watch the battery drop test, below.

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Mayhem is an odd name for a spy, but it’s a pretty good name for a superfast jet. On December 16, the Department of Defense awarded contractor Leidos $334 million to develop a hypersonic flying scout. The award is technically for the “Expendable Hypersonic Multi-mission ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and Strike program,” but it’s also known as Mayhem. It will be uncrewed—a drone.

“The Mayhem system will use a scramjet engine to generate thrust, propelling the vehicle across long distances at speeds greater than Mach 5,” Leidos said in a release.

Hypersonic is the threshold defined as five or more times the speed of sound. Many of the recent developments in hypersonic technology have focused on weapons such as missiles that fly fast to evade detection and interception. Speed is profoundly useful for a weapon, as the force of a fast impact can be tremendously deadly even without a warhead on board.

What sets Mayhem apart from more outright destructive designs is that, while still intended to be expendable, the hypersonic Mayhem is a tool more for finding out than flying around. 

ISR, which stands for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and is generally the Pentagon’s acronym for everything involved in discovering, observing, and monitoring activity below, is a mission often associated with slow-moving vehicles. Drones, like the medium-altitude Reaper or the ultra long-endurance Global Hawk, are built to keep watch on activity below, informing how soldiers, sailors, and pilots below all respond. Yet some missions cannot be done at the ponderous speeds of Reaper’s prop engine, or wait for an overhead satellite to be in place.

It is likely in that void, where the need is urgent and the information collection is dangerous, that Mayhem will work best. 

Past is prologue

One way to understand the role the Mayhem might have is to look at the history of superfast spy planes. The most famous of these is the SR-71 Blackbirds, and its single-seat, CIA-piloted predecessor, the A-12, also known as Oxcart. Both planes were designed to take photographs without being shot down by anti-air missiles, which had advanced considerably in power and accuracy into the Cold War. The Soviet Union used a ground-to-air missile to shoot down a U-2 spy plane in 1960, and while U-2s still fly today, there are certain missions better suited for a faster vehicle. The Oxcart flew missions for the US above North Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, before it was retired. The two-seat Blackbird, with room for a pilot and a person to crew the sensors, operated into the 1990s

“The SR-71 was designed to fly deep into hostile territory, avoiding interception with its tremendous speed and high altitude. It could operate safely at a maximum speed of Mach 3.3 at an altitude more than sixteen miles, or 25,908 m (85,000 ft), above the earth,” notes the National Air and Space Museum.

The Blackbird entered service in the late 1960s, and was retired in 1998. In April 1988, a decade before the Blackbird’s retirement, Popular Science highlighted what the Air Force would want in a replacement, including a speed of Mach 5 and a service ceiling of above 100,000 feet. 

There’s a third distant predecessor to Mayhem: the D-21 supersonic drone. Launched by planes, including the B-52, four D-21s were used to take photographs of China between 1969 and 1971. The drone was designed within the limits of the technology at the time, which meant film cases that had to be ejected and recovered, before they were to be processed in a darkroom. The D-21 flew a fixed path, and then detonated after its mission. None of the four flights over China produced recoverable images, and the program was abandoned. 

Developing a new hypersonic spyplane has long been a goal of the Air Force, with reports of new concepts sprouting periodically. 

Uncrewed is good news

What might make Mayhem a better bet in 2022 than any prior attempt at a Blackbird replacement is a conflux of factors, all of which have led to improved drone technology. Removing the need for a pilot onboard a plane can shrink its overall profile, and lets the aircraft operate without the constraints of having to keep people onboard alive.

Cameras, data processing, and wireless data transfer have all improved tremendously in the past decades. The era of using film cameras for aerial surveillance finally ended this summer, and with it the constraints of having to collect or process film negatives. The cameras that make possible drone sensors, like the far-seeing pods on Global Hawks, show an industrial community proficient in far-seeing sensors, though taking pictures with clarity and at speed has its own obstacles. The Blackbird included sensors for listening and recording signals, like radar and radios, and those too could be incorporated into a hypersonic drone.

Like the D-21 before it, Mayhem can be expendable, where the loss of the drone need not mean the loss of information it collected. But expendable doesn’t have to mean that the drone is destroyed at the end of every mission, and a drone that could be recovered and reused offers a boon to military brass looking for a way to confirm reports by photography 

“This program is focused on delivering a larger class air-breathing hypersonic system capable of executing multiple missions with a standardized payload interface, providing a significant technological advancement and future capability,” is all the detail provided by the contract announcement for what Mayhem actually will do.

However Mayhem ultimately develops, it will fill a void the Air Force has left open for almost thirty years. 

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To confuse Russian aircraft, Ukraine reportedly has access to a training tool from the United States. Known as “Threat Emitters,” they are a way for pilots to learn the signatures of hostile aircraft and missiles, allowing them to safely practice identifying and reacting to combat situations in training. In simulated scenarios, pilots learn how their sensors would perceive real threats, and can safely plan and adapt to the various anti-aircraft weapons they might encounter. The net effect is that pilots learn to fight against a phantom representation of air defenses, in preparation for the real thing.

But when brought to actual war, the emitters in turn are a way to make an enemy’s sensors less reliable, confounding adversarial pilots about what is real and what is merely an electromagnetic mirage.

These “low-cost emitters were built for ranges inside the U.S. but now are in the hands of Ukrainians,” reported Aviation Week, citing Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Q. Brown Jr. “The emitters can replicate surface-to-air missiles and aircraft, and are a cheap, innovative way to further complicate the air picture for Russia.”

One such system is the Joint Threat Emitter. There are two major components to the system: a command unit that lets soldiers operate it, and trailer-mounted radar threat emitters. A command unit can control up to 12 different threat emitters, and each emitter can simulate up to six threats at once. 

These emitters help pilots train on their sensors, practicing for war when far from conflict. In 2013, the Air Force and Navy set up Joint Threat Emitters at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. Both the Navy and Air Force operate from the island, and as the American territory closest to North Korea and China, Guam is prominently featured in war plans around either country. 

“When [pilots] go to a real-world situation, they won’t see anything that we haven’t thrown at them before,” Staff Sgt. Rick Woltkamp, a ground radar systems craftsman with the Idaho Air National Guard, said in 2013. “We simulate a ground attack, and the pilot will react and respond accordingly to the simulation.”

[Related: The Air Force wants to start using its ‘Angry Kitten’ system in combat]

Development and use of the tech goes back two decades. In 2002, the Air Force selected Northrop Grumman to develop the Joint Threat Emitter over the next 10 years as a “high-fidelity, full-power threat simulator that is capable of generating radar signals associated with threat systems” that will “better enable aircrews to train in modern war environments.”

Some of the signals it can generate mimic surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery, both of which threaten planes but require different countermeasures. One example of a non-missile air defense system is the ZSU-23, built by the Soviet Union. The ZSU is an armored vehicle with anti-aircraft guns pointed on a turret that uses a radar dish to guide its targeting. As a Soviet-made system, ZSU-23 systems were handed down to successor states, and are reportedly in operation by both the militaries of Ukraine and Russia.

When used for training purposes, the Joint Threat Emitters let pilots perceive and adapt to the presence of enemies, beyond visual line of sight. At these distances, pilots rely largely on sensor readings to see and anticipate the danger they are flying into. One way for them to adapt might be to pick a new route, further from the anti-air radars. Another would be to divert the attack to knock out anti-air systems first.

[Related: How electronic warfare could factor into the Russia-Ukraine crisis]

In Ukraine, the likely use case for these emitters is to augment the country’s existing air defenses. Using the emitters to project air-defense signals across the battlefield—signals identical to known and real Ukrainian air defenses—could mask where the actual defenses are. Real defenses lurking in a sea of mirage defenses, simulated but not backed up by the actual weapons, is a vexing proposition for an attacker. Discovering what is real means probing the defenses with scouts (or hoping that satellite imagery provides a timely update). But because the emitters, like the weapons they emulate, can be driven around, even a view from space cannot accurately pin down a fixed location for long.

Russia’s air force has struggled to achieve air superiority over Ukraine since it invaded in February 2022. Existing air defenses, from vintage human-portable missiles to newer arrivals, put planes and helicopters at real risk for attack. Videos of Russian helicopters lobbing rockets, increasing range while greatly reducing accuracy, suggest that even in the war’s earliest months Russian pilots were afraid of existing Ukrainian anti-air defenses. 

While the threat emitters alone do not offer any direct way to shoot down aircraft, having them in place makes Russia’s work of attacking from the sky that much harder. Even if a threat emitter is found and destroyed, it likely means that Russia spent ammunition hitting a decoy target, while missing a real and tangible threat.

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The US Army just announced that it has made a historic decision about how its soldiers will be transported around battlefields in the future. After considering two different options—a helicopter from Sikorsky and Boeing and an aircraft from Bell Textron—it said that it is moving forward with the latter. 

Bell’s creation is called the V-280 Valor. But although it can take off and land vertically like a helicopter, it’s technically not a helicopter. It’s a tiltrotor aircraft. With the V-280, Bell won the Army’s competition to create the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, or FLRAA. “The FLRAA is intended to eventually replace the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, which has been in service for more than four decades,” the Army said in a press release on Dec. 5. 

“It’s the biggest Army helicopter decision in 40 years, since they selected the Black Hawk,” says J.J. Gertler, a senior associate in the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This is the Army selecting what will be its main transport helicopter for an entire generation.”

With a tiltrotor aircraft, the rotors do what its name suggests—they can tilt. What that means in practice is that they can direct the thrust they produce towards the ground to allow it to take off and land vertically, and then adjust their positions to send that thrust backwards in forward flight, like the propellers on a traditional aircraft. The wing to which those tilting rotors are attached provides the aircraft with lift as it cruises forward. “There’s nothing out there that can compete with a tiltrotor when it comes to speed and range,” Bell’s program director for the FLRAA program, Ryan Ehinger, told PopSci last year. 

Bell says that the V-280 has traveled faster than 345 mph. The numbers that Sikorsky has revealed for how fast its candidate can go are less than 300 mph. 

The other tiltrotor aircraft in service today is the V-22 Osprey, which is made by Bell together with Boeing. But the V-280 Valor differs from the larger Osprey in some key ways, one of which is that when the rotors tilt on the Valor, the engines do not. Comparing the Valor to the Osprey, “the basic technology of tilting rotors is the same—all of the details are different,” Gertler says. “Bell learned extensively from the V-22 experience.”

[Related: Tilting rotors could help make Bell’s speedy new aircraft the next Black Hawk]

Bell’s competition from Sikorsky and Boeing in the FLRAA contest was a craft called the Defiant X, which sports a compound coaxial design: Two top rotors, one stacked on top of the other, spin in opposite directions from each other. This design was chosen to avoid a problem that occurs with traditional helicopters when they try to travel very quickly: When a helicopter’s blade retreats through the air in the opposite direction of the one the aircraft is traveling in, it can lose lift. 

“This was a fascinating competition because it wasn’t just between two helicopters—it was between two visions of what rotorcraft should be, or could be, in the future,” Gertler says. 

The Defiant X helicopter shares a design approach with a smaller Sikorsky helicopter called Raider X that’s a candidate for a separate competition called FARA. That program also involves Bell, with its 360 Invictus, which is a more traditional helicopter that has partially detachable wings. Meanwhile, the US Air Force’s next-gen bomber, revealed last week, shares a similar name as one of these candidates: the B-21 Raider. 

In a statement following the Army’s decision on the FLRAA program announcement, Sikorsky said that they “remain confident” in their candidate and that they “will evaluate our next steps after reviewing feedback from the Army.”

Now that the contract has been awarded, Gertler notes that it could be protested. If Sikorsky and Boeing ask for a review, for example, it might slow down the process. 

It will be some time before the FLRAA is fielded and soldiers are flying around in a Bell-made tiltrotor—likely not until the next decade. Defense News noted that this new aircraft will start doing Black-Hawk-like tasks “around 2030.”

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On Friday, the public finally got a glimpse at the Air Force’s next bomber, the B-21 Raider. Northrop Grumman, which is producing it, rolled out the futuristic flying machine at a ceremony in Palmdale, California, on Dec. 2. It’s a stealthy aircraft, meaning that it’s designed to have a minimal radar signature. It’s also intended to carry both conventional and nuclear weapons. 

The new aircraft will eventually join a bomber fleet that currently consists of three different aircraft types: the old, not-stealthy B-52s, the supersonic B-1Bs, and the B-2 flying wing, which is the B-21’s most direct ancestor. 

Here’s what to know about the B-21 Raider.

A throwback to 1988

At the B-21’s unveiling, the US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, referred to the new plane as “the first bomber of the 21st century.” Indeed, the bomber models it will eventually replace include the 1980s-era aircraft, the B-2 Spirit. 

As Peter Westwick recounts in his history of low-observable aircraft in the United States, Stealth, two aircraft makers competed against each other to build the B-2. Northrop prevailed against Lockheed to build the stealth bomber, while Lockheed had previously beaten Northrop when it came to creating the first stealth fighter: the F-117. Northrop scored the contract to build the B-2 in late 1981, and rolled out the craft just over seven years later, in 1988. 

The 1988 roll-out event, Westwick writes, included “no fewer than 41 Air Force generals,” and an audience of 2,000 people. “A tractor towed the plane out of the hangar, the crowd went wild, the press snapped photos, and then the tractor pushed it back out of sight,” he writes. It flew for the first time in 1989.

[Related: The B-21 bomber won’t need a drone escort, thank you very much]

Today, the B-2 represents the smallest segment of the US bomber fleet, by the numbers. “We only bought 21 of them,” says Todd Harrison, a defense analyst at Metrea Strategic Insights. “One has crashed, one is used for testing, and at any given time, several others will be in maintenance—so the reality is we have far too few stealthy bombers in our inventory, and the only way to get more was to design and build a whole new bomber.” 

The new bomber

The B-21, when it does fly, will join the old group of bombers. Those planes, such as the B-1, “are really aging, and are hard to keep in the air—they’re very expensive to fly, and they just don’t have the capabilities that we need in the bomber fleet of today and in the future,” Harrison says. The B-52s date to the early 1960s; one B-52 pilot once told Popular Science that being at the controls of that aircraft feels like “flying a museum.” If the B-52 is officially called the Stratofortress, it’s also been called the Stratosaurus. (A likely future scenario is that the bomber fleet eventually becomes just two models: B-52s, which are getting new engines, and the B-21.)

[Related: Inside a training mission with a B-52 bomber, the aircraft that will not die]

With the B-21, the view offered by the unveiling video is just of the aircraft from the front, a brief vision of a futuristic plane. “They’re not likely to reveal the really interesting stuff about the B-21,” observes Harrison. “What’s most interesting is what they can’t show us.” That includes internal as well as external attributes. 

Publicly revealing an aircraft like this represents a calculated decision to show that a capability exists without revealing too much about it. “You want to reveal things that you think will help deter Russia or China from doing things that might provoke us into war,” he says. “But, on the other hand, you don’t want to show too much, because you don’t want to make it easy for your adversary to develop plans and technologies to counter your capabilities.”

Indeed, the way that Secretary of Defense Austin characterized the B-21 on Dec. 2 walked that line. “The B-21 looks imposing, but what’s under the frame, and the space-age coatings, is even more impressive,” he said. He then spoke about its range, stealth attributes, and other characteristics in generalities. (The War Zone, a sibling website to PopSci, has deep analysis on the aircraft here and has interviewed the pilots who will likely fly it for the first time here.)

Mark Gunzinger, the director for future concepts and capability assessments at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, says that the B-21 rollout, which he attended, “was very carefully staged.” 

[Related: The stealth helicopters used in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden are still cloaked in mystery]

“There were multiple lights on each side of the aircraft that were shining out into the audience,” he recalls. “The camera angles were very carefully controlled, reporters were told what they could and could not do in terms of taking photos, and of course, the aircraft was not rolled out all the way—half of it was still pretty much inside the hanger, so people could not see the tail section.” 

“The one word you heard the most during the presentation from all the speakers was ‘deterrence,'” Gunzinger adds. Part of achieving that is signaling to others that the US has “a creditable capability,” but at the same time, “there should be enough uncertainty about the specifics—performance specifics and so forth—so they do not develop effective countermeasures.”

The B-21 rollout concluded with Northrup Grumman’s CEO, Kathy Warden, who mentioned the aircraft’s next big moment. “The next time you see this plane, it’ll be in the air,” she said. “Now, let’s put this plane to bed.” 

And with that, it was pushed back into the hanger, and the doors closed in front of it. 

Watch the reveal video, below.

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This article originally published on Task & Purpose.

Master Sgt. Leah Curtin had four years of experience fixing F-15 fighter jets when she showed up to Luke Air Force Base, Arizona in 2014 to learn how to fix the much newer F-35 Lightning II. Despite her experience on the older jet, Curtin and her fellow maintainers soon realized that the F-35 is a different sort of beast.

“We were kind of trying to figure out how to maintain this brand new aircraft that is so different from legacy” aircraft, such as the F-15 or F-16, Curtin told Task & Purpose. What Curtin may not have known at the time was that the jet she was learning how to fix was not just a new platform to master — it was a new kind of maintenance that could have an impact on how the Air Force fights a possible war against China or other distant foes.

“We’ve had multiple units doing some really good things on how to take small teams and move forward,” as in closer to the fight, Lt. Gen. Michael Loh, director of the Air National Guard, told reporters in September at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air Space & Cyber Conference at National Harbor, Maryland. Loh pointed out Curtin, who can perform multiple maintenance specialties on the F-35.

“Now think about that. You’re only trained to be a crew chief or trained to be avionics or hydraulics or engines. She actually took the time to learn four specialties,” Loh said.

Back in 2014, Curtin was still learning the ropes of the F-35. Fighter aircraft are complicated machines, and mastering how to fix them takes time for both individual airmen and for maintenance squadrons. Curtin and her colleagues had to start building that knowledge base from the ground up.

“It was definitely a learning curve,” said the crew chief, who noted that the F-35 had its first flight in 2006 and arrived at its first base in 2011. It was practically an infant compared to the F-15s Curtin was used to, which first entered service in 1976. But the crew chief and her colleagues were ready to take on the challenge.

“With safety in mind, we were always like, ‘we’ll just figure it out,’” said Curtin, who pointed out that engineers from Lockheed Martin, the F-35 manufacturer, were also there to guide the way.

One of the biggest differences between the F-35 and older jets is that F-35 maintainers can simply hook a laptop up to the jet to test out its flight controls and other diagnostics.

“This jet actually reports faults, and it tells you what’s wrong,” said Curtin, who is currently assigned to the Vermont Air National Guard’s 158th Fighter Wing. “It’s not a perfect system. I don’t think there’s any perfect system out there. But it really can pinpoint if you have a bad sensor or bad filter or anything like that.”

One of the perks of a self-diagnosing jet is that it means maintainers do not necessarily have to get their hands dirty to find out what the problem is, which they might do with previous jets.

“Ask any crew chief who worked on an F-15 or an F-16 or an A-10, we would tell you that we don’t get as dirty as we used to on the older aircraft,” Curtin said. “When those jets broke, they broke hard, but people worked really hard to fix them.”

Part of the reason the older jets break so hard is simply that they are so old. It is similar to an old car, which might require more tender loving care and replacement parts than a car straight off the assembly line, the crew chief explained.

“Right now, we just don’t have a lot of breaks with the hydraulic system, fuel system,” or other components, Curtin said. “That could happen, you know, 20 years down the road. But at this point, these jets are already lasting pretty well.”

What makes the F-35 special is not just its young age or self-diagnosing software: it’s how all the subsystems talk with each other through software to improve the jet’s performance. That means sometimes F-35 maintenance involves simply updating the software. While the system integration improves the aircraft’s efficiency, it also blurs the lines between maintenance specialties.

“This jet is already like a flying computer and a lot of the systems already talk to each other,” Curtin said. “So why can’t our maintainers be able to do more than just what their training guideline is telling them to do?”

Curtin became one of the first airmen to participate in the F-35 nose-to-tail program, where maintainers pick up basic skills from outside their usual specialty. For example a fuels or avionics expert might learn the basics of how the F-35’s weapons systems work.

“We don’t actually load the munition, but we’re able to do troubleshooting on a [weapons] rack if a bomb did not drop or if it is having an issue communicating with the aircraft,” Curtin explained. “So I’m still an expert in my crew chief career field, but I’m kind of like a jack of all trades in everything else.”

The master sergeant particularly enjoys working on the F-35 engine, which she never had a chance to do on the F-15. Curtin explained that the new jet’s engine breaks down into five modules, each of which can be replaced if necessary. 

“That’s probably my favorite part — is working on the engines — where we can actually pull the engine modules apart and replace them,” she said. “When you put it back together and the aircraft flies you’re like ‘yeah, I put that motor together.’”

Curtin is not the only maintainer getting to know the F-35 from nose to tail. The airman said there are about 25 other maintainers picking up similar skills in Vermont. The advantage of an Air National Guard unit like Curtin’s is that air national guardsmen do not have to rotate to another duty location every few years like their active-duty counterparts. Instead, airmen can stay at one base and build up expertise on the aircraft there. That expertise could pay off in a major conflict where the military may have a limited number of seats to send deep into the Pacific or elsewhere.  

“When we are deployed somewhere and we have to go to X location for two weeks with six jets, we don’t have to bring such a huge amount of people,” Curtin explained. “We could have a weapons expert who has been trained to launch and recover a jet, or change a tire, or do some servicing.”

Figuring out how to get the job done with fewer people and aircraft is a major problem for the Air Force. Part of the impetus is funding: Air Force senior leaders do not expect the service to grow any time soon, both in terms of its enlisted force and in terms of an ongoing pilot shortage that makes trained aviators an increasingly scarce resource. The manpower shortage, plus a small fleet of aircraft that is generally older than the airmen flying and fixing them, means the service wants to pack each airman and aircraft with as much operational flexibility as possible.

Sometimes that flexibility takes the form of using B-52 bombers as transport aircraft or, vice versa, using C-17 transport aircraft as bomb trucks. But for many enlisted airmen, it takes the form of a concept called “multi-capable airmen,” which means the Air Force is encouraging airmen to become Swiss Army knives who can work outside their usual job specialty. Though some airmen have criticized the concept as being a fresh coat of paint on the phrase “do more with less,” service leaders say it will be an essential trait to help airmen survive a future fight. 

Multi-capable airmen is one tenet of a larger strategy called agile combat employment, where the Air Force wants to complicate an enemy’s targeting process by operating smaller airfields across the theater of war, in contrast to the sprawling air bases built up in the United States and in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Global War on Terror. 

The theory is that those large bases present juicy, all-eggs-in-one-basket targets for enemies in a future fight. Instead, the Air Force hopes to deploy smaller, more distributed airfields so that if any one airfield were destroyed, the operation as a whole could keep running. All of which is to say that the multirole maintenance airmen training at the Vermont Air National Guard are right in line with the larger Air Force’s preparations for a future fight.

“I would say one multi-capable airman could probably do the job of at least three people,” Curtin said. 

The Vermont air guardsmen tested out the concept this summer, when 35 airmen from the 158th Fighter Wing deployed from Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany to Amari Air Base, Estonia to see if they could operate with a smaller footprint than usual. The airmen completed 28 sorties and 76 flying hours, which was a success according to a press release about the exercise.

“The proof of concept was effective at showing NATO partners that the USAF was able to rapidly deploy to allied nations and perform 5th-generation fighter aircraft operations at non-USAF locations,” Tech. Sgt. Justin Oddy, 158th Operations Support Squadron airfield manager, said at the time. “The [agile combat employment] concept spans across the entire Air Force mission and when it comes to sortie generation, this small task force showed just how effective the concept is and will continue to be with allied support.”

The operation may not have been so successful without Curtin, who over the years has become a mentor for younger maintainers in her unit. Now that she is in a leadership/supervisor role, the crew chief does not get as much time working on the F-35 as she used to, but helping other airmen provides its own rewards.

“I don’t get to play with the jet as much as I would like, but being able to watch my airmen grow into who I was as an expert is awesome to see,” Curtin said “Knowing that I helped train them to be the best maintainers that they can be …  it just makes me really proud to be a crew chief in the Air Force.”

Jets are not the only things that need support: people do too. Curtin was thankful for her parents, sisters and her partner, David Cruson, a fellow maintainer with eight years of experience on the F-35 and 10 on the F-15, for their support.

“They have been my biggest cheerleaders and I couldn’t thank them enough,” she said.

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The entertainment category for Best of What’s New used to primarily contain devices meant for consuming content. But that’s changed. While our Grand Award Winner goes to a big-budget movie this year, you’ll find an increasing number of devices meant for actually making content. Self-flying drones, all-encompassing camera rigs, and even high-end monitors give people the opportunity to make their own content rather than simply consuming it. Other items on this list—primarily the earbuds—provide a reminder that content is a constant part of our lives. We’ve changed the content we consume for entertainment, but more than that, we’ve changed the way we interact with it. And these gadgets help shape that relationship.

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Find it here.

Grand Award Winner

Top Gun: Maverick by Skydance Media/Paramount: A high-speed upgrade to practical filmmaking

Paramount Pictures, Skydance and Jerry Bruckheimer Films

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We’re all too used to watching computer-generated action sequences in movies. When Hulk smashes up the scene or aliens attack a city, we know it’s fake. The sequel to Top Gun, which arrived in May—36 years after the original—did it differently. Actors trained in real aircraft to prepare to climb into Navy F/A-18F Super Hornets, and when they did, they experienced crushing G forces as the jets maneuvered at speeds that ranged from about 250 mph to more than 400. To film it, the studio turned to custom cameras carefully mounted within the cockpits, and other aircraft like the L-39 CineJet shot while airborne, too. That approach, plus scenes shot on both the USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carriers, all add up to give the film a degree of excitement and verisimilitude that’s rare. While the film is still a product of Hollywood that made some use of CGI, and doubles as a recruiting vehicle for the Navy, we still salute its commitment to capturing the thrill and speed of Naval aviation.

Freestyle Projector by Samsung: An advanced projector that handles its own setup process

Samsung

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Samsung’s Freestyle fixes one of our biggest complaints with projectors: that moving them to find the perfect angle is a pain. The floating, tube-shaped all-in-one projector is attached to its frame on a pair of hinges, which lets it be tilted up or down with very little force. The Freestyle can be twisted a full 180 degrees, allowing it to be pointed forward for a traditional viewing experience, or vertically to play games on your ceiling. You can use your phone to enable “smart calibration,” which adjusts its brightness and color settings based on the color of your walls and the room’s lighting conditions. The Freestyle’s fun form factor and smart settings are complemented by impressive hardware features, like native 1080p resolution, stereo speakers, and an HDMI port for connecting external devices. There’s also a USB-C port in case you’d like to connect the Freestyle to a high-capacity power bank to take it on the go.

Frame TV Anti-Glare Matte Display by Samsung: A 4K TV that isn’t afraid of a bright room

Samsung

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A couple of years ago, Samsung imagined a creative way to make use of a large, borderless, high-resolution screen when you’re not using it to watch videos or play games: displaying famous artwork on your wall. The problem was the TV’s LCD panel, which reflected light and made older paintings look like they were displayed on a screen rather than a canvas. That changes with the second-generation Frame, which has an anti-reflective matte display. Despite the change in technologies, Samsung says you’ll still be able to see a billion colors on the screen, and that it’ll continue to automatically adjust its color balance based on your brightness preferences. If you can’t justify the cost of an original Rembrandt, Samsung’s new Frame will be the next best thing.

Linkbuds by Sony: Earbuds that mix your audio with the real world

Sony

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Sony created its LinkBuds to be the antithesis of noise-canceling headphones. They let outside sound in so you never need to take them out. The buds have a hard-shelled body, which means they won’t create a tight seal around your ear, and boast a circular cutout, which Sony calls an open ring. The ring gives LinkBuds their unique look, and is also where the earbuds’ driver is located. Sound is fed from the ring through the bud into your ear, along with some noise from the outside world. You’ll hear cars honking, airplane engines, and people on the street. But if you’re a runner who wants to hear a vehicle approach, this is a feature, not a bug.

QC II earbuds by Bose: Active noise cancellation that works across every frequency

Bose

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Typical noise-canceling headphones have trouble blocking out sound in the middle frequencies between roughly 120Hz and 400Hz. That allows sounds like voices to occasionally get through. Bose has totally reconfigured its noise-canceling algorithm and hardware setup in order to fill in that ANC gap without creating uncomfortable ear pressure or compromising audio quality. The company adjusted its noise cancellation and tuning to a user’s body by measuring the way a chime reflects off the inside of your ears back to the earbuds’ microphones. The attention to detail paid off, as outside noises are greatly reduced even if you’re not listening to music. Bose offers three listening modes by default, but you can create custom ones using the company’s app if you’d like to crank active noise cancellation all the way up, or mellow it out.

Ronin 4D by DJI: An all-encompassing cinema rig and steadicam for creators on a budget

DJI

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DJI’s Ronin 4D rig looks like a futuristic weapon pulled from a Star Wars flick. In reality, it’s a full-featured cinema rig that combines a number of essential movie-making tools into one compact and extremely stable camera rig. The modular system includes DJI’s flagship Zenmuse camera, which can capture 6K raw video at up to 60 fps or 4K video at up to 120 fps. It also boasts a full-frame sensor and interchangeable camera mounts. The whole imaging rig sits on a 4-axis gimbal that stabilizes footage so convincingly that it sometimes looks like it was shot on a dolly or a crane. Because the whole system is modular, you can swap parts like monitors, storage devices, batteries, and audio gear on the fly and customize it for your shooting needs.

Alienware AW3423DW QD-OLED Gaming Monitor by Dell: The first gaming monitor with a new brighter version of OLED tech

Dell

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OLED monitors typically provide unmatched contrast, image quality, and color reproduction, but they lack brightness. Quantum dot (or QLED) displays crank up the illumination, but lose some of the overall image impact found on an OLED. Enter QD-OLED. Like a typical OLED display, each pixel provides its own backlight. But the addition of quantum dots adds even more illumination, giving it a total peak brightness of 1,000 lumens while maintaining the certified HDR black levels to create ridiculous levels of contrast. And with its 175Hz native refresh rate, and super-fast 0.1-second response time, you can’t blame this pro-grade gaming monitor if you’re always getting eliminated mid-game.

Arctis Nova Pro Headset for Xbox by SteelSeries: A gaming headset that works across all of your machines

SteelSeries

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Gaming headsets typically require players to pick a platform for compatibility when you buy them. Some work with a console as well as a PC, but SteelSeries has given its Arctis Nova Pro headset the hardware it needs to work with Xbox, PS5, PC, and even the Nintendo Switch—all at the press of a button. Its secret lies in the GameDAC (short for digital audio converter), which connects to multiple systems and pumps out high-res certified sound with 360-degree spatial audio from whatever source you choose. Plush ear cups and a flexible suspension band ensure comfort, even during long, multi-platform gaming sessions.

Skydio 2+ drone by Skydio: A drone that follows commands or flies itself

Skydio

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Crashing a drone is bad for your footage—and your budget. But this high-end flying machine avoids obstacles with an advanced system that adjusts more than 500 times per second to prevent disaster. A fish-eye lens allows the drone to see 360 degrees around the craft. A dual-core Nvidia chipset generates a 3D-world model with more than 1 million data points per second to identify and avoid anything that might get in its way. With all those smarts, creatives can simply tell the drone to track them or program complex flight paths and the Skydio2+ will capture 4K video at 60 fps on its own. The drone also comes with more than 18 predetermined paths and programs that can make even basic action look worthy of a Mountain Dew commercial.

Dione soundbar by Devialet: True surround sound on a stick

Devialet

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Most soundbars allow buyers a chance to expand their audio system and add satellite speakers or at least a subwoofer. The Dione is different. It’s a totally stand-alone system that relies on nine 41mm drivers and eight built-in subwoofers in order to fulfill the entire sonic range you need to enjoy everything from high-pitched tire squeals to rumbling explosions. Thanks to its Dolby Atmos integration, it mimics a true 5.1.2 surround sound system. The sphere in the center of the bar contains one of the 41mm drivers; it rotates to allow the soundbar to achieve its spatial audio ambitions, whether it’s sitting on a TV stand or mounted somewhere around the television. Devialet’s Speaker Active Matching technology watches over the entire array to make sure none of the individual drivers surpass their optimal operating frequencies, and it even has a dynamic EQ mode that brings up dialog—so you can finally turn off the closed captioning and still understand what the actors are saying.

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In space, no one can hear a probe smash into an asteroid—but that’s just what happened in September, when NASA’s successful DART experiment proved that it’s possible to reroute a space rock by crashing into it on purpose. And that wasn’t even the most important event to materialize in space this year—more on the James Webb Space Telescope in a moment. Back on Earth, innovation also reached new heights in the aviation industry, as a unique electric airplane took off, as did a Black Hawk helicopter that can fly itself. 

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Check it out here.

Innovation of the Year

The James Webb Space Telescope by NASA: A game-changing new instrument to see the cosmos 

NASA

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Once a generation, an astronomical tool arrives that surpasses everything that came before it. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is just such a creation. After more than two decades and $9.7 billion in the making, JWST launched on December 25, 2021. Since February of this year, when it first started imaging—employing a mirror and aperture nearly three times larger in radius than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope—JWST’s vibrant images have captured the attention of the world.

The JWST can see deep into fields of forming stars. It can peer 13 billion years back in time at ancient galaxies, still in their nursery. It can peek at exoplanets, seeing them directly where astronomers would have once had to reconstruct meager traces of their existence. It can teach us about how those stars and galaxies came together from primordial matter, something Hubble could only glimpse.

While Hubble circles in low Earth orbit, JWST instead sits hundreds of thousands of miles farther away, in Earth’s shadow. It will never see sunlight. There, protected even further by a multi-layer sunshield thinner than a human fingernail, the telescope chills at -370 degrees F, where JWST’s infrared sight works best. Its home is a fascinating location called L2, one of several points where the sun and Earth’s gravities balance each other out. 

All this might just be JWST’s prologue. Since the telescope used less fuel than initially anticipated when reaching its perch, the instrument might have enough to last well past its anticipated 10-year-long window. We can’t wait to see what else it dazzles us with.

Parallel Reality by Delta: A screen customized for you

Delta

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You’ve probably found yourself running through an airport at some point, squinting up at a screen filled with rows of flight information. A futuristic new offering from Delta and a startup called Misapplied Sciences aims to change that. At Detroit Metro Airport, an installation can show travelers customized information for their flight. A scan of your boarding pass in McNamara Terminal is one way to tell the system who you are. Then, when you look at the overhead screen, you see that it displays only personalized data about your journey, like which gate you need to find. The tech behind the system works because the pixels in the display itself can shine in one of 18,000 directions, meaning many different people can see distinct information while looking at the same screen at the same time. 

Electronic bag tags by Alaska Airlines: The last tag you’ll need (for one airline)

Alaska Airlines

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Believe it or not, some travelers do still check bags, and a new offering from this Seattle-based airline aims to make that process easier. Flyers who can get an electronic bag tag from Alaska Airlines (at first, 2,500 members of their frequent flier plan will get them, and in 2023 they’ll be available to buy) can use their mobile phone to create the appropriate luggage tag on this device’s e-ink display while at home, up to 24 hours before a flight. The 5-inch-long tag itself gets the power it needs to generate the information on the screen from your phone, thanks to an NFC connection. After the traveler has done this step at home, they just need to drop the tagged bag off in the right place at the airport, avoiding the line to get a tag. 

Alice by Eviation: A totally electric commuter airplane 

Eviation

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The aviation industry is a major producer of carbon emissions. One way to try to solve that problem is to run aircraft on electric power, utilizing them just for short hops. That’s what Eviation aims to do with a plane called Alice: 8,000 pounds of batteries in the belly of this commuter aircraft give its two motors the power it needs to fly. In fact, it made its first flight in September, a scant but successful eight minutes in the air. Someday, as battery tech improves, the company hopes that it can carry nine passengers for distances of 200 miles or so. 

OPV Black Hawk by Sikorsky: A military helicopter that flies itself 

Sikorsky

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Two pilots sit up front at the controls of the Army’s Black Hawk helicopters, but what if that number could be zero for missions that are especially hazardous? That’s exactly what a modified UH-60 helicopter can do, a product of a DARPA program called ALIAS, which stands for Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System. The self-flying whirlybird made its first flights with zero occupants on board in February, and in October, it took flight again, even carrying a 2,600-pound load beneath it. The technology comes from helicopter-maker Sikorsky, and allows the modified UH-60 to be flown by two pilots, one pilot, or zero. The idea is that this type of autonomy can help in several ways: to assist the one or two humans at the controls, or as a way for an uninhabited helicopter to execute tasks like flying somewhere dangerous to deliver supplies without putting any people on board at risk. 

Detect and Avoid by Zipline: Drones that can listen for in-flight obstacles

Zipline

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As drones and other small aircraft continue to fill the skies, all parties involved have an interest in avoiding collisions. But figuring out the best way for a drone to detect potential obstacles isn’t an easy problem to solve, especially since there are no pilots on board to keep their eyes out and weight is at a premium. Drone delivery company Zipline has turned to using sound, not sight, to solve this conundrum. Eight microphones on the drone’s wing listen for traffic like an approaching small plane, and can preemptively change the UAV’s route to get out of the way before it arrives. An onboard GPU and AI help with the task, too. While the company is still waiting for regulatory approval to totally switch the system on, the technique represents a solid approach to an important issue.

DART by NASA and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory: Smashing into an asteroid, for good 

NASA

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Earthlings who look at the sky in fear that a space rock might tumble down and devastate our world can now breathe a sigh of relief. On September 26, a 1,100-pound spacecraft streaked into a roughly 525-foot-diameter asteroid, Dimorphos, intentionally crashing into it at over 14,000 mph. NASA confirmed on October 11 that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)’s impact altered Dimorphos’s orbit around its companion asteroid, Didymos, even more than anticipated. Thanks to DART, humans have redirected an asteroid for the first time. The dramatic experiment gives astronomers hope that perhaps we could do it again to avert an apocalypse.

CAPSTONE by Advanced Space: A small vessel on a big journey

Advanced Space

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Some lunar craft fill up whole rooms. On the other hand, there’s CAPSTONE, a satellite that can fit on a desk. Despite control issues, CAPSTONE—which launched on June 28—triumphantly entered lunar orbit on November 13. This small traveler is a CubeSat, an affordable design of mini-satellite that’s helped make space accessible to universities, small companies, and countries without major space programs. Hundreds of CubeSats now populate the Earth’s orbit, and although some have hitched rides to Mars, none have made the trip to the moon under their own power—until CAPSTONE. More low-cost lunar flights, its creators hope, may follow.

The LSST Camera by SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory: A 3,200-megapixel camera

SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory

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Very soon, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the high desert of Northern Chile will provide astronomers with what will be nearly a live-feed view of the southern hemisphere’s sky. To do that, it will rely on the world’s largest camera—with a lens 5 feet across and matching shutters, it will be capable of taking images that are an astounding 3,200 megapixels. The camera’s crafters are currently placing the finishing touches on it, but their impressive engineering feats aren’t done yet: In May 2023, the camera will fly down to Chile in a Boeing 747, before traveling by truck to its final destination.

The Event Horizon Telescope by the EHT Collaboration: Seeing the black hole in the Milky Way’s center

ESO

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Just a few decades ago, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s heart, was a hazy concept. Now, thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), we have a blurry image of it—or, since a black hole doesn’t let out light, of its surrounding accretion disc. The EHT is actually a global network of radio telescopes stretching from Germany to Hawaii, and from Chile to the South Pole. EHT released the image in May, following years of painstaking reconstruction by over 300 scientists, who learned much about the black hole’s inner workings in the process. This is EHT’s second black hole image, following its 2019 portrait of a behemoth in the galaxy M87.

Starliner by Boeing: A new way of getting to the ISS 

Boeing

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After years of budget issues, technical delays, and testing failures, Boeing’s much-awaited Starliner crew capsule finally took to the skies and made it to its destination. An uncrewed test launch in May successfully departed Florida, docked at the International Space Station (ISS), and landed back on Earth. Now, Boeing and NASA are preparing for Starliner’s first crewed test, set to launch sometime in 2023. When that happens, Starliner will take its place alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, and NASA will have more than one option to get astronauts into orbit. There are a few differences between the two: Where Crew Dragon splashes down in the sea, Starliner touches down on land, making it easier to recover. And, where Crew Dragon was designed to launch on SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rockets, Starliner is more flexible. 

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British airplane engine maker Rolls-Royce and low-cost airline easyJet announced this week that they had successfully powered a modern airplane engine using 100% hydrogen fuel. The test took place at a military facility in the UK, with the engine remaining stationary on the ground. 

Since the aviation industry currently produces about 2% of global carbon emissions, there are serious reasons to develop a greener way to fuel planes. Rolls-Royce (the aerospace and defense contractor, not the similarly named car brand that is owned by BMW) is hoping that hydrogen might hold the answers it needs to keep selling its turbofans and other engines into the future. 

Most airplane engines run on jet fuel, which is based on kerosene. Unfortunately for the climate, that’s a fossil fuel that releases CO2 when burned. Some airlines mix in sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) that are chemically identical to kerosene, though are manufactured from renewable starting materials like used cooking oil, food scraps, and corn stover (the remains of corn cobs after the harvest). Still, because SAFs are chemically the same as kerosene, they release just as much CO2 when they are burned—the benefits are just that the processes required to manufacture them may be more environmentally sustainable.

Hydrogen offers a potentially better option as it contains no carbon. When it’s burned, the main byproduct is water vapor (though there are still some pollutants like nitrous oxide). As long as the hydrogen is produced using wind, wave, or other renewable forms of electricity, it can legitimately be a carbon-neutral fuel. For this test, Rolls-Royce used “green hydrogen” from the European Marine Energy Centre in the Orkney Islands. It was produced using tidal energy, rather than reconstituted from methane gas.

Hydrogen can potentially power planes in two different ways: As the fuel source for an electricity generating fuel cell that powers an electric motor, or by being directly burned. Rolls-Royce and easyJet took the second approach using a Rolls-Royce AE 2100-A regional aircraft engine that had been modified to burn hydrogen instead of jet fuel. Given the success of this test, they plan to work up to a full-scale ground test using a Rolls-Royce Pearl 15 jet engine and eventually a flight test using civil aero engines.

Of course, hydrogen comes with its own host of problems. It is significantly less energy dense than kerosene, so aircraft would have to carry larger amounts of fuel to cover the same distance. It’s also a gas at temperatures above −423°F (−253°C), which makes storing it more challenging. For Rolls-Royce’s test engine, it was compressed to 200 bar (roughly 100 times the typical tire pressure of a car). This makes it significantly more viable for short haul flights, rather than trans-oceanic and other long haul routes. 

Still, there are promising signs that hydrogen could have a future in the world of aviation—especially as the industry strives to be carbon neutral by 2050. Johan Lundgren, the CEO of easyJet, called it “a huge step forward” in the press release. Similarly, Grazia Vittadini, the Chief Technology Officer of Rolls-Royce, said, “The success of this hydrogen test is an exciting milestone… We are pushing the boundaries to discover the zero carbon possibilities of hydrogen, which could help reshape the future of flight.”

Rolls-Royce isn’t the only aerospace company exploring hydrogen as an option. Airbus has plans to get an A380 in the air with a hydrogen engine by 2026. The European Union hopes that by 2035, short-range flights would be possible, and that by 2050 up to 40 percent of flights in Europe would be powered by hydrogen. 

But make no mistake: No matter how successful Rolls-Royce and easyJet’s tests are, we are still a long way from large numbers of hydrogen-powered jets taking to the skies. 

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The wars of the future may be decided by boots off the ground. DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky projects wing, is prepared to award funding for new kinds of personal mobility systems, PopSci sibling publication Task & Purpose has learned. The form may vary, but the net effect of new mobility is the same: DARPA is funding the development of jetpacks for soldiers.

The jetpacks, and other such mobility devices, are being pursued under the Portable Personal Air Mobility System (PPAMS). A DARPA spokesperson told Task & Purpose that DARPA has selected several companies for phase II funding, noting that “DARPA is currently working with the small companies to finalize contracting details and award contracts, so at this time we can’t discuss the specifics.”

This news follows previous developments. In March 2021, DARPA posted a notice stating its intent to develop and demonstrate “novel or unique approaches to personal battlefield mobility for operators in a man portable low-cost package.” While there are already many types of transport already available to soldiers, from Humvees on the ground to parachutes or V-22 Ospreys for arriving from the sky, what this sought was a unique way to move an individual person.

Going beyond existing mobility means finding a new way soldiers can move and fight beyond that. Extra mobility on a personal level is useful for everything from light resupply, fighting in cities, search and rescue, boarding ships at sea, and letting special operations forces sneak in and out of hostile territory. 

“When deployed, the systems allow mobility for a range of at least 5 km [3.1 miles] for a single operator, likely at low to medium altitudes. Systems should be designed such that assembly and deployment can occur in less than 10 minutes using only simple tools or no tools at all,” reads the 2021 notice.

One other standout feature is that DARPA is exploring both reusable and disposable systems. These jetpacks are designed to carry a person over rough terrain, up a building, or somewhere else they could not normally get. Plus, they can be expendable if the situation demands it.

“Some examples of technologies of interest include jetpacks, powered gliders, powered wingsuits, and powered parafoils which could leverage emerging electric propulsion technologies, hydrogen fuel cells or conventional heavy fuel propulsion systems,” continued the notice.

Because these are tools designed in part for covert missions, DARPA wants to make sure that they are both quiet and cool, in a literal sense: If a jetpack is hot enough to show up on infrared sensors, it likely means the person wearing it can be caught and shot. In addition, the kit needs to be simple to operate and quick to learn, with both design and computer-assistance allowing an average grunt to become a jump-jet enabled mobile infantry unit of one in no time.

Phase II of the program is about developing the technology enough to show that it is viable in ground or flight tests, with Phase III aimed at creating a demonstrator. Phase I, which already awarded contracts, asked companies to describe the system, anticipate how it will perform, outline a path for tech to go from concept to demonstrator, and showcase its use.

Triton Systems, a defense contractor, was one of the companies awarded a Phase I contract. In its contract award from 2021, Triton did not describe the type of portable mobility system pursued. Instead, the company noted that its system “will be quiet, highly reliable, capable of carrying a wide pilot and payload weight range, compact and light enough to easily be transported by a single soldier, require relatively little operator training, and can be made to autonomously self-deliver to stranded operators in remote areas.”

Autonomous delivery of a jetpack to people in the field is a major promise, as it turns a jetpack into not just a way in but a tool that could be delivered from some distance away, allowing stranded soldiers the means to escape safely. It is a promising offer, though there are inherent hurdles in the design. A trip to deliver itself to someone will drain fuel or electrical power, limiting travel time and distance, even more so when carrying a human.

There is a long history of the US military pursuing novel flying machines, with an eye towards more mobility and better scouting for individual soldiers. But the hard limits of turning an individual human into an efficient flying machine, at speeds and sizes useful enough for sneaking into key areas, have so far meant these concepts remain novelties and prototypes, instead of a regular feature of war.

In general, modern jetpacks have moved to at least the demonstration stage. Whether or not they can be useful in actual military missions remains to be seen.

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In the desert south of Death Valley, mock patients waited for drones to deliver simulated blood. California’s Fort Irwin is an Army base that hosted an event called Project Convergence 2022 from late September into November, an annual exercise led by the United States where militaries of multiple nations work together to explore new technologies in service of war. By testing drone delivery of medical supplies, in conjunction with other tech, the military is looking at ways to ensure the survival of soldiers after battle injuries, even in circumstances where it’s unsafe to send people on foot for help.

Part of Project Convergence was Project Crimson, which involved drones dropping medical relief to field medics in a simulated mass casualty scenario. 

“Project Crimson is a project to take a common unmanned air system and adapt it to support a medical mission,” said Nathan Fisher, medical robotics and autonomous systems division chief at the US Army’s Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center, in a release. “This drone supports medical field care when casualty evacuation isn’t an option. It can keep whole blood and other crucial items refrigerated in the autonomous portable refrigeration unit and take it to medics in the field with wounded warriors.”

Researchers first proved that drones could successfully deliver blood in 2015. As cargo, blood makes a lot of sense, since a small amount can be life saving, and drones can rapidly transport small cargoes as needed. In the summer of 2021, British marines tested blood delivery by drone swarm, with the dedicated resupply drones carrying everything from ammunition to blood to troops in the field. 

For Project Crimson, the army used a FVR-90 drone, a vertical takeoff and landing UAV. Two outriggers attached to the drone’s wings each feature two rotors, allowing the FVR-90 to launch and land like a quadcopter. In flight, the FVR-90 flies like a fixed-wing plane, with a front-facing propeller and its over 15-feet wide wingspan allowing for long-lasting efficient flight of up to 16 hours. The FVR-90 tops out at 74 mph, but it can carry up to 10 pounds of payload under its wings, ready to drop and deliver.

The drone “doesn’t need a catapult launch or runway to perform a lifesaving mission. This allows military personnel to preserve life in the critical phase of injury and facilitate rapid transport to an Army hospital for further treatment,” said the release.

Beyond medical delivery drones, the army tested distant communication and diagnostic tools, designed to improve the ability of field medics to observe and manage the health of injuries in the field.

One of these is the Battlefield Assisted Trauma Distributed Observation Kit, or BATDOK. It’s a smartphone app that can work with sensors placed on the patients, scanning information and then storing it for up to 25 patients per device. This information can be shared over a mesh network with other devices, or transferred via protocols like Bluetooth and WiFi, letting a field medic pass along records seamlessly for a patient at the point of transfer to better care. 

“The facility can see the patient’s status real-time using BATDOK, while the medics on ground can update treatments and medications for the patients as well. This allows the facility to be alerted, rally and prepare to treat the patient once they are transported,” explained Michael Sedillo, an integrated cockpit sensing program airman systems director with the Air Force Research Laboratory, in a press release.

As part of Project Convergence, troops carried litters of mock casualties to medical transports, with medics applying care in transit. At the field hospital, field medics and hospital staff traded records using local communications infrastructure, ensuring smooth flow of care. 

Project Convergence included participants from the British and Australian Armies, with allied nations like Canada and New Zealand observing.

Ultimately, exercises like this will improve the ability of the military to not just fight wars, but to ensure that injury on the battlefield is dealt with as best as possible. Drone resupply of medical necessities like blood can keep people in the field alive longer until reinforcements or evacuation arrives. Better data management can make sure that as little information as possible is lost when transferring care, letting medical teams move forward in treatment as conditions allow.

As robots and new data tools move into greater use on the battlefield, training on these labor-saving devices should open up the possibility for human soldiers to focus directly on the tasks of saving lives, while machines provide the tools needed to do that.

Watch a video about Project Convergence below:

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Last year, the average distance that American drivers cruised around in their cars each day was just under 33 miles. That metric, which comes from a AAA survey, may not sound like much, but an aviation startup called Archer is aiming to focus on journeys that are even shorter. Its goal is to use electric flying machines for airborne hops above traffic or waterways, and the company just revealed an aircraft it calls Midnight. It’s designed to make jaunts that measure just 20 miles, with time in between for recharging. 

Midnight, which has not yet left the ground, is intended to hold four passengers, have a pilot at the controls, and wing itself through the air at 150 mph. “It can carry 1,000 pounds of payload, and it can travel up to 100 miles,” Adam Goldstein, the company’s CEO, said at an event yesterday. “But this vehicle was optimized around rapid, back-to-back, 20-mile trips in and around cities.” Some quick math suggests that the weight limit for the five humans on board and their bags will be around 200 pounds each.

One specific way that Archer hopes to make this short-hop plan a reality is through a partnership with United Airlines, which plans to purchase aircraft from the startup and has already given it $10 million. Earlier this month, the two companies said they plan to offer brief flights between Manhattan and Newark Liberty International Airport in Archer aircraft beginning in 2025. 

That announcement mirrors one by Delta Air Lines and Joby Aviation in early October, which will focus on carrying people in an electric aircraft in either New York City or Los Angeles into an airport, where they can then catch a regular, fossil-fuel-powered flight in a traditional aircraft. 

[Related: Watch Alice, a new electric commuter plane, fly for the first time]

The range that Archer is promising is either on par with, or slightly below, its competitors in the eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft) space. Last month, Wisk revealed its gen-six aircraft, which is boxy, yellow, and has an advertised range of about 90 miles. (Wisk, which is engaged in a lawsuit with Archer, has a unique plan: to offer autonomous flights for four passengers with no pilot, and just ground-based human supervisors.) Another electric aircraft maker, Beta Technologies, is aiming for missions that are about 150 miles. Joby, on its website, boasts a “max range” of the same. The more people or cargo that one of these craft try to carry, the shorter the distance they’ll be able to eke out of the battery power. 

Like its competitors, Archer’s design for its flying machine relies on battery power and electric motors powering propellers. In the case of Midnight, there are a dozen props: Six in the front of the wing can tilt to help the craft take off vertically and then transition into forward flight, and six in the back don’t tilt, but nonetheless spin and produce lift for takeoff and landing. A smaller aircraft from Archer, called Maker, has functioned as their uncrewed testbed to pave the way for Midnight. It has flown numerous times but hasn’t yet made the transition to completely forward flight with its forward props tilted all the way down. 

Archer is also leaning heavily into the design details of its Midnight aircraft, aiming to evoke nostalgic yet futuristic feelings about flight. 

“The golden age of flying—the 1950s—was a great source of inspiration for us,” Julien Montousse, the company’s head of design and innovation, said at the unveiling. “We want to bring this magical feeling back.” The aircraft, he added, “had to be beautiful.”

Beauty may be an inspirational element when it comes to any aircraft, but the challenge for all these companies will be demonstrating that their flying machines are safe, reliable, and a convenient, comfortable, and affordable alternative to taking ground transportation to a destination like an airport (and of course, they’ll need to pass regulatory scrutiny, too). Otherwise, people are likely to stick to trains, Lyfts, and other automobiles. 

Watch a brief video about Midnight, below.

The post This startup wants to take you on quick trips in its sleek electric aircraft, Midnight appeared first on Popular Science.

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At a range in southern England, researchers tested a new laser, making it one step closer to military use. Developed for the Ministry of Defence, DragonFire is intended to be a long-range answer to incoming threats, a way to defeat projectiles in mid-air through the concentrated power of intense light. On November 8, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) announced it had conducted long-range laser trials at the Porton Down site. During the live fire test, the laser hit and neutralized a small drone at a range of 2 miles.

The laser was developed for the MOD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). Like most laser weapons, it is a composite technology, a sum of multiple systems put together into one more functional package. This included controls and image processing from defense contractor MBDA, a beam directory to track and point at targets made by defense contractor Leonardo, and a 50-kilowatt laser built by QinetiQ. In the future, the plan is for this laser to be able to “scale fire-power levels,” likely letting the user increase or decrease power to match the target. That saves energy otherwise wasted on overkill, while ensuring the laser can defeat tougher targets when they exist. 

“The trials involve firing the UK DragonFire demonstrator at a number of targets over a number of ranges, demanding pinpoint accuracy from the beam director,” DSTL said in a release. “These tests improve the UK’s understanding of how high-energy lasers and their associated technologies can operate over distance and defeat representative targets.” 

To develop the laser, the Ministry of Defence and industry have spent “around £100 million,” or roughly $118 million dollars. Laser weapons are heavily front-loaded on cost, with the research and development expense in the name of creating a weapon that can destroy targets cheaply, relative to using high-caliber bullets, rockets, or missiles instead.

“Laser directed energy weapons have the potential to provide lower cost lethality, reduced logistical burden and increased effectiveness when compared to other weapon systems – the technology could have a huge effect on the future of defence operations,” said DSTL in the release.

[Related: What it’s like to fire Raytheon’s powerful anti-drone laser]

Laser weapons work by combining and focusing powerful light, and then holding that light steady on a target until the heat of the laser can damage it. The effectiveness of the laser depends on a host of factors, from the amount of power going in, to how well the tracking system can keep the laser focused on the same part of an object. Even the location of where a laser is focused on a drone can change the speed at which it is disabled: a laser aimed at plastic casing and circuits will disable a drone much faster than a laser aimed at igniting a battery.

That means simply developing a powerful laser is not enough to ensure a quick takedown of a drone, or a missile, or other threats like mortar rounds and rocket fire. The sensors and automated tracking systems that go into laser weapons are important for reducing the amount of time a laser needs to fire per target. On the range, a laser can focus on one object without distraction, but in a realistic combat scenario, a laser may have a few seconds to disable a projectile before moving onto another. 

The Ministry of Defence has been looking to develop a laser weapon since at least 2015. One of the durable challenges of making a laser weapon is that the beam’s effectiveness can be diminished by particulates in the air, from smoke or dust or even moisture like fog and rain. The 2015 request stated that the goal was for a laser which can “detect, acquire and track targets at range and in varying weather conditions, with sufficient precision.”

Some of those conditions, like billowing dust or thick fog, are also obstacles to drone flight and sensors. But with laser weapons also taking an anti-projectile role, an inability to stop attacks in bad weather could turn a gloomy day into a grim one in combat.

[Related: The UK’s solution for enemy drones? Lasers.]

DragonFire has been in the works since at least 2017, as a way to defeat and disable aerial targets, like drones. Drones are an ideal target, in part because they fly slow enough for lasers to track, and because there is no onboard pilot that a laser can blind. Laser weapon use against people is governed by the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, part of the Geneva Conventions on Certain Conventional Weapons, which entered into force in 1998. Both the United States and the United Kingdom are among the treaty’s 109 signatories, agreeing to not use lasers specifically to blind people in war. 

That makes DragonFire, like other laser weapons, a modern solution to a modern threat. It’s a way to stop flying robots and uncrewed enemies, protecting humans from inanimate attackers.

Watch a video about it below:

The post The UK’s DragonFire laser is designed to burn drones out of the sky appeared first on Popular Science.

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Above the town of Mailuu Suu in western Kyrgyzstan, the International Atomic Energy Agency is flying drones to monitor for radiation. For 22 years, from 1946 to 1968, people in Mailuu Suu mined and processed uranium ore for the Soviet Union. Decades later, waste still remains, and monitoring is essential to ensure that people can live safely in the environment actively contaminated by production of nuclear materials. The drone flights, captured in a video shared online November 4, are a way for new technology to ease the burden of monitoring risk.

The town of Mailuu Suu was intimately tied to the extraction of nuclear material in the Soviet Union, which meant that the town was unlisted on maps, closed to outsiders, and officially logged only as “Mailbox 200.” In the Cold War climate, where espionage was essential for superpowers tracking and estimating the size of nuclear weapons arsenals, this made some degree of sense. It also meant that the protective geography of the town, in a river valley in a region prone to landslides and earthquakes, helped keep residents in place, even as it led to risky decisions like burying waste nearby the village.

An accident in 1958

In 1958, heavy rainfall and seismic activity caused a dam failure that pushed 14 million cubic feet of radioactive waste into the Maylu-Suu river that runs through the town. Downstream, the river flows into the Ferghana valley of Central Asia, an area split between Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, and a region home to 14 million people. The 1958 disaster contaminated the river and areas downstream, leaving a visceral legacy in the memories of those who witnessed it.

The concern for the town, the government of Kyrgyzstan, and international observers, is that such a disaster could strike again. Much of the waste from the site exists in “tailings,” or the sludge left over from extracting uranium ore and processing it with chemicals. In addition to the 23 sites of tailings, there are 13 sites of radioactive rock around the city. Climate change can cause a shift in rain patterns and an increase in storm severity, exacerbating the risk posed by these sites to the whole region.

Eventually, remediation will be needed to tackle all of the sites, ensuring they no longer pose a threat to people in the area or elsewhere. Before that, there is the constant work of monitoring the waste, which has traditionally been done by humans on foot or, rarely, helicopters. Now, uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVS) or drones are being brought to bear on the problem.

“The tailor-made UAV-based gamma spectrometer will make it possible for experts to explore sites without the need to trek through difficult terrain with lots of gear,” Sven Altfelder, an IAEA remediation safety specialist, said in a June 2021 release. “By using the UAV to conduct monitoring duties, experts in the region will be able to easily gather the necessary data quickly, while avoiding potential physical and radiological risks altogether.”

A good job for a drone

Drone monitoring reduces the labor and risk of checking out the area on foot. Thanks to the ability of drone-borne sensors to carry and upload data, it also allows for a more complete picture of radioactive risk and sites, mapped in three dimensions by the flying robot.

Another perk is that drones can detect new or unmarked sites, since thorough scanning of the region by air makes it easier to find mislabeled or unknown waste sites. Drone piloting is also easier and cheaper than using crewed aircraft, and drone pilot training has fewer hurdles than that of pilots who actually fly inside the craft they operate.

The technology was tested in Germany in 2020, showing that the drone can produce a reliable and accurate radiation map of partially remediated sites. This work was funded by the European Union and the German government, which has a specific tie to Mailuu Suu. When the town was set up as a closed community in 1946, among the people relocated to work in it were ethnic Germans, alongside Crimean Tatars and Russian soldiers who had surrendered during World War II.

[Related: Why do nuclear power plants need electricity to stay safe?]

With proof that the drone can be used to successfully monitor the sites in Kyrgyzstan, the hope is that experts in the country, and other Central Asian countries, can be trained to take on the work. The project is supported by the governments of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

“We will be able to use the results obtained by the UAV to explain remediation results to the local population and demonstrate that those areas are now safe,” said Azamat Mambetov, State Secretary of the Kyrgyzstan Ministry of Emergency Situations, in the June release.

The drone monitoring will aid in guiding remediation and proving its success. This, in turn, could expand possibilities in the region, with some hope from the IAEA that a remediated and safe Mailu Suu could not just stop being a risk, but could even become a destination for travelers and tourists, eager to behold the natural beauty.

Watch a video about it below:

The post How drones are helping monitor Kyrgyzstan’s radioactive legacy appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on Task & Purpose.

The U.S. military’s uncrewed space plane has set a record for its longest flight in orbit. The X-37B craft has now been circling the earth for 902 days, greatly exceeding its previous record of 780 days. And it doesn’t appear to be coming back to Earth any time in the immediate future. 

The X-37B current mission started more than two years ago, with the craft launching from Cape Canaveral on May 17, 2020. With this milestone, the space plane’s total record has been more than 3,700 days in orbit.

The mission is secretive, with only two pieces of its payload announced. It’s the sixth Orbital Test Vehicle mission with the space plane, and the military has been keeping its operation and what it is doing on this and past missions relatively secret. Speculation has ranged from testing surveillance systems to experiments on putting satellites in lower orbits. 

What is clear is that this is the first mission launched under Space Force command. The X-37 project started life under the Air Force. After the Space Force formed in December 2019, it took over authority on the program. 

“This important mission will host more experiments than any prior X-37B flight, including two NASA experiments,” then-Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett said in May 2020. “One is a sample plate evaluating the reaction of select significant materials to the conditions in space. The second studies the effect of ambient space radiation on seeds. A third experiment, designed by the Naval Research Laboratory, transforms solar power into radio frequency microwave energy, then studies transmitting that energy to earth.”

This flight is the first time the space plane has been equipped with a service module to carry additional pieces for experiments. During this mission, the X-37B launched a FalconSat-8, a satellite developed by the U.S. Air Force Academy that hosts five different experiments the academy will conduct. The space plane is also testing the effects of radiation and space on seeds, according to Space Force.

The X-37 project is also important because the space plane is reusable. Each launch uses a booster rocket, but the craft can safely land on its own The first flight, in 2010, lasted 224 days, and subsequent missions have pushed the longevity of its orbital capabilities. The space plane is powered by solar cells and lithium-ion batteries.

The United States is not alone in developing winged space planes. China has its own, smaller craft, which is also currently in orbit.

The military as a whole has been testing uncrewed vehicles or crafts, and some have set records for their time in operation. The X-37B however keeps beating its own results by significant margins each mission. It’s unclear when this current mission is set to end.

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A typical hobbyist drone is made by assembling electronic parts on frames made of carbon fiber or plastic. But as these flying machines continue to proliferate, it’s worth remembering that drones can come in many forms.

As an extreme case, consider a drone recently shared on Twitter. The quadcopter looks like it was assembled on a dare. With a body made of six sticks, the drone is little more than rotors, wires, and a control unit wrapped around an ultra minimalist frame. A caption on it reads, in Arabic, “Yemeni makes aircraft from stalks of qat.” For at least a few seconds, the drone flies, soaring overhead.

Here it is, in action: 

The drone is a reminder that such devices can actually be pretty simple. “I think the biggest benefit of this design is that once key materials are available – a battery, a receiver, several small motors, propellers and wiring – such a drone can be essentially assembled ‘on the fly,’ pun intended,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security.

What’s striking is how this drone distills the aircraft down to minimum parts. The wee flying machine is motors, writes, controls, and something it can all stick to. In this case, literal sticks, or stems from the qat plant.

“Obviously, some experience building and flying such quadcopters is helpful in making sure the drone can be properly stabilized, but a lot of those requirements and knowledge is freely available online as well,” says Bendett. “The main point of this video is that the quadcopter frame can be assembled from any products freely available. And the rest of the components can be relatively easily procured or even built/3D printed if necessary.”

Spare parts

The modern drone market is built on complete, packageable products. These are made by a variety of companies, though China’s DJI has long been the industry leader in low cost and mass production of capable drones. DJI drones have such a durable presence that, when Popular Science took part in a laser weapon demonstration in October, their drones were the targets.

As such a large player in the commercial space, DJI’s products end up in military use, which led the company to ban sales in both Ukraine and Russia after the latter invaded the former in February. The ready-made drones are the easiest and fastest way to get scouts into the sky. But as the Yemen-made stick-drone illustrates, the whole can be made from a handful of parts.

ISIS, the theocratic insurgency that for a few years controlled territory in Syria and Iraq, was able to build its own drones. These aircraft, largely fixed-wing (or miniature plane-like), employed plywood and styrofoam for their bodies. Guidance systems came from electronics supply shops, designed to go into DIY drone kits. By tapping into the same market, and getting parts from markets out of territory they controlled, ISIS was able to outfit its own drones from the same broader supply chain that makes mass-produced drones possible.

Food that flies

What stands out about the stick drone is the minimalism of its design, replacing bulky plastic with sticks destined for disposal. Another alternative, as presented in a recent robotics conference, is to make a drone where the wings themselves are cargo, consumable on delivery.

In this case, the drone’s wings are made of rice cakes.

“The researchers designed the wing of this partially edible drone out of compressed puffed rice (rice cakes or rice cookies, depending on whom you ask) because of the foodstuff’s similarity to expanded polypropylene (EPP) foam. EPP foam is something that’s commonly used as wing material in drones because it’s strong and lightweight; puffed rice shares those qualities,” writes Evan Ackerman of IEEE Spectrum.

By cutting rice cakes into hexagons, and then binding them together with edible gelatin, the researchers were able to make a foam-like wing. The electronics of this drone included a rotor, engine, control surfaces on the tail, and a battery. With the rice cakes packed in plastic and attached to the electronics as the wing, the drone is an airborne breakfast for one, designed as air-deliverable rescue rations.

Sticks and drones

While militaries will stick with equipment built for the purpose, the ability to turn a small amount of electronics into a flying machine kit with only a few found materials opens up possibilities for drone operation. In the field, it’s easy to imagine soldiers with a spare parts kit adapting those parts to make a new drone if their built unit is too broken to work. Even if all the spare drone does is make a noise and a distraction, the option for a little unexpected movement directed remotely could be useful, distracting hostile forces while seeking cover or escape. 

With field-assembly of drones as an objective, kits could be designed to work for forces that have to travel light, with an understanding that the drone will be assembled from foraged materials as needed. If a stick-kit drone is designed to be expendable, then the careful considerations of balancing an airframe for hundreds of hours of flight become secondary. Instead, a minimalist drone, built on trash, just needs to fly for a moment, useful until it crashes down and returns to rubbish.

The post A drone made out of sticks? In the UAV space, anything flies. appeared first on Popular Science.

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Before I could lock the laser weapon’s crosshairs on the DJI Phantom drone, I had to make sure it was in the right position. With the drone against a cloudless blue sky, the weapon’s sensors could clearly see and track it, but hard-coded rules of engagement prevented the weapon from firing until the target had an earthen backdrop. Light travels far, and we don’t want to accidentally zap the wrong thing that’s far away.

The target drone’s pilot directed the Phantom below the horizon line, with some landmass behind it. On the laptop in front of me, I placed a tracker marker just to the side of the drone, a push of the left joystick of an Xbox controller fixing the tracker to the target. With a slight nudge of the right joystick, I moved my crosshairs onto one of the quadcopter’s rotors, and then held the trigger. The Phantom lit up on the infrared view, and 15 seconds later it crashed down, the molten plastic of the rotor arm bending on impact.

I set the controller down and an engineer flicked the “armed” switch to the off position. It was my first time firing a laser weapon.

The 10-kilowatt laser in question was a High-Energy Laser Weapon System built by Raytheon, and I was invited by the company to observe it in operation at the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center, part of New Mexico Tech, in Socorro, New Mexico. 

To get to the range, we had to take a four-wheel drive vehicle onto the dirt roads, about six miles behind Socorro Peak. While New Mexico Tech has its origin in mining, its proximity to White Sands Missile Range (and the availability of EMRTC itself) have kept other defense contractors, like Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne, as range tenants.

Some of what is tested at the range is explosives. The shape, composition, and aerodynamics of artillery can all be studied through live fire. On the other side of the ridge from where Raytheon has set up its work station came the unmistakable thunder of artillery. Around the testing area were several M110 Howitzers, artillery pieces on treads that the US retired in 1994. 

This old artillery, juxtaposed against a field demonstration of lasers disabling drones, illustrated one of the realities of modern warfare. Artillery can remain effective for decades after it enters service, but drone scouts are changing how armies move and fight, and how armies direct artillery fire, too. The lasers are a reaction to those drones, and an attempt to make drone destruction simple, effective, and in the long run, affordable.

As we arrived on site, past the weathered cannons, I disembarked from the SUV and saw a launch zone of roughly ten or so DJI Phantom 4s. Depending on the model, these drones can cost up to $3,500 each. That’s on the higher end of DJI’s commercial offerings, but an order of magnitude cheaper than the most bare-bones drones designed for military use. At the range, these Phantoms were lined up like clay pigeons, waiting their turn in the sky before being shot down. 

Frying these drones would be a pair of High Energy Laser Weapon Systems (HELWS), made by Raytheon. One was mounted on the back of a Polaris MRZR, a military grade dune buggy. The MRZR still had the two front seats, and in the back sat the power supply and targeting system for the HELWS. Next to the buggy-mounted laser weapon was an identical system, only this one was on the bed of a large truck. In the field, HELWS is designed to be battery powered, but for today each was running off a portable generator, burning gasoline.

Cost comparison

A relatively small amount of fuel would power the two lasers in use that day for the whole of their operations. By the end of the day, 10 DJI Phantom 4s would lie, collected, in various states of destruction. At roughly $3,000 apiece, depending on the model, that’s $30,000 in drones destroyed for roughly what it takes to fill up a small car.

This cost disparity, between cheap drones and even cheaper laser takedowns, is an explicit reason for developing laser weapons. Current means of destroying drones in the field can risk overkill, and come with various drawbacks.

“It has to be a cost-effective solution for soldiers to be able to use it,” said Annabel Flores, chief operating officer of Global Spectrum Dominance at Raytheon Intelligence and Space. “It makes no sense to shoot something that’s hundreds of thousands of dollars or a million-dollar missile into something that’s a thousand dollars.”

In 2017, a US ally reportedly fired a Patriot anti-air missile at a hobbyist quadcopter. Patriot missiles are designed to intercept cruise missiles and airplanes, and they cost about $3 million apiece. Patriots are also made by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, and while the missile was effective against the drone, the cost difference is so great it was at best a Pyrrhic victory. It’s like killing a mosquito using a grenade.

“That’s just the wrong side of the cost equation that you wanna be on,” said Flores. “What fundamentally drove us down this path is that this is a real need and a real solution.”

The cost of each laser activation is only part of the equation. Raytheon has been awarded at least $52.4 million to develop and deliver HELWS systems to the Department of Defense. Those prototypes and models have been put through the paces, with deployments outside the United States and 25,000 hours operational hours. 

“The next step for us is really being prepared so that it’s not just a cool demonstrator, a cool prototype, but these are producible systems that assembly technicians are putting together today,” said Flores. “Originally physicists were the ones that were working with lasers, then it became engineers while we were doing these proofs. Now it’s assembly technicians that are pulling these systems together.”

What I saw on the monitor in front of me

On the drive to the range, my hosts asked if I play video games. It’s been a decade since I really spent time on a first-person shooter, but there’s a muscle memory to video game controllers that persists. The controls for the laser were set up inside a nearby trailer with plywood walls, but they could fit into a backpack easily.  Firing the HELWS laser is done through a program running on a laptop, which is fed information by ethernet or fiber-optic cord. In my hand, controlling the turret and the laser, was the plug-in Xbox controller.

The laptop’s screen was divided into quadrants of different sizes. In the upper-left, there’s a wide view from the electro-optical camera, showing a slice of surrounding terrain. In a smaller window on the upper right is a narrower view, looking down the “sight line” of the laser. (More on that in a moment.) Below the narrow view is a compass on a map, showing the direction the vehicle is facing, the orientation of the laser, and when designated, any targets in view. That quadrant also has columns for “cues” that the camera can quickly pivot to, which could be predetermined points to focus on or could be new drones added to the system by sensors. 

In the bottom-left of the screen was a landscape-oriented photographic panorama of the area surrounding the laser. This image was captured by the camera pod, and it has layered data on top. A bright red line traces the horizon, hard-coding a boundary that, for this range on this shoot, the laser is not permitted to fire above. In a cluster, beneath a high slope, sit several green rectangles, marking fields of vision and fire zones. Within those settings, the laser turrets can track and then fire and melt drones, but above the horizon line or outside the box, the trigger pull on the laser won’t work. 

This capability, which was set by other menus, is useful on the training range, and has applications in the field. A laser deployed to protect a power plant, say, may want to be hard-coded with certain areas as off-limits, to be absolutely sure the laser doesn’t hit infrastructure by accident. 

Arming the laser

Before firing the laser, it needs to be armed. A safety interlock box with two toggles lets users turn on the laser weapon, and turn on a laser illuminator, which is distinct from the laser weapon. The illuminator is used for targeting, but can also cause harm and disorientation if pointed in a person’s eyes. To ensure that the laser cannot be set up without command authorization, the toggles can be locked off by a key, carried by a commander.

With the controller in hand, targeting the laser is something like playing a video game, though one where the difficulty of aiming in infrared is hard to ignore, rather than eased for sake of playability. Once an object is designated as a target, the turret can follow it well, but zooming around to find the object can be tricky, especially against the juniper-speckled hills of the high desert.

In the field and at other ranges, optical identification can be aided by radar data, which can ping and track new drones arriving within range. With this, a laser gunner can “Slew to Cue,” or toggle between tracked objects the way a remote flicks between favorite channels.

Firing the laser

The laser of the HELWS is housed in the body beneath the turret, and it points upwards at a lens that focuses it. This orientation also lets a camera point in the same direction, giving the video feed a perspective that’s equivalent to looking down the barrel of a gun, though the laser has no barrel and is not a gun. 

The HELWS laser is built into an existing Raytheon camera and laser designator pod. Remove the laser weapon, and the pod’s infrared and electro-optical cameras, as well as the laser illuminator, can be found on vehicles like Predator drones and C-130 planes. The illuminator can seem redundant, but in action it can even out the image on the camera while the laser weapon itself is powered on. In the infrared view, the heat of the laser distorts the target, a bright glowing spot over what was once clearly drone features. With the illuminator, the heat appears washed out, and the laser on the target can clearly be seen. 

The laser has an effective range of 3 kilometers, or just over 1.8 miles. The speed at which the laser can burn through a target depends on a host of factors, not least of which is the air itself. Had the day been rainy, or windy and dusty, the visit would have been rescheduled, as the particles in the air can hinder its function. The laser’s time to destroy a target is also determined by the steadiness of its focus, the wattage of the weapon, and the material of what it was firing against.

To get a feel for the laser before firing it at drones, some targets were set on a board, with another board on a stand behind it. These included inert 20mm rounds with rubber tips, mock grenades, cans of energy drinks and soda and, later, an ammunition box. One of the 20mm rounds lit like a candle under the laser fire, as the heat from the metal moved upward to burn off part of the rubber tip. The soda cans popped and drained, thin metal heating quickly and bursting outwards. The empty ammo box burned open in seconds. The grenades were uneventful. The cement backing of the board behind the objects melted, cement and fiber looking glassy, crystalline upon examination afterwards.

Against drones, the key factor for how long a takedown took was what part of the drone was hit. Battery casings took the longest. A clean shot into the hull and electronics could down a drone in 8-10 seconds. My long shot on the rotor, which melted part of one arm, was the slowest of the day, at 15 seconds.

Modern weapons for modern battlefields

Ultimately, it’s hobbyist drones used as cameras that have sustained the Pentagon’s interest in the HELWS and weapons like it. Prior to drones, aerial surveillance was expensive, requiring planes or helicopters, and could be neutralized with expensive weapons. Now camera drones, even ones cheap enough to buy at a store, are useful enough that forces fighting on both sides in Ukraine see them as essential. The drones can scout, sometimes even attack, and guide artillery fire. In real time, soldiers operating long-range weapons can see not just where to shoot, but the impact of a shot after the dust settles. The lasers, mounted on trucks and buggies, are a way to prevent that, to incapacitate drones and leave foes without that information in the field.

Throughout the day, the boom of artillery would occasionally interrupt conversation, adding extra ambience. The laser testing facility was, ultimately, a trailer and a few four-wheel drive vehicles, parked on a hill with some porta-potties and sparse bunkers. The landscape was beautiful, especially at a distance. Worn and rusted metal collected in certain spots, and hardy plants with sticky seeds dug into everything.

We drove away from the site around 4 o’clock. Behind, in the dirt waiting to be carted out, were the molten husks of several once-useful flying robots.

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On October 21, the Asian American Journalists Association, together with Military Veterans in Journalism, put forth guidelines urging “newsrooms to refrain from use of the Japanese word ‘kamikaze’ to describe the self-detonating Iranian-made drones that Russia is using to conduct attacks in Ukraine.” The letter came in light of a flurry of news stories using the term to describe attacks like a recent one in Ukraine, where Russian forces fired Shahed-136s at military targets and civilian buildings. 

When a Shahed-136 hits, sometimes people die, but a pilot on the weapon never does, because it’s uncrewed.

“‘Kamikaze’ is a Japanese word that translates to ‘divine wind,’ and is commonly used to refer to the Empire of Japan’s military pilots who were ordered to go on suicide missions during World War II, purposely crashing aircraft loaded with explosives onto targets, such as U.S. Navy ships,” reads the guidance. 

With modern loitering munitions—in this case, loitering means the ability to fly around before it impacts a target, if it does—a guidance system, or sometimes a remote operator, makes the decision to aim the uncrewed explosive into a building, vehicle, or people, selected as a target. Yet the term “kamikaze drone” has stuck, with multiple outlets using it in headlines. In 2010, when Popular Science was covering the early development of the Switchblade, it referred to the prototype as both a “Flying Assassin Robot” and “Kamikaze Suicide Drones.” 

Another variation, used by news orgs and manufacturers like Switchblade-maker Aerovironment, is “Suicide Drone.” This lacks the same historical or cultural stigma attached to the word “kamikaze,” but also describes a process that does not happen when the drone detonates, because there is no human on board to die by suicide. 

In place of the term, the guidance from AAJA and the veterans organization suggests “self-detonating drones.”

“Kamikaze attacks have nothing to do with modern drone warfare, and there is no good reason for reporters to reference a previous historical warfighting tactic in this context,” Russell Midori, president of Military Veterans in Journalism, said in the statement. “Instead, we recommend using language that more accurately explains how this new technology impacts present-day conflicts.”

“Self-detonating drones” is not an especially remarkable term, though it captures an essential part of what separates this kind of weapon from others. These weapons fly like drones, and they blow up like missiles. 

History: loitering munitions and self-detonating drones

In 1918, the Kettering Bug was built for action in World War I, but never saw it. It was an early ancestor of drones and guided missiles, and was dubbed an “aerial torpedo,” matching the water-based weapons that would seek out ships by means of rudimentary guidance. The Kettering Bug itself would follow a gyroscope for navigation and then would fly a predetermined distance, before shedding its wings and crashing its explosive-containing body into the ground.

The Kettering Bug is useful as a way to understand where drone and missile development diverged. With missiles, engineers and weapon designers regularly improved the guidance and navigation systems, creating a weapon that could fly itself to a target accurately and then explode on arrival. Drones, instead, were developed as remotely controlled systems. 

In World War II, the United States also converted some B-17 bombers to be remotely controlled drone bombs, which were directed from pilots in other bombers flying nearby. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr, the older brother of future president John F. Kennedy, died in 1944 while flying a mothership when the drone bomb B-17 it was commanding detonated mid-flight.

As remote control and guidance systems improved, more kinds of drone bombs became possible, blurring the once-clear division between missiles and drones. The Harpy, developed by Israel, is one of the earliest “loitering munitions,” a drone-shaped missile that can detonate into a target, but one that can also be called off from an attack and flown for another mission. 

In short, once fired, missiles fly towards a target and then explode, while drones in the form of loitering munitions can seek out a target in flight, and then be directed to attack or not. And of course, drones not built as munitions can also be used for more traditional tasks, such as intelligence-gathering or launching small missiles. 

Why rename the weapons now?

Loitering munitions and self-detonating drones are in the news because they are being actively used as tools of war. The Switchblade, made by Aerovironment, is a short-range loitering munition that the United States has provided to Ukrainian forces, as they resist the invasion by Russia. Switchblades were first deployed in 2012, though coverage on the use of drones by the US largely focused on larger, Predator- and Reaper-sized drones. Switchblade’s role as a specific weapon given as aid against the invasion, along with the development of the newer “Phoenix Ghost” loitering munition, has given the weapons newfound prominence.

Russia continues to use Iranian-made Shahed-136s against Ukraine. These weapons reportedly cost about $20,000, and so many have been fired in the war that the Ukrainian Air Force can claim it shot down at least 200 of them. The weapons have joined long-range missile attacks as a way for Russia to strike deeper into the country.

Whenever a Shahed crashes to the ground, it’s a hazard and almost certainly a tragedy for all those caught in its blast. The people who perish after such an attack are its targets. The machine, never alive, does not die when it completes its objective.

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NASA’s independent study into Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) begins today, and we have the names of the 16 people comprising the team. First announced in June, the task force is charged with identifying how unclassified data gathered by civilians, government entities, commercial organizations, and other sources can potentially be utilized to “shed light on UAPs,” as well as providing a roadmap for future studies and analysis. The project is expected to take nine months, with findings to be released to the public sometime in mid-2023.

“Exploring the unknown in space and the atmosphere is at the heart of who we are at NASA,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in today’s official announcement. “Understanding the data we have surrounding unidentified aerial phenomena is critical to helping us draw scientific conclusions about what is happening in our skies. Data is the language of scientists and makes the unexplainable, explainable.”

[Related: Congress has concerns about UAPs.]

The team is chaired by David Spergel, founder of the Flatiron Institute for Computational Astrophysics and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, and features SETI Institute affiliates, astrophysicists, oceanographers, science journalists, AI theorists, as well as former International Space Station commander and astronaut, Scott Kelly.

“Without access to an extensive set of data, it is nearly impossible to verify or explain any observation, thus the focus of the study is to inform NASA what possible data could be collected in the future to scientifically discern the nature of UAP,” reads NASA’s announcement.

[Related: UFO conspiracies can be more dangerous than you think.]

The government and military rebranded UFOs as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) a few years’ back as part of an ongoing effort to de-stigmatize the genuinely baffling—and, for some, worrisome—sightings by both the public and other credible experts. Setting aside headline-grabbing theories involving alien invasions and conspiracy theories, a number of dramatic, still unexplained events in recent years present significant challenges to national security officials, with unidentified objects seemingly capable of seamlessly traversing land and water environments, as well as moving at speeds and in ways that our known technology can’t handle.

Ongoing public developments such as today’s task force launch indicate that the government is still very much concerned with getting to the bottom of these sightings, and take many of them seriously. Once NASA’s investigation presents its findings, we hopefully will get some additional information as to how these issues will be handled and analyzed in the years ahead.

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Every October, the Association of the United States Army hosts an exposition in Washington, DC, where arms makers from across the globe gather to showcase the latest vehicles and weapons. On offer at the 2022 conference was a new and quintessentially modern type of vehicle: a rugged military truck with a launcher for loitering munitions, which are drone-shaped guided missiles that can (as their name implies) loiter, or spend time circling an area before crashing into a target. The idea was so compelling, it showed up on the floor at least twice. In one case, the F72-U Hero-120, made by Flyer Defense, mounts a loitering munition launcher on the back of the company’s F-72 utility truck. And in another, made by AM General, the HUMVEE Saber Blade features a loitering munition launcher on the back of a HUMVEE vehicle.

The existence of both vehicles suggests that there is special value in this kind of composite technology. Both models are working with existing, known, and reliable trucks as platforms. Adding loitering munition launchers to the back creates a new vehicle, one that can launch weapons at distance and with accuracy, before moving away. 

These developments are taking place in light of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, where artillery and drones have both had a major impact on how forces fight. For example, the HIMARS, a US-made and supplied rocket artillery truck, mounts a sophisticated launcher on the back of a vehicle, letting crews fire at a target and then drive away before retaliation. 

In a pinch, both options from Flyer Defense and AM General suggest the ability for an army to use loitering munitions in much the same way that a HIMARs employs rockets. A vehicle-mounted launcher gives flexibility for advance and firing, as well as mobility to relocate after launch.

Flyer assault

The F72-U Hero-120 is built around the ability to fire Hero-120 loitering munitions. These winged missiles, made by Mistral and UVision, have a range of at least 25 miles, and can carry a 10-pound warhead. The Hero-120s can also fly for up to 60 minutes, powered by their onboard electric motor. This also lets the missiles be called off after launch, in case the situation changes or the target is no longer relevant, which is one of the more crucial distinctions between loitering munitions and unrecoverable missiles. 

As displayed, Flyer’s vehicle can transport 10 of the weapons, with four ready to launch and six stowed.

The Marine Corps has already selected Hero-120s as a loitering munition to pair with Organic Precision Fires-Mounted requirement. The goal of that program is to arm a vehicle that can travel with marines, while also expanding the range of what those marines can target beyond that of infantry-carried weapons. 

Saber rattling

Also on display, and following a similar template, is the HUMVEE Saber Blade. Made by AM General, the Saber Blade also features a remote-control weapon station and counter-drone system, made by Hornet. This includes airburst ammunition and a special drone-specific detection sensor.

“The current conflicts have demonstrated the increasing importance of drones, whether to target vehicles or for reconnaissance missions. Being able to detect and defeat such threats while maintaining the vehicle’s primary protective capacity is the ultimate capability for a Remote Control Weapon Station,” Jean Boy, managing director of Hornet, said in a release.

Drones, from hobbyist models to dedicated military machines, have been a regular feature of the Ukraine Donbas war since 2014. In that conflict, drones often scouted static positions, or on occassion dropped small bombs. When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, both sides began using drones in far more extensive ways. Armed drones have been used to hunt tanks. Small quadcopters have been used to guide infantry and artillery fire, to the point where soldiers fighting without quadcopters in their formations felt like “blind kittens.” 

The Saber Blade vehicle can not just defend itself against drones, it can also launch Switchblade 300 and Switchblade 600 loitering munitions, which its maker AM General describes as “loitering precision strike missiles for use against non-line-of-sight targets.”

Loitering munitions

Loitering munitions, like drones, are an increasingly common presence on modern battlefields. Russia has launched attacks on Kyiv using Iranian-supplied Shahed-136 loitering munitions. These weapons can complement missile barrages or rocket attacks. The history of modern artillery development suggests that the weapons can be used for precision strikes, as well as wider destruction.

While it will likely be some time before these vehicles can be adopted and integrated into modern forces, the promise is for accurate, beyond line of sight fire that leans on the kind of sensors and navigation already inherent in loitering munitions. Equipping mobile formations with loitering munitions mounted from trucks lets soldiers fight enemies at greater distances, with weapons that can, as designed, hit just the specific vehicles, enemies, or buildings targeted.

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For years, companies have been working on developing electric flying machines that are designed to make short hops that bring people or cargo from one spot to another. That vision is getting closer to taking off, as two companies, Joby and Delta, announced today that they will be working together to whisk people to and from airports in a Joby-made aircraft. 

The plan is to begin with two large hubs: New York City and Los Angeles. The companies promise a “premium” experience, although aren’t yet sharing how much it will cost or when exactly the service will begin. The general idea is something like this: Someone booking a ticket via Delta to fly from John F. Kennedy International Airport to another city would see an option to add on an air taxi leg to get them from a heliport-like facility somewhere near their home to JFK, and would book it through Delta’s app or website. 

Eventually, the air taxi, made by Joby, might even deliver its passengers to a spot at the airport that’s located post-security, Ed Bastian, Delta’s CEO, said during a press conference on Monday. Delta is also investing $60 million in Joby. 

The main player here is Joby’s air taxi, which sports six large tilting propellers. They provide the thrust it needs to get off the ground, and then tilt into a different position to wing it through the air. Four of these propellers, which are all powered by electric motors, are attached to the wing, while two are on the tail. It took some work to arrive at this version: “We built dozens of different configurations,” JoeBen Bevirt, Joby’s CEO, told PopSci last year when we took a closer look at the aircraft. 

The modern version of the aircraft holds four people, as well as a pilot, and the company lists its capabilities as having a range of 150 miles and a maximum velocity of 200 mph. (A robust amount of passenger luggage could affect the aircraft’s ability to hold four riders who want to go to the airport.) The fact that it has a pilot might sound like a no-brainer, but not every player in this industry is taking that approach. Wisk Aero, which is backed by Boeing, just revealed its sixth-generation flying machine, and Wisk’s strategy remains to pursue autonomy first, and have no pilot on board. They will have human operators overseeing the flights from the ground, though. 

Work remains to be done before all of Joby and Delta’s plans become a reality—from getting the proper regulatory approvals to developing the actual sites where the Joby vehicle would take off and land. In a press release, Joby said that their aircraft has completed “more than 1,000 test flights, demonstrating its range, speed, altitude and low noise profile.” 

However, on February 16, a test flight ended in an accident, with an aircraft becoming “substantially damaged,” according to a preliminary report from the NTSB, due to a “component failure.” No one was hurt in the incident that took place near a village called Jolon, California, which is roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The plane was being “remotely piloted” and the testing that day reportedly involved speeds as high as 276 mph; the aircraft was involved in a fire once it was on the ground, according to the NTSB. (You can find a link to the report here.)

Joby and Delta are not the only players working to usher in a new aviation era involving short, battery-powered flights. Others include Eviation, which just flew its Alice demonstrator for the first time, and electric-air-taxi-maker Archer scored $10 million in August from United. Plus, Air Canada plans to buy hybrid-electric aircraft designed to seat 30 people and made by Heart Aerospace. And in addition to Wisk and its plans for self-flying air taxis, Beta Technologies has developed a piloted electric aircraft that’s been flown by US Air Force pilots.

Watch a video about the Joby aircraft, below.

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On October 4, the USS Gerald R. Ford departed Norfolk, Virginia, for a trip across the Atlantic. The ship is the first of the Ford-class aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered hangars-and-runways that serve as the centerpiece of the US Navy’s fleets and, as such, project American military might all across the globe. While the Ford has already sailed on sea trials, this will be its first deployment as an operational part of the Navy. For this mission, the Ford will include at least one foreign port of call, but the journey itself is set to be a shorter voyage than a typical carrier deployment.

The Ford’s construction began in 2009, and it was formally commissioned in 2017. In 2008, when funding for the Ford was approved, it cost $13.3 billion. The ship was first declared operational in December 2021, though it suffered delays as work on technical problems, like weapons elevators, was still needed before it could properly set sail.

The Ford is the eleventh aircraft carrier presently in the fleet to enter active service, and it’s the first of the new design. The previous Nimitz-class carriers first entered service in 1975, with the most recent of that class joining in 2009. Eleven carriers is a lot, more than that of any other nation, though it’s also the minimum allowed by Congress. It’s a number that also does not include the Navy’s amphibious assault ships, in both Wasp and America classes, which have flight decks and are comparable in size to the aircraft carriers of other nations.

[Related: A handy glossary to all the military aviation terms in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’]

The Ford borrows a hull design from the Nimitz class, though it is somewhat modified. Internally, the carrier is redesigned to maximize both its utility and minimize long-term costs. This includes, most notably, the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), which replaces the steam catapults on earlier carriers. Steam catapults help planes get up to speed when taking off from the short carrier runways, pulling a cable that helps hurl the plane as it accelerates to flight. EMALS replaces the steam buildup and launch of the previous system for an electromagnetic rail, which can be reset and reused more quickly. 

The EMALS is one of several systems developed for the Ford-class carriers that have had performance issues in development, necessitating repair and modification. Other design changes include replacing the hydraulic weapons elevators of the Nimitz system with electromagnetic motors, allowing more and faster movement of munitions to and from deck. There are 11 of these elevators on the ship, and all 11 were fixed after construction, with repairs continuing until December 2021, even as the Ford was conducting trials at sea

[Related: The US Navy floats its wishlist: 350 ships and 150 uncrewed vessels]

The Ford class also includes a more powerful nuclear power plant, allowing it to run existing and future electronics systems. Another big change with the design is that the Ford class is designed to need about 800-1,200 fewer crew than a Nimitz class, saving space, labor costs, and ultimately, allowing the Navy to fulfill more needs on more ships with fewer people.

On its deployment, the Gerald R. Ford will travel with a flotilla, formally referred to as a Carrier Strike Group. This will include three destroyers, a guided missile cruiser, two cargo ships, and an oiler, which carries spare fuel for the other ships and for aircraft. The combination, ultimately, is designed to let the carrier launch aircraft at enemy ships or targets on land, while the fleet protects the carrier from any of a number of hostile threats that might be encountered at sea, most especially submarines.

One durable risk to aircraft carriers is that, by concentrating so many people and so much force into a single ship, if that vessel is sunk a navy loses a significant amount of its fighting power. Submarines with torpedoes have long threatened carriers, and new anti-ship missiles also threaten the massive and expensive ships. This is partly why the Navy has invested in means to shoot down missiles, like with shipboard laser weapons. It is also why, when a carrier sets sail, it does so surrounded by an entourage of allies, armed to the teeth. 

In total 17 ships and one submarine will form the multinational fleet on the Ford’s first deployment, including participation from the US, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden.

[Related: The Navy’s robot pilots could one day outnumber its human ones]

“USS Gerald R. Ford is going to sail on the high seas with our partners,” Capt. Paul Lanzilotta, Ford’s commanding officer, said in a release. “We want interoperability, we want interchangeability with our partners. Our NATO partners that are sailing with us – we’re going to work with them every day, every night. That’s what it means to operate on the high seas. Air defense exercises. Long-range maritime strike. We’re going to be doing pretty much every mission set that’s in the portfolio for naval aviation, and we’re excited about that.”

For its voyage, the Ford is bringing eight squadrons of aircraft. This includes the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets strike aircraft, which can fight other aircraft as well as drop bombs or fire missiles at ships or targets on land. The carrier will also house EA-18G Growlers, which are Super Hornets modified for electronic warfare. Early warning  E-2D Hawkeye aircraft and C-2 Greyhound cargo aircraft will also be part of the carrier’s fixed-wing component. Seahawk helicopters, capable of transport, combat, search and rescue, and anti-submarine warfare, are also part of the complement of aircraft aboard.

Gerald R. Ford’s first voyage will be across the Atlantic ocean, which would be a calm theater in which the crew and allied ships can better learn the ins and outs of the new vessel in operation. 

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Last week, an experimental electric commuter airplane from Eviation made a very brief flight for the first time. At the controls of the aircraft was a tried and true form of aviation technology: a human pilot.

Meanwhile, a different firm—Wisk Aero, which is backed by Boeing—unveiled the latest version of its electric flying machine today, and it’s designed to fly with no pilot at all. It’s an air taxi, intended to transport four passengers (and no human aviator) over distances of 90 miles, perhaps less for a smaller hop. The goal is to be an all-electric, driverless Uber in the sky that cruises at 138 mph.

Here’s what to know about this latest aircraft, and how Wisk’s approach differs from other companies. 

The newly released plane has a slightly boxy appearance and is Wisk’s sixth-generation aircraft. While in the past the company has referred to its fifth-gen aircraft as “Cora,” this one is simply called Generation 6. It hasn’t flown yet. It is designed to employ 12 motors that spin 12 propellers to enable it to take off, fly, and land. 

The dozen motors have different jobs. The 6 motors in the back spin what are known as lift fans, which are oriented parallel to the ground and remain that way. Those produce vertical thrust for takeoff and landing. The six motors in the front control six propellers that can tilt, so at takeoff and landing they would work together with the lift fans, with all of them oriented the same way, to allow the aircraft to move up and down. During forward flight, the tilting propellers in front of the wing would be positioned like normal propellers, and the lift fans behind the wing stop and remain motionless. Previous generations from Wisk had a propeller in the back to push the aircraft forward, but this one does not. 

The reason the company killed the propeller in the back is “simplicity of design,” says their CEO, Gary Gysin. While the previous setup needed two different motor types because it had that pusher propeller, the new one can utilize just one type of motor. “Right now, we have the same motor for all 12, [but] the front ones tilt,” he adds. He also notes that the new version is quieter and more efficient. 

What’s less simple, at least from a regulatory standpoint, is the company’s plans to make these air taxis self-flying. “The aircraft will be fully autonomous and run its route,” says Gysin. “There’ll be a human in the loop that’s on the ground—more like a supervisor. They don’t have a stick, they don’t have a rudder. They’re not actively controlling the aircraft.” 

The humans on the ground will be like air traffic controllers. “They’re watching the telemetry of the aircraft,” he says. The goal is for one human operator on the ground to be able to monitor 10 different flying machines in the sky, says Gysin, although Chris Brown, a spokesperson for the company, adds that that goal is for the future, and that an initial ratio might be more like one human for three unpiloted aircraft. 

Gysin compares what the aircraft will be like someday to a car with level-four self-driving capabilities. In case you don’t have the levels of car automation memorized, they come from an organization called SAE International. According to SAE, level four has “automated driving features [that] will not require you to take over driving.” That’s in contrast to level three, which involves a system that could ask you to assume control. Meanwhile, level five is similar to level four, but could operate autonomously in “all conditions.” In other words, by aiming for an airborne version of level four, Wisk wants to make an aircraft that can fly itself with zero control input from someone inside of it, but in limited conditions. 

That represents a different approach from competitors in the electric air taxi space. Joby Aviation, for example, has an air taxi that seats four people and is designed to be flown by a pilot in the fifth seat. Beta Technologies flies an electric aircraft designed to carry five people, with a pilot as person six. Archer is doing something similar, with plans for an aircraft called Midnight that can hold four and be flown by a fifth, although their current-gen aircraft is called Maker, and is just a demonstrator that flies with no one on board. (Archer and Wisk are involved in a lawsuit.) 

Finally, another company, Kitty Hawk, was working on a one-person self-flying airplane, but they recently announced that they are shutting down, leading the Washington Post to ask, “If a Google billionaire can’t make flying cars happen, can anyone?” (Kitty Hawk has been, and still is, a “minority investor” in Wisk, says Gysin.)

In terms of its automation-first approach, Gysin argues that that will be an asset but concedes that it will slow their process towards getting regulatory approval to carry passengers. “What we’re doing is automating all the mundane tasks” of flight, he says. “It’s going to be fundamentally safer [than a piloted aircraft]—it will be harder, for sure, to get certified.” 

“All the regulations are built around having a pilot in the cockpit,” he adds. 

Ultimately, how the industry and its multiple players end up truly shaking out remains up in the air. 

Watch a video about Wisk’s gen-six aircraft, below.

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When it comes to equipping the aircraft carriers of the 21st century, the US Navy wants a mix of aircraft that is at least 60-percent uncrewed. This goal was “outlined by multiple officials during updates at the annual Tailhook Association symposium in September,” reports Aviation Week, referring to the conference held by a fraternal order of Naval Aviators, the pilots who presently and previously performed the kind of job that the Navy intends to shift mostly to robots.

The Navy has made no secret of its intentions to move towards more uncrewed aircraft flying on and off of carriers. In March 2021, Vice Adm. James Kilby told the House Armed Services committee that “we think we could get upwards of 40 percent of the aircraft in an air wing that are unmanned and then transition beyond that.”

Shifting from 40 to 60 percent is a substantial leap, though it’s of a piece with the overarching strategy for how the Navy intends to incorporate and expand the use of uncrewed vehicles in the coming decades. In the 2022 Navigation Plan, the Navy’s longer-term procurement strategy document, the Navy said that by the 2040s it is planning to field “Aircraft for anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare, to include helicopters and maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, all augmented by unmanned aviation systems” with a capacity goal of “approximately 900.”

For the Navy, much of its uncrewed aviation plans hinge on the continued success of the MQ-25 Stingray tanker drone. The Stingray’s mission is to take off from a carrier deck, and travel with fighters like the F/A-18 jets part of the way to their mission. Then, the Stingray is supposed to top off the fuel tanks of the jets while they’re already airborne, extending the functional range of those fighters. This is a mission at present performed by specially equipped F/A-18s, but switching the refueling to a specialized uncrewed aircraft would free up the crewed fighter for other missions.

In June 2021, a Stingray successfully transferred fuel from an external storage tank to a fighter in flight for the first time, and testing of the aircraft continues, with the Navy expecting the drones to enter service in 2026. While not as flashy as the combat missions Navy drones may someday fly, the tanker missions require mastering the ability to take off from and land on carrier decks, as well as the ability for an uncrewed vehicle to coordinate with human pilots in close contact while airborne. If the airframe and its autonomous systems can accomplish that, then adapting the form to other missions, like scouting or attack, can come in the future. 

Adding uncrewed aircraft can potentially increase the raw numbers of flying machines fielded, as autonomous systems are not limited by the availability or capacity of human pilots. The uncrewed aircraft can also be designed from the start without a need to accommodate human pilots, letting designers build airframes without having to include space for not just cockpits but the pilot safety systems, like ejection seats, oxygen, and redundant engines. 

By saving the labor of piloting by shifting towards autonomy, and saving space on an aircraft carrier through denser uncrewed design, roboting wingmates could allow ships to put more flying machines into the sky, without needing to have a similar expansion in pilot numbers or carrier decks. 

[Related: The US Navy floats its wishlist: 350 ships and 150 uncrewed vessels]

The Navy’s intention has parallels across the Department of Defense. In September, DARPA announced ANCILLARY, a program looking for a versatile drone that could fly from rugged environments and ship decks, without any need for additional infrastructure. GAMBIT, a program by defense contractor General Atomics, is pitched to the Air Force as a way to develop four different drone models from one single core design, allowing cost savings and versatility with shared parts.

Beyond those speculative programs, the Air Force has worked to develop semi-autonomous drones that can receive orders from and fly in formation with human-piloted planes. This Loyal Wingmate program is aimed at expanding the number of aircraft, and in turn sensors and weapons, that can be flown in formation, again without expanding the number of pilots needed. It also allows the Air Force to develop a rotating cast of uncrewed aircraft around existing crewed fighters, with hoped-for shorter production timelines and rapid deployment of new capabilities once they’re developed.

[Related: A guide to the Gambit family of military drones and their unique jobs]

The Navy’s ultimate vision, one suggested at 40 percent uncrewed and necessitated at 60 percent, is that the new robotic planes perform well enough to justifying their place in carrier storage, while also being expendable enough that they can take the brunt of risk in any conflict, sparing human pilots from exposure to enemy anti-aircraft weaponry. A shot-down pilot is a tragedy. A shot-down drone is just lost equipment and the ensuing paperwork.

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For eight minutes today, an electric airplane from Eviation flew in the skies above central Washington state. Propelled by two electric motors spinning two propellers near the tail, pulling energy from 8,000 pounds of batteries, the aircraft hit a speed of about 171 miles per hour during its brief flight.

The flight of the sleek electric plane, which its maker calls Alice, was a significant milestone for a sector of aviation that focuses on carrying small amounts of people—nine or fewer—short distances, and doing it with no tailpipe emissions. 

“We made aviation history flying Alice, the world’s first all-electric commuter aircraft, here at the Moses Lake Flight Test facility,” Gregory Davis, the company’s CEO, said during a press conference following the flight. 

This successful flight, brief as it was, followed a high-speed ground test that the company conducted on September 18. 

While the flight test today appeared to go off without a hitch—save for a brief taxi away from the runway before takeoff and then back again, to adjust a screen in the aircraft—the company has hard problems to solve ahead of this milestone. The most pressing long-term technical problem, Davis reports, is the batteries themselves, which are in the plane’s belly. While the company is targeting eventual flight times of one to two hours and distances of some 170 to 230 miles, or even 288 miles, the energy that lithium-ion batteries can hold right now isn’t currently sufficient.

[Related: Watch this sleek electric plane ace its high-speed ground test]

“The biggest tech challenge that Eviation has to overcome is the development of the batteries—that couldn’t be more clear,” Davis said. “It’s looking at the evolution of the chemistry and the physics around those batteries. Of course, we are able to control how we integrate them, and how we optimize them from a design perspective for the aircraft, but we really do need the industry to boost the energy density.” 

That may be the company’s biggest technical hurdle, but others remain, such as conducting more flight tests, building more aircraft, getting the commuter aircraft certified under the FAA’s Part 23, and eventually shipping it to customers such as DHL or Cape Air at prices that airlines can afford. Davis says they hope to make their first deliveries in 2027. 

This is not the first electric aircraft to ever fly. Small air taxis from companies like Joby Aviation, Beta Technologies, and others have already taken to the skies multiple times. For example, a flying machine from Beta, called Alia, flew from New York to Arkansas—with many stops along the way—in May. Eviation’s Alice aircraft is positioning itself in a slightly different category from the air taxis being flown by these companies, as it’s an aircraft with the ability to someday carry nine people. (The air taxis from those companies are designed to carry fewer than nine people—Joby’s holds four passengers and a pilot, for example.)  

Additionally, an electric seaplane from Harbour Air has taken to the skies, as has a speedy Rolls-Royce machine. 

As for today’s flight, which had the aircraft flying at an altitude of 3,500 with Washington’s Grant County International Airport as its point of departure and landing, more immediate post-flight work remains for the team. Davis said that the flight produced oodles of systems data that Eviation now needs to process. That data is measured in terabytes, Davis said. “We need to review it, and understand how the performance of the aircraft matched our models—so we’ll be doing that over the next couple of weeks.” 

Watch the first flight, below:

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The Air Force is testing a new tool for sinking ships with guided bombs, and this month released additional footage of a successful test of the system from April.

In the video captured from the deck of the derelict ship Courageous, the bomb hits as a plume of water and smoke, with the camera’s angle jolted skyward as the now-halved vessel splits and sinks. The footage, released September 19, offers a more complete picture of an Air Force Research Lab weapons test, which originally took place on April 28. Previous footage showed the ship sinking, from the sky. Now, with the footage from the onboard camera recovered, it is possible to see what would be a sailor’s eye view of the destruction, before the falling bomb permanently condemns them to what would be a long stay in Davy Jone’s locker.

The Air Force Research Laboratory describes its new Quicksink technology as a “low-cost, air-delivered capability for defeating maritime threats.” It is, in practice, a target-tracking system that can attach to existing bombs and bomb guidance systems, letting fighter jets and other planes sink ships from the sky with the accuracy and force typically reserved for seaborne torpedoes. 

In the April demonstration, an F-15E Strike Eagle released a roughly 2,000-pound JDAM bomb, hitting and sinking the ship set up as a target in the Gulf of Mexico. (JDAM means “Joint Direct Attack Munition,” and refers to a family of bombs with guidance systems used by both the Air Force and the Navy.) In the first footage released of the test, the target ship can be seen intact, then buckling upward as the bomb hits one-third of the length from the rear of the vessel. The whole of the ship is soon engulfed in a plume of smoke, debris, and blasted water, with the split sections mostly submerged by the time the cloud clears 20 seconds later. 

Sinking into history

Sinking ships with attacks from aircraft is a century old idea. In the summer of 1921, the US Navy and Army competed to see which pilots could sink captured German World War I warships used for target practice. (Previously, some of these warships had been used as target practice for battleship guns.) Planes sinking ships became a crucial part of World War II, with some dedicated planes carrying torpedoes, and others flying harrowing dive-bomb attacks to place bombs on ship decks. 

Precision guidance systems have improved dramatically since the end of World War II and especially since the 1970s, and anti-ship missiles have benefitted as well. 

Current options for sinking surface ships from planes “are the Harpoon AGM-84, Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) AGM-158C, and laser guided bombs (GBUs). All achieve functional and mission kills, but sinking a ship may require multiple munitions and all require some level of intelligence knowledge of the ship for mission planning and targeting the critical nodes,” Kirk Herzog, AFRL program manager, told Popular Science via email.

These weapons can prove effective, but long-range flight, navigation, and guidance systems come at a cost. The Harpoon anti-ship missile can be air-, surface-, or submarine-launched, has seen action in Ukraine, and costs over $1 million per missile. The Long Range Anti Ship Missile, a cruise missile built to do what it says on the label, costs over $3.5 million per missile.

Bombs away

Bombs, on the other hand, are relatively cheap, even with guidance systems. In 2020, every JDAM purchased by the Air Force cost about $21,000 apiece. Herzog said that, as a technology demonstration program, there is no target cost per item, but the “objective of the program is to incorporate features, such as Weapon Open System Architecture and open competition, that drive down the overall life cycle cost.” This would make Quicksink a low-cost way for planes to sink ships with JDAMs.

Navy submarines, armed with torpedoes, already perform this patrol function to some degree. The AFRL says that Quicksink “aims to develop a low-cost method of achieving torpedo-like seaworthy kills from the air at a much higher pace and over a much larger area than covered by a lumbering submarine.”

Submarines are an odd direct comparison to aircraft, especially when planes like the Navy’s P-8 Poseidon already carry anti-ship weapons and are used for maritime patrol. What Quicksink offers when used from a stealth fighter, like torpedoes fired from a submarine, is surprise in sinking a vessel. Unlike submarines, which risk revealing themselves in an attack, a stealth plane retains a similar degree of stealth even as it flies away.

The latest video released features a 3D model of the Courageous resting on the seafloor. This 3D model was produced for the Okaloosa County Artificial Reef Office (explore it on their site), and the reefs, which include other wrecks, are promoted by the Office as “excellent sites for fishing, diving, and snorkeling activities.” To make the model, a company called Reef Smart Guides took images captured from an underwater uncrewed vehicle, and then fed it into software that produced a 3D video. “It’s the same technologies used for years to map the ocean bottom, inspect bridges, cables, and other underwater infrastructure,” said Herzog.

One of the videos released by the AFRL shows an animated segment representing a hypothetical future mission where having Quicksink would be important. In that scenario, a navy reconnaissance plane spots a “ship heading to the west coast armed with long range ballistic missile disguised as typical cargo containers,” then dispatches an already-flying F-35 on maritime patrol, which sinks it. 

In addition to its effectiveness at guiding a bomb through a target ship, Quicksink is designed as a “Weapon Open Systems Architecture” tool, or one that can easily plug into existing system. Should the US suddenly find itself beset by cargo ships secretly arming and launching ballistic missiles, the ability to easily and rapidly convert existing bombs into guided anti-ship weapons would prove a direct boon for national security. 

Watch the ship being sunk, below:

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On September 18, an all-electric aircraft sped down a runway in Washington state, its nose wheel lifting off the ground. It didn’t take off, though, by intention: The test was a predecessor to an actual first flight, which the company says is “imminent.” 

The 57-foot-long aircraft, which its makers call Alice, is just a prototype, although a pretty slick one at that. Someday, if a production version enters service with an airline like Cape Air, the goal will be for it to be able to carry nine passengers and their bags for flights lasting about an hour or two—think distances of about 170 to 230 miles. Up front in the commuter plane will be space for two pilots, although it will be certified to be flown by just one person. 

Other companies working on electric flight, which is one way that the industry hopes to become less carbon-intensive, are developing flying machines that don’t look like traditional aircraft. An air taxi by Joby Aviation, for example, is capable of taking off and landing vertically, and thus has a different design. But Alice, made by a company called Eviation, looks a lot more like a regular plane. Here’s how it works right now. 

Batteries in the belly

The plane’s motors need battery power to give them the juice they need. Not surprisingly, the batteries that do that are in the bottom of the plane, where the girth of the aircraft is also a little wider. 

Batteries are heavy, and they don’t have the same energy density as regular fuel does, which sets a major limit for electric flight. The batteries on this prototype weigh a total of 8,000 pounds, and these lithium-ion cells are cylindrical, which is the same shape that some automakers, like Tesla and Rivian, use. For luggage, the cargo compartment is behind the passenger cabin. 

Other attributes of the aircraft’s design are all about making it be able to accomplish its intended mission—commuter flights over relatively short distances—while harnessing battery power. “Building an electric aircraft is a war on weight, and it’s a war on drag,” notes Gregory Davis, the company’s CEO and president. “Our challenges are to get the best possible lift-over-drag ratio.”

The aircraft has long, narrow wings, which don’t sweep backwards; wings that are lengthy and skinny are referred to as possessing a high aspect ratio. “We need to have the most efficient wing that we can,” he says. (For a point of comparison, take a look at the wings on an aircraft like an F-16, which is designed for performance and supersonic speeds, as opposed to efficiency.) 

As for keeping the weight to a minimum where they can, the plane is made mostly out of carbon composite material, Davis says. The aircraft is also what is known as fly-by-wire, which Davis says also makes it lighter than it otherwise would have been. A non-fly-by-wire aircraft employs mechanical connections, like metal cables, to translate what the pilot does at the controls to the actual surfaces on the outside of the plane. A fly-by-wire aircraft uses computer signals to do the same, removing those cables or other physical connectors.

Props in the back 

At the rear of the aircraft are two electric motors that spin two propellers. Those motors are made by a company called magniX; an airline, Harbour Air, has also used a magniX motor to power a converted electric seaplane. 

In the case of the Alice aircraft, the power units in the back “can produce 650 kilowatts of power per side, so 1.3 megawatts of power for the aircraft during takeoff, which is great,” Davis says. 

Right now, there’s an understandable gap between where the company eventually expects to arrive with the range of its production-model aircraft and the prototype, which will soon be making its first flight. “The batteries aren’t there yet,” he says. “Battery technology is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest challenge in electric aviation.” The hope is that as development of the Alice aircraft continues, the industry—electric aircraft, electric ground vehicles—keeps innovating. 

He refers to this battery situation as “a challenge for the entire industry.” The prototype aircraft, he says, is good “for demonstrating that the technology works together.”

To be sure, Eviation and its Alice aircraft are not the only ones working in this new frontier. Companies like Beta Technologies and Joby Aviation are flying electric air taxis that are designed to take off and land like helicopters, although in recent flights with Air Force pilots at the controls, or a multi-leg journey to Arkansas, Beta’s demonstrator took off and landed conventionally. Others include Archer and Wisk. Finally, Kittyhawk was working on a one-person plane known as Heaviside, but just announced on September 21 that they would be shutting down the company.

And in related news, a company called Heart Aerospace is working on a hybrid-electric aircraft, the ES-30. The Air Current aviation website has more on why Heart recently pivoted away from an all-electric smaller craft to a larger, 30-seat machine that also has turbo-generators on board. 

For Eviation’s Davis, he compares their current stage of development to NASA’s Mercury program, which saw the first American in a sub-orbital flight in 1961, eight years before the moon landing of Apollo 11. “What we’re doing here with Alice is like Alan Shepard going into space on a Redstone [rocket]—it’s showing that we can do it,” he says. “Where we’re headed in terms of making electric aviation part of our world—something that our children will fly on and we won’t think twice about—that’s the destination here. We need to show that we can do it.” 

Watch the high-speed taxi test, below. 

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On Thursday, JetBlue, Virgin Atlantic, the US Air Force and others announced their commitment to purchase sustainable jet fuel from a New York-based startup called Air Company. 

JetBlue agreed to buy 25 million gallons of Air Company’s sustainable aviation fuel over five years, and Virgin Atlantic agreed to purchase up to 100 million gallons over 10 years. Boom Supersonic, a company trying to bring back supersonic passenger flight, plans to purchase up to 5 million gallons of this fuel on an annual basis through its Overture flight test program.

According to a press release, the US Air Force, which awarded the company a contract, has already completed a “first-of-its-kind unmanned flight using Air Company’s 100% unblended CO2-derived jet fuel.”

“Aviation as a whole represents 2-3% of global CO2 emissions and is widely considered one of the most ‘hard to decarbonize’ industries,” Air Company noted in a statement. “Using the same proprietary technology that mimics photosynthesis to create its consumer ethanol, Air Company has developed and deployed its single-step process for CO2-derived fuel production using renewable electricity.”

There has been a great deal of emerging research and investment into the development of sustainable aviation fuel, as more attention is directed at technologies that can help corporations reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. While electric and battery powered vehicles are also being looked into as alternatives for air transportation, they can come with their own challenges. Electric aircraft could work for short hops, but they aren’t feasible for long journeys. Thus, the need for more environmentally friendly ways to power the combustion engines on aircraft.

So what is sustainable aviation fuel?

Traditional jet fuel, or kerosene, is a mix of hydrocarbons made from a series of chemical reactions. But to make it sustainable, instead of using fossil fuels, engineers would instead integrate more renewable starting materials, like feedstocks, or waste products, such as used cooking oils (read PopSci’s explainer on sustainable aviation fuel here). In general, the idea is that even if they still emit carbon pollution when they are burned, since they took carbon out of the air in the production process, they end up being “carbon neutral.”

Sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) can be made from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. This subset of products are called synthetic SAFs. 

[Related: The truth about carbon capture technology]

“Application of our new carbon conversion process has the potential to replace legacy Fischer-Tropsch systems by simplifying a multi-step conversion into single-step CO2 hydrogenation to fuel-grade paraffin,” Air Company co-founder Stafford Sheehan said in a press release. (Fischer-Tropsch systems turn hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide into water vapor and hydrocarbons through reactions that rearrange the bonds between the compounds. The source of the carbon monoxide is usually coal or natural gas.) “Furthermore, with additional reactor modifications, we can produce a fuel composition that is able to be used in a jet engine without the need for any blending with fossil fuel, as demonstrated in our test flight with the U.S. Air Force. Our single-step process will make SAF more cost-effective, toward widespread use.”

The company laid out their full fuel production process in a white paper published in the journal ACS Energy Letters. Earlier this year, the company experimented on a smaller scale with making ethanol out of thin air through products like vodka, hand sanitizer, and perfume.  

The US has already approved the use of SAFs in a mix with traditional jet fuel. Researchers in Europe have been looking into ways to reconfigure the original jet fuel production process with renewable energy and non-fossil fuel starting materials. Efficiency, though, is a barrier, and so is cost. SAFs reportedly cost anywhere from two to four times more than traditional jet fuel, and Air Company is no exception to this problem. The company’s CEO told Axios that their SAF is “not close to cost parity with traditional jet fuel,” but SAF-specific incentives included in the Inflation Reduction Act should be able to cut some of the costs. Another obstacle is the availability of SAFs compared to traditional jet fuel.

Although a few companies have been testing small flights run on this greener jet fuel alternative, questions still remain about how compatible SAFs are with the materials that make up the aircraft in the long haul. 

However, despite skepticism and hurdles, many companies are still investing in this vision. In July, Alaska Airlines, Microsoft, and Twelve said that they were working towards a demonstration flight using fuels derived from recaptured CO2 and renewable energy. And last year, Lufthansa announced a similar agreement to produce and use synthetic jet fuel. 

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On September 19, defense giant General Atomics unveiled four related drone concepts, all under the family name of Gambit. The program, which was first announced in March, aims to take advantage of the possibilities afforded to uncrewed design, allowing several distinct aircraft to be built around a single core. Drones based on the Gambit Core would then join fighter wings and missions, under the direction of human pilots in F-35s or newer fighters, all working towards the same end.

The heart of the Gambit, as General Atomics says, is a “core platform that encapsulates a single set of common hardware: landing gear, baseline avionics, chassis, and other essential functions. A common Gambit Core accounts for roughly 70 percent of the price among the various models, providing an economy of scale to help lower costs, increase interoperability, and enhance or accelerate the development of variants.”

General Atomics, in its announcement, explicitly compares this to the assembly line style of automotive manufacture, in which both luxury sedans and family economy models start from the same base and then deviate only later in production. Gambit is pitched explicitly as a suite of useful drones, which will offer four useful versions and come in a line that can be expanded as production evolves.

Common core for four

The four initial Gambit models, as pitched, come complete with sketchpad-style illustrations. General Atomics announced them as each having a number, and each one is also intended to have a specific focus. Together, they will allow the military to use drones for everything from scouting to combat to advanced training to stealth missions.

Gambit 1

This is a scout and surveillance drone. This scout Gambit will take the core package and add “high aspect wings and a fuel-optimized engine,” letting it “spend more time patrolling a given box of airspace to provide early warning or surveillance.” This is the role most familiar to the pattern of drones like the Reaper or Global Hawk, made by General Atomics and Northrop Grumman respectively, though as described the scout Gambit is intended to watch for enemy planes, in addition to any watching movements below on the ground.

Gambit 2

This is an air-to-air fighter. This fighter drone will have less endurance than the long range scout. Instead, it will fight in packs, with sensors shared between multiple fighter-Gambits, all using shared signals to triangulate and find even stealthy targets. General Atomics says that this group could do multiple tasks: “They could alert human-piloted fighters farther away with a burst transmission. They could wave off to keep clear of the hostile fighter. They could attack with their own weapons using AI and machine learning to harass and trap the hostile fighter.” This theoretically lets drone aircraft be on the bleeding edge of a fight, with commanding human supervisors able to respond after the drones have already detected a hostile enemy.

Gambit 3

This aircraft is a training tool, a drone that will be able to emulate the powerful sensors of a modern crewed stealth fighter and pretend to be something it’s not, all without requiring actual pilots to fly training missions and masquerade as enemies. Training work is important and time-intensive, and the Air Force is already invested in using AI to evaluate pilots and pilot technique. Tools that are especially effective at training, like the Angry Kitten electronic warfare suite, can end up adapted to frontline service.

Gambit 4

Last but not least, this model is “a combat reconnaissance-focused model with no tail and swept wings,” which in the sketch resembles the flying wing B-2 bomber or the uncrewed RQ-170 drone. The General Atomics release for this drone is the least descriptive, offering only that the stealth Gambit is “optimized for long-endurance missions of a specialized nature, leveraging low-observable elements and other advanced systems for avoiding enemy detection.” As the B-2 and RQ-170 indicate, that kind of stealth is useful for bombing targets despite the presence of air defenses, or for surveillance in areas where another plane would risk getting shot down or being detected.

Teaming with possibilities

When General Atomics president David Alexander announced Gambit in March, he said that “Gambit will usher in a new era, where UAS [uncrewed aircraft systems] work collaboratively with manned aircraft to detect, identify and target adversaries at range and scale across the battlespace.”

The drone family is designed to work with and around existing and new crewed aircraft, letting autonomy take over many of the tasks presently done by remote pilots. Instead of multiple analysts gathering around a video feed from a drone while a remote crew steers it and directs sensors, the Gambit family is envisioned as self-sufficient but under human direction. That allows the fighter pilots in the sky to focus on missions, like clearing out anti-air missiles or intercepting enemy jets, without devoting their full energy and mental capacity to shepherding drones.

With programs like the Loyal Wingman, the Air Force has already indicated an interest in drone escorts for future fighters, and has worked with multiple contractors on designs that meet this need. Gambit, at a minimum, suggests that the defense industry is interested in providing whole families of potential drone escorts.

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In an animated video released on September 7, a glistening silver-white drone flies towards a modest warship. The drone turns 90 degrees vertically, its rotors allowing it to descend gradually as its wings pivot at elbow joints to take up only a fraction of the ship’s helipad. Made by DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky projects wing, this is the vision of a new drone program called ANCILLARY, an acronym that comes, not quite naturally, from the phrase “AdvaNced airCraft Infrastructure-Less Launch And RecoverY.”

To scout and resupply the battlefields of the future, DARPA is asking companies to design compact, useful, vertical-takeoff-and-landing drones that can fly from ships or unprepared clearings. On Sept. 20, DARPA is hosting a “Proposers Day,” for traditional and non-traditional military aircraft makers to explore creating this new drone.

ANCILLARY is an X-Plane program, making it more akin to past experiments in aviation that demonstrated concepts of flight design more than outright designed aircraft for production. Inside the clunky acronym, the term “Infrastructure-Less” refers to the ability to launch and recover a drone without runways or special equipment, which would be a big boon for uncrewed aircraft. Presently, vertical takeoff or landing are small, like quadcopters, and limited in what they can carry.

Many ship-launched fixed-wing drones, which boast useful range for sea scouting, launch from rails, and land by crashing into nets or catching skyhooks on approach. That kit of rail launch and hook or net can be set up on land, but requires at minimum a truck to transport it around. It also takes up space and uses time and effort from the crew, at sea or on land, making it a more labor intensive process than simply landing.

With ANCILLARY, DARPA says it wants to develop and flight test “critical technologies required for a leap ahead in vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), low-weight, high-payload, and long-endurance capabilities,” with the goal of building “a plane that can launch from ship flight decks and small austere land locations in adverse weather without launch and recovery equipment typically needed for these systems.”

Because this is the earliest stage of the project, the actual shape and design of the drones sought is likely to change from the concept. What is clear, at least in the video demonstration, is the kind of missions these drones will be called on to perform. 

In one scene, the ANCILLARY drone descends onto a marked-out landing zone on a road through a jungle. The landing indicators are a handful of lights, and next to them sit soldiers in dark uniforms that suggest a night mission by special operations forces. While the squad provides armed overwatch (looking out for enemies with weapons drawn), one member unloads a cylinder of supplies, and another prepares to send the drone on a return mission with a quick command on the tablet. 

The concept video shows ANCILLARY drones flying in teams, cameras and other sensors pointed below to surveil an archipelago, all while staying in communication with the small ship that launched the scouts. DARPA is service-agnostic, but the scenario described is likely for the US Navy in support of marine advances.

Another scene shows the ANCILLARY aircraft flown from behind a rough mountain to spy on a village of mud-brick houses, sending information of suspected enemy positions back to the tablet of a commander. This scenario most resembles the use of drones in the long counter-insurgency wars waged by the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq, and presently parts of sub-Saharan Africa. 

The Department of Defense has already explored a range of delivery drones, from the hoverbike-derived Joint Tactical Aerial Resupply Vehicle to the tilt-body APT-70 cargo drone. Neither of these drones were designed to perform the scouting tasks like the catapult-launched and skyhook-recovered ScanEagle. Adding a vertical-takeoff ability to drones like the ScanEagle has been such a long-standing interest that in 2015, the company that makes ScanEagle released a video showing the drone launched and recovered from a giant quadcopter mothership.

Across the conceptual DARPA scenarios, the drone is a self-contained tool, taking up at most a fraction of a landing pad or the back of a single truck. Flying from anywhere, it delivers aid and intelligence to the forces that need it, with similarly minimal input expected from human operators. In the DARPA video, the hypothetical drone appears to be a tail-sitter, meaning that it performs a pivot maneuver when taking off or landing to adjust its orientation. The Space Shuttle was also a tail-sitter when it took off, but not when it landed.

If such a drone already existed, DARPA would not need to fund the research to develop one. DARPA’s bet is that the components for such a drone can be found across commercial and military design. The agency suggests ANCILLARY will take advantage of “advancements in small propulsion systems, high capacity low weight batteries, fuel cells, materials, electronics,” and affordable 3D printing, all of which could allow new, more capable drone designs.

If ANCILLARY can deliver a delivery drone, soldiers stuck in rough terrain, distant islands, small ships, or wherever else normal supply infrastructure struggles could see aid arriving by sky, thanks to the autonomous robot couriers. Designing one drone capable of such delivery, while also functioning as a useful scout and communications relay, is a hard problem, one that will likely have to lean on the capabilities developed in both military and commercial sectors. 

Watch the DARPA video, below.

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Someday over the next decade, if you live in Texas or California, a roughly car-sized robot could deliver your Uber Eats order to your curb. That’s thanks to a 10-year partnership between Uber and a company called Nuro that’s set to start this fall. This curbside grab-and-go scheme was announced today. 

Nuro is known for creating autonomous electric vehicles that can schlep stuff like groceries or pizza down the road; those vehicles have no room in them for humans. In January, the company unveiled the newest version of this self-driving delivery machine, which, like the company itself, is called Nuro. This latest iteration of bot can transport almost 500 pounds of goods, keeping them hot or cold as needed. It even sports an airbag on the outside of its front end, so that if ever accidentally bumps into anyone, hopefully the harm will be minimal. 

The newest Nuro vehicle follows two predecessors, both also designed to take deliveries where they need to go along public streets. In February of 2020 Nuro revealed the R2 machine, which is about 9 feet long and 3.6 feet wide. The R2 unit followed the company’s original version, the R1, which Dave Ferguson, the company’s cofounder, described in 2018 as being about the size of “a big guy on a motorbike.”

The company won’t say exactly the size of the latest Nuro vehicle, but does note that it is about 20 percent smaller, width-wise, than a regular car. 

Today, the company lists three different vehicles in its fleet: the Nuro, the R2, and the P2, which is different from the others—it’s a Toyota Prius, with room for humans in it, outfitted with specialized hardware. P2 rolls with “onboard safety operators,” the company says on its website. 

With the Uber Eats deal, which will take place in Houston, Texas and Mountain View, California (as well as eventually the larger San Francisco Bay area), the company says that all of their different vehicle types will be involved. “We will be utilizing three different vehicles from the Nuro autonomous fleet including Nuro,” a Nuro spokesperson said via email. “We have committed to using Nuro with Uber at a mutually agreed upon time during the term of the partnership.” 

However, it remains unclear to what extent, and when, deliveries will be arriving in truly uncrewed vehicles versus the self-driving Priuses. Nuro has previously carried out programs with the likes of Kroger and Domino’s, but won’t say to what extent those deliveries have occurred with the person-less bots versus the Priuses. “We have made tens of thousands of deliveries to date,” the company said in a statement. “We can’t share the specific number of deliveries for each partner, since these details, along with the types of vehicle deployments and specific deployment plans with partners, are confidential.”

The company added: “We are actively working to increase our deployment of R2 on public roads and intend to learn much more from expanded operations over the next year.” 

More specifically, TechCrunch reports that the company “will initially use” the R2 and that the Nuro vehicle will be coming out in “late 2023.”

Ultimately, the robotics company sits at the interesting intersection of EVs, autonomy, and fulfillment of goods and services—and is certainly not the only player in that general space. While some companies like Waymo, Zoox, or Cruise work on creating vehicles that can carry humans from place to place on the road, others are delivering goods from the air, via small drone, like Wing and Zipline. And finally, companies are working on transporting people and cargo through the skies, like Beta Technologies or Joby. It’s a bold new transportation and delivery future—or at least that’s what the companies envision.

With the Nuro-Uber partnership specifically, the Verge reports that it is “the culmination of over four years of start-and-stop negotiations between the two companies.” Food delivery via bot doesn’t always come easily. 

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The US Air Force is looking for a new way to win fights in the sky, and is turning to drones that can escort crewed fighters to do so. To explore the concept, the US Air Force is eyeing the idea of using a drone called the Ghost Bat, which was built for the Royal Australian Air Force. Speaking at an August event with the head of the Royal Australian Air Force, US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall suggested that the MG-28 Ghost Bat, or a variant, may fly into combat alongside future US fighters. The remark was first reported by Breaking Defense and hints at a future of international design for the loyal wingmate aircraft of tomorrow.

“I’m talking to my Australian counterparts in general about the [Next Generation Air Dominance] family of systems and how they might be able to participate,” Breaking Defense reports Kendall saying. In that context, Kendall continues, the Ghost Bat “could serve ‘as a risk reduction mechanism’ for NGAD’s drone capability.”

Next Generation Air Dominance is a long-in-development Air Force program and concept for designing aircraft that will fight in the skies of the 21st century. Historically, the Air Force has invested a great deal of effort into developing generations of fighter jets, with each wave flown alongside fighters from the previous and succeeding eras until deemed fully obsolete and phased out. 

Generations of jets

Consider the F-4 Phantom, a third-generation fighter that first entered military service in 1958, where it flew alongside the second-generation F-100 Super Sabre. The US retired the F-4 Phantom in 1996, after it flew alongside fourth-generation planes like the F-15 and F-16. Today, those fourth generation fighters fly alongside fifth-generation planes like the F-22 and F-35.

That pattern of development, which matched the pace and limits of aircraft development in the 1950s through 1990s, meant planes being flown for decades, despite becoming more and more obsolete as newer aircraft entered service at home and abroad.

“The Next Generation Air Dominance program is employing digital engineering to replace once-in-a-generation, mass-produced fighters with smaller batches of iteratively-upgraded platforms of multiple types,” declares an Air Force acquisition report from 2019-2020. 

Ghost Bat is a product of the Loyal Wingman program, which set out to design a dependable drone escort for fighters. This program is a way for the Air Force to iterate on plane design without committing to decades of service from the drones. 

Loyal wingmate

In the 2019-2020 report, the Air Force described Next Generation Air Dominance as a way to achieve air superiority in challenging conditions. At present, the air superiority mission is performed by crewed fighters like the F-22 and F-15, whose pilots risk their aircraft and their lives when fighting against enemy aircraft and anti-air weapons. Instead of building a single new fighter to replace F-15s and F-22s, the Air Force wants to borrow from the iterative design of the automotive industry, making drones with open architecture that can be more quickly developed, all in the name of improving the Air Force’s ability to survive, kill, and endure in the face of enemy aircraft and weapons. 

This survival will come as part of a mixed fleet of drones and crewed aircraft. Under the Loyal Wingman program, the Air Force has worked for years to develop a drone that can fly and fight alongside a crewed aircraft. Loyal wingmates, as envisioned, will fly alongside F-22s and F-35s, and any crewed aircraft that replaces the stealth jets may be designed with loyal wingmates in mind. 

What is the Ghost Bat?

The Ghost Bat is an uncrewed plane that is 38 feet long, with a flight range of 2,300 miles. Boeing, which makes it, says that the drone will incorporate sensor packages for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and expects it to perform scouting missions ahead of other aircraft, as well as being able to detect incoming threats. In addition, the plan is for the Ghost Bat to employ “artificial intelligence to fly independently or in support of crewed aircraft while maintaining safe distance between other aircraft.”

When the Royal Australian Air Force announced the Ghost Bat in March, they said it was the “first Australian-built aircraft in more than 50 years.” 

The name, selected from a pool of over 700 possibilities, is a tribute to the only carnivorous species of bat in Australia; they are hunters that use both eyes and echolocation to hunt prey. As the announcement from the RAAF explained, Ghost Bat was chosen as a name because ghost bats are the only Australian bat that can prey on both terrestrial and flying animals. In addition, the RAAF pointed to the drone’s possible use in electronic warfare, a mission already carried out in Australia by a unit with a ghost bat symbol. 

None of this offers a wealth of information on what the Ghost Bat actually does, but that’s sort of the point. What the Ghost Bat most needs to be able to do is be an uncrewed plane that can fly safely with, and receive orders from, crewed aircraft. To meet the goals of Next Generation Air Dominance, the Air Force wants planes that can be easily adapted to new missions and take on new tools, like sensors or electronic warfare weapons, or other tech not yet developed. 

Boeing built the Ghost Bat for the Loyal Wingman program, but it’s not the only loyal wingmate explored. The Kratos Valkyrie, built for the Air Force and tested as a loyal wingmate with the Skyborg autonomous pilot, has already seen its earliest models retired to be museum pieces.

While these are distinct aircraft, the flexibility of software and especially open-architecture autopilots means that an autonomous navigation system developed on one airframe could become the pilot on a different one. It is this exact modularity and flexibility the Air Force is looking at, as it envisions a future of robots flying alongside human pilots, with models numbered not in generations but years.

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The US Army operates hundreds of large helicopters called Chinooks. The flying machine’s job is straightforward and unflashy: To transport people or equipment. But the Chinook fleet is not going anywhere right now, because the Army has grounded them. The problem leading to the grounding is a series of engine fires—there have been four reported fires over the past 90 days, according to an Army spokesperson.  

The news of the vast grounding was reported earlier this week by The Wall Street Journal. 

Here’s what to know about this unique military helicopter and why it was grounded. 

The basics 

“The Chinook is right now one-of-a-kind for the Army,” says Stacie Pettyjohn, who directs the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. “It’s the only heavy lift helicopter that it has.” 

The CH-47 doesn’t look like a typical helicopter, either, thanks to its bus-like shape and two large, counter-spinning top rotors. The body of the aircraft is just over 50 feet long and, when the rotors are spinning, the flying machine’s total length is about 100 feet, according to a Boeing factsheet. It can hold more than 30 passengers. 

“For the Army, it provides it with mobility, and an ability to transport needed equipment or troops to different locations,” she adds. “This is really important in operations such as Afghanistan, where you’re in this really mountainous terrain that doesn’t have a particularly good road network.” 

While versions of the Chinook have flown for decades, currently, two different variants are in service, notes Mark Cancian, a retired colonel in the Marine Corps and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The CH-47F is the base model, and the MH-47G is intended for special operations. 

That “G” variant features “fancy additional capabilities,” Cancian says. “The big one is that the avionics are more sophisticated—it allows much more complex navigation, [and] I think it allows it to fly closer to the ground.” 

Regardless, experts describe the aircraft as a workhorse. It’s “not flashy,” Cancian notes. Flying in one, he says, is very loud, and passengers sit along the sides. “You’re in mesh seats, facing each other,” he says. “It’s just so noisy, you can’t talk.” 

Other Army helicopters include the Apache and the Black Hawk. Meanwhile, as part of a larger program called Future Vertical Lift, two companies, Sikorsky and Bell, are competing to produce both a new armed reconnaissance helicopter (see the candidates here and here) and a new Black-Hawk-type assault aircraft (here’s option one and option two). 

The grounding

The issue behind the fires and subsequent grounding is believed to stem from an O-ring, which is like a gasket, in some engines. “All CH-47 helicopters are currently undergoing inspection to determine if the O-rings are defective,” says Army spokesperson Jason Waggoner, via email. (A separate Army statement from Army spokesperson Cynthia Smith notes that “no deaths or injuries occurred” as a result of the “small number of engine fires.”)

Those O-rings are in T55 engines made by Honeywell. In a statement, the company said: “Honeywell helped discover that O-rings not meeting Honeywell design specifications had been installed in some T55 engines during routine and scheduled maintenance at an Army Depot. It is believed these suspect O-Rings have been identified and isolated.”

Waggoner notes that the Army cannot say how long the grounding will last. “Based on the results of our investigation some aircraft may not require corrective measures and may soon return to normal flight operations,” he says. 

In total, he says, the Army has more than 400 of these helicopters, but the Journal quotes a figure of “more than 70 aircraft” that could be specifically affected out of the larger fleet. 

The takeaway 

Experts characterized a grounding like this one as a major event, even if it’s not unprecedented. “I wish I could say it’s rare,” says Todd Harrison, the head of research at Meta Aerospace. “It’s unusual, to be sure, but it usually means that there’s a serious safety issue that they’re concerned about.” 

But the grounding of a fleet that includes more than 400 of the same type of aircraft is a reminder of a vulnerability that accompanies a trend in military aviation, Harrison says. “If you look at our broad inventory of aircraft—rotary wing and fixed wing, across the military—not only has it been getting smaller, we’ve been narrowing down different types of aircraft fleets into a smaller and smaller number of types.” 

While having larger numbers of the same types of aircraft can come with economical benefits, the strategy comes with a weakness in the form of many eggs in one basket. 

“What that means is since you’re flying a lot of the same hardware—same engine, same airframe, things like that—that when you find some sort of a critical vulnerability, a safety issue, and you have to ground that fleet,” Harrison observes, “you’re now grounding a much greater percentage of your overall force.” 

Correction on Sept. 3: This article has been updated to refer to the special operations variant of the Chinook as the MH-47G, not the CH-47G.

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On August 24, the Department of Defense announced it would be sending anti-drone weapons called VAMPIREs to Ukraine. The announcement of the VAMPIRE came in a larger, nearly $3 billion package of assistance from the United States to Ukraine as it fights against Russia’s invasion. The inclusion of VAMPIRE highlights the major role that drones are playing in the war, and the challenge of fighting against them without having specialized weapons.

The shape of the war is reflected in the other weapons included in the package. The US is sending up to 245,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition and up to 65,000 rounds of 120mm mortar ammunition, weapons that emphasize how much of the present conflict is an artillery fight. The 155mm artillery rounds, fired by US- and NATO-supplied howitzers, can duel with Russian artillery, while the mortar rounds let soldiers on foot attack enemy defenses from behind hills or otherwise out of sight. Paired with the artillery are two dozen counter-artillery radars, allowing better targeting in artillery duels.

The other half of the package is all drone- or counter-drone related. VAMPIRE is the headlining system, which combines a sensor with an anti-drone missile launcher that can mount on a range of vehicles, but it’s hardly the only counter-drone system in the package. Beyond an unspecified number of VAMPIRE systems, the August 24 announcement included six additional National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems, a kind of anti-air missile system already in use in Ukraine, along with ammunition to match. The package includes laser-guided rocket systems, confirmed to be Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System II rockets, which have been tested against drones. The drones included are Pumas and Scan Eagles, which can be launched without runways and give forces on the ground a better sense of where enemies and their artillery are.

What is the VAMPIRE counter-drone system?

Colin Kahl, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, described the VAMPIRE as a kinetic system that uses small missiles to shoot drones out of the sky. Many counter-drone systems use electromagnetic interference or jamming to disrupt the way a drone flies and communicates remotely with a human operator, but destroying the drone outright is a straightforward solution.

Made by L3Harris, VAMPIRE stands for Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment. “Vehicle-Agnostic” means it can go in multiple vehicles, and L3Harris’ site shows the system mounted in the bed of a crew-cab truck. Civilian vehicles are abundant and often modified for war. When weapons are mounted on such a vehicle, it becomes a “technical,” and the popularity of Toyota Hi-Lux trucks as technicals has led to the whole category of insurgency-by-truck being dubbed “Toyota Wars.”

Modular and palletized both refer to how the VAMPIRE can be transported and modified, and that the system includes its own power supply. ISR is “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance,” and in the case of VAMPIRE refers to the specific camera pod attached to the system. This camera pod, made by L3 Harris, includes a thermal sensor, optical camera, low-light optical camera, laser rangefinder, and a laser target marker to guide the laser-guided rockets. This sensor system can also include image processing, feature recognition, and video tracking, all of which are features that could enable it to see and track drones in flight.

What will the VAMPIRE hunt?

Drones are extensively used by both sides fighting in Ukraine. Before the invasion, Russia prepared with dedicated military drones to act as scouts and, especially, as spotters for artillery. Since the invasion, both forces have used drones extensively, with Ukraine using bomb and rocket-armed Bayraktar TB2 drones to strike Russian forces and record footage of the act.

As the war progressed, and initial stockpiles of machines and weapons depleted through use or destruction, both Ukrainian and Russian forces turned increasingly to other drone supplies. The United States, as well as NATO allies, continue to supply Ukraine with scout-and-spotter drones like the Pumas and Scan Eagles included in the latest package, as well as armed drone-missiles like the Switchblade and Phoenix Ghost. 

Russia has turned to Iran for extra drone supplies, and provincial governments in Russia have even redirected funds to purchase hobbyist, commercial drones so that their soldiers can go into battle with quadcopter scouts equal to the numbers used by Ukrainian soldiers. Hobbyist quadcopters are so in-demand militarily that Russia is formally training volunteer drone pilots. These drones are much cheaper than dedicated military models, with limited range and more vulnerable to jamming or other kinds of electronic warfare. 

A Mavic quadcopter can cost around $400, and the laser-guided rockets fired by VAMPIRE can cost $27,500 apiece, a disparity that suggests VAMPIRE will instead be hunting more specific military models like Orlan-10 and Orion drones, as well as other aircraft. Larger Iranian-made Mohajer-6 and Shahed drones, now in Russian service, are also likely VAMPIRE targets.

But in the context of the broader artillery duel in Ukraine, and with Ukrainian forces launching a counter-offensive to retake the Russian-held city of Kherson on the mouth of the Dnipro river, the ability to destroy artillery spotters in the form of drones in flight could save lives and preserve the advance. Brought into the open, VAMPIRE shows that modern counter-drone weapons are no longer kept in the shadows. 

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The next time you scan a document and feel annoyed at the tedium of the process, consider the people in Kansas who have to scan in an entire Apache helicopter. A group at the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR), a part of Wichita State University, is creating a three-dimensional digital rendering of an Apache attack helicopter, a process that includes making a scan of each part. The project is set to take three years and is the result of an Army contract. 

Melinda Laubach-Hock, who is leading the massive scan job, estimates that the Apache could have around 5,000 to 6,000 parts. Her estimate is based on a similar project her team is wrapping up that involved scanning in around 5,000 parts of a Black Hawk helicopter.

“We are taking an airframe, disassembling it down to the detail parts, cleaning it up, scanning it in, [and] reverse engineering it,” she says, describing the process for the Apache aircraft. “We build detailed models at the manufacturing-quality level for every part, and then we basically digitally reassemble the airframe.” 

A three-year undertaking like this, which a NIAR describes as “tedious,” begs the questions: Why do this? And how?

So, why?

The purpose is two-fold, says Lauback-Hock. The first is to help with repairs, or “to improve the way we’re doing sustainment for the legacy Apache fleet,” she says. The variant of Apache that they’re working on is an AH-64D, or delta, model, and she estimates that the US Army has 800 of them in service. Having a high-fidelity digital representation of a part could help with the fabrication process when it comes to repairing or replacing a helicopter component. She also argues that a digitally designed repair solution for a part could be more enduring than just a one-off fix created by one person. It’s probably not going to be a digital version of a helicopter in a Dropbox folder, but you get the idea. 

The second involves exploring, more generally, the role that having a detailed digital version of an aircraft—a concept generally called a digital twin—might play in the future. Next-generation helicopters and tiltrotor aircraft are being born in the digital age (with both Sikorsky and Bell competing in two separate Army programs), setting them apart in some ways compared to older machines. 

[Related: Why Bell’s sleek new helicopter has detachable wings]

With the Apache program, beyond just scanning in the parts, the goal is to also put them together digitally so they represent a virtual version of the real aircraft, that can be used to model how loads or stresses might affect the real thing. She refers to the digital beast that they will create as a “high-fidelity engineering structural model.” 

“Basically, that’s an engineering model that says, ‘If I push here on the structure, this is how the load propagates through the structure,’” she adds. And then to make sure that that digital model is truthful, she says that they will procure a second Apache helicopter, which they will physically stress. “We’re going to push and pull, and measure the response, and we’re going to use those measurements to calibrate our engineering model,” she notes. 

[Related: Take a peek at Sikorsky’s scout helicopter prototype]

She also argues that in general, having a digital version of a helicopter could help with doing maintenance in a more predictive, proactive way. 

So why not just get the plans from the company that made the helicopter in the first place, which for the Apache is Boeing? “I don’t know whether they exist at Boeing or not,” Lauback-Hock says. (The Apache version Boeing produces today is the AH-64E, while the version being scanned in Kansas is an AH-64D. A Boeing spokesperson said via email: “Boeing keeps detailed records in a variety of formats of the D-model and E-model Apaches.” They also noted, regarding the NIAR project, that “Boeing has offered assistance.”)

But more generally, the ways that aircraft makers created the plans for flying machines in the past were different from the standards of today. “My experience is, we’ve received models on other legacy platforms that we’ve been building [digital] twins for,” Lauback-Hock says, “and there’s quite a substantial amount of work that has to go into upgrading them to today’s standards.” 

How does one scan in a helicopter?

The team is using an Apache helicopter they have on site in Kansas, although it’s not a complete aircraft. “There was an airframe involved in an incident, and it could not be repaired,” she says. “We started there, and then the Army is looking for ways to get us access to pieces we don’t currently have.” 

Any damaged parts are gone now, so what’s left is roughly 80 percent of the helicopter. But with a project as big as scanning an entire helicopter, it made sense to just start with what they have, she says. To scan in the parts, they use a device called a Hexagon Arm that can capture components in 3D. “You just kind of paint over the surface with the laser multiple times, and that creates a very dense, geometrically correct point cloud that can represent the outside shape of the article,” she says. 

The Apache is not the first aircraft to be subjected to this kind of digital intake. The Black Hawk project is about 95 percent complete, she says. They’re also scanning in a B-1 bomber and an F-16 fighter jet, the latter of which is about 15 to 20 percent done. Laubach-Hock notes that other programs exist in this arena that have not been publicly disclosed. 

Students are going to be helping out, too. Ultimately, Lauback-Hock says that about 65 people will be working on the Apache program, with 30 of those being students. One student told ksn.com that the project “looks incredibly great on my resume.”

This post has been updated to include comment from Boeing.

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Contactless delivery systems boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic since they reduced the risk of transmission when delivering essential supplies like food and medications. Countries like Rwanda and Ghana used drones throughout the pandemic to limit physical contact while delivering medical commodities and COVID-19 supplies to people’s doorsteps.

In the US, companies are also adopting drone delivery services. Drones can help businesses expand their consumer reach, reduce delivery times, and increase revenues. For instance, major retail and pharmacy chains Walmart and Walgreens have partnered with DroneUp and Google’s Wing, respectively, for commercial drone delivery operations.

There’s no doubt that drone deliveries are beneficial for consumers and retailers alike, but new research shows that there’s another upside to them. As it turns out, using drones for small parcels may be more environmentally friendly than a conventional delivery truck or van.

Drones can be greener than vans and trucks for small deliveries

The use of drones for last-mile deliveries—which refers to the final step of the delivery process where the parcel arrives at the customer’s doorstep—may be an effective tool to reduce carbon emissions related to transportation. According to a recent study published in Cell Patterns, using quadcopter drones to deliver small, lightweight packages could reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by up to 94 and 84 percent, respectively, per package delivered.

To determine the energy consumption of a small drone, the authors developed an energy model based on 188 drone-delivery flights and found that it consumes approximately 0.08 megajoules of energy per kilometer. Afterward, they compared it to the energy consumption and associated carbon emissions of different delivery vehicles, which include diesel vans and trucks, electric vans and trucks, and electric cargo bicycles.

[Related: FedEx is charging up its electric vehicle fleet.]

Based on the study’s findings, only the electric cargo bicycles had a similar or lower carbon footprint per package than the small quadcopter drones. “Our study shows that drones could considerably reduce the energy consumption and GHG emissions of last-mile delivery, helping to mitigate the environmental footprint of the transportation sector,” says Thiago A. Rodrigues, study author and PhD candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

Using energy-efficient vehicles is an important first step for businesses that intend to reduce the carbon emissions of their deliveries, in addition to finding routes where more packages are delivered per mile, he adds.

Earlier this year, the US Postal Service announced that it placed an order for 50,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles to replace its fleet of aging delivery trucks. They intended to purchase at least 10,019 battery electric vehicles (BEV), but after facing several lawsuits for their plan to buy mostly gas-powered delivery vehicles, they increased the number of BEVs to 25,000.

Drones can produce even fewer carbon emissions if charged using renewable resources, says Sarah Lyon-Hill, associate director for research development at Virginia Tech Center for Economic and Community Engagement who was not involved in the study. Over time, the carbon emissions of electricity-powered vehicles—drones, vans, trucks, and cargo bicycles—are expected to improve as the electricity grid continues to get cleaner. And we’ll still need trucks and vans for our bigger deliveries, so greening our electricity use is still crucial.

Consumers benefit from drone deliveries

Our transportation infrastructure is currently strained due to the high demand for delivery services, which increased exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Lyon-Hill. However, even before COVID, plenty of households with needs for home delivery, such as those with elderly residents or lower-income households without car access, had limited transportation options. 

“Delivery drones have the potential to address this higher level of demand, decrease road congestion, speed up last-mile delivery services, and offer those services at lower costs to support lower-income households,” says Lyon-Hill. By reducing the number of vans on the road, drone deliveries can reduce traffic congestion, noise pollution, and harmful emissions. 

Drones may also be an effective way to deliver urgent medications and medical supplies, especially in rural areas. In a 2021 European Heart Journal study, drones with automated external defibrillators (AED) were deployed for 12 cases of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. The AED was successfully delivered onsite in 92 percent of the cases and arrived before the ambulance in 64 percent of the cases.

[Related: Check out Wing’s new delivery drone prototypes.]

Despite the benefits of drones, there are still limitations that might prevent their use in certain applications. For instance, drones have limited capacity in terms of the mass and volume of the parcel they can transport, says Rodrigues. He adds that some areas may also be subjected to aerospace regulatory restrictions, which limit drone delivery routes. Areas near airports, schools, stadiums, and government buildings may have temporary and permanent no-fly zones that prohibit drone flights.

And companies are already on top of it. Amazon Prime Air, which plans to start drone deliveries this year, is currently working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and local officials in Lockeford, California to give consumers the option to have their parcels delivered via drones. 

“Other companies will likely follow this trend [of drone deliveries],” says Rodrigues, “if we develop the conditions to overcome some of the operational and regulatory challenges mentioned.”

Of course, just like with driverless cars and other forms of automation, there are always concerns with what will happen for delivery workers and their jobs. But drone deliveries, even when all of the policy kinks are straightened out, will still only be one part of future deliveries. Until then, making sustainable choices like ordering fewer times in larger quantities or accepting slower delivery times, can help bring down your online shopping footprint no matter how it is delivered.

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Over the past few years, Congress has slowly admitted that it is just as confused as the rest of us about the numerous unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) incidents reported by reliable US military and government personnel. In 2021, for example, Congress charged the Department of Defense (DoD) with establishing a replacement for the short-lived Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force after releasing a largely inconclusive preliminary assessment of 144 documented UAPs. We haven’t heard much about it since then, and neither has Congress, apparently. What’s more, it just made it very clear that it thinks we aren’t moving fast enough to address the issue.

Deep within an addendum to the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 elected officials expressed their frustrations with the lack of progress in establishing a new group dedicated to UAP sightings. “The [Select Intelligence] Committee is disappointed with the slow pace of DoD-led efforts to establish the office to address [UAP] threats and to replace the former Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force,” reads the congressional filing, later adding that the committee “was hopeful that the new office would address many of the structural issues hindering progress.”

[Related: US intelligence report lists reasons for UFO sightings.]

To move things along, Congress announced its intention to merge both the existing Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the Aerial Object Identification and Management Synchronization Management Group into an Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena Joint Program Office. It’s still in the works, but the Senate clearly thinks its goals remain incredibly important, seeing as how it describes incidents as “threats” to the US that are expanding “exponentially.”

Interestingly, the addendum puts a clear emphasis on “cross-domain, transmedium” threats, the Pentagon’s term referring to objects capable of seamlessly, inexplicably traveling between air, water, and space environments. Congress also issued yet another rebrand of the mysteries formerly known as Unidentified Flying Objects: Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena.

[Related: US government UFO investigations could combat stigma.]

The new language also focuses on “addressing technological surprise and ‘unknown unknowns,'” and goes so far as to admit that there remain multiple objects potentially possessing technology of non-human origin. “Temporary nonattributed objects, or those that are positively identified as man-made after analysis, will be passed to appropriate offices,” Congress states. The “or” in that sentence is operative, and denotes that there are clearly things experts can’t confidently classify as human tech.

A close read into all of this indicates Congress is extremely troubled by the apparent evidence of objects that can seemingly move between sea, air, and space terrains in ways known human technology cannot. It’s a big deal, to say the least. Setting aside dramatic alien conspiracies (for just a moment), the knowledge that there is potentially a fleet of inexplicable, hyper-advanced technologies hovering above our heads is pretty disconcerting. Congress certainly thinks as much, and believes we aren’t doing nearly enough about it.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly cited Motherboard as the first to cover the story. It has been brought to our attention that the UAP addendum was originally cited by D. Dean Johnson and subsequently written up by Liberation Times. PopSci regrets this error.

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Nothing captures the human imagination quite like the thrill of flying. Not the middle-seat-on-a-plane kind of flying, pressed between the lucky passengers who scored the window and aisle seats, passive-aggressively vying for elbow space, while watching with resignation as an airplane icon creeps toward its destination on a crude digital GPS map plastered to the seatback in front. But rather, the kind of flying that would enable us to break free of gravity’s yoke and the roads that hem us in—soaring solo into the third dimension with air rushing over our limbs. This kind of unfettered flight inspired Hugo Gernsback’s August 1928 cover of the iconic science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, with fictional spaceman hero Buck Rogers sporting a backpack that boosted him into the air. Inventors have been chasing these kinds of lightweight jetpacks ever since.

“The appeal of the jetpack is that it’s something you can stow in a locker, pull out, and put on to go somewhere,” says John Hansman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. “But the versions we’ve seen so far don’t make a lot of sense. They are just stunts.” Despite the array of fantastical, but perhaps impractical (and dangerous) jetpack designs, Hansman adds, “It’s an interesting time. There are a number of technologies coming online that could give you the capability of a jetpack.”

For more than eight decades, Popular Science has been chronicling the effort to get jetpacks off the ground. Our first story was published in March 1940 with Russian-born inventor George de Bothezat’s one-person helicopter—a simple frame with twin props spinning overhead, powered by “a lightweight gasoline engine.” The apparatus was controlled in the air by the pilot’s body, arm, and leg movements. De Bothezat died before he could actually build the invention. But his attempt was not entirely for the birds. In July 1945, we described the efforts of Boeing engineer Horace T. Pentecost, who improved upon de Bothezat’s design with a “flight stick” for steering. Pentecost rebranded the whirligig a “hoppicopter”—the gizmo only capable of staying in the air for short distances.

Popular Science began taking slow-to-evolve jetpacks more seriously in January 1952 when two pages of the magazine were devoted to the next generation of Pentecost’s hoppicopter: Gilbert Magill’s pinwheel. Magill kept the overhead rotors from the original design but upgraded the stick and added a seat and pilot safety gear (whew)—little more than a “crash helmet with a plastic face shield.” 

The first jet engine-like breakthrough arrived in our December 1958 feature, which described the US military initiative “Project Grasshopper” that sought to upgrade a secret jump rocket into a flying belt. Jump rockets were a “solid-fuel device” that could be strapped around a soldier’s waist to enable them to jump distances as wide as a 50-foot river or leap up into a second-story window. Project Grasshopper’s goal was to extend the jumper’s air time using nitrogen-compressed gas canisters that could be “snapped in place of exhausted ones in less than a minute.” 

Soon after, Bell Aerosystems’ engineer Wendell Moore made a big jetpack leap with the Rocket Belt (also funded by the US Army), a personal propulsion device spotlighted in a January 1966 rundown of James Bond gadgetry. Sean Connery strapped into Bell’s Rocket Belt for the opening escape scene in the 1965 Bond film Thunderball, rocketing away Buck Rogers-style from a villain’s chateau. The name Rocket Belt came from the rocket engine propulsion design. The engines run on distilled hydrogen peroxide and nitrogen gas, which is used to generate high-pressure, super-heated steam that thrusts the pilot skyward. Other designs of rocket belts have shown some staying power, at least for big-event stunts like the opening ceremony of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. We covered them as recently as March 2006, in a profile of homemade rocket-belt builder Juan Lozano. Even in 2006 we remained skeptical about their ability to bestow true jetpack-flight freedom, PopSci staff awarding Lozano’s rocket belt a reality meter score of 2 out of 10, meaning the chance of a commercial breakthrough was slim.

While momentum seemed to be rising with the rocket belt, jetpack development suddenly fell flat. Besides covering the occasional space-based jetpack (November 1971), there weren’t many new developments to report. Then in December 2008, New Zealand inventor Glenn Martin’s decades-long quest to build a ducted fan (non-jet), gasoline-powered jetpack paid off. Ducted fans rely on rotary-style propellers contained in a canister to direct thrust. Martin’s jetpack was so noteworthy that he earned a spot in the magazine’s coveted list of top innovators. 

A couple months later in February 2009, we covered the strange story of Swiss pilot Yves Rossy, or Wingman, who had attached mini-jet engines to a homemade wing, strapped himself in, and jumped out of a plane over the English Channel. While technically not a jetpack, Rossy’s wing did use a true jet engine, foreshadowing what was on the horizon.

By the 2010s, jetpacks and other personal aircraft innovation reached a new height—hoverboards, flyboards, and water-powered jetpacks, not to mention countless drones, had taken over. Then, after a seven decade journey from the solo-operated helicopter of the 1940s to the ducted fan of the 2000s, a true jet-engine jetpack finally emerged with a form factor and lift that would have raised Buck Rogers’s eyebrows. JetPack Aviation conducted the maiden flight of its wearable launcher around the Statue of Liberty in New York on November 3, 2015. All the while, New Zealand inventor Glenn Martin, continued to improve upon the ducted fan jetpack, finally attracting the kind of venture capital to expand his company Martin Jetpack and offer a consumer product.

By 2017, the promise of solo flight seemed so real—and potentially profitable—that Boeing sponsored a $2 million competition GoFly to encourage personal aircraft innovation that would bring them into the mainstream. The aerospace company saw promise in the growing progress in the technology, such as improvements in propulsion, light-weight materials, and control and stability systems.

In 2019, before the GoFly finals had concluded, we took another look at the jetpack reality meter and decided that, while progress had been made, the tech was still too noisy, too heavy, and too expensive. The GoFly judges seemed to agree because, while they doled out some awards for innovation, no one won the contest. None of the entrants met the contest’s basic size constraints and flying-time parameters, among others. John Hansman, who had been an initial advisor but dropped out, wasn’t surprised by the disappointing outcome.

According to Hansman, there are way too many things that can go wrong with a Buck Rogers-style jetpack. He calls it an extreme version of a motorcycle, but even more dangerous because of altitude and speed. Plus, jet engines are not the most effective way to get around Earth. “Jetpacks work great in space,” Hansman notes, “where the best way to get propulsion is to push a gas.” Where there’s an atmosphere, however, “a jet engine doesn’t compete very well with a rotor propeller.” Jetpacks require continuous thrust to stay aloft—therefore expending a lot of fuel—whereas propellers leverage Bernoulli’s principle, or the difference in air pressure above and below the rotor.

But jetpack designers today are learning from decades of trial and error. Hansman believes the field is on the cusp of a fresh round of innovation in personal aircraft, but not in the classic jet-engine backpack form. “Nothing has changed substantially on the jet side,” notes Hansman—there hasn’t been enough development to convince him that jet engines offer the best design. Rather, he sees personal aircraft in the form of rotor-based airbikes or hoverboards. “If you think about the technologies that have come along,” he says, “it’s battery technology in electric aircraft, distributed propulsion, and relatively inexpensive active control systems.” Drones, for instance, can have cheap active control systems that use sensors and software to stabilize them. Distributed propulsion, where there are multiple rotors working in coordination, has enabled the design of crafts like hoverboards and, perhaps in the near future, air taxis and air bikes.

Hansman sees the market initially embracing recreational personal aircraft, similar to jet skis on the water. That’s because building a reliable, commuter-style vehicle requires a different level of engineering to handle the wear and tear of daily use. Plus, there’s the matter of navigating controlled airspace. Even though the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) does not regulate ultralight aircraft (single person, less than 254 pounds empty, and with max speeds no more than 60 mph), or direct traffic in airspace below 400 feet, they do restrict airspace around airports and cities. Those restrictions will have to be modified to realistically support personal commuter aircraft.

Despite the remaining obstacles, jetpacks and other personal aircraft have come a long way and are closer to reality than they’ve ever been. For hardcore jetpack enthusiasts, there are a number of companies like JetPack Aviation, Martin Jetpack, Gravity Industries, and Maverick Aviation that have working products—that is, if you have cash to burn and you aren’t intimidated by the danger of these devices. For those seeking safer ways to experience the thrill of solo flight, it may not be long before a weekend excursion to the mountains comes with an airbike or hoverboard rental that will allow you to soar over treetops and lakes, 20 minutes at a time. But if your goal is to sweep past traffic-snarled streets and highways on your daily commute, gloating at earthbound motorists as you glide overhead, you’ll have to wait even longer—and unfortunately what you’re waiting for will likely not be found in the Buck Rogers aisle of a future flymart superstore.

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In mid-June, a drone called the Zephyr took off from Arizona. The solar-powered aircraft remained in the sky, flying through the rest of June, all of July, and about half of August. It flew, according to the Army, more than 34,500 miles. It even ventured over South America. 

But one night last week, something went wrong. While above the Yuma Proving Ground (YPG), which sits right near the border between Arizona and California, it “encountered events that led to its unexpected termination,” according to an Army release. The Army says that it is investigating what happened. 

All told, the aircraft, which is designed to soar at altitudes north of 60,000 feet, remained airborne for 64 days. Previously, the drone had completed other very long duration flights, such as one in 2018 that lasted almost 26 days, and two flights last year of about 18 days. As for the ultra-long journey that just suddenly ended, the Army says that it’s the longest flight on the books for an uncrewed aircraft, noting that it “beat all known unmanned aircraft endurance records.” However, as Simple Flying notes, a bizarre flight involving two pilots in a Cessna that took place between 1958 and 1959 lasted for nearly 65 days, so the record the Army is boasting about is for uncrewed aircraft. 

[Related: A solar-powered Army drone has been flying for 40 days straight]

So what happened to cause this flight to suddenly end? “Our team is working hard to gather and analyze important data following the unexpected termination of this flight,” Michael Monteleone, a cross-functional team director with Army Futures Command, said in a statement. The Army also notes that no one was hurt in the event.

Meanwhile, Simple Flying used the flight data it was able to glean and notes that its last moments had it at an altitude of some 45,000 or 50,000 feet, and that it experienced “a vertical descent rate which rapidly increased, topping out at a speed of 4,544 feet per minute.” As both that outlet and Task & Purpose speculate, the resulting unplanned impact with the ground was probably not gentle. 

The Zephyr gets its power from the sun, via onboard solar panels, and can store that energy in a battery system so that it has the juice it needs to keep flying when the sun isn’t shining. Made by Airbus, the most recent version has a wingspan of 82 feet. 

An aircraft like the Zephyr is known as a HAPS, which stands for high-altitude platform station (or pseudo-satellite). Besides Airbus, another company working in the space is AeroVironment. With the Zephyr, Airbus markets the craft as a type of connected watchtower high in the sky, like a satellite in the stratosphere, allowing it to conduct intelligence, surveillance, or reconnaissance missions for a military or carry out other tasks.

“When you have a platform that can stay in the air at very high altitudes that long, there are really two main missions that it’s very well suited for,” says JJ Gertler, a senior associate in the aerospace security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “One is reconnaissance—whether it’s looking down, or conceivably even looking up—the ability to stay on station a long time, and stare at a particular target or a particular area, is very useful.” 

“The other main mission would be [as a] communications relay—to be sort of a cell tower in the sky, connecting all kinds of different units,” he adds. “The more altitude you can get, the more area you can cover for that mission.”

Gertler notes that the Zephyr staying in the sky for 64 days “is something that was made possible by a number of technical advances—most significantly, lightweight photovoltaics.” 

But with a very long flight also comes new potential issues. “We’re not used to flying aero-structures for months at a time,” he adds. “We don’t know what kind of fatigue issue there may be when you do it for that long, without landing, or without maintenance. That’s life on the edge of technology.” 

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Personal flying cars remain a dream mostly relegated to science fiction, but the introduction of “air taxis” above our heads is starting to look far more likely—for better or worse. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported United Airlines is moving forward with an initial $10 million down payment on 100 airborne commuter vehicles from Archer Aviation. The investment is only a small portion of last year’s $1 billion partnership announcement between the major airliner and much buzzed-about startup, but it’s a major milestone within a burgeoning industry, one that indicates the new transportation option may be much more than mere vaporware.

“There’s a lot of talk about orders in the industry, a lot of talk about paper commitments, but this is the first real cash commitment,” Archer Aviation CEO Adam Goldstein said in a statement.

United’s major investment into private air taxi partnerships is only one of multiple, similar deals within the aviation world. Last year, American Airlines pledged $25 million towards a team-up with Archer Aviation competitor Vertical Aerospace, while Wisk and Boeing are currently working together on their own plans for autonomous, electric vehicles. If all goes according to plan, United and Archer intend to move forward with manufacturing consumer aircraft sometime next year.

[Related: This little air-taxi company just got a big lift from Boeing.]

Building air taxis while generating consumer interest is one thing, but convincing federal regulators to sign off on the idea is another issue entirely. So far, no aviation company has received the Federal Aviation Administration’s blessing to begin commercial services, and there remain a host of areas to shore up, such as pilot requirements and how to to integrate these new transportation options within the current airspace environment. Still, the WSJ reports the FAA is confident that at least some of these hurdles can be cleared as early as 2024, with companies like Archer on track to begin taking commuters to the sky soon afterwards.

Transportation alternatives are coming to the forefront of public discussions as airliners face increasing pressure to address their impacts on climate change. United, for example, claims it is pledged to become 100-percent carbon neutral by 2050, and heavy investment in supposedly eco-friendly projects like air taxis could potentially help its image. Of course, issues of accessibility, affordability, and safety are still huge areas of concern with aero-commuting. Noise pollution, infrastructure requirements, and criticism of the vehicles’ actual environmental viability need to also be taken into consideration as the industry moves forward.

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For decades, humans have used radio waves to remotely control drones. But this summer, British defense firm QinetiQ announced the successful control of a drone by laser. The communication and control method—between a flying robot and a human operator—suggests a new way to command drones in circumstances where traditional radio controls are susceptible to interference or interception. It is a promising technology, one that trades the existing known set of radio control limitations for a whole new set of laser-focused challenges.

The demonstration took place earlier this year at the Salisbury Plain Training Ground in southern England near Stonehenge. The drone was controlled, at least in part, by a system called “Free Space Optical Communications (FSOC),” in which information is turned into light, transmitted through the open sky, and picked up by a dedicated receiver.

“FSOC provide very high bandwidth, very low probability of detection communications, low logistical footprint and the potential to negate the considerable investment that adversaries may have made in denying the RF spectrum,” reads the July announcement from QinetiQ.

The demonstration took place in March of 2022, as part of a broader push by the United Kingdom’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory effort to make drone communications more resilient. Communications that depend on sending and receiving laser signals can struggle in low-visibility weather, like fog or dust, which obscures the sky. The promise of this approach, though, is for the possibility of clear, high-bandwidth transmission of vast quantities of data rapidly with light, and done openly wherever the sender and receiver may be. This has already been realized in networks of fiber-optic cables, which are closed space optical communications, and require infrastructure investment to establish and connect. 

Light years

Making this kind of communication work has been the subject of military research for decades. In 2004, the Air Force Research Laboratory and DARPA collaborated on the Optical and Radio Frequency Combined Link Experiment (ORCLE). The program aimed to combine the high data capacity of light communications with the signal fidelity of radio. ORCLE set out to integrate both methods into a network of communication nodes, with an understanding that radio would allow for persistent communication in difficult weather.

In 2008, DARPA awarded a contract to Northrop Grumman for the Optical RF Communications Adjunct (ORCA) project, aimed at providing “an all-weather, high connectivity, jam resistant, high bandwidth network,” according to Northrop Grumman’s release.

Because of the limits of optical communication alone, much of the research on free-space optical communication pairs it with radio communication for greater resiliency.

“Although FSOC systems can be inoperable through clouds or thick fog, employing them in a hybrid RF/optical link configuration can yield a system that can operate under most weather conditions and provide high-bandwidth, secure, jam-resistant communications under most conditions,” argued the authors of a 2011 paper on free-space optical networks, including members of DARPA. 

More recently, DARPA has focused its research on optical communications in space between satellites, which is free from the atmospheric obstacles impeding light-based communication on earth. 

Free space, narrow aperture

Radio signals are sent over known frequencies, understood and monitored for ever a century. The nature of radio transmission means the waves can be observed beyond where they are received, as the signals travel through open air and sometimes refract or diffuse across terrain and atmospheric phenomena. That trait is useful for transmitting information over distance, but is less useful for keeping that information secret. The promise of optical communication, specifically based on lasers, is that it will instead concentrate all its transmitted information in a narrow beam of light.

“Free Space Optical Communications is almost impossible to intercept or detect, as the laser beam travels directly from one platform to another over a very narrow path,” QinetiQ describes on its website. “Interception would require an adversary to be physically present in the path of the beam – something that is extremely difficult to achieve.”

If interception is difficult, maintaining a signal is likely not easy. While a drone would have the advantage of knowing where the directed beam is coming from, and automatically orienting its receiver to that point, it could become vulnerable to laser dazzlers, designed to disable the sensors on a flying robot.

The greatest promise of the technology, used at the shorter ranges of small drones, is that it would allow soldiers a way to command a scout without being detected along radio frequencies. QinetiQ’s announcement notes that the demonstration “included Free Space Optical Communications (FSOC) as a bi-directional link in its mission communication system.” 

Other bi-diretional communication links may exist in the system tested by QinetiQ, serving as fail-safes or backups. A drone designed to only receive laser signals could be challenging to use. A drone that includes a laser signal alongside traditional methods would, in a fail-case, operate normally, while having the potential for extra utility.

For now, this technology appears focused on the command, control, and data transfer functions of a scouting drone. The challenge becomes more complex should it apply to a drone designed to carry weapons. But with just a scout, the faster data transfers of optical communication would let useful video arrive rapidly, or allow greater resolution cameras without bandwidth concerns. All with the promise, at least, that the drone would be useful even in the face of radio jammers and counter-drone technologies.

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In February, for the first time, a Black Hawk helicopter flew itself around with no humans on board. The self-flying military helo project involved both DARPA and Sikorsky, which makes the UH-60 helicopters. 

Meanwhile, in some places, companies like Zipline and Wing are delivering goods by drone. Other companies are working on electric air taxis to transport people or cargo, and of course normal air traffic—commercial flights out of big airports, general aviation airplanes zipping out of others—is flying around, too. Factor in helicopters, hot air balloons, and more, and there can be a lot going on up there.  

With all this busyness in the skies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon are working on an artificial intelligence pilot system that can carry out tasks like predicting what another aircraft might do, or keep an eye out for nearby planes using cameras on an aircraft. The idea is that an AI like this could help fly drones, assist a human pilot, or even someday fly a plane on its own. 

Right now, in a flight simulator, the AI is able to figure out what another aircraft is doing, or might do, and then figure out how to safely land the plane accordingly. Think of the way a driver behind the wheel of a car notices another vehicle approaching an intersection, and begins preemptively planning what to do if the other car were to run a stop sign, for example. 

In this case, the AI is looking out for another plane, not a car, of course. “It basically looks at their behavior for 10 seconds,” says Jay Patrikar, a doctoral student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “It tries to judge: ‘They are here. What are they potentially likely to do?’” 

In that sense, it’s like an AI that can play chess, says Patrikar, thinking about what its move would be in advance if its opponent were to take a certain action.

[Related: The Air Force plans to test an AI copilot on its cargo planes]

Artificial intelligence systems need data to learn from. In this case, the team is gathering data from two real-world airports, both of them in Pennsylvania. One has an air traffic control tower, and the other does not. Patrikar says that at those airports the data they hoover up includes visual information from cameras located on a hanger or near the taxiway, spoken communication from the radios, weather data, and more. “We record the entirety of it,” he says. The idea is for the AI to be able to learn cause and effect by paying attention to all this information. 

“It knows the causality of things,” he adds. That means that the AI could learn, for example, that “it was because of the weather that they [a pilot] decided to do this particular thing.” The training the AI received in these scenarios has helped it learn how to navigate a landing in simulation, Patrikar says. 

Plus, an AI bringing an aircraft in for a landing at a small, uncontrolled airport must both follow FAA rules as well as other norms when interacting with other planes, Patrikar points out. “One of the ways humans trust each other is with our shared understanding of rules—our social norms,” he says. People on a busy sidewalk might decide how to pass each other by moving to the right, for example, and rules like that apply in aviation that the AI pilot must follow. 

[Related: This company is retrofitting airplanes to fly on missions with no pilots]

Related work in the real world, not in simulation, has the team putting cameras on aircraft like a Cessna 172 or a hexacopter drone. Those cameras and the AI are able to spot other aircraft in the area, identify them, and figure out how far away they are with a greater than 90-percent accuracy rate at a distance of 700 meters (about 2,300 feet). This kind of tech could help a human pilot in a small plane visually spot other traffic in the area. “I would like to have that system on my plane,” says Patrikar, who has a private pilot license. After all, artificial intelligence doesn’t blink.

To be sure, the Carnegie Mellon researchers are not the only people exploring the new frontier of artificial intelligence that can fly, or help fly, aircraft. The Zipline drone company has been working on a way to use microphones on its drones to listen for other aircraft in the area and then take evasive action to avoid any potential collisions. And notably, a company called Merlin Labs has also developed a digital pilot that could take the place of a human copilot. As one example, it’s working with the Air Force on equipping C-130J cargo planes with their system, so instead of a human crew of two pilots, the aircraft could be flown by a single human paired with an artificial copilot. 

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On August 1, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) announced that the next plane in its inventory would be a single-engine prop aircraft. SOCOM will buy up to 75 AT-802U Sky Warden planes, built by L3Harris Technologies and Air Tractor. These planes will support special operations forces, like Delta Force or Navy SEALs, as they fight irregular wars.

The name of this program is “Armed Overwatch.” The contract announcement says it “will provide Special Operations Forces deployable, affordable, and sustainable crewed aircraft systems fulfilling close air support, precision strike, and armed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, requirements in austere and permissive environments for use in irregular warfare operations in support of the National Defense Strategy.”

Irregular warfare is a broad term that is easier to define by what it doesn’t include. Regular warfare is when the uniformed soldiers of one nation fight the uniformed soldiers of another. These conflicts usually involve the whole range of conventional military forces, from rifles through tanks and artillery to fighter jets and bombers. Irregular warfare, by contrast, involves fighting against insurgencies, rebellions, and tracking down people linked to terror operations. It can also involve helping other countries’ militaries do the same.

For example, in 2003, the US invaded Iraq with a conventional war, which lasted until the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s military. Armed resistance afterwards to the American military and to the new government of Iraq became irregular warfare, and to this day the US deploys forces in the country to assist in training Iraq’s military in irregular warfare. 

For SOCOM’s purposes, a plane that can support special operations forces doesn’t need to survive in a sky filled with hostile fighter jets or when the enemy brings dedicated anti-aircraft vehicles to the battle. Instead, what is most important is that the plane can fly easily, shoot what it needs to shoot, as well as take off and land if need be on rough runways and cleared fields, instead of dedicated airbases.

[Related: Navy SEALs could get new airborne backup. Here’s what the planes look like.]

Those characteristics, that rugged versatility, are likely why the Sky Warden won out over the four other planes SOCOM considered for the contract last summer. The contract initially awards $170 million, or about the price of two F-35A stealth jets, with a ceiling of $3 billion for the full fleet. L3Harris said in a statement that production will begin in 2023, for the initial lot of six Sky Wardens. 

“We want to deliver game-changing, modular solutions to U.S. special operators for their hardest missions, and Sky Warden does just that,” Christopher E. Kubasik, CEO of L3Harris, said in a statement.

“Armed Overwatch” is a role that involves both scouting for targets and attacking enemies on the ground. While SOCOM considered planes that could also perform a transport role for the special operators, the Sky Warden is built to scout and to attack. To that end, the Sky Warden can carry over 8,000 lbs of payload while armored. The wings can carry a range of weapons, from 500-pound bombs to small missiles to sensor pods, and the center of the aircraft can host two heavier systems as well. The wing station can fit a gun, like a .50-caliber machine gun or a 20mm cannon. With a full load of sensors and weapons, the plane can take off on a runway of just 1,400 feet, and it can land on one 1,200 feet long. The tandem cockpit seats two pilots.

The AT-802 (note the lack of a “U,” which denotes the latest variant, the AT-802U, that SOCOM is getting) first flew in 1990, where its rugged airframe and heavy payload capacity made it an ideal crop duster. As a crop duster, the plane was used to spray crops on counter-narcotics missions, an action that sometimes saw the planes shot at by farmers defending their crops. “Years of coca crop eradication missions in South America resulted in the development of lightweight composite ballistic armor for the AT-802U cockpit ‘bathtub’ and engine compartment,” notes the Air Tractor page for the plane.

In other words, SOCOM is getting a plane with crop duster origins, and one that can be used for the military missions of special operators. The Sky Warden is armored against attack, provided the enemy it is facing is armed mostly with small arms, like machine guns and rifles.

This was a concern 13 years ago, when the Air Force announced a plan to purchase 100 such planes in 2009. Skeptics of the Air Force’s 2009 plan for a light attack plane similar to the Sky Warden noted at the time that insurgent forces could get portable and effective anti-air weapons that could threaten the aircraft. With the award of the Armed Overwatch contract this week, former Popular Science contributor Peter W. Singer, now a fellow at New America, revisited an article he wrote that year, tweeting, “And note, since writing that in 2009, the cropduster [Sky Warden-style plane] has not improved, while both the enemy capabilities and the unmanned alternative has obviously drastically improved.”

As nations like Germany and the United States offload old anti-air missiles to Ukraine for use in its war against Russia, the possibility exists that some of these weapons will make their way onto the black market. While old anti-air missiles may struggle against modern jets or be overkill for modern drones, they are perfectly suited for attacking planes like the Sky Warden. As SOCOM makes a big bet on how to fight irregular wars from the sky, it is also gambling that the enemies it finds will lack anti-air weapons, even as war makes those weapons more available. 

Correction on August 3: This story has been updated to correct a typo that referred to the F-35 fighter jet as an F-25.

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Fifty feet into the April sky above Eglin, Florida, the drone wobbled, its passenger seat empty. The flying machine is the Hexa, made by LIFT Aircraft. Hexa is an electric, remotely piloted, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft capable of human transport. More than three months after that April 4 flight, the Air Force announced on July 14 that a second Hexa, Hexa 09, had recently completed a flight test, also at Eglin Air Force Base. Run by the Air Force’s 413th Flight Test Squadron, the Hexa flights are a way for the Air Force to learn what the utility of this specific vehicle is, and what vehicles like it might offer the service in the future.

Broadly described, the Hexa is a rotorcraft. The vehicle has 18 electric motors, each powering a separate rotor, in a canopy that looks like what would happen if a DALL-E-style AI was asked to draw a tree in the style of a drone. The rotors sit on a latticework canopy, with a rotor on each of the Hexa’s six arms and 12 rotors spaced evenly around the outer ring. Machines like these are also called eVTOLs, for electric vertical take-off and landing craft.

The many rotors are a big shift from the traditional one or two massive rotors of a traditional helicopter. They allow for greater redundancy and a small footprint. A helicopter like the UH-60 Black Hawks flown by the military has a rotor diameter that’s nearly 54 feet. The Hexa, instead, is just 15 feet in diameter. Even the much smaller MH-6 Little Bird helicopter has a rotor diameter of over 26 feet.

The Black Hawk and Little Bird both put their size to use as cargo transport for troops, resupply, and rescue, and both can also carry guns, bombs, and missiles, fighting like flying gunships. The Hexa has the capacity for a single occupant, one that is fully optional. In the test flights at Eglin, the Hexas flew under remote control.

Hexa is one of several projects funded by Agility Prime, an initiative specifically to develop electric vertical takeoff or landing (eVTOL) vehicles. Other projects supported by Agility Prime include the Heaviside electric plane, Joby, Archer, and Beta’s Alia.

Air Force testing of the Hexa “aims to accelerate and further develop HEXA for future public and military applications like emergency first response, personnel transport, base logistics, and search and rescue missions,” LIFT said in an April 7 statement.

Those are roles where a small-footprint aircraft offering high visibility could be especially useful. A human passenger acting as a spotter, especially one with access to sophisticated sensors mounted on the airframe, could look for people lost in unfriendly terrain. With the vehicle remotely piloted, the spotter could devote their full attention to looking below, telling the remote pilot where to steer the Hexa. Another advantage of a remotely piloted craft for search and rescue is that a Hexa could be flown empty to where it’s needed, letting a person climb inside while the remote pilot carries them to safety.

For personnel transport, it is easy to imagine the Hexa filling roles both vital and of convenience. A commander skipping the ground traffic to catch a ride to a meeting across base is certainly a possibility, and multiple Hexas could be kept in place, and charging, to ensure they are always available.

Using a Hexa for cargo likely would require cargo that either straps well into a seat, or a different airframe built around the same principle. Here, also, the small footprint of the rotor-lattice, combined with the redundancy of the many engines, could be appealing as an alternative to human couriers. 

What is unlikely is that a Hexa built as it presently is will see combat. Remote control is useful for medical evacuation or transporting emergency responders to the injured. But the Hexa’s open sides, oblong profile, and whirring rotors slot it into the long and frustrating history of single-personnel flying transports. 

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Department of Defense explored single-pilot rotorcraft that featured soldiers standing on a platform above spinning blades. The Hexa, which keeps people beneath its rotor array, is a massive improvement over that era of design. And, unlike the novelty of jetpacks explored by militaries specifically for combat, the Hexas initial test cases all seem within the bounds of existing technology, without risking catastrophic disaster from use under fire. (Should disaster come, the Hexa boasts a parachute and the ability to land on water.)

With the flight at Eglin, Hexa 09 reached 50 feet in altitude and was airborne for about 10 minutes (Hexa 05, which flew at Eglin in April, also reached 50 feet.) Any useful flying machine will need to fly both higher and longer, but sustained flight is a promising early sign of the vehicle’s potential. If the Hexa can remain as low-cost and easy to fly as LIFT promises and the Air Force expects, the vehicle could become a buzzing part of routine military operations, effectively moving people from place to place with all the flash and dazzle of an airborne Segway. 

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The rising oceans of the 2040s will be battlefields for both crewed ships and robotic ones. In a document called Force Design 2045, the US Navy’s strategy guiding the next decades of ship and vehicle development, anticipating what war will be like in the middle of the century is crucial to ensuring peace or, failing that, seizing victory. In announcing the strategy, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday wrote that “the world is entering a new age of warfare, one in which the integration of technology, concepts, partners, and systems—more than fleet size alone—will determine victory in conflict.”

The strategy is couched, first and foremost, in continued open, free, and lawful trade across the seas, including the familiar commerce of goods and materials, but also incorporating the undersea cables that connect the internet as vital infrastructure. To ensure this peace, the plan says the Navy must maintain a nuclear deterrent (presently missile-carrying submarines), control the sea to deter invasion (and land Marines as needed), and to defeat enemies in ocean battles should it come to that.

To meet this need, the Navy plans to maintain its crewed fleet of aircraft carriers, nuclear-armed ballistic submarines, nuclear-powered attack submarines, as well as crewed destroyers and frigates. The Navy also plans to introduce over a hundred robotic ships. Here’s how it’s all going to shake out.

How many ships?

Variations of this strategy have existed since the dawn of nuclear-armed submarines. Beyond submarines, the question for the Navy has been how it meets those objectives, and what composition of ships it needs to get there. In the latest strategy, the Navy offers clear numbers.

“In the 2040s and beyond,” reads the strategy, “we envision this hybrid fleet to require more than 350 manned ships, about 150 large unmanned surface and subsurface platforms, and approximately 3,000 aircraft.”

[Related: An exclusive look inside where nuclear subs are born]

The exact number of ships needed by the Navy has been the subject of presidential campaigns, with then-candidate Trump proposing a 350-ship Navy when running in 2016. In October 2020, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper called for a Navy with more than 500 ships. At present, the US Navy has 298 ships, with previous plans floated this year suggesting the Navy aim for a goal between 316 and 367 ships.

With the new strategy, the Navy sets an ambitious goal for 52 more crewed vessels than at present, while also showcasing that to get the reach and numbers promised by a 500-ship fleet, the Navy will have to lean heavily on uncrewed ships, like those tested this month at the major RIMPAC naval exercises.

So what will the drone ships do?

The most immediate use for uncrewed ships and robotic submarines will be as scouts. The ocean is vast, and scanning the seas in real time allows the Navy to see some of it and plan accordingly.

“The integration of autonomous USVs with manned combatants will give fleet commanders much-needed enhancements to maritime domain awareness, thereby increasing decision speed and lethality in surface warfare,” Captain Scot Searles, Navy program manager for unmanned maritime systems, said in a release describing the use of uncrewed ships at RIMPAC.

Sensors on robotic ships represent an ideal initial use case, because that approach offers an immediate benefit without requiring constant human supervision or careful monitoring. These roles are also good testing opportunities for autonomous navigation and remote direction, both features that will be crucial should oceans become battlefields.

[Related: A Navy ship got a giant liquid-metal 3D printer earlier this month]

“Unmanned surface and subsurface platforms to increase the fleet’s capacity for distribution; expand our intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance advantage; add depth to our missile magazines; supplement logistics; and enhance fleet survivability,” reads the strategy. “This transition will rebalance the fleet away from exquisite, manpower-intensive platforms toward smaller, less-expensive, yet lethal ones.”

Scouting will likely be the first mission for these ships, but future missions will include resupply and transport, allowing extra ammunition and other vital cargo to be carried on ships without sailors. To get to “lethal,” these uncrewed ships will need to have weapons, as the Navy has already demonstrated. 

Under remote operation, a missile battery on an uncrewed ship could still be under human control, with the decision to fire handled by humans who are located on a different vessel. As with any autonomous sensor-and-weapon system, the possibility exists that targeting and firing could be made autonomous in the future, though nothing in the strategy indicates that as an approach.

Armed uncrewed ships, like the planned Large Unmanned Surface Vehicles, will carry vertical launch system missile tubes, expanding the number of missiles that can be brought to battle. Uncrewed armed ships can’t do everything a crewed missile-destroyer can, like relief missions or dissuading attacks of opportunity. In a ship-to-ship naval battle, the available number of missiles ready to launch may be more important for victory than the number of ships in a flotilla.

In addition to the uncrewed ships, the strategy says the Navy will “augment the force with an evolving complement of thousands of small, rapidly adaptable, and attritable unmanned platforms.” These many small and expendable drones in land, surface, and underwater will include models that scout ahead of ships, ones that wait in the ocean a long time, and ones that can hurt enemy vessels, through electronic warfare or explosive power, all with the goal of enhancing the fighting ability of the crewed fleet.

Putting it all together

As the Navy plots a strategy for a course between now and the 2040s, it is focused primarily on a singular potential threat: the growing naval capabilities of China. Where once Russian and before that Soviet navies were the focus of US fears, China has overtaken the country in the imagination and warplanning of the Pentagon. Fighting a future war against China, should it occur without a world-ending nuclear exchange, means adapting to a very different reality, a kind of naval warfare that has not yet been attempted.

In the decades since the Pacific campaigns of WWII, missile technology has improved tremendously, not to mention the development of modern hypersonic weapons. Missiles shift the calculus for fleets, as a successful missile hit can sink a massive and expensive ship for a fraction of what it cost to produce the vessel. Replacing a ship takes years even in ideal conditions, and even if a ship is damaged, it can still be out of commission for months.

While the Navy’s plan still relies on aircraft carriers, submarines with nuclear missiles and those without, and big crewed escort ships, adding in uncrewed vessels means the burden of resupply can gradually be removed from crewed ships, preserving sailors for the vessels on which they’re most needed. The ability to scale up ship operations, without training new human crews, means the Navy could operate more and smaller resupply vessels, minimizing the harm from each loss. 

While the Navy sets out a strategy for 2045, the immediate impact will be seen in spending, on what ships and programs the Pentagon decides to build out for its fleet now. If the future of war is human-crewed fighting ships with uncrewed resupply and robotic scouts, that future will start to take shape in shipyards.

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Very early in the morning on June 15, a lightweight drone with a 82-foot wingspan took off from the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, assisted by a handful of people who had to hand-launch it from the runway. It’s been 40 days since then, and the drone is still flying, continuously breaking its own record with each minute that goes by until it lands at some point. 

On Friday, Breaking Defense noted that the light, solar-powered aircraft had been up there for 37 days, a mission that had it “demolishing its previous 26-day record.” An Army spokesperson confirmed to PopSci that the drone is still airborne as of today, meaning it’s been flying for 40 days and change. 

The Airbus-made drone is solar-powered, designed to fly in the stratosphere and operate off just a tiny bit of electricity. In fact, an October 2021 Army release noted that its power needs are the same as “a single commercial light bulb.” 

The Zephyr has flown for long periods of time previously. It flew for two weeks in 2010, and then it carried out its then-record-breaking 26-day flight (to be precise, that flight time is actually listed as 25 days, 23 hours, and 57 minutes) in 2018. That year, it was also noted as a Best of What’s New winner from PopSci.

Since that year, the Zephyr has been upgraded internally, the Army said in 2021. “It has some design upgrades to make it a more capable system,” Simon Taylor, the head of Zephyr program, said in a release. “The aircraft physically isn’t very different, it’s what sits inside the aircraft and the clever software inside it. We’re going for a much more ambitious flying campaign than we’ve ever attempted to date.” In 2021, it carried out two flights, according to an Army spokesperson. Each of those was about 18 days long. 

[Related: An electric aircraft just completed a journey of 1,403 miles]

The Zephyr’s first flight of 2022 is the one that’s airborne now, and it took off mid-June. It is a mission that has so far “demonstrated Zephyr’s energy storage capacity, battery longevity, solar panel efficiency and station-keeping abilities that will further the Army’s goal to implement ultra-long endurance stratospheric UAS capabilities,” the Army said on July 21. This flight is also the first time that this drone has flown into international airspace or over water. 

Drones like the Zephyr, which can soar for long periods of time in the stratosphere at altitudes higher than 60,000 feet, have applications in a field known as ISR, which stands for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. “Ultra-long endurance unmanned platforms have the potential to provide significant military capabilities and enhanced confidence as part of the Army’s diversified multi-layered architecture,” Michael Monteleone, who directs a group in the Army called the APNT/Space CFT, said.

This Zephyr may be flying right now, but the Army says a second one is set to take off “in the coming weeks.” Its destination? It is set to “travel over the Pacific Ocean.” 

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When the new B-21—the Air Force’s next-gen stealth bomber—goes to war, it will do so without a drone escort. The news, broken by Breaking Defense on July 16, is a sharp reversal from earlier plans that had included developing a drone fighter that could travel alongside the bomber and protect it. 

The story of the planned and then abandoned drone escort is a smaller part of the broader story about the B-21, the first new bomber developed by the United States in 30 years, and the first one developed entirely after the Cold War.

News of the cancellation of the drone escort came at the Royal International Air Tattoo, a massive military air show held in England every July.

“The idea of a similar range collaborative combat aircraft is not turning out to be cost effective, so it looks like we’re not going to go that direction,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told Breaking Defense in an interview at the event. Kendall had previously announced the possible drone escort in December 2021, with the intention of the drone fighters being a budget item for 2023.

Abandoning the concept of a fighter escort, even an uncrewed one, for the new bomber is part of the long history of failed attempts to protect bombers en route. Three separate but related programs are key to understanding the impact of this cancellation: the B-21 itself, escort fighters, and the Loyal Wingman drone fighter program.

The B-21

The B-21 Raider began its history as the Long Range Strike Bomber. Rebranded the B-21, and with its “Raider” name stemming from the Army Air Force’s 1942 raid on Tokyo, the aircraft will be the fourth bomber in service with the Air Force. These include the ancient B-52 bombers, which have fought in every US war since Vietnam, the supersonic B-1 bombers, which entered service in 1986, and the stealth B-2 bombers, which first saw combat in the Kosovo War in 1999. The B-21 will be closest in conceit to the B-2.

Those bombers all represent a range of abilities and design eras. While all were built to carry both conventional and nuclear weapons, today only the B-2 and B-52 do so. Nuclear capability was engineered out of B-1 bombers in upgrades done as part of arms control limits on total nuclear-capable bombers.

Early in the development of the Long Range Strike Bomber, the Air Force explored the possibility that the bomber could fly uncrewed, though that notion was roundly rejected for nuclear missions, and probably for other bombing runs, too.

As designed, the B-21 will be a stealth long-range bomber capable of carrying both conventional bombs and nuclear weapons. Long-range in this sense is intercontinental: the B-1 can fly almost 6,000 miles with a useful payload, while the B-2 can reach nearly 7,000 miles, and the B-52 can fly close to 9,000 miles. (Air refueling helps.) To replace existing bombers and accommodate planned future need, the Air Force is requesting that a minimum of 100 B-21s be built, with construction on the first six B-21s underway as of February 2022. (It has not yet flown.)

For countries that want to protect against bombers, the weapons they have historically turned to are anti-air missiles and fighter aircraft. Stealth features, which the B-2 was built around and the B-21 will incorporate as well, make it harder for sensors like radar to detect and track a plane, limiting the danger from anti-air missiles. 

Escort fighters

Fighter jets that can intercept and attack bombers are a hard threat to mitigate. In World War II, bombers, especially the “Fortress” line of which the B-52 is still a part, adopted on-board guns to shoot fighters. (The B-52’s tail guns saw use in Vietnam, but the guns were removed in October 1991, while the gun’s rear-facing radar systems were retained.) That defense strategy struggles against the threat of long-range anti-air missiles and especially at the high speeds of jet combat, which is where the possibility of an escort fighter is appealing. 

An escort fighter is one designed to fly alongside bombers and, in the event of interception, protect the bombers from the hostile fighters. A variant of escort is the “parasite” fighter, which rides attached to or inside a bigger plane, waiting to be released when needed. While the parasite fighters save on fuel, carrying one reduces a bomber’s effective payload and also requires the difficult task of landing a fighter back on a plane after the bombing is done. DARPA is exploring cargo planes that can launch drones, for a similar effect, but without having to worry about a pilot on board or their safety after the mission.

If the escort is to fly alongside the bomber, then, it needs to have the same range as the bomber, while still being in a small enough airframe to be useful and maneuverable as a fighter when it falls under attack. Removing the pilot from a cockpit saves some room in a fighter escort, but the plane would still need to carry enough fuel for an intercontinental journey, enough sensors and weapons to fight, and if the drone is designed for repeat use, enough fuel to carry it back afterwards. That is a tall ask, especially when crewed fighters like the F-16 Fighting Falcon have a one-way travel range of just over 2,000 miles, and a shorter combat effective range.

Mid-air refueling can extend the range of both bombers and fighters, but it would be another hurdle for a long-distance drone escort fighter. Before adding “autonomous mid-air refueling” to the list of tasks for a drone, it is likely the Air Force will want to try a shorter-range drone fighter first.

The Loyal Wingman

The Air Force is already working on a drone fighter of sorts, just not one built for the great distances of bomber flights. The Kratos Valkyrie, part of the Air Force’s “loyal wingman” program, is a drone designed as a relatively inexpensive complement to fighter squadrons.  And Skyborg, another Air Force program to create an autonomous pilot for aircraft, is an effort to enable uncrewed planes to fly alongside crewed craft.

These drones are designed to fly alongside fighters crewed by pilots, with the autonomous system of the drones possibly carrying out tasks like flying ahead. By keeping extra sensors and possibly even weapons in the loyal wingmates, pilots of expensive fighters like the F-35 could send drones in for riskier missions, like scouting and attacking hostile surface-to-air missile sites. 

Even as the prospect of a drone fighter escort for bombers is unlikely, the loyal wingman program remains a priority for the Air Force. The Air Force is still developing drones that can fly and fight alongside crewed planes, even if they are not yet bomber escorts. For now, the B-21 will have to rely on stealth and speed to keep it safe. 

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