Driverless cars, OK. Pilotless fighter jets? They’re flying now, too.
AP reports on a robot F16 that has just taken Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall out for a joyride courtesy of an AI fighter pilot: […]
aeronautics
Science Art: X-2 After Drop from B-50 Mothership, 1957.
Off we go…. Here’s some cutting-edge technology from 1957 which, frankly, is still pretty impressive. The Bell Labs X-2 is a rocket-plane that flew humans […]
Science Art: Ryan 262 Manta Ray: Program Status Report cover, 1975
This is the cover of a report on the Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical “Navy Mini-Drone (STARS),” otherwise known as the Manta Ray. It was a fiberglass […]
Science Art: Avro Canada VZ-9AV Avrocar.
This is not a movie prop, but a working prototype of the Avrocar, a disc-shaped flying machine that graced the skies between 1959 and 1961. […]
Science Art: 821393 – Flying Machine – Wright Brothers, May 22, 1906.
It’s an airplane. Maybe the airplane. And this is how it looked when the U.S. Patent Office made it official. I found the illustration on […]
An AI fighter plane has taken off, engaged a simulated enemy and landed without a human pilot’s help.
DARPA reports on the Air Combat Evolution program’s newest breakthrough, which took a regular F-16 fighter jet, equipped it with an Artificial Intelligence program capable […]
Airship hangar awaits new zeppelin revolution.
BBC is waiting patiently for Google co-founder Sergey Brin to create another world-changing revolution. They’re hanging out in an enormous hangar, the Goodyear Airdock in […]
Exploring alien planets (and Earth) by balloon
Science News looks at the recent breakthroughs in planetary research using an often-overlooked kind of vehicle, a lighter-than-air balloon, as a research platform in alien […]
Science Art: Fig 2.1: Powder Rocket Projectile, 1956.
This is one of the first illustrations in V. I. Feodosiev’s and G. B. Siniarev’s Introduction to Rocketry, an English translation of a Russian text […]
SONG: A Pseudo-Satellite
SONG: “A Pseudo-Satellite” [Download] . ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: CNN 5 May 2022, “This solar-powered plane could stay in the air for months,” as used in […]
Solar plane can do the job of a satellite without going into space.
CNN is covering the Skydweller, a plane powered by more than 17,000 solar panels, enabling it to stay aloft for month, doing the same work […]
Science Art: Pénaud’s first sketch of an amphibian aeroplane, 1873
CW: Ends in despair. French aviation pioneer Alphonse Pénaud designed this, with engineer Paul Gauchot, as an aeroplane that could land on water or on […]
Science Art: Scheme of quadrocopter impellent (X and H configuration), by Ulrich Heither
This looks like a heraldic emblem to me, but it’s not. It’s also not merely an abstract diagram of circular forces, though that’s a little […]
Flying taxi by Toyota
Endgadget (yes, I know) enthuses over the Toyota-backed SkyDrive flying car, tested with a pilot at a Toyota facility: The SD-03 is billed as the […]
Science Art: From The Helicopters Are Coming, 1944.
Click to embiggen This illustration, by Erik Nitsche and Roslyn Welcher, is from a book by CBF Macauley that claims to be “the first complete […]