After over half a century of loyal service, the world’s last remaining Super Guppy aircraft continues to dutifully transport NASA’s gigantic rocket parts in its cavernous, hinged cargo bay. On Tuesday, the Huntsville International Airport posted a video and accompanying images to social media of the rotund plane arriving from Kennedy Space Center. Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, it sounds like a prop plane of that size can make a huge, rich racket on the tarmac.

[Related: Artemis II lunar mission goals, explained.]

Aboard the over 50-ton (when empty), turboprop plane this time around was the heat shield that protected last year’s Artemis I Orion spacecraft. The vital rocketry component capable of withstanding 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit resided in the Super Guppy’s 25-foot tall, 25-foot wide, 111-foot long interior during a nearly 690-mile journey to the Alabama airport, after which it was transported a few miles down the road to the Marshall Space Flight Center. From there, a team of technicians will employ a specialized milling tool to remove the heat shield’s protective Avcoat outer layer for routine post-flight analysis, according to NASA.

The Super Guppy is actually the third Guppy iteration to lumber through the clouds. Based on a converted Boeing Stratotanker refueling tanker and designed by the now defunct Aero Spacelines during the 1960s, an original craft called the Pregnant Guppy was supplanted by its larger Super Guppy heir just a few years later. This updated plane included an expanded cargo bay, alongside an incredibly unique side hinge that allows its forward section to open like a pocket watch. A final Super Guppy Turbine debuted in 1970, and remained in use by NASA for over 25 years. In 1997, the agency purchased one of two newer Super Guppy Turbines built by Airbus. This Guppy is the current and only such hefty boy gracing the skies. With its bulky profile, the Super Guppy’s travel specs are pretty impressive—it’s capable of flying as high as 25,000 feet at speeds as fast as 250 nautical miles per hour.

[Related: NASA’s weird giant airplane carried the future of Mars in its belly.]

Last PopSci checked in on the Super Guppy’s journeys was back in 2016, when it transported an Orion crew capsule potentially destined for a much further trip than the Artemis missions’ upcoming lunar sojourns—Mars. According to Digital Trends, the Super Guppy’s next flight could occur sometime next year ahead of NASA’s Artemis II human-piloted lunar flyby.

“Although much of the glory of America’s space program may be behind it, the Super Guppy continues to be one of the only practical options for oversized cargo and stands ready to encompass a bigger role in the future,” reads a portion of NASA’s official description.

Until then, feel free to peruse the official, 74-page Super Guppy Transport User’s Guide.

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There’s an aviation term called the “death spiral”—when pilots’ skewed sensory perceptions contradict the accurate readings on their instruments, causing confusion and leading to bad course corrections. As the name implies, this often leads to tragic consequences—many experts believe such an issue contributed to John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s fatal crash in 1999, as well as the 1959 tragedy that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper. Disorientation was also one of the causes in the 2021 helicopter crash that claimed Kobe Bryant’s life.

[Related: How pilots end up in a ‘death spiral’ ]

Such a scenario is terrifying enough on its own—but imagine a similar situation while floating in the vacuum of space. With no gravitational pull and few, if any, points of reference, working in such an environment could quickly become disorienting and potentially dangerous as astronauts lose their sense of direction.

Although NASA astronauts receive copious training to guard against spatial disorientation, the issue is still a huge concern, especially as private companies increasingly expand their own projects with both space tourism and governmental contracts. Thanks to a team of researchers, however, wearable sensors enhanced by vibrotactile feedback might one day help keep astronauts feeling grounded.

[Related: This US astronaut will have spent an entire year in orbit.]

“Long duration spaceflight will cause many physiological and psychological stressors which will make astronauts very susceptible to spatial disorientation,” Vivekanand P. Vimal, a research scientist at Brandeis University’s Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Lab, explained in a recent profile. “When disoriented, an astronaut will no longer be able to rely on their own internal sensors which they have depended on for their whole lives.”

To explore these issues, Vimal and their colleagues conducted a series of trials involving 30 participants. The team taught 10 of them to treat their vestibular senses (which pick up onwhere they are in space and where they are going) with skepticism. Another 10 volunteers received the same training alongside the addition of vibrotactors—devices attached to their skin that buzz depending on their geospatial positioning. The final 10 participants only received the vibrotactors with no training whatsoever. Subjects then wore blindfolds and earplugs while white noise played in the background, and took their place inside an intentionally disorienting “multi-axis rotation device” (dubbed MARS).

Similar to an inverted pendulum, MARS first rotated upright subjects from side-to-side around a central axis to act as an analog to everyday gravitational cues on Earth. Subjects then used two joysticks to attempt to remain stabilized without swinging into either side’s crash boundary. A second phase involved the same parameters, but with the cockpit shifted on a horizontal angle (with the participants facing the ceiling) to better approximate a space environment without Earth’s gravitational reference points. Throughout each subject’s 40 trials, vibrotactors on 20 of the 30 participants buzzed if they shifted too far from a central balancing point, thus potentially queuing them to correct their position with their joysticks.

Vimal, alongside co-authors Alexander Sacha Panic, James R. Lackner, and Paul DiZio, published the results in a new study published on November 3 with Frontiers in Physiology. According to the team’s findings, all participants first felt disoriented during the analog tests due to conflicting input from their vestibular systems and vibrotactors. Those with prior training with their sensors performed best during the space phase, while training-only participants without the wearables “crashed” more often. This third group also accidentally destabilized themselves more frequently than the other two. However, the subjects performed far better while situated in the Earth analog position, with or without the vibrotactors’ aid—Vimal’s team suspects the devices may have been too weak, or participants needed more time to adjust to the devices. 

[Related: ISS astronauts are building objects not possible on Earth.]

With further testing and refinement, Vimal’s team believes engineers could integrate similar wearables into astronauts’ suits to provide orientation aid, both inside spacecraft and outside space stations. They may be small additions, but they are some that could save explorers from some very serious, scary, and possibly even fatal circumstances.

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The government’s ongoing campaign to investigate and destigmatize unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) sightings entered its latest stage this week. A new, easy-to-use online reporting tool is available to file incidents occurring as far back as 1945—but only for those already affiliated with the US government. For now.

Announced on October 31 by the Department of Defense, the system will be overseen by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), and is specifically equipped to securely handle sightings involving national security information and military intelligence. The form is only intended for “current and former military members, federal employees and contractors” with “direct knowledge” of alleged US programs related to UAPs.

[Related: NASA wants to use AI to study unidentified aerial phenomena.]

The submission portal includes specific instructions for filing, and specifically prohibits including classified information in an initial report. That said, the AARO is cleared to handle sensitive material, which can be conveyed in potential follow-up interviews.

“The information you submit in the form will be protected,” AARO director Sean Kirkpatrick said via this week’s DoD announcement, adding that any information provided in subsequent follow-up interviews will also be safeguarded according to its proper classification. Any reports must also be firsthand accounts.

Established in July 2022, AARO formed following the dissolution of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. Per its official description, it is charged with “minimiz[ing] technical and intelligence surprise by synchronizing scientific, intelligence, and operational detection identification, attribution, and mitigation of unidentified anomalous phenomena in the vicinity of national security areas.” AARO released its second annual UAP report earlier this year, which dramatically increased the number of documented sightings from 144 to 510 incidents—including 247 from the previous year alone.

AARO’s latest announcement also importantly notes that, although part of its congressional mandate required collecting information regarding “any potential UAP-related programs overseen by the U.S. government in the past,” it has yet to do so.

“We do have a requirement by law to bring those [witnesses] who think that it does exist, and they may have information that pertains to that,” Kirkpatrick said, while also making clear they “do not have any of that evidence right now.”

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

As AARO currently concerns itself predominantly with classified reports, NASA is continuing its own parallel investigations into declassified and public UAP sightings. In September 2023, the 16-member panel released a new independent study report, which recommended harnessing public trust of the agency alongside artificial intelligence programs to help sift through decades’ worth of UAP incidents.

But if you’re a plainclothes civilian still needing to get that one weird sighting off your chest, take heart: AARO is also planning to launch a similar public portal sometime in the near future.

“We want to hear from you,” said Kirkpatrick.

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An autonomous drone with the wingspan of an albatross is now trialing cargo restocks for a giant offshore wind farm in the North Sea. Overseen by the Danish wind power company Ørsted, the 128-pound unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)—roughly the weight of “a large baby giraffe”—is meant to cut down on time and costs, while also improving overall operational safety, and is billed as the first of its kind in the world.

“Drones mean less work disturbance as turbines don’t have to be shut down when cargo is delivered,” Ørsted’s October 30 announcement states. “They avoid risk, making it safer for personnel working on the wind farm and minimize the need for multiple journeys by ship, reducing carbon emissions and climate change impacts.”

In a video posted to the social media platform, X, the hefty drone is shown launching from a cargo ship’s deck while towing a large orange bag suspended by a cable beneath the UAV. From there, the transport soars over a few hundred feet of North Sea waters to hover above one of Hornsea 1’s 7-megawatt wind turbines. Once in place, the drone carefully lands its cargo on the platform before releasing its tether to return to its crew transfer vessel, where human pilots have overseen the entire process.

While Ørsted didn’t name its drone partner in the project announcement, additional promotional materials provided by the company confirm it is a Skylift, a UK-based business focusing on offshore wind farm deliveries.

[Related: Atlantic City’s massive offshore wind farm project highlights the industry’s growing pains.]

“[W]e want to use our industry leading position to help push forward innovations that reduce costs and maximize efficiency and safety in the offshore wind sector,” Mikkel Haugaard Windolf, head of Ørsted’s offshore logistics project, said via the company’s October 30 reveal, adding that, “Drone cargo delivery is an important step in that direction.”

Ørsted’s Hornsea 1 wind farm consists of 174 turbines installed across over 157-square-miles in the North Sea. Generating roughly 1.7Gw of power, the farm’s electricity is enough to sustainably power over 1 million homes in the UK.

Despite the company’s multiple Hornsea wind farm successes, Ørsted has encountered significant setbacks during attempts to expand into the US market. Earlier this month, local officials in Cape May County, NJ, filed a lawsuit attempting to block construction of a 1.1 gigawatt project involving nearly 100 turbines off the coast of Atlantic City, citing regulatory sidesteps and environmental concerns. In an email to PopSci at the time, the American Clean Power Association’s Director of Eastern Region State Affairs described the lawsuit as “meritless,” and reiterated that offshore wind energy production remains “one of the most rigorously regulated industries in the nation.”

According to a 2015 report from the US Department of Energy, wind farms could supply over a third of the country’s sustainable electricity by 2050.

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On Wednesday, October 18, an electric aircraft powered by a single propeller flew into, and then out of, Joint Base Andrews, the military facility famous for hosting Air Force One. That planned stop at the Maryland base was part of a long journey from Vermont to Florida.

Today, the aircraft, created by Vermont-based Beta Technologies, finally arrived in Florida, touching down at Duke Field airport, which is part of Eglin Air Force Base. The reason for the long trip from north to south is for Beta to give the US Air Force a chance to test the battery-powered aircraft and see how it handles tasks like moving cargo.

The testing the Air Force carries out will involve gathering “both ground and flight data,” says Maj. Riley Livermore, the flight commander for the 413th Flight Test Squadron. The exercises will involve “flying from point A to point B,” testing the plane at “different speeds,” simulating “different payloads,” and in general “seeing how the aircraft performs.” During these tests the aircraft will be crewed, meaning that it will be flown by a pilot who is on board the plane. The accouterments at Duke Field also include a Beta-installed charger to give the aircraft the juice it needs.

The aircraft, called Alia, has a 50-foot-long wing, seats for two pilots up front, and cargo space behind them. Beta is developing two different versions of the electric plane. One is called a CTOL aircraft, which stands for “conventional take-off and landing.” The aircraft that the Air Force will have on hand in Florida is outfitted for CTOL flight, meaning it takes off and lands by cruising down a runway, like a regular plane. A second version is designed for VTOL flight, an acronym that stands for “vertical take-off and landing.” That variant utilizes four propellers that are parallel to the ground to allow it to take off and land in that fashion. Both variants have a propeller in the back to push it through the air. Beta has a contract with UPS to eventually sell the package-carrier 10 planes, with an option for more, and also has a contract with United Therapeutics. The goal is to sell zero-emissions aircraft to companies that will use them for schlepping packages, cargo, and logistics.

[Related: Futuristic aircraft and robotic loaders dazzled at a Dallas tech summit]

Livermore says that having the aircraft for testing will allow them to compare how it stacks up against Alia’s “glossy brochure” in real-world use. “Actually doing it for months on end is gonna really give us good exposure to where it’s really strong, and where more development or investment is needed,” he adds. Part of that could involve monitoring how much it costs to charge up the aircraft’s batteries and keeping an eye on its maintenance needs. 

The arrival of this electric aircraft at an Air Force base parallels a similar development that occurred in September, when Joby Aviation delivered their electric flying machine to Edwards Air Force Base in California. That VTOL aircraft from Joby will be flown in an uncrewed, remote fashion at first, and the Air Force says they might use the Joby aircraft for tasks like keeping an eye on the base’s perimeter. The Air Force, through a program called AFWERX and Agility Prime, will be testing out both the Beta aircraft in Florida and the Joby aircraft in California. “The data we’re generating here for Beta—that same kind of data is being collected for Joby” at Edwards, says Livermore, even if it’s not precisely an “apples-to-apples comparison.” Still, information regarding how long it takes to charge up a plane like this applies to both aircraft, as does answering questions about their ranges.

Beta and Joby are not the only two companies working on electric flight, to be sure. Other notable players in the new industry include Wisk, which is part of Boeing, and Archer, which just said it had flown its Midnight aircraft for the first time. Joby has also announced that it will build a large production facility to make its aircraft in Ohio, while Beta has opened a large production facility to do the same in Vermont. That Beta facility in Vermont measures 188,500 square feet—that’s about the size of 67 tennis courts—and has solar panels on the roof for power and geothermal wells for the climate system.

To get down to Florida, the Beta aircraft made more than a dozen stops along the way, departing Burlington, Vermont on October 11 and flying 84 miles to Glens Falls, New York, a hop that took 49 minutes. It eventually left New York, flying through states such as Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and finally ended up in Florida. The distance covered for the entire mission was 2,000 miles, according to Beta. 

Several different pilots took turns operating it, including Nate Moyer, who has military experience flying aircraft such as F-16s. He was also the pilot at the controls for when the aircraft flew in and out of Joint Base Andrews. “The responsiveness is unbelievable,” he says, describing what it’s like to fly Alia. “It’s sensitive enough that I just kind of breathe on the stick and it does exactly what I want it to do.” In that sense it’s like the control stick for an F-16, which is also known for being very sensitive to pilot inputs. 

Like a trip that this same Beta aircraft took last year out to Arkansas, this journey down south was a chance for regular people to see a neat new plane. “People come up and they ask really interesting questions that I never would have expected. We had a 5-year-old ask if we came from Mars,” Moyer mentions. “We didn’t actually remember to tell him ‘no,’ so I don’t know what he actually believes.” 

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Airborne lead levels in the US have declined an impressive 99 percent since 1980 thanks to Environmental Protection Agency regulations, but leaded gas isn’t gone completely. While large jet aircraft do not use leaded fuel, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, over 220,000 smaller, piston-engine aircraft capable of carrying between two and 10 people still run on leaded aviation gasoline, or “avgas.” 

Today, the EPA took its first step towards attempting to finally phase out air transportation’s lingering lead holdouts with a new endangerment finding announcement highlighting the adverse effects of even minuscule levels of airborne lead. With the new findings, the EPA argues that leaded avgas endangers public health and welfare under the Clean Air Act—and because of this, the US could finally see its first-ever avgas lead limitations.

“The science is clear: Exposure to lead can cause irreversible and life-long health effects in children,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan via the agency’s October 18 announcement. “Aircraft that use leaded fuel are the dominant source of lead emissions in our air.”

[Related: The US can’t get away from lead’s toxic legacy.]

The federal level determination earned support from legislators including House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA). “[The] EPA’s conclusion confirms what constituents in my district and Americans across the country know all too well—emissions from leaded aviation fuel contribute to dangerous lead air pollution,” Lofgren said via the announcement. She also cited the disproportionate exposure to leaded avgas in many poorer and minority communities near general aviation airports.

Lead’s neurotoxic effects have long been understood, especially its dangers to younger children, as it  negatively affects cognitive abilities and slows physical growth. In 2022, the Centers for Disease Control announced a redefinition of “lead poisoning,” lowering the threshold for toxic exposure from 5 micrograms per deciliter of a child’s blood down to just 3.5 mgs per deciliter. Even with the added stringency, however, the EPA reiterated in its October 18 announcement that there is no evidence of any threshold to fully reduce lead exposure’s harmful effects.

[Related: Leaded gas may have lowered the IQ of 170 million US adults.]

The new avgas endangerment finding does not carry any regulatory or legal weight itself. Instead, it opens the door to a future phaseout of avgas for small aircraft. Last year, the FAA and industry leaders announced their “Eliminate Aviation Gasoline Lead Emissions” (EAGLE) program aiming to “achieve a lead-free aviation system” by 2030. The FAA has already approved usage of a 100 octane unleaded fuel capable of being used by piston-engine aircraft, although the EPA notes it is not yet commercially available. A lower octane fuel is also available at an estimated 35 US airports, with plans to “expand and streamline the process for eligible aircraft to use this fuel.”

As The Washington Post notes, however, the EPA’s and FAA’s attempts to phase out avgas come as Congress considers a long-term reauthorization of the FAA that would all but require smaller airports to continue offering leaded avgas.

“While today’s announcement is a step forward, we cannot be complacent,” Lofgren added on Wednesday. “We must finish the job and protect our nation’s children from all sources of lead.”

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On October 8, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to the eastern Mediterranean, as part of an American response to the surprise and staggering attack on Israel’s military and civilians by the armed group Hamas. Then, on October 14, Austin sent the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group to the eastern Mediterranean. 

The United States Navy maintains 11 carrier strike groups, which are formations including not just the namesake carrier and its aircraft, but also an escort fleet of other ships. The carriers are the most visible, tangible expression of naval power abroad, and the deployment of two carrier strike groups is both a threat of force and shows where the US most wants to attempt to deter the outbreak of further violence through that show of force.

The attack that sparked the deployment of the two US carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean started with bulldozers, drones, motorboats, and paragliders. Gaza is home to two million Palestinians, of whom about half are under the age of 18. Hamas, the militant group elected to power in the Gaza Strip in 2006 and which has not held an election since, broke through the wall maintained by Israel around the Gaza Strip, and launched attacks killing an estimated 1,400 people in Israel, including civilians. Retaliatory airstrikes, launched by Israel’s military against Gaza, have killed over 2,700 people, including civilians, and rendered hundreds of thousands homeless. The death totals, especially in Gaza, continue to increase, as hospitals run out of supplies. The situation is evolving and has complex roots.

Beyond Hamas and Israel, there’s a chance that the outbreak of violence could expand to involve regional military players, like Iranian-backed Hezbollah north of Israel in Lebanon, Iran itself, or other countries in the region. President Joe Biden has traveled to Israel to meet with its government. 

An aircraft carrier, complete with escort ships and fighter firepower, is designed to fight the planes and ships of nations more than it is built to root out fighters with rifles hiding in city blocks. In the October 8 announcement of the deployment, Austin said the Ford Carrier Strike Group was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean to “bolster regional deterrence efforts.” In the October 14 announcement, the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group’s deployment was part of moves to “signal the United States’ ironclad commitment to Israel’s security and our resolve to deter any state or non-state actor seeking to escalate this war.”

To better understand the US force projection in response to this outbreak of violence, it is important to understand aircraft carriers, and the fleets that escort them.

What is a carrier strike group?

Alone, an aircraft carrier is a powerful weapon. The size of a small town, one carrier can be a tempting target. The Nimitz-class carriers, which make up most of the US carrier fleet at present, carry around 5,000 to 5,200 people. This crew is primarily devoted to operating and maintaining the ship, which is powered by a pair of nuclear reactors, while about 1,500 of that crew is dedicated to flying and maintaining the 60 or more aircraft flown from a carrier. 

Ford-class carriers, the planned replacement for the Nimitz class, are crewed by just over 4,500 people total, and can carry and launch over 75 aircraft. (Currently there is one Ford-class carrier in the fleet, which is the USS Gerald R. Ford.) Both Nimitz and Ford-class carriers are 1,092 feet long, their decks constituting the runway for takeoff and landing of planes at sea.

Because carriers are so large—by design, they have to be—they make enticing targets for enemies at war. “Carrier Group” as a phrase first appears in the Popular Science archives in a July 1985 story called “Invisible Subs” that describes ships as either “submarines or targets.” The ship-mounted weapons on carriers are largely defensive: anti-air and anti-missile Sea Sparrow missiles, Phalanx Close-In Weapon Systems designed to intercept rockets, and other projectiles with radar-targeted bullets.

Those weapons should be seen as a last line of defense for carriers. The first lines of defense are the other ships that accompany carriers as they move about the globe.

In Secretary Austin’s announcements, he names specific ships in each carrier group. The USS Gerald R. Ford is escorted by the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Normandy, as well as the Arleigh-Burke-class guided missile destroyers USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney, and USS Roosevelt. The USS Eisenhower is escorted by the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea, guided-missile destroyers USS Gravely and USS Mason, and is carrying the nine aircraft squadrons of Carrier Air Wing 3. In general, a carrier group has between three and four surface ships escorting it, as well as an assumed (but not announced) attack submarine traveling near the fleet underwater.

Carrier Air Wing 3 includes four squadrons of F/A-18E Super Hornets, jet fighters that can fly over 1,200 nautical miles; these jets can carry a range of weapons including anti-air missiles, anti-ship missiles, guided and unguided bombs, and more. These planes are the primary strike force of the carrier group, allowing the US Navy to attack and destroy vehicles, people, and buildings far from shore. In addition to the strike fighters, a carrier air wing includes E-2C Hawkeyes, which are big flying tactical radars; EA-18G Growlers, which carry electronic warfare weapons for jamming and obscuring enemy sensors; and Seahawk helicopters, which can be used to launch anti-tank missiles and for submarine hunting, among other roles.

The Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers are, as the name suggests, armed with an array of missiles, including cruise missiles to hit targets on land, as well as anti-submarine missiles and torpedoes to protect against enemies underwater. Guided missile destroyers are similarly armed, with anti-air missiles as well as part of the regular complement.

Much of the equipment of a carrier strike group is built around the particular vulnerability of aircraft carriers to anti-ship missiles and submarines—threats that are unlikely to be a factor for deployments in the eastern Mediterranean. The offensive firepower, from cruise missiles to guided bombs dropped by fighter jets, enable the carrier groups to pose an outsized threat. 

The presence of a carrier strike group can be seen as a form of deterrence, and deterrence is a strategic bet that the presence of massive retaliatory power is enough to prevent an armed group from trying to advance their political aims through violence. If the actions of other armed groups in the region can be shifted, deterred, or delayed by the presence of the US Navy, this would be the force that can do it.

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Currently, the world’s longest non-stop commercial flight takes 18 hours and 50 minutes: It connects Singapore’s Changi Airport to New York City’s John F. Kennedy Airport. But is that trek necessary? With AI-assisted flight routes, electric planes, and other tech poised to change air travel, it’s only a matter of time before long-haul flights become more efficient. And more importantly, are long flights like that safe for your health?

There are a few health risks linked to flying (aside from being swarmed by mosquitoes or breathing in dog farts), but tacking on a few more hours probably won’t have much of an impact.

“If it’s one-seventeenth of the trip, it’s not that big of a deal,” says Fanancy Anzalone, an aerospace medicine physician and past president of the Aerospace Medical Association. Still, he says, “There’s a multitude of things that you need to be concerned about when you do go on a long-haul flight.”

Cramped conditions

Sitting still in a cramped seat for hours isn’t just unpleasant—it can lead to deep vein thrombosis, when blood clots form in the legs because of poor blood flow. The longer you don’t move, the greater your risk. Worst-case scenario, the clot can break free and lodge in the lungs. Fortunately, this is rare. And you can cut down on your risk by getting up and walking around or flexing your legs.

Passengers “really need to think about getting up anywhere between three to four hours and walk around,” Anzalone says. “But by sitting on your chair and just pumping your legs—in essence pressing down on your heels and up with your toes—that little bit can make a big difference in whether somebody is going to have [deep vein thrombosis].”

Dry air and germs

So you might be out of luck if you’re seated next to someone who is already ill. However, the idea that the recirculating air on a plane abets disease transmission is a myth. “Airflow and circulation of cabin air is quite sophisticated technically, so there is usually no high risk of getting infected even if you have someone [sick] sitting two rows before,” says Jochen Hinkelbein, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Cologne in Germany and treasurer for the European Society of Aerospace Medicine.

You should be more concerned about the tray tables, bathrooms, and other germ-gathering surfaces you’re likely to come into contact with, even though they do get wiped down after flights. “The major airlines that are flying long-haul in my experience do extremely well in making sure that the airplane is as clean … as possible,” Anzalone says. But he does recommend traveling with disinfecting wipes or sanitizer. Really, it’s best to touch as little as possible.

Radiation and air pressure

There’s not much you can do about the cosmic rays, though. Each time a passenger flies, they are exposed to a tiny amount of radiation from space. “The more time you’re on the plane, the more radiation exposure you’ll get,” says Steven Barrett, an aerospace engineer at MIT.

However, the radiation most travelers are exposed to in a given year falls comfortably within the recommended radiation exposure for a member of the public. “The very frequent travelers who are flying on long-haul flights could potentially go above the recommended limits of radiation exposure,” says Barrett, who has calculated how much radiation flyers are exposed to. “But that’s not within the region where you’d have any real health concerns.” It’s unclear how harmful these still-low levels of radiation exposure are, or if they are harmful at all, he says.

Pilots and other flight crewmembers do spend enough time in the air that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers them radiation workers. The agency recommends they try to limit their time on flights that are very long, fly at high altitudes, or fly over the poles.

Another concern is that the air pressure is also lower on a plane than it is at sea level. This doesn’t bother most people. However, the thin air can cause problems for those who are old or have heart conditions or other pre-existing illnesses.

Overall risk factors

Ultimately, the longer a flight is, the more time you have for something to go wrong. And planes have become larger in recent years, which also increases the probability of in-flight medical emergencies.

“Traveling itself is becoming more and more popular, more and more convenient even for the old ones with … pre-existing diseases,” Hinkelbein says. “So we have an unhappy triad which is the setting is not ideal for unhealthy persons, the persons are older and older and having more pre-existing diseases, and not moving within the aircraft cabin, drinking only a little bit.”

For these crises, airline staff are equipped with medical kits and equipment such as defibrillators. “Every one of the long-haul flights have a way by radio to connect to physicians that are available around the world to talk to them,” Anzalone says. “I have talked to pilots about medical issues that are on board and how to handle it, do you divert or not divert.”

However, very few airlines have forms to document when passengers do get sick, Hinkelbein says. He’d like to see standardized forms and an international registry where all in-flight medical problems are reported. “Then you can try to figure out what are really the most [frequent] causes of in-flight medical problems.”

For the vast majority of people, though, even the longest flights will pass uneventfully. “The flying public on major airlines is very safe,” Anzalone says.

Plane emissions

In fact, a plane’s most profound influence probably isn’t on the passengers—it turns out that airplanes cruising miles above the Earth’s surface can cause problems down below.

“The main health impact is probably emissions that come from them and the health impacts for people for the ground,” Barrett says. He and his colleagues have estimated that 16,000 people globally die each year because of air pollution caused by planes. These emissions, which are linked to lung cancer and cardiopulmonary disease, came from planes at cruising height as well as those in the midst of takeoff and landing.

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In Dawn McKenzie’s free time, she soars high above the ground in a hot air balloon, as she has since she got her FAA-issued ballooning license when she was 19.

Ted Gauthier, McKenzie’s dad, taught her how to fly. Gauthier and four of his five brothers took up ballooning decades ago, and he passed his skills to his daughter, the only woman in the family to pick it up. They flew together until he passed away in 2021, and McKenzie resumed flying Daydream, the 62,000 cubic foot balloon her father built.

This July, McKenzie competed in the 2023 US Women’s Hot Air Balloon National Championship with her uncle Marty (her dad’s brother) as her crew chief. Piloting one of these beautiful, colorful vessels takes extensive research before each flight—mainly on weather elements like wind, clouds, and precipitation—and a fair measure of courage, especially when in a basket all alone. McKenzie relishes the challenge.

This is how the flight process works.

Wind power

Flying a balloon is serious business. It’s the oldest form of human-carrying flight, McKenzie says, and has an excellent safety record. The weather “pretty much has to be perfect” for a hot air balloon pilot to take to the skies. As they get ready to fly, hot air balloonists check the weather from every angle, carefully analyzing wind speeds on sites like RyanCarlton.com (run by a hot air balloon instructor of the same name) or Windy.com.

“That information also helps us determine where we might take off depending on where we’re trying to fly,” McKenzie says. “We have to make sure that there isn’t rain or storms in the forecast, and we need at least five miles of visibility. If the dew point is too close to the temperature, there is likely fog.” If there is fog, she can’t fly.

As an experienced pilot, McKenzie has a checklist of items before she takes to the air. Weather analysis, crew preparation and briefing, navigation planning, launch site selection, a pre-flight inspection, and more. (Her day job also involves transportation; she’s a communications manager for Ford, an expert on trucks like the Super Duty, F-150, F-150 Raptor, Ranger, and Maverick.)

[Related: The biggest hot air balloon in the US was built to carry skydivers]

Once she’s in the basket and off the ground, McKenzie continues to monitor the weather and wind closely, manages the fuel in her propane tanks, scans the area for obstacles, and engages in constant aeronautical decision-making, which is a systematic approach to the mental process used by pilots to consistently determine the best course of action in response to a given set of circumstances.

“The most challenging thing is the uncertainty of the weather,” McKenzie says. “We’ll go out to the field and be ready to go but we’ll have to wait for it to calm down. You have to be really flexible and patient, which can be challenging.”

Getting ready to fly

To start, McKenzie picks her launch spot depending on which direction she wants to travel, based on the wind. Then, she and her crew assemble the burner components and connect it to the basket. They tip the basket on its side and spread out the balloon fabric (called the envelope), connecting the cables from the balloon envelope to the basket. Employing a powerful fan, the crew holds open the mouth of the balloon to inflate it with cool air. McKenzie turns on her propane tanks, ensures her crew is ready, and uses the burner to shoot a 15-foot-long, 5-foot-wide flame into the balloon, heating the air to stabilize it and make the balloon rise. 

Once there’s enough heat inside the envelope (the fabric portion of the balloon system that holds the heated air mass), it becomes buoyant and floats up, trying to rise above the cooler surrounding air. It takes a lot of upward force (or buoyancy) to counteract gravity when you consider the mass of the basket and all its passengers, which is why hot air balloons are usually so massive. One of Dawn’s balloons is 90,000 cubic feet and about eight stories tall. 

[Related: This Florida teen is making a business out of rebuilding old-school auto tech]

At the top of the balloon, a giant circular panel of material called a parachute top is used to vent heat or deflate the envelope. Held in place by Velcro tabs during inflation, the parachute top is connected to a long red line that pilots use to let hot air out of the balloon; it quickly seals back up. In that way, McKenzie controls her climb or descent.

Steering is dependent on the direction of the wind. As the balloon climbs higher, it’s getting wind from one direction or another, and knowing which way it’s coming from and at which altitude determines where the pilot should fly to get where they’re going.

“Sometimes, when you’re lower to the ground you’ll go left, and higher you’ll go right, for example,” McKenzie says. “The winds are constantly changing, so we’re looking at the reports ahead of the flight and after we set up and even once we’re in the air.”

McKenzie likes to fly during the few hours around sunrise and sunset, as do most pilots, because during the day, there is often thermal activity that isn’t safe for ballooning. Those thermal vertical currents make it more difficult to control the balloon, adding a serious element of danger to be avoided as much as possible.

“Heat off the pavement makes the unstable air rise up and forces warm air upward,” McKenzie says. “It pushes the balloon up with it, so you might start to climb or fall when you hadn’t planned to do that; it’s really unnerving.”

Wind between 10 to 12 knots (about 12 to 14 mph) is ideal, she says. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration describes a knot as one nautical mile per hour, used to measure speed; a nautical mile is slightly more than a standard mile on the ground.

“You don’t always know exactly where you’re going to land, but that’s exciting,” McKenzie says. “That makes it an adventure.”

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Last week at a ranch outside Dallas, Texas, hundreds of people gathered to hobnob and discuss topics like transportation, aviation, drones, and more. Some were clad in cowboy hats. The event, called the UP.Summit, included investors, politicians, business leaders, representatives from large companies like Airbus, Bell, Boeing, as well as relatively newer players like Beta Technologies and Joby Aviation that are working on electric aircraft. 

On display was gear and hardware from companies like Wisk, Zipline, Jedsy, and much more.  

Take a look at some of the flying machines and other gadgets and equipment that were at the event, which is put on by investment firm UP.Partners.

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On the second floor of the Walter E. Washington convention center in the District of Columbia sits a robot tanklet, designed to hunt drones. The uncrewed vehicle is the TRX SHORAD, and it is part of the display from defense giant General Dynamics Land Systems, assembled alongside the wares of over 650 other exhibitors for the annual Association of the United States Army meeting and exhibition. The TRX SHORAD suggests a future of robot-assisted combat, where attacks by drones are met with the automated speed and power of a companion robot built to destroy quadcopters.

TRX SHORAD is a composite name. TRX is the category name for General Dynamics 10-ton tracked robots, a platform that can accommodate a range of payloads including cargo and weapons. SHORAD is a military acronym for “Short Range Air Defense,” a category that is somewhat vague but broadly includes finding and destroying threats such as drones, helicopters, low-flying planes, and more.

“The TRX SHORAD is designed to bring a new dimension of combat power in SHORAD battalions and provides autonomy within a tiered, layered air defense,” reads the description from a General Dynamics video of the vehicle. 

[Related: The Army’s new 42-ton assault vehicle has a compelling backstory]

In the video, a blurred-out quadcopter with the rough contours of a DJI Phantom is spotted moving over a field. The TRX SHORAD tracks the drone across the sky, then pivots its turret, aiming what appears to be rockets and a large caliber gun at the drone. With a powerful “ka-thunk,” the robot’s turret fires on the quadcopter, and the still-blurred drone falls after a cloud of smoke. In a second demonstration, a similarly blurred-out quadcopter erupts into a smoke cloud and plummets. Unblurred, in the background of the video, is a drone that appears to be patterned like a DJI Inspire, which was likely used to capture much of the mid-air footage.

This is a kind of aerial warfare, but it takes place in the low sky, the space immediately above the heads of soldiers and vehicles. It’s a space previously occupied largely by projectiles, rockets and mortars and missiles. Drones, which offer greater scouting possibilities while also carrying weapons and facilitating attacks, change the fundamental dynamic of aerial threats to armies.

What is most crucial about the range of threats these weapons are designed to stop is that they exist at a cost, operational profile, and likely even altitude that is hard for the jet fighters of the Air Force to intercept and destroy in a timely way. In other words, a quadcopter can launch, scout, and return before a jet can be launched to respond. The Army used to maintain dedicated units called Air Defense Artillery to protect against aerial threats, but, as a report from the Congressional Research Service notes, “in the early 2000s, these ADA units were divested from the Army to meet force demands deemed more critical at that time. Decisionmakers accepted the increased risk that threat aircraft might pose to ground forces and other critical assets because they believed the U.S. Air Force could maintain air superiority.”

What has changed since the early 2000s is the preponderance of drones used by militaries. “Since 2005, potential threats from air and missile platforms that could threaten U.S. ground forces have significantly increased. The use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) has increased, and UASs have been used successfully by both sides in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict,” the CRS report notes.

These drones come in a range of sizes and variable threats. Small, hobbyist or commercial drones, like the DJI Phantom models used for anti-drone target practice, can carry cameras and be flown by anyone in minutes. In the summer of 2022, Russian infantry reported that moving in battle without quadcopters was like “fighting as ‘blind kittens.’” These drones can also be adapted to carry small bombs, the size of grenades or so. With a first-person view, or cameras allowing remote pilots to steer the drone as though they are on board, cheap drone bombers have been used to devastating effect in battle.

While commercial drones are commonly used in battle, drone scouts the size of small planes can fulfill a role once taken on by human-piloted aircraft, carrying weapons and intelligence missions at a greater distance than the short-range drones flown by infantry squads. Self-detonating drones, used as cheaper alternatives to cruise missiles, are abundant and deadly enough to constitute yet another new threat on the battlefield.

All of these threats pose a risk that is hard for an air force to directly address. This is the layer of layered defense that vehicles like the TRX SHORAD, or other SHORAD vehicles, are designed to fill. With bullets for small drones, larger projectiles for bigger and faster threats, and sensors to detect and track the movements of aircraft, TRX SHORAD could accompany soldiers, trucks, and tanks on maneuver, offering another line of defense against the crowded low skies of modern warfare.

Watch a video of TRX SHORAD below:

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The F-35 is built for a war fought with missiles. The United States’ newest stealth fighter comes in three flavors: F-35A for the Air Force, F-35B for the Marine Corps, and F-35C for the Navy. All variants are built around a shared architecture and mission: to destroy enemy targets, while evading detection long enough to return and fly another day. These missions are, thanks to the specific nature of stealth, at cross-purposes: weapons carried externally by a plane make it more visible to radar, undermining stealth, while only storing weapons internally limits what a fighter can bring to battle. 

On September 25, the Air Force publicly stated it had earlier that month awarded a contract to defense giant Northrop Grumman Defense Systems to start work on the Stand-in Attack Weapon, or “SiAW.” The contract, with a value of up to $705 million, is for “an advanced air-to-surface missile providing stand-in platforms the ability to rapidly strike a wide variety of targets.”

“Air-to-surface” encompasses virtually everything not in the sky or orbit as a potential target, and given that the F-35 is designed to fight at sea as well as over land, it includes ships, tanks, buildings, and anything else below. Northrop Grumman, in a September 25 release, emphasized that the SiAW will “provide strike capability to defeat rapidly relocatable targets as part of an enemy’s anti-access/area denial environment.”

“Anti-access/area denial” is modern military jargon for an old concept. The terms essentially mean weapons that will attack and threaten to destroy planes, boats, and other enemies that move too close to the defenses. Because weapon technologies adapt, the military uses a catch-all term, though some specific examples are useful for understanding these techniques. On land and in the sea, mines are a kind of denial technology, as they threaten anyone attempting passage with an abrupt and explosive end. For aircraft, anti-air missiles can deny aircraft safe flight, as can jammers that interfere with sensors like radar or GPS. For marines advancing up a beach, or soldiers fighting through a forest, artillery fire is an attempt to deny access. Anti-ship missiles, like their anti-air counterparts, threaten any ship that advances within range, promising a watery death should they hit a vulnerable enough spot.

In peacetime, these defenses serve as a warning, as an ominous threat of what a country could threaten should hostilities break out. Should the United States go to war against a country with such defenses, it will want to destroy as many of them as it can, while allowing its own forces to get close enough. This is where a weapon like the SiAW comes into play. 

The SiAW is designed to be carried internally by the F-35, Janes reports. That means the stealth fighters can use the weapon without compromising their stealth, as weapons carried externally make the planes more visible on radar. Stealth is largely a material and structural technology, where the specific shape and texture of a plane are used to minimize how few radio waves are reflected back towards the radar that emitted them. Earlier in September, the efficacy of this stealth was clearly on display, after an F-35B pilot ejected and the Marine Corps turned to the public for help tracking down the missing plane.

Stealth ensures that the F-35s can get closer to their targets than they would without it. Air and Space Forces Magazine reports that the Air Force is setting the targets for the SiAW as air defense radars, command posts, ballistic and cruise missile launchers, GPS jamming systems, anti-satellite systems, and “other high-value or fleeting targets.”  Destroying any and all of those targets make it easier for other parts of the military to advance and survive, including jets with more weapons that aren’t stealthy. 

The Air Force has declined to give the range for the new SiAW weapon, though the operating assumption is that it will be longer range than the High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM) air-to-surface missiles in use today. Those missiles have a stated range of over 30 miles. The Air Force aims to have the SiAW at an initial operational capability by 2026; it expects to buy 400 of the missiles by 2028, with up to 3,000 eventually.

Should the missile deliver as promised, it will allow F-35s to launch attacks on targets at useful ranges, giving the military more options than just long-range cruise missiles to destroy important targets in advance of an assault. Unlike cruise missiles, SiAWs fired from F-35s or other planes will be able to catch more mobile vehicles, ensuring that if there’s a weapon that can be relocated, the missile is a tool to destroy it before it disappears.

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

IF A BUILDING COLLAPSES or a bomb goes off, there are often more people who need medical treatment than there are people who can help them. That mismatch is what defines a mass casualty incident. The military’s most famous R&D agency, DARPA, wants to figure out how to better handle those situations, so more people come out of them alive.

That’s the goal of what the agency is calling the DARPA Triage Challenge, a three-year program that kicks off November 6 and will bring together medical knowledge, autonomous vehicles, noninvasive sensors, and algorithms to prioritize and plan patient care when there are too many patients and not enough care—a process typically called triage. Teams, yet to be named, will compete to see if their systems can categorize injured people in large, complex situations and determine their need for treatment.

A sorting hat for disasters

Triage is no simple task, even for people who make it part of their profession, says Stacy Shackelford, the trauma medical director for the Defense Health Agency’s Colorado Springs region. Part of the agency’s mandate is to manage military hospitals and clinics. “Even in the trauma community, the idea of triage is somewhat of a mysterious topic,” she says. 

The word triage comes from the French, and it means, essentially, “sorting casualties.” When a host of humans get injured at the same time, first responders can’t give them all equal, simultaneous attention. So they sort them into categories: minimal, minorly injured; delayed, seriously injured but not in an immediately life-threatening way; immediate, severely injured in such a way that prompt treatment would likely be lifesaving; and expectant, dead or soon likely to be. “It really is a way to decide who needs lifesaving interventions and who can wait,” says Shackelford, “so that you can do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.”

The question of whom to treat when and how has always been important, but it’s come to the fore for the Defense Department as the nature of global tensions changes, and as disasters that primarily affect civilians do too. “A lot of the military threat currently revolves around what would happen if we went towards China or we went to war with Russia, and there’s these types of near-peer conflicts,” says Shackelford. The frightening implication is that there would be more injuries and deaths than in other recent conflicts. “Just the sheer number of possible casualties that could occur.” Look, too, at the war in Ukraine. 

The severity, frequency, and unpredictability of some nonmilitary disasters—floods, wildfires, and more—is also shifting as the climate changes. Meanwhile, mass shootings occur far too often; a damaged nuclear power plant could pose a radioactive risk; earthquakes topple buildings; poorly maintained buildings topple themselves. Even the pandemic, says Jeffrey Freeman, director of the National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health at the Uniformed Services University, has been a kind of slow-moving or rolling disaster. It’s not typically thought of as a mass casualty incident. But, says Freeman, “The effects are similar in some ways, in that you have large numbers of critically ill patients in need of care, but dissimilar in that those in need are not limited to a geographic area.” In either sort of scenario, he continues, “Triage is critical.”

Freeman’s organization is currently managing an assessment, mandated by Congress, of the National Medical Disaster System, which was set up in the 1980s to manage how the Department of Defense, military treatment facilities, Veterans Affairs medical centers, and civilian hospitals under the Department of Health and Human Services respond to large-scale catastrophes, including combat operations overseas. He sees the DARPA Triage Challenge as highly relevant to dealing with incidents that overwhelm the existing system—a good goal now and always. “Disasters or wars themselves are sort of unpredictable, seemingly infrequent events. They’re almost random in their occurrence,” he says. “The state of disaster or the state of catastrophe is actually consistent. There are always disasters occurring, there are always conflicts occurring.” 

He describes the global state of disaster as “continuous,” which makes the Triage Challenge, he says, “timeless.”

What’s more, the concept of triage, Shackelford says, hasn’t really evolved much in decades, which means the potential fruits of the DARPA Triage Challenge—if it pans out—could make a big difference in what the “greatest good, greatest number” approach can look like. With DARPA, though, research is always a gamble: The agency takes aim at tough scientific and technological goals, and often misses, a model called “high-risk, high-reward” research.

Jean-Paul Chretien, the Triage Challenge program manager at DARPA, does have some specific hopes for what will emerge from this risk—like the ability to identify victims who are more seriously injured than they seem. “It’s hard to tell by looking at them that they have these internal injuries,” he says. The typical biosignatures people check to determine a patient’s status are normal vital signs: pulse, blood pressure, respiration. “What we now know is that those are really lagging indicators of serious injury, because the body’s able to compensate,” Chretien says. But when it can’t anymore? “They really fall off a cliff,” he says. In other words, a patient’s pulse or blood pressure may seem OK, but a major injury may still be present, lurking beneath that seemingly good news. He hopes the Triage Challenge will uncover more timely physiological indicators of such injuries—indicators that can be detected before a patient is on the precipice.

Assessment from afar

The DARPA Triage Challenge could yield that result, as it tasks competitors—some of whom DARPA is paying to participate in the competition, and some of whom will fund themselves—with two separate goals. The first addresses the primary stage of triage (the sorting of people in the field) while the second deals with what to do once they’re in treatment. 

For the first stage, Triage Challenge competitors have to develop sensor systems that can assess victims at a distance, gathering data on physiological signatures of injury. Doing this from afar could keep responders from encountering hazards, like radioactivity or unstable buildings, during that process. The aim is to have the systems move autonomously by the end of the competition.

The signatures such systems seek may include, according to DARPA’s announcement of the project, things like “ability to move, severe hemorrhage, respiratory distress, and alertness.” Competitors could equip robots or drones with computer-vision or motion-tracking systems, instruments that use light to measure changes in blood volume, lasers that analyze breathing or heart activity, or speech recognition capabilities. Or all of the above. Algorithms the teams develop must then extract meaningful conclusions from the data collected—like who needs lifesaving treatment right now. 

The second focus of the DARPA Triage Challenge is the period after the most urgent casualties have received treatment—the secondary stage of triage. For this part, competitors will develop technology to dig deeper into patients’ statuses and watch for changes that are whispering for help. The real innovations for this stage will come from the algorithmic side: software that, for instance, parses the details of an electrocardiogram—perhaps using a noninvasive electrode in contact with the skin—looking at the whole waveform of the heart’s activity and not just the beep-beep of a beat, or software that does a similar stare into a pulse oximeter’s output to monitor the oxygen carried in red blood cells. 

For her part, Shackelford is interested in seeing teams incorporate a sense of time into triage—which sounds obvious but has been difficult in practice, in the chaos of a tragedy. Certain conditions are extremely chronologically limiting. Something fell on you and you can’t breathe? Responders have three minutes to fix that problem. Hemorrhaging? Five to 10 minutes to stop the bleeding, 30 minutes to get a blood transfusion, an hour for surgical intervention. “All of those factors really factor into what is going to help a person at any given time,” she says. And they also reveal what won’t help, and who can’t be helped anymore.

Simulating disasters

DARPA hasn’t announced the teams it plans to fund yet, and self-funded teams also haven’t revealed themselves. But whoever they are, over the coming three years, they will face a trio of competitions—one at the end of each year, each of which will address both the primary and secondary aspects of triage.

The primary triage stage competitions will be pretty active. “We’re going to mock up mass-casualty scenes,” says Chretien. There won’t be people with actual open wounds or third-degree burns, of course, but actors pretending to have been part of a disaster. Mannequins, too, will be strewn about. The teams will bring their sensor-laden drones and robots. “Those systems will have to, on their own, find the casualties,” he says. 

These competitions will feature three scenarios teams will cycle through, like a very stressful obstacle course. “We’ll score them based on how quickly they complete the test,” Chretien says, “how good they are at actually finding the casualties, and then how accurately they assess their medical status.” 

But it won’t be easy: The agency’s description of the scenarios says they might involve both tight spaces and big fields, full light and total darkness, “dust, fog, mist, smoke, talking, flashing light, hot spots, and gunshot and explosion sounds.” Victims may be buried under debris, or overlapping with each other, challenging sensors to detect and individuate them.

DARPA is also building a virtual world that mimics the on-the-ground scenarios, for a virtual version of the challenge. “This will be like a video-game-type environment but [with the] same idea,” he says. Teams that plan to do the concrete version can practice digitally, and Chretien also hopes that teams without all the hardware they need to patrol the physical world will still try their hands digitally. “It should be easier in terms of actually having the resources to participate,” he says. 

The secondary stage’s competitions will be a little less dramatic. “There’s no robotic system, no physical simulation going on there,” says Chretien. Teams will instead get real clinical trauma data, from patients hospitalized in the past, gathered from the Maryland Shock Trauma Center and the University of Pittsburgh. Their task is to use that anonymized patient data to determine each person’s status and whether and what interventions would have been called for when. 

At stake is $7 million in total prize money over three years, and for the first two years, only teams that DARPA didn’t already pay to participate are eligible to collect. 

Also at stake: a lot of lives. “What can we do, technologically, that can make us more efficient, more effective,” says Freeman, “with the limited amount of people that we have?” 

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Aerospace companies that create a new stealth aircraft as their signature achievement face a conundrum. They put years if not decades of work into its aerodynamic and industrial design and its state-of-the-art technology, creating a machine that carries terrible destructive power. And after all that, the contours of the design can be public but the details must remain somewhat obscured. This is true especially when it comes to the physical shape of the plane itself, as the exterior form of a stealth plane is part of what makes stealth possible. All of these concerns made it an unexpected surprise, and a planespotter’s delight, when the United States Air Force released two new photos of the stealthy B-21 Raider on September 12.

On the military media repository platform DVIDS (Defense Visual Information Distribution Service), the new photos are dated July 31. One shows the Raider, head-on, in the hangar. The other has the Raider outside the hangar, at sunset.

The details revealed in the photographs are remarkable, but it is important to start with what is left out of these images. The rear of the bomber, and especially the exhaust ports, are not visible. Stealth, as a family of technologies, is primarily designed to hide aircraft from detection by refracted radar waves. Jet engines, full of spinning blades at a sharp angle to the world, are refractive, so in stealth design the turbines are tucked away behind inlets. Exhaust ports, while not as radar-revelatory, will show up on sensors that look for infrared and heat. Missiles that seek heat are decades old, and looking for exhaust is one tried and true way to see what a low-visibility design on radar obscures.

The available angles on the B-21, including these new photographs as well as photos from the initial flashy December roll-out, all largely serve to obscure the control surfaces on the Raider’s flying wing body. One photo taken March 7 offers an angle somewhat from above, but that photo is at a much lower resolution than the others.

But while it’s easy to focus on what the new photos of the Raider don’t show, what’s at least as compelling is the new evidence contained in these latest releases. Tyler Rogoway of The War Zone focused in part on the “ejection hatch panels.” He observed: “They sit far back and are another indicator of just how limited the pilots’ visibility will likely be in this aircraft. They also speak to the challenge that is judging the proportions on the alien-like B-21. The cockpit is either very small or very tall. We are leaning toward the former. We also see the aerial refueling markings peeking out from atop the aircraft’s bulged spine.” (The War Zone is owned by Recurrent Ventures, PopSci’s parent company.)

Other hidden gems abound, and Rogoway’s analysis offers insight. One that is pertinent to future observations of the bomber is that the B-21 on display, serial number 0001, has a large probe affixed to it. This will collect data in-flight for testing purposes, whenever the Raider makes its first test flight later this year.

In addition to the two photos released by the Air Force on September 12, Northrop Grumman, makers of the B-21, released a photo of the bomber on the same day. This photo was paired with an announcement that the Raider is undergoing engine runs, part of the testing to ensure that the plane’s power plant works as intended in the aircraft. 

“Engine testing is an essential milestone for the program as the world’s first sixth-generation aircraft continues on the path to flight test,” reads the Northrop Grumman announcement. “The B-21’s first flight will remain a data driven event that is monitored by Northrop Grumman and the United States Air Force.”

Airplane generations vary depending on the exact counting, but it is important to note that the B-21 is not just a stealth flying wing, but a successor stealth flying wing to the B-2 Spirit. In more than most senses, this means the plane represents an era shift in design, even as it draws from similar lessons about form.

Rogoway notes that the quarter view of the Raider reveals “Just how deeply ‘buried’ the Raider’s [engine] inlets — one of the most exotic and challenging low-observable features of the design — truly are.” He added: “This is a good reminder of just how the Raider will conceal its engine inlets from adversary radars, especially those emitting from any aspect below the aircraft.”

Until the Air Force flies the B-21 for the first time, analysis and understanding of the plane will come in bits and pieces as new filtered images trickle out. That is, unless details about the bomber end up leaked to the War Thunder forums, as has already happened with classified documents about two different military aircraft this month.

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A white-hulled MQ-4C Triton accelerated down a runway in Guam before lifting off into dark clouds. The video, captured August 18 by the US Navy, was recorded to mark a modest milestone in the drone program. The Navy’s Tritons have now reached “initial operating capability,” meaning that enough aircraft, spare parts, and crew are available to use the vehicles as intended. The Triton, the Navy’s version of the RQ-4 Global Hawk flown by the Air Force since 2001, is an eye in the sky, tasked with watching the ocean.

Located over 3,700 miles west from Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and just over 1,800 miles east from the coast of China, Guam is a centerpiece literally and figuratively in the plans and ability of the United States to operate in the Pacific Ocean. The Triton is a flying sensor platform, built for long endurance and maritime domain awareness, or watching and tracking action on the sea below. The Navy’s P-8 Poseidon, a crewed maritime surveillance plane based on the Boeing 737 airline airframe, flies with a nine-person team on board. Being able to have drones perform some of this type of observation, with fresh human crews on the ground swapping out multiple times mid-flight, means that the Navy can maintain surveillance for an extended time.

It takes a team of five to operate the Triton. That means someone to manage the drone’s flight, two people to manage its different sets of sensors, one person in charge of the signals it sends and collects, and a coordinator in charge of the whole operation. The Triton has a wingspan of 130 feet, meaning that its wings stretch wider than those on a 737. It flies at a cruising cruising speed of about 368 mph.

[Related: The US military’s tiniest drone feels like it flew straight out of a sci-fi film]

“We have been successfully operating Triton in Guam for several years, and now we have expanded this platform’s capabilities far beyond those it started with,” said Josh Guerre, MQ-4C Triton program manager, in a release.

Two Tritons were first deployed to Guam, as part of the Navy’s Unmanned Patrol Squad 19 (shortened to VUP-19), in January 2020 through October 2022. That time allowed for significant observations to be made in how the drones operated, and meant that when the Navy redeployed them this summer to Guam, the drones’ sensors had received a major upgrade. 

Those sensors are likely the signals intelligence (SIGINT) sensor upgrades boasted about earlier by Triton maker Northrop Grumman: “Triton Multi-INT gets its name from the addition of two new SIGINT sensors: one that gathers electronic intelligence and one that gathers communications intelligence. We’ve also removed an older electronic support measures sensor and installed a new, more capable version of the electro-optical infrared sensor flying on Triton today, said Rob Zmarzlak, chief engineer for Northrop Grumman’s Autonomous ISR and Targeting Programs, in a release.

One of the distinct challenges of watching for activity on the ocean, as compared to scanning for action on the ground, is that the vast and largely uniform expanse of the sea can be especially devoid of human activity, outside of major sea lanes. By listening for the signals given off from boats and ships, the Triton can more reliably find useful activity onto which it can train its cameras.

Northrop Grumman boasts that the Triton can, from an altitude of 50,000 feet and on a mission lasting 24 hours, survey four million nautical miles. That’s a major delivery on the promise of the Triton, which first flew in 2013. As Popular Science said at the time, its high altitude flights will allow it to take in “a 2,000-nautical-mile view of the ocean in every direction” and then “it will be able to tell a container ship from a Chinese frigate from a surfacing Russian submarine–from up to 2,000 nautical miles away (we felt that point was worth stressing here). Triton’s strengthened airframe, augmented with de-icing technology, will then allow it to rapidly descend and ascend, so it can swoop in for a closer look at vessels of particular interest.”

Even as the Navy prepares for Tritons to become a regular part of operations, USNI News reports that the Navy is looking to halt the production of Tritons at just 27 total units, down from the original plan of 70. The Triton is useful for extensive watching of the sea, especially in conjunction with other tools, but it comes with a serious price tag. For 2022, the unit cost of each Triton was roughly $141 million.  Even as the US Navy scales down the number of Tritons it is looking to buy and maintain, Australia is looking to expand the number of Tritons it will use and operate from three to four.

Watch the Triton’s ascent in Guam below:

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A new high-tech surveillance drone developed by a California-based startup Skydio will include infrared sensors, cameras capable of reading license plates as far as 800 feet away, and the ability to reach top speeds of 45 mph. Skydio hopes “intelligent flying machines”–like its new drone X10–will become part of the “basic infrastructure” supporting law enforcement, government organizations, and private businesses. Such an infrastructure is already developing across the country. Meanwhile, critics are renewing their privacy and civil liberties concerns about what they believe remains a dangerously unregulated industry.

Skydio first unveiled its new X10 on September 20, which Wired detailed in a new rundown on Tuesday. The company’s latest model is part of a push to “get drones everywhere they can be useful in public safety,” according to CEO Adam Bry during last week’s launch event. Prior to the X10’s release, Skydio has reportedly sold over 40,000 other “intelligent flying machines” to more than 1,500 clients over the past decade, including the US Army Rangers and the UK’s Ministry of Defense. Skydio execs, however, openly express their desire to continue expanding drone adoption even further via a self-explanatory concept deemed “drone as first responder” (DFR).

[Related: The Army skips off-the-shelf drones for a new custom quadcopter.]

In such scenarios, drones like the X10 can be deployed in less than 40 seconds by on-the-scene patrol officers from within a backpack or car trunk. From there, however, the drones can be piloted via onboard 5G connectivity by operators at remote facilities and command centers. Skydio believes drones like its X10 are equipped with enough cutting edge tools to potentially even aid in stopping high-speed car chases.

To allow for this kind of support, however, drone operators are increasingly required to obtain clearance from the FAA for what’s known as beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) flights. Such a greenlight allows drone pilots to control fleets from centralized locations instead of needing to remain onsite. BVLOS clearances are currently major goals for retail companies like Walmart and Amazon, as well as shipping giants like UPS, who will need such certifications to deliver to customers at logistically necessary distances. According to Skydio, the company has already supported customers in “getting over 20 waivers” for BVLOS flight, although its X10 announcement does not provide specifics as to how. 

Drone usage continues to rise across countless industries, both commercial and law enforcement related. As the ACLU explains, drones’ usages in scientific research, mapping, and search-and-rescue missions are undeniable, “but deployed without proper regulation, drones [can be] capable of monitoring personal conversations would cause unprecedented invasions of our privacy rights.”

Meanwhile, civil rights advocates continue to warn that there is very little in the way of such oversight for the usage of drones among the public during events such as political demonstrations, protests, as well as even simply large gatherings and music festivals.

“Any adoption of drones, regardless of the time of day or visibility conditions when deployed, should include robust policies, consideration of community privacy rights, auditable paper trails recording the reasons for deployment and the information captured, and transparency around the other equipment being deployed as part of the drone,” Beryl Lipton, an investigative researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells PopSci.

“The addition of night vision capabilities to drones can enable multiple kinds of 24-hour police surveillance,” Lipton adds.

Despite Skydio’s stated goals, critics continue to push back against claims that such technology benefits the public, and instead violates privacy rights while disproportionately targeting marginalized communities. Organizations such as the New York Civil Liberties Union cites police drones deployed at protests across 15 cities in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd.

[ Related: Here is what a Tesla Cybertruck cop car could look like ]

Skydio has stated in the past it does not support weaponized drones, although as Wired reports, the company maintains an active partnership with Axon, makers of police tech like Tasers. Currently, Skydio is only integrating its drone fleets with Axon software sold to law enforcement for evidence management and incident responses.

Last year, Axon announced plans to develop a line of Taser-armed drones shortly after the Uvalde school shooting massacre. The news prompted near immediate backlash, causing Axon to backtrack less than a week later—but not before the majority of the company’s AI Ethics board resigned in protest.

Update 09/26/23 1:25pm: This article has been updated to include a response from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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Today, members of the military and an executive from Joby Aviation used a giant pair of scissors to cut a ribbon in front of an electric flying machine parked at Edwards Air Force Base in California. 

The moment is significant because, with the exception of small electric drones, the other aircraft that the Department of Defense have on hand are powered by fossil fuels. Cargo planes, fighter jets, helicopters, and other flying machines that can carry people or hefty cargo all burn petroleum products. But the flying machine behind the ribbon, an air taxi from a company called Joby Aviation, is a different kind of craft—like an EV, it’s powered by batteries. The aircraft has now taken up residence at Edwards Air Force Base in California, a facility famous as a flight testing center, where it might patrol or inspect the rugged landscape. 

The electric aircraft sports six large propellers that can tilt, enabling the machine to take off and land vertically and also fly horizontally, like a regular plane. Think of it as something like a small version of the military tiltrotor aircraft that already exist, such as the V-22 Osprey or the V-280 Valor. It has space for four passengers (or 1,000 pounds of cargo), one pilot, and can fly at speeds of 200 miles per hour.

[Related: The US military’s tiniest drone feels like it flew straight out of a sci-fi film]

Joby has been testing and developing electric aircraft for years; it flew a “subscale demonstrator,” or small version of the plane, back in 2015. The full-sized aircraft that Joby has delivered to the Air Force is the first production prototype to come off the company’s line in Marina, California, in June. “It’s massive” as a moment, JoeBen Bevirt, the company’s CEO, tells PopSci. “This is like a dream come true.” 

There are a couple ways that the Air Force might use the aircraft. One is to patrol the Edwards Air Force Base’s sprawling footprint, which spans more than 400 square miles. (It’s an area bigger than New York City.)  Because the base is so big, says Maj. Philip Woodhull, who focuses on emerging technologies in the Air Force, the people who guard it “have quite a time doing perimeter security management.” 

“One of the ideas that we’re thinking of—an experiment we can do—is using a Joby aircraft for security forces purposes to do these perimeter sweeps,” he says. Their plan is to fly the aircraft remotely at first, meaning that a pilot would be operating it from the ground, without humans inside. 

The Joby craft could also monitor a giant lake bed at the base, which Woodhull says measures 12 by 20 miles in size. That area “is a great resource for doing emergency landings, but it is a natural landscape,” he says. The weather can alter the condition of the designated runways in the lake bed, and so, Woodhull says, “we always have to check whether the runways that we have designated out there are actually usable.” The Joby aircraft could help with that inspection process, as opposed to taking pickup trucks out to the site, although the initial plan is to fly the aircraft without anyone in it. If the Air Force becomes comfortable putting crew inside, though, the aircraft could also help transport people or supplies from one part of the base to another. The testing at the base will involve NASA, as well.

An aircraft that flies on electric power will be quieter than one that uses loud engines powered by fossil fuels, and that attribute could also have military appeal for other purposes. “There’s been significant interest across not only the other services,” such as the Army and Marine Corps, says Col. Thomas Meagher, who works with an Air Force program called AFWERX Agility Prime, but also “on the special forces side.”

“Low acoustic signature has lots of benefits for the DOD in some of those scenarios,” he adds. 

While delivery of the Joby air taxi to the Air Force represents a milestone, Bevirt notes that it remains “a Joby asset” even in DOD hands. And another Joby aircraft should be delivered to the base next year. Joby’s long-term plan is to eventually operate an air-taxi service for regular people to hail via an app like they would an Uber, and they’ve announced plans to partner with Delta.

Meagher says that this is the first electric aircraft “of this class”—specifically, it can carry several people, has tiltrotors, and a fixed wing—that the Air Force will use for an extended period. Meagher notes that they have previously experimented with a machine from a company called Lift by remotely flying it—that aircraft is a wild-looking contraption designed to carry one person. The Air Force also has experience with flying an electric aircraft from Vermont’s Beta Technologies. Beta has started to build an electric aircraft charging station at Duke Field near Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base. 

At the ribbon cutting ceremony today, Col. Douglas Wickert, who commands the 412th Test Wing at Edwards Air Force Base, commented about the aircraft behind him: “Just looking at that, I mean you’re looking at the future—that is obvious.” 

Watch the event below.

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A regular helicopter has two pretty visible main components: the top rotor, for giving the flying machine lift, and the tail rotor, to function as an anti-torque system and keep the aircraft from spinning in circles. 

A new aircraft from Airbus Helicopters, the H160, takes the tail rotor and tilts it at an angle of 10 degrees. Why do that? It gives the helicopter “free lift,” says Olivier Gensse, the H160’s test pilot. In other words, since the tail rotor is tilted ever so slightly downwards, in addition to carrying out its main anti-torque function, it also directs some thrust downwards. “It’s one percent” of the helicopter’s total lift, Gensse says. (The H160 is not the only helicopter with a canted tail rotor.)

The tail rotor is also enclosed in something called a Fenestron, which gives it an element of safety, because a tail rotor can be a source of serious danger for those on the ground, especially if it’s not enclosed. To understand where the word Fenestron comes from, consider the French word for “window,” which is fenetre, as well as the word fenestrou, which Airbus points out “is Provençal for ‘little window’” and is what the Fenestron used to be called. The H160 also has a design change to its main rotor blades that makes them quieter.

[Related: The US military’s tiniest drone feels like it flew straight out of a sci-fi film]

This June, the H160 received its FAA type certification, although US pilots still need to finish a formal training process allowing them to fly the aircraft for a US carrier, meaning that the H160 may not be operating here until 2024. The helicopter is already flying in places like Europe, Brazil, and Japan; Airbus first showed it off back in 2015.

Take a closer look at the design features of the helicopter, which Gensse refers to as “the first of the new generation” of Airbus helicopters, below.

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For roughly 24 hours, between the afternoon of September 17 and the evening of September 18, the United States Marine Corps couldn’t find one of its F-35B stealth fighter jets. The pilot had ejected, but it took the military a spell to find the jet, and in the process it put out a call for the public to keep their eyes peeled for the plane. Joint Base Charleston confirmed Monday evening that a debris field was found two hours northeast of the base, believed to be the crashed plane. 

So how does the military lose a stealth jet? That’s the $100-million question. F-35 unit prices vary by model and the lot in which they are purchased; recent F-35B purchases have cost a high of $108 million per jet and a low of $78.3 million. On the other hand, F-35A models, which the Air Force fly, cost around $69.9 million now, though older lots cost up to $89.2 million. 

The nature of stealth helps explain how it’s possible, in 2023, for the Department of Defense to lose track of one of its own jets, prompting a call for citizens to help search. Stealth is a technology designed to hide planes from radar, so that stealth fighters and bombers can attack buildings, ships, vehicles, and other targets in war with less fear of getting detected and shot down by enemy aircraft and anti-air missiles. To achieve this sort of radar-invisibility, stealth planes have physical shapes that reduce radar signature, along with special coatings that dampen the reflectivity of radio waves.

Because the stealth characteristics are built into jets like the F-35 series, as well as the F-22 fighter, and the B-2 and B-21 bombers, they are just harder for radars to track. One way to keep track of where planes are is a transponder, which sends out a signal announcing the aircraft’s location. Transponders are useful for commercial and military aircraft, and required for almost all flights in US skies, as they allow aircraft to avoid each other. The Washington Post reported that the F-35B’s transponder was not working at the time the pilot ejected, leading the military to ask the public for help locating the plane.

Another way to make stealth jets more visible, and to conceal the true ability of their radar-avoiding shape, is to include high-radar-visibility augmentation, as is sometimes done at air shows. The military sometimes augments the F-35′s cross-section during public or semi-public flights so they will look different on a radar from how it would during an actual combat mission, retired Air Force General Hawk Carlisle told Defense News.

Public transponder records, as reported by the War Zone (which is owned by PopSci’s parent company, Recurrent), show the search pattern the Air Force used to try to locate the lost F-35B before finding the debris field. If other techniques were used to find the plane beyond visual search, it is likely the military will want to keep those secret, as details about how to find a stealth plane could undermine the massive investment already put into stealth jets.

Even if it briefly created a flurry of media attention, the case of the temporarily missing F-35B is just the latest incident of the US military losing control of something powerful and important. Here are several others.

Lost drones

For as long as the military has operated drones, some of those drones have gotten lost. Both of these instances have some similarity to this week’s wild F-35 hunt.

A plane called the Kettering Bug was built during World War I as an “aerial torpedo,” or a flying uncrewed bomb that would, in the fixed trench combat of the time, travel a set distance and then shed its wings to crash into an enemy position with explosive force. The war ended before the Bug could see action, but this predecessor of both drones and cruise missiles was tested as a secret weapon in the United States. 

On October 4, 1918, the biplane bomb took off, and then flew off track. The US Army searched the area near its Dayton, Ohio launch site, asking the public if they had seen a missing plane. Several of the witnesses reported what appeared to be a plane with a drunk pilot, and the Army went along with those stories, saying the pilot had jumped out and was being treated. The plane, as an uncrewed weapon, had no human pilot on board. Rather than reveal the secret weapon, the Army let witnesses believe they had seen something other than the aerial torpedo. The Army found the wreckage of the Bug, recovered its reusable mechanical parts, and burned the wrecked fuselage on the spot.

Almost a century later in 2017, the US Army lost an RQ-7B Shadow drone, which was launched from a base in southern Arizona on January 31, then discovered over a week later on February 9, having crashed into a tree outside of Denver. The Shadow drone has a stated range of under 80 miles, though that range is how far it can fly while remaining in contact with the ground station used by human operators. Shadow drones can also fly for nine hours, with a cruising speed of 81 mph, so the 630-mile journey was within the distance the drone could technically cover. While drones like the Shadow are programmed to search for lost communications signals, autonomous flight features mean that a failure to connect can lead to unusual journeys, like the one the Shadow took.

Lost jets

The F-35B that went missing in South Carolina is just the latest such plane to crash and require search and recovery. In November 2021, a British F-35B operating from the HMS Queen Elizabeth crashed into the Mediterranean. The pilot ejected safely, but the sunken stealth jet, once found, required a maritime salvage operation. 

Then, in January 2022, the US Navy lost an F-35C in the South China Sea. The plane approached too low on a landing, skidded across the deck, and then fell off the deck’s edge into the ocean after the pilot had ejected. The incident injured seven sailors, including the pilot.  The sunken stealth jet had to be recovered from a depth of 12,400 feet, using a specialized remotely operated vessel.

While in both cases these crashes featured witnesses in the general vicinity who knew where the lost planes ended up, the recovery took on a similar sense of importance, as even a crashed and sunken jet could reveal crucial details of the aircraft’s design and operation to another country, had one of them gotten there first.

Lost nukes

While jets are often the most expensive piece of hardware lost in a crash, there’s also the cargo to consider. In February 1958, the US Air Force lost a Mark 15 thermonuclear bomb off the coast of Tybee Island, Georgia, following a mid-air collision with an F-86 fighter jet. To date, the bomb has not yet been found in its watery resting place, despite extensive searching by the US Navy for the months after the incident.

In January 1961, a B-52 bomber transporting two nuclear bombs started to fall apart in the sky above North Carolina. The two bombs crashed into the ground, either as part of the plane or released independently (accounts vary), and neither bomb detonated. But both bombs did come close to detonation, as several safety triggers were activated in the fall, and the whole incident prompted a change to how easy it was to arm US nuclear bombs.

The incident over North Carolina was just one of several nuclear near-misses that came from the transport and failure of systems around US nuclear bombs. In January 1966, a US bomber collided with the tanker refueling it above the village of Palomares in Spain, releasing one nuclear weapon into the sea and three onto land, where two of them cracked open and dispersed the bomb’s plutonium into the wind. The three bombs on land were found and recovered quickly, and the fourth bomb was recovered from the sea after an extensive underwater salvage operation. Cleanup work on the site where the bombs scattered plutonium continued into the 2010s.

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UPDATE: Sept. 18, 2023, 6:50 p.m. ET: On Monday night, the Joint Base Charleston released a statement on X, formerly Twitter, stating: “Personnel from Joint Base Charleston and @MCASBeaufortSC, in close coordination with local authorities, have located a debris field in Williamsburg County. The debris was discovered two hours northeast of JB Charleston. We would like to thank all of our mission partners, as well as local, county, and state authorities, for their dedication and support throughout the search and as we transition to the recovery phase.”

The US military is asking you to help them find their very expensive, very missing jet. According to Joint Base Charleston’s public statement posted on September 17 to Facebook, officials are still searching for an F-35B Lightning II stealth fighter jet after a “mishap” resulted in its pilot safely ejecting somewhere near South Carolina’s Lake Moutrie. Talking with The Washington Post, Joint Base Charleston spokesperson Jeremy Huggins explained the jet’s transponder, usually employed to find aircraft in such situations, has malfunctioned “for some reason that we haven’t yet determined… that’s why we put out the public request for help.”

[Related: Air Force declares F-35 ready for combat.]

Although it is certainly possible one of the military’s most expensive and high tech jets has crashed, Huggins confirmed to NBC News that the pilot (who is in “stable condition”) left their plane in autopilot mode before ejecting—meaning it could actually still be airborne.

“How in the hell do you lose an F-35?” Rep. Nancy Mace posted to X, formerly Twitter Sunday night.

Although the missing plane’s exact cost isn’t confirmed, estimates put a single F-35B Lightning’s worth at somewhere around $78 to $81 million. (The F-35 also comes in an A variant for the Air Force and a C variant for the Navy.) The F-35B is first-and-foremost a stealth craft, featuring different “coatings and designs” that make it much more difficult to detect than standard planes,” according to Huggins. An F-35B can also take off and land vertically, thus requiring much shorter runways than those aboard aircraft carriers. According to Lockheed-Martin’s official description, an F-35B equipped with a full weapons load capacity of 15,000 lb clocks in at Mach 1.6 (around 1,200 mph) while also pulling upwards of 7 G’s during flight. It is currently used within the US Marine Corps, as well as the UK and Italian Air Forces.

The USMC finally declared the F-35B “operational” in 2015 after a decades’ long funding and development saga. At the time, a squadron of 10 jets were estimated to cost somewhere between $1.04 billion and $1.34 billion.

“The public is asked to cooperate with military and civilian authorities as the effort continues,” Joint Base Charleston’s Facebook post explains, adding that any information that could help them be relayed to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing Public Affairs Office at 252-466-3827.

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The biggest hot air balloon in the United States is designed to fly to an altitude of 35,000 feet or higher, carrying seven people in its rattan basket over New Mexico. Five of those people are then planning to jump out of it (wearing parachutes), plunging from an icy altitude where airliners typically fly but balloons rarely travel. Update on September 28: The team successfully carried out the jump.

Hot air balloons do not typically float up to such great heights. “Balloons don’t normally fly above 18,000 feet,” says Andrew Baird, the general manager of Cameron Balloons US, the balloon-making company behind this specific vessel. In fact, he notes, riding a hot air balloon up to 30,000 feet represents a special kind of milestone for anyone who does it. “It’s hard on the body,” he says. “You have to approach the mission scientifically, and with great caution.” 

Flying up to 30,000 feet in a balloon may be rare, but carrying so many people when doing so and even hitting 35,000 feet is “extremely unusual, let alone jumping out of the aircraft.” The purpose of the jump (which aims to break a world record) is to raise money for an organization called the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. 

Here’s what to know about the balloon that will carry these people to such a lofty place, by the numbers.

560,000 cubic feet

This specific balloon is known as the A-560, with the 560 standing for 560,000 cubic feet. That’s the volume of the fabric part of the balloon. 

The fabric that it’s made out of is a kind of nylon known as Hyperlast, and it’s coated on both sides with silicone, says Baird. That silicone keeps the material from being porous.

[Related: The US military’s tiniest drone feels like it flew straight out of a sci-fi film]

“The purpose of a balloon fabric obviously is to trap air—we want to trap all that hot air because that’s what generates the lift,” he says. “We want it to be lightweight and flexible, but we also need it to be rugged, and slightly elastic.” 

“It’s the biggest balloon that Cameron Balloons US has ever made,” he says, although “a few” bigger ones exist in Europe. The company says it will measure about 113 feet tall when it’s inflated all the way.

1,069 pounds

All of that fabric and other related gear weighs more than 1,000 pounds, a figure that doesn’t include the weight of the basket and its burners. And of course, creating that fabric portion takes careful engineering and construction. A hot air balloon is not made out of one piece of fabric, but hundreds. One key component is called a gore, and these segments run longitudinally up and down the balloon. (This page has a helpful image.) “A gore is kind of like a segment of an orange—slightly bulbous, thin at the top, wider in the middle, and thin at the bottom again,” he says. This balloon has 20 gores. “And each one of those gores is made up of a number of panels that run horizontally.” 

The hundreds of panels comprise a type of “jigsaw puzzle,” Baird says.

“You have to know where each piece goes, you have to know which way up it goes, you have to know which way around it goes, and then you have to sew all of those together,” he adds. That sewing is done by people operating industrial sewing machines and joining the segments together with nylon thread, using a special seam. After the panels come together to form a gore, the team will begin to join the gores to one another. 

4 burners

A hot air balloon needs burners to make the air in the fabric nice and toasty. This specific balloon has four. Two of those are “absolutely standard,” he says, and the other two have been “modified specifically for high-altitude operation.” If you want to float up to around 30,000 feet, the standard burners could do the trick, but going north of that altitude demands the special burners. 

The air in the fabric needs to be hot, of course, because that’s the reason the whole thing can fly. The process of launching a balloon starts with just regular air, on the ground, propelled in with fans. 

“Then we turn the burners on, and we heat that air up, and that air expands,” he continues. “And because the balloon is a fixed volume, as the air inside the balloon expands, some of it is forced out of the mouth—and the mass of air that’s forced out of the mouth is exactly equal to the lift that you generate.” An airplane gets its lift from its wings, a helicopter from its spinning top rotor, and in this case the lift comes from burning propane to heat the air. The less dense air in the balloon is lighter than the surrounding air. 

The basket that hangs below the balloon is made from rattan, and the floor of the basket is constructed out of a kind of synthetic plywood. He says it also has a “jump platform.” 

“They will congregate on this platform; they will link up, and they will all go out together,” he says. The initiative is called the Alpha 5 Project and the jump could happen towards the end of this month, although the window for the flight technically spans September 15 to October 15, and, of course, requires nice weather. 

1,000 feet

This special jump involves traveling up very high. But when it comes to regular hot-air ballooning, Baird says that the magic number for having fun is much lower: “The fun way to fly is 1,000 feet or less—once you get above 1,000 feet, everything looks the same, just smaller.”

Being close to the ground in an open basket makes for a special kind of flight. 

“From a sightseeing perspective, the fun way to fly in a balloon is to be down low—if you’re out in the countryside, to come low, to dip down, get your feet wet in a lake, brush through the tops of the trees,” he adds. “Ballooning is unlike any other form of aviation, in that you are really part of the environment.” 

Update: The team successfully pulled off the jump on September 28. Watch a video of the plunge from the balloon, below.

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On August 31, the Air Force announced that a California company called Oklo would design, construct, own, and operate a micro nuclear reactor at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. The contract will potentially run for 30 years, with the reactor intended to go online in 2027 and produce energy through the duration of the contract. Should the reactor prove successful, the hope is that it will allow other Air Force bases to rely on modular miniature reactors to augment their existing power supply, lessening reliance on civilian energy grids and increasing the resiliency of air bases.

Located less than two degrees south of the Arctic Circle, Eielson may appear remote on maps centered on the continental United States, but its northern location allows it to loom over the Pacific Ocean. A full operational squadron of F-35A stealth jet fighters are based at Eielson, alongside KC-135 jet tankers that offer air refueling. As the Department of Defense orients towards readiness for any conflict with what it describes as the “pacing challenge” of China, the ability to reliably get aircraft into the sky quickly and reliably extends to ensuring that bases can have electrical power at all times.

“If you look at what installations provide, they deliver sorties. At Eielson Air Force base they deliver sorties for F-35 aircraft that are stationed there,” Ravi I. Chaudhary, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Energy, Installations, and Environment, tells Popular Science via Zoom. “But if you think about all that goes with that, you’ve got ground equipment that needs powering. You’ve got fuel systems that run on power. You’ve got base operations that run on power. You’ve got maintenance facilities that run on power, and that all increases draw.”

And it’s not just maintenance facilities that need power, Chaudhary points out; the base also houses communities that live there, go to school there, and shop at places like the commissary.

While the commissary may not be the most immediately necessary part of base operations, ensuring that there’s backup power to send the planes into the air, and take care of families while the fighters are away, is an important part of base functioning. 

But in the event that the base needs more power, or an independent backup source, bases often turn to diesel generators. Those are reliable, but come with their own logistical obligations, for supplying and maintaining diesel generators, to say nothing of the carbon impact. As a promotional video for the Eielson micro-reactor project notes, the military is “the nation’s largest single energy consumer,” which understates the outsized role the US military has as a producer of greenhouse gasses and carbon emissions. 

This need is where the idea of a small nuclear reactor comes into play.

“When you have a core micro reactor source that can provide independent clean energy to the installation, that’s a huge force multiplier for you because then you don’t have to rely on more vulnerable commercial grids,” says Chaudhary. These reactors would facilitate a strategy Chaudhary called “islanding,” where “you take that insulation, you sequester it from the local power grid, and you execute operations, get your sorties out of town and deploy.”

The quest for a modular, base-scale nuclear reactor is almost as old as the Air Force itself. In the 1950s, the US Army explored the idea of powering bases with Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One, or SL-1. In January 1961, SL-1 tragically and fatally exploded, killing three operators. The Navy, meanwhile, successfully continues to use nuclear reactor power plants on board some of its ships and submarines.

In this case, for its Eielson reactor, the Air Force and Oklo are drawing on decades of innovation, improvement, and refined safety processes since then, to create a liquid-metal cooled, metal-fueled fast reactor that’s designed to be self-cooling when or if it fails.

And importantly, the Air Force is starting small. The announced program is to design just a five megawatt reactor, and then scale up the technology once that works. It’s a far cry from the base’s existing coal and oil power plant, which generates over 33 megawatts. Adding five megawatts to that grid is at present an augmentation of what already exists, but one that could make the islanding strategy possible.

If a base can function as an island, that means attacks on an associated civilian grid can’t prevent the base from operating. This works for attacks with conventional weapons, like bombs and missiles, and it should work too for attempts to sabotage the grid through the internet, like with a cyber attack. Nuclear attack could still disrupt a grid, to say nothing of the resulting concurrent deaths, but Chaudhary sees base resilience as its own kind of further deterrent action against such threats.

“We’ve recognized in our national defense strategy that strong resilient infrastructure can be a critical deterrent,” says Chaudhary. “Our energy is gonna be the margin of victory.”

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On April 18 in New York City, a parking garage in lower Manhattan collapsed, killing one person—the garage’s manager, Willis Moore. Much of the media coverage surrounding that event focused on a robotic dog that the New York City Fire Department used on the scene, a mechanical quadruped painted like a dalmatian and named Bergh. But another robot explored the collapsed structure that spring day—an exceptionally tiny and quiet drone flown by militaries that looks exactly like a little helicopter.

It’s called the Black Hornet. It weighs less than 1.2 ounces, takes off from its operator’s hand, and streams back video to a screen so people can see what the drone sees and make decisions before approaching a structure that might have hostile forces or other hazards inside it. 

Here’s how this 6.6-inch-long drone works, what it’s like to fly it, and how it was used that April day following the deadly structural collapse. 

Restaurant reconnaissance

Popular Science received a demonstration of the drone on August 10, and had the chance to fly it, in a space on the ground floor of a New York City hotel near Central Park. 

Rob Laskovich, a former Navy SEAL and the lead trainer for the Black Hornet with Teledyne FLIR, the company that makes the diminutive drone, explains that the drone’s low “noise signature” makes it virtually undetectable when it’s more than 10 feet away from people and 10 feet in the air. “It almost disappears,” he says. “And the size of this thing—it’s able to get into very tight corners.” 

Because it’s so quiet and so maneuverable, the itty bitty drone offers a way to gather information about what’s in a space up to a mile away or further and stream that video (at a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels) over encrypted radio link back to the base station. This latest version of the Black Hornet also doesn’t need access to GPS to fly, meaning it can operate inside a building or in other “GPS-denied” spaces. It carries no weapons. 

Laskovich removes one of the toy-sized Black Hornets from a case; there are three of them in this kit, meaning two can be charging while another one is flying. The drone has a nearly invisible wire antenna that requires a flick of the finger to make it hang out down off the back. The Black Hornet, he says, is “almost like a mini Black Hawk helicopter.” It is indeed just like a miniature helicopter; it has a top rotor to give it lift and a tail rotor to prevent it from spinning around in circles—the anti-torque system. 

Mission control for the little bird involves a small non-touchscreen display and a button-filled controller designed to be used with one hand. Laskovich selects “indoor mode” for the flight. “To start it, it’s a simple twist,” he says, giving the Black Hornet a little lateral twist back and forth with his left hand. Suddenly, the top rotor starts spinning. Then he spins the tiny chopper around a bit more, “to kind of let it know where it’s at,” he says. He moves the aircraft up and down. 

“What it’s doing, it’s reading the environment right now,” he adds. “Once it’s got a good read on where it’s at, the tail rotor is going to start spinning, and the aircraft will take off.” And that’s exactly what happens. The wee whirlybird departs from his hand, and then it’s airborne in the room. The sound it makes is a bit like a mosquito. 

On the screen on the table in front of us is the view from the drone’s cameras, complete with the space’s black and white tiled floor; two employees walk past it, captured on video. A few moments later he turns it so it’s looking at us at our spot in a corner booth, and on the screen I see the drone’s view of me, Laskovich, and Chris Skrocki, a senior regional sales manager with Teledyne FLIR, standing by the table. 

Laskovich says this is the smallest drone in use by the US Department of Defense; Teledyne FLIR says that the US Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force have the drone on hand. Earlier this summer, the company announced that they were going to produce 1,000 of these itty bitty aircraft for the Norwegian Ministry of Defense, who would send them to Ukraine, adding to 300 that had already been sent. Skrocki notes that a kit of three drones and other equipment can cost “in the neighborhood of about $85,000.”

Eventually Laskovich pilots the chopper back to him and grabs it out of the air from the bottom, as if he was a gentle King Kong grabbing a full-sized helicopter out of the sky, and uses the hand controller to turn it off. 

Kitchen confidential 

The demonstration that Laskovich had conducted was with a Black Hornet model that uses cameras to see the world like a typical camera sensor does. Then he demonstrates an aircraft that has thermal vision. (That’s different from night vision, by the way.) On the base station’s screen, the hot things the drone sees can be depicted in different ways: with white showing the hot spots, black showing the heat, or two different “fuse” modes, the second of which is highly colorful, with oranges and reds and purples. That one, with its bright colors, Laskovich calls “Predator mode,” he says, “because it looks like the old movie Predator.”

Laskovich launches the thermal drone with a whir and he flies it away from our booth, up towards a red EXIT sign hanging from a high ceiling and then off towards an open kitchen. I watch to see what the drone sees via the screen on the table in front of me. He gets it closer and closer to the kitchen area and eventually puts it into “Predator mode.” 

A figure is clearly visible on the drone’s feed, working in the general kitchen area. “And the cool part about it, they have no idea there’s a drone overhead right now,” he says. He toggles through the different thermal settings again: in one of the drone’s modes, a body looks black, then in another, white. He descends a bit to clear a screen-type installation that hangs from the ceiling over the kitchen area and pushes further into the cooking space. At one point, the drone, via the screen in front of me, reveals plates on metal shelving. 

“There’s your serving station right there,” he says. “We’re right in the kitchen right now.” He notes that thanks to “ambient noise,” any people nearby likely can’t detect the aircraft. He flies the drone back to us and I can see the black and white tile floor, and then the drone’s view of me and Laskovich sitting at our table. He cycles through the different thermal settings once more, landing on Predator mode again, revealing both me and Laskovich in bright orange and yellow. 

In a military context, the drone’s ideal use case, Laskovich explains, is to provide operators a way to see, from some distance away, what’s going on in a specific place, like a house that might be sheltering hostile forces. “It’s the ability to have real-time information of what’s going on on a target, without compromising your unit,” he says.

Flight lessons

Eventually, it’s my turn to learn to fly this little helo. The action is all controlled by a small gray hand unit with an antenna that enables communication to the drone. On the front of the control stick are a bunch of buttons, and on the back are two more. Some of them control what the camera does. Others control the flight of the machine itself. One of them is a “stop and hover” button. Two of the buttons are for yaw, which makes the helicopter pivot to the left or right. The two on the back tell the helicopter to ascend or descend—the altitude control. The trick in flying it, Laskovich says, is to look at the screen while you’re operating the drone, not the drone itself. 

I hold the helicopter in my left hand, and after I put the system in “indoor mode,” Laskovich tells me, “you’re ready to fly.” 

I twist the Black Hornet back and forth and the top rotor starts spinning with a whir. After some more calibration moves, the tail rotor starts spinning, too. I let it go and it zips up out of my hand. “You’re flying,” Laskovich says, who then proceeds to tell me what buttons to press to make the drone do different things. 

I fly it for a bit around the space, and after about seven minutes, I use my left hand to grab onto the bottom part of the machine and then hit three buttons simultaneously on the controller to kill the chopper’s power. And suddenly, the rotor and tail stopped spinning. The aircraft remains in my left hand, a tiny little flying machine that feels a bit like it flew out of a science fiction movie. 

Flying this aircraft, which will hold a stable hover all on its own, is much easier than managing the controls of a real helicopter, which I, a non-pilot, once very briefly had the chance to try under the watchful tutelage of an actual aviator and former Coast Guard commander. 

The garage collapse

On April 18, Skrocki was in New York City on business when he heard via text message that the parking garage had collapsed. He had the Black Hornet on hand, and contacted the New York Police Department and offered the drone’s use. They said yes, and he headed down to the scene of the collapse, and eventually sent the drone into the collapsed structure “under coordination with the guys there on scene,” Skrocki says. 

He recalls what he saw in there, via the Black Hornet. “There were some vehicles that were vertically stacked, a very busy scene,” he says. “It just absolutely appeared unstable.” When the flight was over, as Skrocki notes on a post on LinkedIn that includes a bit of video, he landed the drone in a hat. The Black Hornet drone doesn’t store the video it records locally on the device itself, but the base station does, and Skrocki noted on Linkedin that “Mission data including the stills/video was provided to FDNY.”

Besides the robotic dog, the FDNY has DJI drones, and they said that they used one specific DJI model, an Avata, that day for recon in the garage. As for the Black Hornet, the FDNY said in an emailed statement to PopSci: “It was used after we were already done surveying the building. The DJI Avata did most if not all of the imagery inside the building. The black hornet was used as we had the device present and wanted to see its capabilities. We continue to use the DJI Avata for interior missions.” The FDNY does not have its own Black Hornet. 

Beyond military uses, Skrocki says that the Black Hornet can help in a public safety context or with police departments, giving first responders an eye on a situation where an armed suspect might be suicidal or have a hostage, for example. The drone could provide a way for watchers to know exactly when to try to move in.

In New York state, the Erie County Sheriff’s Office has a Black Hornet set that includes three small aircraft. And Teledyne FLIR says that the Connecticut State Police has the drone, although via email a spokesperson for that police force said: “We cannot confirm we have Black Hornet Drones.” 

The New York City Police Department has controversially obtained two robotic dogs, a fact that spurred the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union to tell The New York Times in April: “And all we’re left with is Digidog running around town as this dystopian surveillance machine of questionable value and quite potentially serious privacy consequences.” 

Stuart Schrader, an associate research professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Africana Studies, highlights the potential for military-level technology in civilian hands to experience a type of “mission creep.”

“It seems quite sensible to not put humans or [real] dogs in danger to do the [parking garage] search, and use a drone instead,” Schrader says. “But I think that the reality is what we see with various types of surveillance technologies—and other technologies that are dual-use technologies where they have military origins—it’s just that most police departments or emergency departments have very infrequent cause to use them.” And that’s where the mission creep can come in. 

In the absence of a parking garage collapse or other actual disaster, departments may feel the need to use the expensive tools they already have in other more general situations. From there, the tech could be deployed, Schrader says, “in really kind of mundane circumstances that might not warrant it, because it’s not a crisis or emergency situation, but actually it’s just used to potentiate the power of police to gain access for surveillance.”

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Once considered prohibitively expensive and inefficient, hydrogen fuel-powered planes are finally beginning to literally and figuratively take off around the world. Last week, the Germany-based startup H2FLY achieved a major industry milestone—completing the world’s first piloted electric aircraft flights fueled entirely by liquid hydrogen.

“This achievement marks a watershed moment in the use of hydrogen to power aircraft. Together with our partners, we have demonstrated the viability of liquid hydrogen to support medium and long-range emissions-free flight,” H2FLY co-founder Josef Kallo said in a statement on September 7.

According to the company’s official announcement, H2FLY completed a total of four flights using liquid hydrogen, one of which boasted over three hours of airtime. Unlike past tests, however, the company’s HY4 prototype aircraft this time around utilized liquified, cryogenically stored hydrogen (LH2) instead of pressurized gaseous hydrogen (GH2). The fuel source alteration reportedly allows for significantly lower fuel tank volumes and weights, thus boosting the aircraft’s range, as well as the amount of space that can be dedicated for payloads.

[Related: Hydrogen-powered flight is closer to takeoff than ever.]

Even with only four test flights completed, LH2 fuel shows incredible promise in powering more-sustainable planes. Thanks to the strategic fuel shift, the company’s HY4 aircraft can hypothetically double its maximum range from 750 km to 1,500 km (466 to 932 miles), making it much more viable for medium- and long-haul commercial, carbon-emissions free flights. For comparison, a flight from New York City to Columbus, Ohio, is around 765 km; a flight from NYC to Tallahassee, Florida, is about 1,470 km.

As Electrek notes, H2FLY engineers boast a string of achievements over the years when compared to similar zero-emission aviation companies. The HY4 aircraft completed its maiden flight in 2016, and set new records when it achieved an altitude of over 7,000 during a 77-mile test run in 2022.

Atop the impressive test results, H2FLY explains its latest HY4 flights “marks the culmination” of Project HEAVEN, “a European-government-supported consortium assembled to demonstrate the feasibility of using liquid, cryogenic hydrogen in aircraft.” Apart from various business consortium partners, the project included funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, the German Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport, and the University of Ulm.

Moving forward, H2FLY aims to begin work on commercialization of its aircraft and fuel technologies. This will include the development of new fuel cell systems capable of providing full power ranges for emissionless flights achieving altitudes as high as 27,000 feet. Next year, the company also plans to open a Hydrogen Aviation Center at Germany’s Stuttgart Airport.

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The Federal Aviation Administration has cleared UPS to operate its growing delivery drone fleet beyond the visual line of sight (BVLOS) of pilots. Per the FAA’s August 6 announcement, the freight and shipping company’s UPS Flight Forward subsidiary can now begin deploying its Matternet M2 drones to much further distances, thus expanding their range of potential customers. This means human operators will simply monitor routes and deliveries from a centralized location.

As the industry term implies, BVLOS means that human monitors are not required to maintain literal eyes on drones as they travel between their hubs and destinations. Approval for BVLOS operations is a natural end goal for most drone delivery services, with companies such as Amazon and FedEx vying to kickstart their own programs. Just last month, Wing—a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, Inc.—announced its own partnership with Walmart to test a drone delivery system within a six mile range around the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. According to Walmart, approximately 60,000 homes fall within the drone fleet’s range, which promises deliveries in under 30 minutes. To accomplish the speedy deadlines, Wing’s drones reportedly will travel as fast as 65 mph.

As The Verge notes, however, not all drone services are faring as well. In May, Amazon’s Prime Air project only made an estimated 100 deliveries between its California and Texas locales. Although more current figures aren’t available, Amazon previously hoped to complete 10,000 deliveries by the end of the year. Only days after announcing its lofty goal, however, Amazon also confirmed a significant number of layoffs within its Prime Air workforce.

[Related: Walmart and Wing join forces for drone deliveries in Texas.]

Although labor and automation issues are serious concerns during the expansion of drone delivery systems, their environmental benefits remain promising. According to one study in 2022, using quadcopter drones to handle small, lightweight packages during figurative “last-mile” deliveries could reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by respectively up to 94 and 84 percent per package. That said, most drones can only currently delivery one package at a time, meaning that efficiency could have its caveats.

Meanwhile, the usage of drones to deliver potentially life-saving medical equipment and treatments—such as blood transfusions or defibrillators—shows immense promise, according to a study from the European Heart Journal. 

FAA regulators, recognizing the industry’s increasing demand and capabilities, formed a Beyond the Visual Line of Sight Committee in 2021 to standardize laws ensuring operations became “routine, scalable and economically viable.” The FAA is currently reviewing the committee’s final report.

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

YOU MAY NOT HAVE HEARD of the National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence organization whose existence wasn’t declassified until 1992, but you have perhaps come across some of its creepy kitsch: patches from its surveillance-satellite missions. Consider the one that shows a yellow octopus strangling the globe with its tentacles, with the words “Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach” stitched beneath. Yikes.

The office, known as the NRO, is in charge of America’s spy satellites. The details of its current capabilities are largely classified, but we, the people, can get hints about it from public information—like the fact that the NRO donated two telescopes to NASA in 2012. The instruments were obsolete as far as the spies, who point their scopes at Earth instead of space, were concerned, but they were more powerful than the space agency’s Hubble.

But how the NRO came to build such capable watchers isn’t just the story of a secret government organization; it’s the result of that secret government organization’s collaboration with academics and corporate engineers—a story that Aaron Bateman, assistant professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University, lays out in an article published in June 2023 in the journal Intelligence and National Security called “Secret partners: The national reconnaissance office and the intelligence-industrial-academic complex.” 

Although the phrase military-industrial complex has become common since Dwight D. Eisenhower coined it in 1961, academia’s role in that same complex often gets left out. So, too, does the intelligence side of the shiny national-security coin. 

That gap in the historical literature is what made Bateman decide to dig into the National Reconnaissance Office’s early connections to scholars and private companies. And while the collaborations he traces are decades old, they echo into today. Companies, universities, and colleges all still contribute to intelligence agencies—the latter’s needs sometimes shaping the trajectory of scientific inquiry or technological development. Wonky advances from academics and corporate types, meanwhile, still make spies lift their eyebrows in interest. 

California and the Corona project

The story Bateman tells begins in Sunnyvale, California, a town in what is now, but was not then, Silicon Valley. In the 1950s, as the country was looking toward orbit, Lockheed—today Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest defense contractor—took notice of the government’s gaze. “Lockheed already had considerable presence in aerospace but wanted to carve out a space for itself—no pun intended—in space,” says Bateman.

Lockheed execs began contemplating what they would need to do to make that happen. Number one, carving out that space in space required…well…space. “During the 1950s, the Bay Area was full of just unused land that was fairly cheap,” says Bateman. But it wasn’t just the area’s wide-openness that appealed to Lockheed. “Most importantly, Stanford University was located there,” he continues. The defense contractor could siphon smart engineers from the school. Those variables locked down, Lockheed set up its Sunnyvale shop a few years before the NRO was founded, and it had won an Air Force satellite design contract by 1956.

This Bay Area facility soon became key to the NRO’s aptly named National Reconnaissance Program. Within big Bay Area buildings, Lockheed snapped together the components for the Corona project—the first satellite program to take pictures from space—and other nosy spacecraft. Once satellites were in orbit, industrial-academic collaborators helped the government operate and troubleshoot them. The feds couldn’t handle those tasks on their own, not having made the spacecraft themselves. 

Importantly to the development of these eyes in the sky, there was also “a free flow of knowledge,” according to Bateman’s research, among Stanford, Lockheed, and the people in trenchcoats who worked for the government.

Starting in the late 1950s, Stanford created the Industrial Affiliates Program, through which Lockheed employees taught university courses—ensuring students’ education would benefit future intelligence-industrial contributors—and also attended university classes, so they could stay up on the latest developments. 

Stanford grad students, meanwhile, waxed poetic about their research in presentations to the corporate suits. Lockheed recruited students whose work had relevance to their Secret Squirrel pursuits. 

The school also ran the Stanford Electronics Laboratory, a location fit for collaboration. Its academic environment supported a riskier, more experimental mindset than a deliverables-driven office might. For instance, a laboratory employee once installed a radar receiver in a Cessna plane and flew around San Francisco just to prove the instrument would work at high altitude—a “told you” that led to a satellite instrument that mapped the USSR’s air defense network. 

What developed on the East Coast 

Not to be left behind, the eastern part of the US had its own members-only meetings with the government. In Rochester, New York, Kodak created film that could survive the inhospitality of space, so it could be used to snap shots up there from a satellite. The film then fell back down through the atmosphere to Earth, where it was, incredibly, caught midair by a plane. 

The film had to capture clear pictures even as the camera peered through the entire atmosphere, survive the cosmic vacuum, and not break apart during the shaky, vibrating ride between here and there. 

Creating such kinds of film pushed photographic science along. As Bateman’s paper points out, “Technology is not just ‘applied science.’ Rather, technological needs can also lead to scientific advances.” 

In this case, those advances included not just image-taking but image analysis. And for that, the NRO turned to the Rochester Institute of Technology—where, by virtue of it being next to Kodak, photographic-science scholars had amassed. Amping that up, a CIA organization dedicated to image analysis, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, started a grant program at the university, funding projects whose results would curve the path of scientific inquiry in a favorable direction for spies. One project, for instance, proposed new ways to pick up camouflage in photos. Scientists who got grants were then sometimes recruited into full-time espionage-focused employment.  

But it’s not as if the government and academia were peaceful partners all the time. “There’s widespread opposition on college campuses across the United States to any kind of classified research,” says Bateman. But in the late 1960s, the negativity was “fairly extreme” at Stanford, where “students tried to break in and vandalize facilities that were actually doing classified work for the National Reconnaissance Program.” They tossed rocks into the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The Stanford Electronics Lab was occupied by protestors for nine days. 

“In New York, it’s kind of a different story,” says Bateman, speaking of the same era in the Northeast. “There isn’t really this wave of anti-government sentiment.” Partly, perhaps, because the Rochester Institute of Technology trended more conservative, and partly, Bateman’s work posits, because “the intelligence community offered photographic science students access to some of the most advanced technologies in their field.” That’s a pretty tasty carrot. 

After the general wave of opposition, Stanford ceased its super-official classified work, but progress continued just outside the school at a place called the Stanford Research Institute. 

Surveillance and scholarship

The intelligence-industrial-academic triad is alive and well today, says James David, curator of National Security Space at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Many military and intelligence organizations, for instance, have scientific advisory boards made up of scholarly experts. 

And just look at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he says—a NASA center that’s managed by Caltech and does classified work alongside its more press-releasable development of rovers for Mars. Both kinds of missions require commercial contractors. 

Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, meanwhile, was designed to do classified work on behalf of the school, which itself prohibits secret projects. The Draper Laboratory, formerly housed by MIT, announced a separation from the school in 1970 when the university tried to separate itself from military work. Now, though, the lab offers the Draper Scholar Program to fund the work of masters and PhD students. The MIT Lincoln Laboratory, meanwhile, is still under the university’s umbrella, and has an entire “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance” research division. 

“It’s just continued to this day,” says Davis. 

But Bateman does see a big difference between past and present: “The level of openness,” he says. Whereas the NRO did not acknowledge its own existence when Stanford kids were throwing rocks, the spy agency now has an Instagram account. 

The agency’s reps show up at conferences too. “They go to universities and they talk about what they can do,” he says. 

The openness goes both ways: Companies in the commercial space industry reach out to spies and say, “‘Hey, I’m doing this thing over here,’” imitates Bateman, “‘and we think you might be interested in that.’ And sometimes the government says, ‘Yeah, actually, that’s really interesting. That could be a good thing for us, so we’re going to throw money your way.’” 

Previously, it wasn’t so. “If I can be a little reductive and Hollywood-esque here,” Bateman continues, describing the way it used to be, “guys in trenchcoats show up and knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, we’re from the US government. We’re not gonna tell you where, but we’d like to collaborate with you.’”

These days, collaborations like those still happen, just minus the trenchcoats. 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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On August 19, a Russian Tu-22M bomber was reportedly destroyed while it was parked in an airfield in northwestern Russia. Russia’s defense ministry, while downplaying the damage to the bomber, stated that it was hit by a copter-style drone. Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Directorate (GUR) has since claimed credit for the attack. The targeted bomber itself, a venerable Cold War design, has a long history, with its use against Ukraine only the latest chapter.

Evidence of the attack comes from multiple sources. The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence has been watching and offering public commentary on the war in Ukraine ever since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, and on August 22 the Ministry tweeted that the “Tu-22M3 BACKFIRE medium bomber of Russia’s Long Range Aviation [LRA] was highly likely destroyed at Soltsky-2 Airbase in Novgorod Oblast, 650 km away from Ukraine’s border.” (The Tu-22M’s NATO designation, or the term used by NATO countries to distinguish between Soviet-made planes, is “Backfire.”)

That strike, just over 400 miles away from Ukraine, is beyond the range of most Ukrainian weapons, unless someone were nearby to launch a close-in attack. It also illustrates the range that Russia’s bombers have been able to cover in order to attack people and places in Ukraine.

As the BBC notes, Russia has a fleet of 60 Tu-22M bombers, meaning the country can absorb the loss of one bomber while still operating at regular effectiveness. Nevertheless, photographic and satellite evidence indicate that despite claims from the Russian military otherwise, the bomber was almost certainly a complete loss. 

“Aside from showing the burned aircraft, the satellite images also show that Russia has since evacuated all other Backfires that had been parked at Soltsy-2” on August 16, reports The War Zone. (The War Zone is owned by Recurrent Ventures, PopSci’s parent company.) While the attack did not destroy all 10 bombers visible on satellite photography on August 16, it did destroy one, and likely forced the others to further interior air bases for safekeeping. 

Cold War origins

The Tu-22M is the second class of bomber under the Tu-22 name. The original Tu-22, named “Blinder” by NATO, was an early Cold War supersonic bomber, the first bomber capable of dashes at speeds faster than the speed of sound used by the Soviet Union. The design of the Blinder was underwhelming, with limited range and performance.  While the bomber saw use in the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, in wars against foes with anti-aircraft missiles, Tu-22 Blinders were regularly shot down. Ukraine, which inherited its military equipment from the USSR, had Tu-22 Blinders in its inventory in 2000, though the plane has long since been retired with one left as a literal museum piece.

Meanwhile, the Tu-22M, while borrowing that “Tu-22” designation, is a wholly different design, meant to fill the same role. The Tu-22M has variable-geometry swept wings, meaning it can have the wings spread out wide for more efficient flight at subsonic speed, while the wings can fold back for reduced drag when flying supersonic, something like US-made F-14s. The Tu-22M’s original mission was to destroy US bombers and airfields.

While the first flight of a Tu-22M took place in 1969, the bombers were built up gradually over the 1970s and 1980s. Tu-22Ms saw use in the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and were largely mothballed in the early 1990s, as Russia’s strategic picture changed following the dissolution of the USSR.

The aircraft functions as a conventional bomber, the role the Tu-22M took in Afghanistan and presently performs above Ukraine. It was also built to be capable of carrying nuclear weapons, including both nuclear bombs and nuclear-armed cruise missiles. 

“The mission of the bomber, peripheral attack or intercontinental attack, became one of the most fiercely contested intelligence debates of the Cold War,” reports the Federation of American Scientists. “The key variable was the estimate of the range of the aircraft. A series of competitive analyses to determine the range produced divergent results and failed to end the debate.” 

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) initially assessed the Tu-22M’s range at up to 3,100 miles, while the CIA instead assumed 2,090 miles. Part of the complication is that the Tu-22M can be fitted with a probe to permit air refueling, though the probes are not permanently installed on the plane. Russian sources, since made public, attest to a range of 3,170 miles for the model that entered service in 1976, and 4,350 miles for the version that entered service in 1981. These ranges put the bomber, and its feared nuclear payload, squarely in the “intercontinental” range. Cruising speed for the Tu-22m is 560 mph, while maximum speed is 1,430 mph.

Modern warfare

Using the technology of the time, the Tu-22M is designed to evade defenses in two distinct ways. Supersonic speeds allow the bombers to strike fast and outpace missile interceptors. Subsonic flight, at low altitudes, is designed to let the bomber fly “below the radar,” or low enough to the ground that attempts to track it by radar would fail by getting extra feedback from the ground, confounding it. 

The first Tu-22M lost in combat occurred during Russia’s August 2008 five-day-long invasion of Georgia, the neighboring country in the Caucasus mountains bordering the Black Sea. While Russia handily bested its minuscule neighbor, the loss of any aircraft in combat was surprising. (The war ended with Russia’s military occupying and guaranteeing the breakaway of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two Georgian provinces.) 

At the time, the Russian military claimed that the Tu-22M lost was a reconnaissance variant. Former Russian air force chief Anatoly Kornukov told the Associated Press in 2008 that “Using the Tu-22 for a reconnaissance mission over Georgia was the same as using a microscope to drive nails.”

Above Ukraine in 2022, the Tu-22M was observed dumping unguided bombs on the then-Ukrainian held parts of Mauripol, the Black Sea city encircled by invading Russian forces as the military fought its way from the Donbas to Crimea. Carpet bombing is one of the oldest ways planes have been used in war, and because it does not deliver precision strikes, it is a reliable way to create swathes of indiscriminate desolation and brutality.

Beyond carpet bombing, the Tu-22M bombers were used as missile-launching platforms alongside other Russian bombers in the Long Range Aviation, part of the Russian Aerospace Forces. These bombers could hit targets deep from the frontlines, and importantly far from Ukrainian air defenses, by using their range and speed to launch anti-ship missiles against terrestrial targets, causing panic and destruction.

While capable of hitting targets at great range, a supersonic bomber built to penetrate Cold War air defenses being used to fire missiles and fly away is a far cry from its original purpose. Both Ukraine and Russia have struggled to establish control over the skies in the present conflict, leaving each side to adapt to new ways to ground the other’s aircraft.

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The B-2 Spirit bomber is an elegant machine for a war that never came. The flying wing stealth bomber, unveiled for the first time in 1988, represented the near-peak of the American Cold War defense industry. The first Spirit entered operational service in 1997, six years after the end of the Cold War, and only 21 of the bombers were ever built. Nineteen of those bombers remain in service (one was destroyed in a fire in 2008), and on August 9, Northrop Grumman announced the successful demonstration of transferring mission data from a ground station to an airborne bomber’s computer, thanks to new upgrades.

It is easy, given how futuristic the B-2’s appearance remains, to forget that the bomber was designed and built before the ubiquitous wireless data transfers of modern technology. Mission data, or information like where to fly and what targets to bomb, had to be inputted manually. B-2s are crewed by two pilots, and they fly long missions. An Air Force fact sheet lists the range as simply “intercontinental”; the Federation of American Scientists notes the range without refueling is 6,000 nautical miles (6,900 statute miles), and with air refueling the range of the B-2 can cover the entire globe. 

On such a long flight, or even a normal one, there’s always a chance a human pilot manually entering data will make an error.

The new technology is an “integrated airborne mission transfer,” which “delivers an advanced capability that enables the B-2 to complete a digital, machine-to-machine transfer of new missions received in flight directly into the aircraft,” Northrop Grumman stated in a release.

Machine-to-machine transfer is a big deal, especially ensuring that it is done securely. Every B-2 bomber is capable of carrying both conventional and nuclear weapons. Together with roughly half of the venerable B-52 bombers, these planes largely constitute the bomber third of the “nuclear triad,” a distribution of nuclear launch capabilities between ground-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched missiles, and bombs dropped or missiles launched by planes. (US fighter jets are also capable of carrying some nuclear bombs, though these aren’t usually included in the discussion of the nuclear triad.)

Carrying nuclear weapons is a terrible responsibility, and films like Dr. Strangelove and Failsafe show what tragedy might happen when a nuclear bomber cannot receive new information in flight. The B-2’s manual system to input data mid-mission makes changes possible. But a human manually entering data can still make errors, even in the least stressful of contexts. A direct machine-to-machine update of mission data removes the possibility of human error from data entry, letting pilots devote their full attention to piloting and other tasks.

In addition, as Northrop Grumman told Air & Space Forces Magazine, this allows mission data to be uploaded to the bomber without interfering with any other computer processes, keeping flight and other critical systems secure. Introducing any connectivity can risk a possible exploit of that entry point by a malicious actor, though it appears the security concerns and risks are being taken seriously.

“We are providing the B-2 with the capabilities to communicate and operate in advanced battle management systems and the joint all-domain command and control environment, keeping B-2 ahead of evolving threats,” said Nikki Kodama, vice president and B-2 program manager, Northrop Grumman in a release.

Advanced Battle Management and Joint All Domain are military concepts, heavily pursued by the Pentagon in recent years, that make it so many different tools, from fighter squadrons to bombers to ships to tanks and infantry, can be used together in a fight together. Battle management is giving tools to the commanders in charge of parts, or all these forces, to be able to send new orders as the situation changes. If soldiers fighting on one island spy the deployment of anti-air missiles, and communicate that, a commander could then use that information to redirect bombers on a course out of range of those missiles, for example. In short, the Pentagon wants to make it easier for the military to share information with itself, in a timely fashion.

“The integration of this digital software with our weapon system will further enhance the connectivity and survivability in highly contested environments as part of our ongoing modernization effort,” said Kodama. 

Taking in new mission data, directly from machine to machine, reduces the steps in which error can enter the process. It’s the difference between handing someone a written note or playing a verbal game of telephone, where whispered messages can lose or change meaning at every step of the process.

While the B-2 fleet is small, upgrades like this could help ensure the stealth bombers can remain part of the US arsenal for years to come, while the new, more numerous B-21 Raider stealth bomber fleet is built and integrated into the Air Force. There is no retirement date set for the B-2 beyond the readiness of its planned replacement. New tools ensure that, for however long that transition takes, the US will still have a handful of stealth flying wings, ready to drop conventional or nuclear weapons across continents.

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Wing, Google-parent company Alphabet’s drone-delivery subsidiary, has just announced a new partnership with Walmart in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. Over the coming month, the drone-delivery service will start operating from two Walmart Supercenters reaching approximately 60,000 homes. According to Walmart’s corresponding announcement post, using Wing’s app, “customers will be able to order items like frozen treats (when those ice cream cravings hit), household essentials, last-minute meal solutions like macaroni and cheese, and even fragile items like eggs.” 

And delivery will be fast. Wing is aiming to complete deliveries in under 30 minutes. To achieve that, its drones can fly at speeds of up to 65 mph and have a six-mile range. Crucially, the FAA allows one pilot to oversee multiple drones—all of which can be beyond visual range. As Shannon Nash, Wing’s chief financial officer writes in the announcement, “Wing’s technology allows operators to oversee the system from a remote location, which means pilots won’t need to be stationed at stores or customer homes. The aircraft essentially fly themselves, so each operator is approved to safely oversee many drones at the same time.” According to Bloomberg, though, Wing still has to have a spotter on the ground who keeps an eye out for small aircraft that aren’t capable of broadcasting their location.

While all this is impressive, you won’t be able to use Wing to satisfy any midnight cravings. The service will operate between 10:30am and 6:30pm every day except Wednesday. 

[Related: Watch a Google drone deliver beer and snacks to Denver’s Coors Field]

This new partnership with Wing isn’t Walmart’s first foray into drone delivery. Since the company announced it was trialing a drone delivery program in 2021, it has expanded to 36 stores (soon, 38) in seven states and partnered with three different drone delivery startups: DroneUp (which it partly owns), Flytrex, and Zipline. The company already has a network of 11 drone hubs operating in the Dallas metro area. 

Despite the relatively large number of trial locations, Walmart’s delivery numbers aren’t especially good. The company claims to have made “more than 10,000 safe deliveries,” which pales in comparison to the more than 330,000 deliveries Wing has pulled off in its test markets across the US, Europe, and Australia. The drone operator has “moved as many as one thousand packages per day in a delivery region of more than 100,000 people.” In fact, one Virginia couple in their 80s received more than 1,200 packages from Wing’s drones, including 371 takeaway meals from a local Mexican restaurant and 210 blueberry muffins from a bakery. 

Unfortunately, Wing’s announcement post suggests that it will be operating a drone delivery base at the two Walmart Supercenters, rather than using the AutoLoader system it announced earlier this year. This means that Walmart staff will load each package into a drone that’s waiting outside on a charging pad which will then takeoff, deliver the package to the customer, before returning to its charging pad. With the AutoLoader, the staff member would instead load the package into a crane-like contraption that a passing drone based off-site would collect before delivering it to a customer and. It could also potentially fly to another store to collect a different package. Basically, the Autoloader will allow Wing to operate a ride-sharing like model for drone deliveries called the Wing Delivery Network, instead of relying on each store to operate its own drone base.

Still, it’s a fairly exciting time in the drone delivery space. Wing seems committed to finding a business and operational model that works—at least in large suburbs adjacent to major metro areas. And some of Walmart’s other partners are finding their own successes too. Zipline, which partners with Walmart in Arkansas to deliver packages within a 50 mile radius, has already developed a successful operation delivering medical supplies across long distances in Rwanda, Ghana, and Nigeria. 

While there are obviously still plenty of problems to be solved with widely available drone delivery, there appears to be genuine progress. The biggest question right now is where is Amazon? After a flashy announcement almost a decade ago, its Prime Air program has achieved…very little. According to a report from CNBC earlier this year, the retailer had only completed 100 deliveries. Wing is likely to soon be doing those kinds of numbers every day from its new Walmart hubs.

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The largest cryptological survey of Loch Ness in over 50 years is scheduled to take place this weekend, featuring technology never before used to search for the elusive, still unproven Loch Ness Monster. Affectionately known by many as “Nessie,” no physical evidence of the cryptid—a creature whose existence isn’t proven by science or biology—has ever been found. The expedition is sponsored by the “independent and voluntary research team,” Loch Ness Exploration (LNE), an organization that is currently seeking additional help from the public in conducting a “giant surface watch” of the loch’s waters. Although an “overwhelming” demand has already resulted in sold out in-person spots, those who can’t make it over to Scotland can still tune in to LNE’s official 24/7 live stream to help out organizers.

“Since starting LNE, it’s always been our goal to record, study and analyze all manner of natural behavior and phenomena that may be more challenging to explain,” Alan McKenna, LNE founder, said in a statement earlier this month. “It’s our hope to inspire a new generation of Loch Ness enthusiasts and by joining this large scale surface watch… to personally contribute towards this fascinating mystery that has captivated so many people from around the world.”

[Related: New DNA evidence may prove what the Loch Ness Monster really is.]

Alleged sightings of the supposed lake monster (or monsters) in Loch Ness date back centuries, but the tales particularly rose to global attention after the famous 1934 “Surgeon’s Photo.” Although the iconic silhouette was later proved a hoax, folklore surrounding a large aquatic creature lurking within the loch remains strong. In 2019, samples taken from the nearly 22-square-mile body of water indicated the prevalence of eel DNA, potentially providing an explanation for at least some of visitors’ sightings over the decades. The collected DNA, however, did not indicate an eel’s size, thus adding little support to a “giant eel” theory. Of course, many still hold out hope for the possibility of a somehow still undiscovered pod of plesiosaurs calling Loch Ness home.

On August 26 and 27, however, the LNE team will deploy at least a few new tools in hopes of uncovering evidence of something strange. According to the event’s announcement page, drones will traverse the loch while taking thermal imaging of the waters via infrared cameras, potentially “identifying any mysterious anomalies.” Meanwhile, researchers will repeatedly deploy an underwater hydrophone to listen in on any “Nessie-like calls.”

“The weekend gives an opportunity to search the waters in a way that has never been done before, and we can’t wait to see what we find,” said Loch Ness Centre general manager, Paul Nixon. 

Of course, the odds aren’t exactly in Nessie volunteers’ favor following decades of debunks, hoaxes, and misattributed sightings. Still, it’s probably as nice a time of the year as any to get out onto the loch and enjoy the Scottish summer.

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For 18 months, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been fought largely from the ground. Neither Russia nor Ukraine has been able to establish air superiority, or the ability to completely rule the sky at the other’s expense. While Ukraine is working to gradually build up a new air force using NATO-model fighters like the F-16 (which nations including Denmark and the Netherlands have pledged to the country), it is also using a range of drones to drop death from the sky. On August 19, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense announced a small new armed drone for military use: the SkyKnight.

The announcement of the new UAV was posted to the Ministry of Defense’s Telegram account, and features an image of the SkyKnight drone. The vehicle is compact, and features four limbs like a common quadcopter, but each limb sports two rotors, making the drone an octocopter. A sensor is fitted on the front of the drone, with a camera facing forwards, and what appears to be batteries are strapped, in an unusual configuration, to the top of the drone’s hull. Underneath it holds a 2.5 kg (5.5 lbs) bomb. That’s between three and five times as heavy as a hand grenade, and would be a large explosive for a drone of this size.

“This can be used against stationary and moving targets – anything from tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and other systems, to infantry units on the move and in trenches, and against any target that is identified as a Russian military one,” says Samuel Bendett, an analyst at the Center for Naval Analysis and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security. “This payload can be effective and devastating against infantry units, as evidenced from multiple videos of similar attacks by quadcopters.”

Before the massive invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the country fought a long, though more geographically confined, war against Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas of Eastern Ukraine. Using quadcopters as bombers was a regular occurance in that war, like when in 2018 Ukrainian forces used a DJI Mavic quadcopter to drop a bomb on trenches. While the Mavic was not built for war, it is a simple and easy to use machine, which could be modified in the field to carry a small explosive and a release claw. Paired with the drone’s cameras and human operators watching from a control screen, soldiers could get a bird’s eye view of their human targets, and then attack from above.

This tactic persisted in the larger war from February 2022, where small drones joined medium and larger drones in the arsenals of both nations fighting. The war in Ukraine is hardly the first war to see extensive use of drones, but none so far have matched it in sheer scale.

“Never before have so many drones been used in a military confrontation,” writes Ulrike Franke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Many, possibly the majority, of the drones used by Ukrainian forces were originally designed for commercial purposes or for hobbyists.” 

The SkyKnight is described as domestically produced, a production of the present Ukrainian industry built for this specific war. It appears to share parts in common from the broader hobbyist drone market, and its assembly, complete with strapped-on batteries and exposed wires (at least according to how it’s depicted on Telegram), speaks to ease of assembly over finicky obsession with form.

In the announcement of the SkyKnight, the Ministry of Defence says that if the pilot has any familiarity with DJI or Autel drones, which stabilize themselves in flight, then the pilot can learn to fly the SkyKnight in about a week.

“DJI and Autel are a staple [Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle] across the Ukrainian military, with many thousands fielded since the start of the Russian invasion,” says Bendett. “DJI especially as a go-to drone for ISR, target tracking, artillery spotting and light combat missions. Ukrainian forces and drone operators have amassed a lot of experience flying these Chinese-made drones.”

Domestic manufacture is important, not just because of the shorter supply lines, but because DJI’s response to the conflict has been to ban the sale of its drone to Ukraine and Russia.

“The Chinese manufacturer DJI produces most of these systems,” writes Franke. “It officially suspended operations in Ukraine and Russia a few weeks into the war, but its drones, most notably the Mavic type, remain among the most used and most sought-after systems.”

By making its own self-detonating drone weapons, Ukraine is able to use the drones as a direct weapon, which can attack from above and is hard to see or stop. In a war where soldiers describe fighting without quadcopters as being “like blind kittens,” a flying camera with a bomb attached makes soldiers deadly, at greater range, and in new ways.

Beyond the airframe and remote control, the Ministry of Defense boasts that the SkyKnight has an automatic flight mode, and can continue to fly towards a target selected by the operator even if the operator loses communication with the drone.

“Ukraine is investing a lot of resources in domestic combat drone production to meet the challenge from the Russian military that is increasingly fielding more quadcopter and FPV-type drones,” says Bendett. “This SkyKnight needs to be manufactured in sufficient quantities to start making a difference on the battlefield.”

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On July 28, defense giant Lockheed Martin announced it was planning to scale its current laser technology up to a 500-kilowatt-class laser. This would be a substantial increase in output over the company’s existing 300-kW laser, and would be more powerful than existing laser weapons in development or in the field today. The move also illustrates one of the fundamental truths about modern laser weapons: when it comes to destruction by laser, more power equals faster results.

Laser weapons represent a substantial up-front cost during their development and research, with the promise that they will pay off down the road in lower costs per shot fired and object destroyed. Lasers are primarily defensive tools: High-powered light is used to melt through and disable income drones, mortar rounds, rockets, and other projectiles. Many of these targets are small, like hobbyist quadcopters or simple rockets, and can be defused as a threat by disabling a rotor limb or a guide fin. 

But when it comes to protecting big targets, like Navy ships, Army bases, or Air Force hangars, destroying threats quickly and effectively becomes an essential task of base defense. 

A laser with 500 kilowatts of energy would be powerful. In October 2022, when Popular Science got to go hands-on with a Raytheon laser weapon, it was a 10-kilowatt laser. Held steady against a drone by a professional, it could disable a quadcopter in as little as eight seconds. Used by PopSci, it took 15 seconds to stop the same style of drone.

What the 500-kilowatt laser in development promises is 50 times the same energy concentrated into a beam, likely melting drones in fractions of a second. The US Army has already selected Lockheed’s 300-kw laser to mount on armored vehicles and protect formations from rocket attacks.

“Lockheed Martin has invested in our production infrastructure in anticipation of the Department of Defense’s demand for laser weapons that have additional layers of protection with deep magazines, low cost per engagement, high speed of light delivery and high precision response reducing logistics requirements,” said Rick Cordaro, vice president of Mission Systems & Weapons at Lockheed Martin, in a release. “The 500-kW laser will incorporate our successes from the 300-kW system and lessons learned from legacy programs to further prove the capability to defend against a range of threats.”

While jargon-dense, Cordaro’s statement parses out to a comprehensive overview of why, exactly, the Pentagon wants laser weapons. “Additional layers of protection” means that these lasers will not replace existing defenses, but join them, letting lasers slot into use alongside protective measures like Patriot missiles and anti-helicopter rockets. “Deep magazines” refers to the capacity of a laser to fire as long as it has electrical power. This can come from batteries, generators, or from onboard power plants when used on ships. It’s a reference to magazines of ammunition, typically bullets or shells, used by guns and cannons. While those magazines are limited by physical constraints, like how many bullets can be prepared to feed into a gun before firing, the quantity of a laser’s shots are limited by its access to electrical power.

Additionally, “low cost per engagement” is the military and industry’s long promise to reduce the cost of each zap fired by a laser down to about $1. “Engagement,” here, means destruction of incoming targets. A cost per engagement is how much ammunition was used to destroy a threat. Patriot missiles, built to shoot down jets, cost about $4.1 million apiece, which is a lot of money, but can be worth it against expensive jets, or to prevent cruise missiles hitting more valuable targets. If lasers like Lockheed’s can offer cheaper ways to stop some threats, it can let the military save more expensive tools for threats lasers cannot hit.

Finally, Cordaro emphasizes “high speed of light delivery and high precision response reducing logistics requirements.” If the laser can quickly and accurately stop threats, especially threats that are hard to hit at present or take lots of ammunition to stop, then a more powerful laser can meet those threats at the price of electricity generated.

Lockheed is developing the 500-kW laser as part of the High Energy Laser Scaling Initiative, a Pentagon program to develop lasers at the 300-, 500-, and 1000-kW power ranges. A Government Accountability Office report from April 2023 notes that “Such systems could eventually enable [high energy lasers] to engage powerful targets such as cruise missiles.”

For now, work at the 500-kW level is in development. Should it succeed, and should lasers be able to scale up even more, the promise is for weapons that, once in place, could offer unprecedented protection against major threats. For decades, missiles have presented an unbalanced threat to tanks, planes, and ships, where the missile is much cheaper than the vehicle it is designed to destroy. Lasers, while not cheap to develop, could make missiles less effective as a counter to such vehicles, because the directed energy would be able to zap them before they reached their targets. 

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It is the Department of Defense’s responsibility to secure the skies above the United States from potential threats. Following the transit across the US in February of a large balloon originating in China, the Air Force scrambled jets to shoot down new objects seen with more sensitive radar apertures. This led to the shoot-downs of several objects. Finding unknown objects in the sky is hard work, which is why the Pentagon commissioned think tank RAND to map public reports of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena across the United States.

RAND’s report was completed in May 2023, sent to the Department of Defense for review, and published on July 25. One day later, on July 26, former Department of Defense employee David Grusch testified before a House Oversight and Accountability subcommittee, specifically offering statements on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs. The term is largely a modern rebranding of UFOs, after the latter abbreviation became shorthand for objects potentially connected with extraterrestrial life. The hearing attracted far-reaching headlines, as well as disputes regarding Grusch’s claims from news media and the Pentagon alike. 

The question of what people spot and keep spotting in the skies above the US is real. The RAND report, with access to great swathes of data, offers a good starting point for understanding this topic. When it comes to modern observations of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, the RAND study’s most concrete finding is that unknown aircraft are most commonly reported near Military Operations Areas (MOAs), or swathes of the sky designated for military practice and maneuvering. These areas are not necessarily near air bases.

The history of UFO sightings and Project Blue Book

For decades, air traffic over the United States was largely limited to commercial and military vehicles, with onboard human pilots. Other types of flying machines, like balloons or uncrewed target drones, were used within specific areas, and would sometimes show up in public reports of unusual phenomena. (The sensor-carrying balloon that crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico in June 1947 is likely the most famous of these.)

Following a flying saucer panic in the US in 1947, the Air Force collected public reports of Unidentified Flying Objects through Project Blue Book. An analysis of Blue Book sightings, conducted by the University of Colorado in 1969, found that at least 90 percent of sightings could be explained as naturally occurring phenomena, like Venus seen at dawn. Of the remaining 10 percent that could not be publicly explained, documents declassified in 1992 revealed that fully half of those sightings were Americans reporting the flight paths of US spy planes, like the U-2. These were flying objects known to the government, but not known to the public.

Area 51, the Air Force base that is almost synonymous in popular culture with alien research, was started as a place to test the U-2 spy plane. It is still in use to this day for flights of experimental craft, and the military secrecy around the bases’ contents and operations lend it an outsized air of mystery.

What the RAND report found about UAPs today

To understand where and why Americans are reporting unusual sightings in the sky, RAND researchers Marek N. Posard, Ashley Gromis, and Mary Lee started with the National UFO Reporting Center database. Established in 1998, the NUFORC is a nongovernmental entity that allows people to report sightings, and through a moderation process filters out obvious hoaxes. The researchers used that data to answer two questions at the heart of the report: where in the US are people likely to report such sightings, and what factors predict where people are more or less likely to report UAP sightings?

The sightings were matched to US census-designated places, then compared to places of interest, like military bases, MOAs, airports, and weather stations. The data set is big, with researchers finding 101,151 reported UAP sightings in 12,783 census-designated places from 1998 to 2022.

“The most consistent—and statistically significant—finding from our models was for reports of UAP sightings in areas within 30 km of MOAs,” write the authors. “According to the FAA, ‘MOAs are established to contain nonhazardous, military flight activities,’ including air combat maneuvers, air intercepts, and low-altitude tactics. Given this association, we suspect that some of the self-reports of UAP sightings to NUFORC are authorized aircraft flying within MOAs.”

A good example of an MOA is the Desert MOA, situated north of Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s near Nellis Air Force Base, but planes are also likely to fly from Nellis to Carson MOA, which is far from any air bases. 

Notably, reported sightings of UAPs went down when people were within about 19 miles (30 km) of an Air Force or Navy base, and they also went down further than 37 miles (60 km) away. Being within 37 miles of an airport reduced the rate of sightings. While weather stations did not change the frequency of sightings, weather did, as for “each additional 1 percent of cloudy days, the expected rate of all UAP sightings increased by 1.6 percent.”

Taken altogether, the research suggests that people are more likely to not report unusual sightings of aircraft when they are in an area where they expect aircraft to be, like by an Air Force base. 

“One possible explanation for this pattern of findings is that people located in more–densely populated areas, near airports and near weather stations, are more aware of the types of objects that fly overhead and nearby and are therefore less apt to report aerial phenomena,” write the researchers.

Identifying the unknown

New aircraft, like cheap high-altitude balloons or abundant hobbyist drones, are already changing how people see and understand the sky. Air Force sensors are geared towards identifying larger crewed aircraft. One policy choice posed by the RAND study is if there is value in the military turning to public reports of unusual aircraft.

The authors offer three suggestions. 

“First, we recommend that government authorities (e.g., local and state government officials, the FAA, and DoD) conduct outreach with civilians located near MOAs,” they write. This would help people near skies used by the military, but far from airbases, understand what exactly it is they are observing. Being near an airbase makes the presence of aircraft intuitive, but training areas exist largely on maps until they are abruptly in use, with no ground-based indicators highlighting what is happening. “Second, we recommend that government authorities conduct additional outreach to notify nearby civilians when there is airspace activity near a MOA,” the authors continue.

The authors’ third recommendation is a new evaluation to inform the design of a detailed and robust system for public reporting of UAP sightings. A new reporting tool could improve precision in location, in tools used to record sightings, and ideally would be designed to filter out hoaxes or known objects.

“In conclusion,” they write, “the U.S. government has a large swath of airspace to monitor at a time when there is greater access than ever to small, technologically advanced, and inexpensive aerial objects. If officials believe that public reporting could be a valuable tool to help manage U.S. airspace, it will be important to ensure that members of the public report actual threats. Greater transparency in how sightings are collected, investigated, and used may also help mitigate the conspiracy theories that have long surrounded aerial phenomena.”

It has been so long since the military first collected data about unusual sightings that the UFO term has transcended its role as a military acronym. Instead of relying on a non-governmental tool to capture reports from the public, a new government-created tool for civilians may offer a way to understand the skies better, but it is unlikely that reporting alone will be enough to dispel conspiracy theories.

Correction on August 9: This article has been updated to remove a reference in the first paragraph to a hobbyist balloon that had potentially been linked to a shoot-down of an object on February 11, 2023.

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A buzzer goes off in a large industrial kitchen at an Army base in Natick, Massachusetts. Two small metal tubes full of food—truffle mac and cheese and hash browns with bacon—have been heating up for five minutes in a steam oven and are now ready for eating. Daniel Nattress, a senior food technologist with the military’s Combat Feeding Division, uses a red protective mitt on his right hand to grab them. 

Then comes the moment I’ve been waiting for: a chance to eat the food that comes out of these tubes—the mac and cheese, the hash browns with bacon, and a tube full of what’s called chunky apple pie, which I’ll be consuming at room temperature. The apple pie is first, and attached to the tube is an orange probe that’s like a rigid straw. I squeeze the tube to push the food through the probe, and eat some. “It actually tastes like apple pie,” I remark.

The food made in this facility is unique among military rations for the Department of Defense. A soldier in the field may get their nourishment from an MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat), sampling a flavor like “spaghetti with beef and sauce.” Or, if they were at a base, they’d eat whatever was served at the dining facility. Meanwhile, a sailor on a ship or submarine will eat grub in the galley. But the pilots of the high-flying U-2 spy planes bring along sealed tubes of food to give them a boost during a long flight. Here’s why they rely on tube food, and how it’s made. 

Dining at 70,000 feet

When an Air Force pilot flies a U-2 aircraft, they wear a full pressure suit and helmet. The plane is known for being both a challenge to fly—especially to land—and for its ability to soar at heights significantly higher than commercial airliner cruising altitudes. The U-2 can operate, according to an Air Force fact sheet, “at altitudes over 70,000 [feet],” and the suit the aviators wear exists to protect them. 

“Really what it does is it acts as a backup envelope, as it were, for the pilot if the cockpit cabin were to decompress,” says Hannah Jacobs, the Air Force program manager at the David Clark Company in Worcester, Massachusetts, which makes the suits. It’s like “a secondary atmosphere—a container to keep the individual flying the aircraft safe if the aircraft were to become damaged, or if the cabin pressurization system were to fail,” she says.

Jacobs knows the topic well. Before working for the David Clark Company, she was in the Air Force, where she was a technician who was a part of the U-2 program, focused on areas such as maintenance and repair of those pressure suits.

[Related: The real star of this aerial selfie isn’t the balloon—it’s the U-2 spy plane]

Someone wearing a sealed pressure suit can’t exactly grab a protein bar to gnaw on if they get hungry. That’s where the tube food and the straw-like probe comes into play. The pilot, who can heat the tube in the cockpit, puts the probe through a small portal in the helmet, allowing them to get sustenance while staying protected within the envelope of the sealed suit. “The idea is that you don’t have to break the seal at all,” she says. “The straw goes in through the feeding port, and that also has an o-ring around it that would prevent any kind of air leakage from escaping the suit, and so you stay protected the entire time.”  

While there are 19 flavors of the tube foods, she recalls the popularity of the chocolate pudding (there is both a regular version and a caffeinated one) and that she once, while in the Air Force, “experienced a chocolate pudding shortage.” 

“You never want to be the tech delivering that news to anyone—that the chocolate pudding supply has been exhausted,” she adds. 

How the tube food is made

The food that a U-2 pilot eats—flavors include hash browns with bacon bits, chocolate pudding, chicken tortilla soup, polenta with cheese and bacon, beef stroganoff, beef stew, and pepperoni pizza—begins its life in the Department of Defense kitchen in Massachusetts. (Technically in a building called the Bainbridge Combat Feeding Laboratory, at the US Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center, which is also known as the DEVCOM Soldier Center, which is located at a base in Natick.) Favorite items include pears, chicken tortilla soup, and the hash browns with bacon.

The main event happens at the Nordenmatic 602, a machine that according to the company’s website can fill various kinds of tubes with various kinds of things—think stuff like toothpaste or cosmetics. 

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

The tubes for this Air Force cuisine are made of aluminum with a gold food-grade liner inside to prevent the grub from being in direct contact with the aluminum. Each one holds about 5 ounces, and before it’s filled with its delicious contents, one end remains open, so it’s essentially a cylinder. The tubes take a trip on a small track in the machine with their open end facing upwards, passing below a hopper from which the food travels down into the tube. Another part of the machine then crimps the end of the filled tube, sealing it. 

“This is brand-new,” Nattress says, noting that it replaced an older machine. So why the upgraded equipment? “They’re envisioning that the U-2 will fly another 20 years,” he says. Two more decades of flight for this storied aircraft means two more decades of tube food production.

To get into the hopper above the Nordenmatic, the food travels through a hose from a 40-gallon steam-jacketed kettle. This large metal container is where the food is mixed—it then gets pumped into the hopper of the nearby Nordenmatic machine. After being filled, the tubes are sterilized in a retort oven.

It’s better than baby food

Nattress, who has been in charge of the tube food program for 25 years and is a trained taste-tester, takes the culinary mission seriously. He notes the four ways that people derive sensation from food: taste, texture, smell, and appearance. A pilot who is squirting the food directly from an opaque tube through a probe and into their mouth is missing out on some of those senses, leaving two for them to focus on. 

“Texture and taste are huge,” he says. The key is to make sure there is a texture to the cuisine, with little particles that can fit through the probe. 

“If we just grind it down into nothing, you lose that texture,” he says. “You want to have a little bit of texture in there, so that they can discern the food particles.” For example, the chunky apple pie dish is made from real sliced apples (as opposed to applesauce) that have been ground up, along with graham cracker crumbs. The chunks are good, but they can’t be too big. “Imagine being up there at 70,000 feet, and you want to have something, and it clogs up,” he says.

While holding a tube of the chunky apple pie, he recalls the process that went into developing that flavor. “We’ll take a nice apple pie—a nice, good-quality apple pie—we’ll put it in our mouth and taste it, and we try to describe, write down, those sensations that we get. And we try to recreate that in here,” he says, pointing at the tube. 

In other words, this stuff is not just flavored paste, sauce, or a baby-food like substance. “Even like the more advanced baby foods, they may have a little bit of texture, but they don’t have a lot of spice in it,” he adds. “We want to have that full-flavor profile.”

Eating the tube food

The chunky apple pie I tasted straight from the probe included not just apples, graham crackers crumbs, but also cinnamon, nutmeg, and “some dairy,” Nattress says. After eating the dessert item first, it was time to eat the two that he’d heated: the truffle mac and cheese, and the hash browns with bacon. 

To conserve those plastic probes, he squirts the truffle mac and cheese straight onto a plate into a gooey yellow pile, and hands it to me with a spoon. This item’s ingredients include truffle oil, gouda, a cheese powder, onion powder, paprika, little bitty pastas, and cream. 

The next one was the hash browns and bacon, whose origin story, Nattress says, involved a request for breakfast food. “They were expecting an egg product,” he says. But that’s not what they got—they got a delicious and savory combination of hash browns and bacon bits. He squirts that one onto a different plate. The hash browns, he says, have actually started out as tater tots. 

I tried both, and perhaps due to an aversion for creamy food, the winner in my eyes was the hash browns with bacon. “I think this is my favorite, so far,” I say, after my first spoonful of this breakfast item made for spy plane pilots. “You can taste the little bacon bits in there.”

Nattress says they produce more than 20,000 tubes each year.

Watch a short video about the process below—including the taste tests. 

The post Inside the US military lab making tube food for spy plane pilots appeared first on Popular Science.

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Despite only recently taking to the skies, hydrogen-powered planes are already assuaging some skeptics about their role within a more sustainable airline industry. And while current prototypes won’t be making transoceanic flights anytime soon, their proofs-of-concept could guide better, more efficient, and larger craft in the years to come.

As Canary Media highlighted on August 2, two California-based startups’ have recently run multiple successful test flights for their experimental hydrogen gas fuel cell propeller planes. Both prototypes involve retrofitting existing turboprops to accommodate hydrogen fuel technology, albeit in slightly different ways to achieve different goals.

Universal Hydrogen’s 40-passenger Dash 8 prototype, for example, pairs an original jet fuel engine alongside a 1.2 megawatt fuel cell and 800-kilowatt electric motor. According to the company’s CTO Mark Cousin, the Dash 8 has successfully flown a total of nine times as high as 10,000 feet while at speeds upwards of 170 knots (195 mph). Meanwhile, ZeroAvia’s modified 19-seat Dornier 228 has flown 10 times at 5,000 feet while traveling at 150 knots without any issues. The company’s twin-engine turboprop includes one standard fuel setup, as well as a 600 kilowatt combination of hydrogen fuel cells and batteries.

[Related: This plane powered by hydrogen has made an electrifying first flight.]

Air travel has steadily rebounded following countries’ easing of COVID-19 lockdown precautions. While the numbers still aren’t pre-pandemic levels, they are expected to surpass them by 2025, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). All those additional planes in the sky come with carbon emissions—roughly 800 metric tonnes of it, as of last year. In order to ensure a sustainable future, the IEA estimates that nations need to keep those CO2 levels below 1000 metric tonnes through the decade’s end. Unfortunately, the organization currently deems the airline industry “not on track” to achieving the goal.

For years, industry experts largely agreed that hydrogen fuel airplanes simply weren’t economically or logistically viable, given issues such as hydrogen canisters’ space requirements and their overall power outputs. Over time, however, both Universal Hydrogen and ZeroAvia intend to transition to liquid hydrogen, which packs more of a punch while also taking up less canister space.

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

Given the current technological landscape, flights that can completely run on hydrogen will still likely be restricted to shorter distance journeys, but that could still put a major dent in airline emissions. According to a new report from the International Council on Clean Transportation, even a retrofitted fuel-cell plane could generate one-third less CO2 over its entire lifetime compared to even “e-kerosene,” i.e. fuel made from water, carbon dioxide, and electricity.

“The question of how to create sustainable air travel has plagued the green movement for decades,” Dale Vince, an environmental entrepreneur planning to utilize ZeroAvia’s engine for passenger flights between England and Scotland, told the BBC in July. “The desire to travel is deeply etched into the human spirit, and flights free of C02 emissions, powered by renewable energy will allow us to explore our incredible world without harming it for the first time.”

The post Hydrogen-powered flight is closer to takeoff than ever appeared first on Popular Science.

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American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan in the 2000s and early 2010s had a problem. The country’s terrain, with steep mountains, sharp hills, and deep valleys, made it easy for their enemies to hide, especially given their adversary’s local knowledge of the terrain. US airplanes and helicopters had uncontested control of the skies, but by the time a patrol was ambushed, had called for air support, and then the support arrived, the fight might be over. The Switchblade drone, originally developed as the Lethal Miniature Aerial Missile System, offered an answer to this threat. 

The Switchblade is a kind of piloted missile that can also be a scout. From its initial deployments with the US Army in 2012, to its inclusion in US military aid to Ukraine in March 2022, the Switchblade has expanded the power and ability of infantry. For example, in May 2022, Ukraine’s military released footage showing a Switchblade used to attack a Russian tank crew, who were on top of the tank. The human-portable missile, with an onboard camera to provide its operator a view as it attacks, offers soldiers air support they can bring to battle on their backs. Plus, its operator can call off a strike if the situation changes.

Why a miniature missile?

The Switchblade began development, like many drones, as a scout. According to Switchblade-maker AeroVironment, in 2004 the US Army asked the company to develop a drone that could be launched from the barrel of a 105 millimeter mortar, letting the artillery team do damage assessment after their attack without having to send anyone close to the site to check. While that program didn’t ultimately pan out, AeroVironment had succeeded in developing a tube-launched drone that could send real-time video back to human operators.

DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue sky projects agency, was interested in developing a “Close Combat Lethal Reconnaissance” tool, which was built on the same tube-launched premise. AeroVironment pitched an armed tube-launched drone to Air Force Special Operations, who were so impressed they offered funding for it in 2006, and by 2010 the US Army ordered the weapons as well. 

In Afghanistan, the main threats faced by US and coalition forces on patrol came from ambushes, snipers, and roadside bombs, or Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Alone or in combination, all of these could prove fatal. One such adaptation was the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, or MRAP, a vehicle that protected its occupants from the immediate harms of a roadside bomb. Another was the Switchblade, which offered a way to combine the scouting power of human-carried drones with an explosive charge, so it could be used like a missile against sniper nests or people setting up IEDs.

“Think about it—pairing switchblade aerial munitions with an [unmanned surveillance drone like a] Raven, Wasp, or Puma—a small team with those tools can know what is going on around them within about 15 klicks. Once they identify a threat, Switchblade lets them engage that threat immediately,” Steven Gitlin, a spokesman for AeroVironment, told Marine Corps Times in 2012.

For special operations forces, who are used to operating without air support, and for the mainline infantry of the Army and the Marine Corps, having a backpackable missile on hand expanded how they could fight in the field. In a pinch, the Switchblade offered a way out of an ambush, or just-enough firepower to drive an enemy back while waiting for more air support to arrive.

How does a Switchblade work?

The Switchblade is a flying camera robot with an explosive inside. These all-electric machines are weapons that will help find or attack nearby enemies, not far-away ones. 

Switchblades come in two sizes: the Switchblade 300 and Switchblade 600. Both can be carried by one person, though the weight difference is substantial—a 300 weighs just 5.5 pounds and can fit inside a backpack. The 600 is heavier, with the missile itself weighing 33 lbs and the components needed to transport it much heavier.

The Switchblade 300 can hit targets at a range of just over 6 miles, and can fly for a total of 15 minutes. The 600 has a range of 25 miles or a flight time of 40 minutes. The Switchblade contains cameras, and video from these sensors, as well as GPS information and image processing, is used to guide the Switchblade. The Switchblade is also designed to receive targeting information from other drones, allowing it to follow and find selected targets. That makes it one weapon among many that can be directed against a target with the targeting information provided by other drones.

What kind of targets could a Switchblade be used against?

Unlike other drones that are just used for reconnaissance, the Switchblade 300 carries a small explosive payload, the kind most likely used to hit people or unprotected weapons, like a mortar launcher or exposed machine gun emplacement. For the larger Switchblade 600, the payload is an “anti-armor warhead,” making it useful against vehicles.

If the humans directing the Switchblade see that it no longer has a target, it can be called off and then recovered. The brochure for the Switchblade 600 boasts that the weapon offers a rechargeable battery.

While these seem like a highly modern creation, there’s historical context: The Kettering Bug, a 1918 uncrewed biplane that’s considered a predecessor to both drones and cruise missiles, flew for a time before an internal signal released its wings and it crashed its explosive payload into the ground. 

[Related: What is DARPA? The rich history of the Pentagon’s secretive tech agency]

Modern loitering munitions typically fly for some time, using sensors to look for targets such as anti-air missile sites and radar stations. Even at the full endurance of the Switchblade 600, the drone can only fly for 40 minutes, and the short duration of a Switchblade 300 is barely enough to qualify it as a loiterer.

When the missiles were first proposed and tested, they were commonly referred to as either “kamikaze drones” or “suicide missiles.” Popular Science, in its coverage a decade ago, referred to prototype Switchblades as a “Flying Assassin Robot” and a “Kamikaze Suicide Drones.” All of those names capture something important about the category: when one of these weapons blows up, it cannot be used again or recovered. Today, in addition to calling such weapons “loitering munitions,” Popular Science uses the term “self-detonating drone.”

Is a Switchblade an autonomous weapon?

Like many drones, the Switchblade is directed by waypoint navigation, in which a human plots a path on a map and the robot, once launched, flies on its own accord.

“[Unlike] radio-controlled devices, the operator is not flying the aircraft, the operator’s simply indicating what he wants to look at, what he wants the camera to be pointing at, and the onboard computer flies the aircraft to that point and maintains on target,” Steve Gitlin, AeroVironment’s Chief Marketing Officer, told The War Zone in 2020. “We have a similar capability in our tactical unmanned aircraft systems. You could lock in on a target and the aircraft will basically maintain position on that target, autonomous.”

Other software on the Switchblade, like feature and object recognition, likely aids in its ability to find and track a target. That doesn’t make it an autonomous weapon in the strictest definition, but it is a weapon with autonomous features, which can change the ways people use them.

Focusing on whether or not it fits a strict definition of autonomous weapon is less important than understanding how, exactly, Switchblades use what autonomous features they have. “It’s therefore probably wisest to put the definitional debates aside and instead focus on the novel (as well as familiar) challenges and risks that are raised by the growing autonomy of weapon systems,” tweeted Arthur Holland Michel, a scholar of drones and autonomous war machines. “For example: Do the operators have sufficient situational awareness to make a decision on the use of force? Do the weapons provide a sufficient control surface for human operators to exercise precaution in attack?”

In battle, the short flight time between launch and impact for Switchblades, especially Switchblade 300s, means that the person firing the weapon is operating in a similar manner as someone firing an anti-air missile at a plane, with trust that the missile’s own targeting system will hit what it is supposed to hit. 

What is different for the Switchblade, compared to other missiles, is that the human operator has the possibility of calling off the attack if something changes, like a civilian walking into the area or the cameras revealing what the operator thought was a tank to be a school bus instead. That’s different from something like a high-flying Reaper drone, which fires missiles that can’t be turned around.

The ability to exercise that kind of control, to in effect un-fire a missile already airborne, is one of the big promises of control systems like this for weapons. For that promise to be realized, it requires that a human, launching weapons in battle, is able and willing to watch the missile’s own video feed until it ends.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on March 22, 2022.

The post Everything to know about Switchblades, the attack drones the US gave Ukraine appeared first on Popular Science.

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In 1957, the Soviet Union changed the night sky. Sputnik, the first satellite, was in orbit for just 22 days, but its arrival brought a tremendous set of new implications for nations down on Earth, especially the United States. The USSR was ahead in orbit, and the rocket that launched Sputnik meant that the USSR would likely be able to launch atomic or thermonuclear warheads through space and back down to nations below. 

In the defense policy of the United States, Sputnik became an example of “technological surprise,” or when a rival country demonstrates a new and startling tool. To ensure that the United States is always the nation making the surprises, rather than being surprised, in 1958 president Dwight D. Eisenhower created what we now know as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Originally called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, ARPA/DARPA has had a tremendous impact on technological development, both for the US military and well beyond it. (Its name became DARPA in 1972, then ARPA again from 1993 to 1996, and it’s been DARPA ever since.) The most monumental achievement of DARPA is the precursor to the service that makes reading this article possible. That would be ARPANET, the immediate predecessor to the internet as we know it, which started as a way to guarantee continuous lines of communication over a distributed network. 

Other projects include the more explicitly military ones, like work on what became the MQ-1 Predator drone, and endeavors that exist in the space between the civilian and military world, like research into self-driving cars.

What is the main purpose of DARPA?

The specific military services have offices that can conduct their own research, designed to bring service-specific technological improvements. Some of these are the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM). DARPA’s mission, from its founding, is to tackle research and development of technologies that do not fall cleanly into any of the services, that are considered worth pursuing on their own merits, and that may end up in the hands of the services later.

How did DARPA start?

Sputnik is foundational to the story of DARPA and ARPA. It’s the event that motivated President Eisenhower to create the agency by executive order. Missiles and rockets at the time were not new, but they were largely secret. During World War II, Nazi Germany had launched rockets carrying explosives against the United Kingdom. These V-2 rockets, complete with some of the engineers who designed and built them, were captured by the United States and the USSR, and each country set to work developing weapons programs from this knowledge.

Rockets on their own are a devastatingly effective way to attack another country, because they can travel beyond the front lines and hit military targets, like ammunition depots, or civilian targets, like neighborhoods and churches, causing disruption and terror and devastation beyond the front lines. What so frightened the United States about Sputnik was that, instead of a rocket that could travel hundred of miles within Earth’s atmosphere, this was a rocket that could go into space, demonstrating that the USSR had a rocket that could serve as the basis for an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, or ICBM. 

ICBMs carried with them a special fear, because they could deliver thermonuclear warheads, threatening massive destruction across continents. The US’s creation and use of atomic weapons, and then the development of hydrogen bombs (H-bombs), can also be understood as a kind of technological surprise, though both projects preceded DARPA.

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

Popular Science first covered DAPRA in July 1959, with “U.S. ‘Space Fence’ on Alert for Russian Spy-Satellites.” It outlined the new threat posed to the United States from space surveillance and thermonuclear bombs, but did not take a particularly favorable light to ARPA’s work.

“A task force or convoy could no longer cloak itself in radio silence and ocean vastness. Once spotted, it could be wiped out by a single H-bomb,” the story read. “This disquieting new problem was passed to ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), which appointed a committee, naturally.”

That space fence formed an early basis for US surveillance of objects in orbit, a task that now falls to the Space Force and its existing tried-and-true network of sensors.

Did DARPA invent the internet?

Before the internet, electronic communications were routed through telecommunications circuits and switchboards. If a relay between two callers stopped working, the call would end, as there was no other way to sustain the communication link. ARPANET was built as a way to allow computers to share information, but pass it through distributed networks, so that if one node was lost, the chain of communication could continue through another.

“By moving packets of data that dynamically worked their way through a network to the destination where they would reassemble themselves, it became possible to avoid losing data even if one or more nodes went down,” describes DARPA. 

The earliest ARPANET, established in 1969 (it started running in October of that year), was a mostly West Coast affair. It connected nodes at University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Utah; and Stanford Research Institute. By September 1971 it had reached the East Coast, and was a continent-spanning network connecting military bases, labs, and universities by the late 1970s, all sending communication over telephone lines.

[Related: How a US intelligence program created a team of ‘Superforecasters’]

Two other key innovations made ARPANET a durable template for the internet. The first was commissioning the first production of traffic routers to serve as relay points for these packets. (Modern wireless routers are a distant descendant of this earlier wired technology.) Another was setting up universal protocols for transmission and function, allowing products and computers made by different companies to share a communication language and form. 

The formal ARPANET was decommissioned in 1988, thanks in part to redundancy with the then-new internet. It had demonstrated that computer communications could work across great distances, through distributed networks. This became a template for other communications technologies pursued by the United States, like mesh networks and satellite constellations, all designed to ensure that sending signals is hard to disrupt.

“At a time when computers were still stuffed with vacuum tubes, the Arpanauts understood that these machines were much more than computational devices. They were destined to become the most powerful communications tools in history,” wrote Phil Patton for Popular Science in 1995.

What are key DARPA projects?

For 65 years, DARPA has spurred the development of technologies by funding projects and managing them at the research and development stage, before handing those projects off to other entities, like the service’s labs or private industry, to see them carried to full fruition. 

DARPA has had a hand in shaping technology across computers, sensors, robotics, autonomy, uncrewed vehicles, stealth, and even the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. The list is extensive, and DARPA has ongoing research programs that make a comprehensive picture daunting. Not every one of DARPA’s projects yields success, but the ones that do have had an outsized impact, like the following list of game-changers:

Stealth: Improvements in missile and sensor technology made it risky to fly fighters into combat. During the Vietnam War, the Navy and Air Force adapted with “wild weasel” missions, where daring pilots would draw fire from anti-air missiles and then attempt to out-maneuver them, allowing others to destroy the radar and missile launch sites. That’s not an ideal approach. Stealth, in which the shape and materials of an aircraft are used to minimize its appearance on enemy sensors, especially radar, was one such adaptation pursued by DARPA to protect aircraft. DARPA’s development of stealth demonstrator HAVE BLUE (tested at Area 51) paved the way for early stealth aircraft like the F-117 fighter and B-2 bomber, which in turn cleared a path for modern stealth planes like the F-22 and F-35 fights, and the B-21 stealth bomber.

Vaccines: In 2011, DARPA started its Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics (ADEPT) program. Through this, in 2013 Moderna received $25 million from DARPA, funding that helped support its work. It was a bet that paid off tremendously in the COVID-19 pandemic, and was one of many such efforts to fund and support everything from diagnostic to treatment to production technologies.

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If you want to see a retired NASA space shuttle, you have a few options. You could travel to Virginia and see Discovery, or journey to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida to check out the angled Atlantis. And don’t forget about Enterprise in New York City, a shuttle that never flew into space but did glide through the atmosphere. 

Then there’s Endeavour. Right now, that space shuttle, which made 25 trips to space and back, is on display horizontally at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. But the museum has towering plans for the shuttle: It’s going to move it into a vertical position, and display it with solid rocket boosters and an external fuel tank, all attached together as if the ship was about to blast off into space. When that happens, it’ll be the only shuttle displayed vertically. And instead of having to cope with the forces of a launch, the orbiter assembly will need to withstand any California earthquakes.

As Endeavour is now, “it’s a great display, you can walk under it, look up at the tiles—it’s wonderful,” says Jeffrey Rudolph, the president and CEO of the museum. “But it will be amazing, and we think [a] far better display, when it’s vertical, with the whole stack. This’ll be 200 feet tall—20 stories tall—and you’ll be able to look at it [from] multiple perspectives, multiple views, at multiple levels.” 

To get it into the launch position requires an operation worthy of an actual NASA mission. It kicked off in earnest on July 20, when two components called aft skirts came in via crane and were lowered into position on a concrete pad. Each of those aft skirts are as wide as 18 feet and weigh 13,000 pounds and have both lifted off on actual shuttle flights. 

The aft skirts comprise the base of the solid rocket boosters (SRBs). Other segments, called the solid rocket motors, which are about 116 feet tall, will join them to make up each SRB, as will parts called forward assemblies. Those two SRBs will weigh in at a total of a quarter million pounds together. Before Endeavour can join those SRBs, the 76,000-pound external tank (technically known as ET-94) must be moved into place, too.

The plan holds that early next year, the 176,000-pound Endeavour itself will be lifted into launch position using two cranes, one of which will simply make sure the orbiter’s tail doesn’t hit the ground.  

For this whole assembly operation, “we’re basically following the same process that Kennedy Space Center used,” Rudolph notes, adding that no one has put together a shuttle at a non-NASA facility before. As an example, this incredible time-lapse video shows the space shuttle Atlantis being lifted and then mated with its solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank for the very last shuttle flight in July of 2011. 

Like a real NASA launch, Rudolph adds that weather will play a key role in when they actually carry out that maneuver of lifting the actual orbiter into place. Windy conditions, which could interact with the orbiter, would cause a delay. “It is a glider,” he points out. “It’s got wings.” 

[Related: Astronauts explain what it’s like to be ‘shot off the planet’]

The whole flight assembly—Endeavour, the solid rocket boosters, and the tank—will together weigh just over half a million pounds, according to the California Science Center. “We’ve got the last hardware—the last external tank—so it’s the only place in the world you’ll be able to see a full space shuttle stack in launch position,” Rudolph says.

To mitigate against the possibility of an earthquake, the whole shuttle configuration will be perched on a thick concrete pad that weighs more than 3 million pounds. “It’s a 8-foot-thick concrete pad that is surrounded on all four sides by a 3-foot moat, basically,” Rudolph explains. And under that pad are a half-dozen seismic isolators, which Rudolph compares to “big ball bearings.” The Los Angeles Times has helpful graphics.

“That whole pad can move independently of the building, and will withstand any foreseeable earthquake,” he adds. 

Rudolph says that it will be a couple years before the facility is actually open, and that the entire planned Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center that will house Endeavour and other exhibits costs $400 million. According to a previous NASA estimate, it cost around $450 million to actually launch a shuttle. A more recent estimate via the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the number at well over $1 billion for each launch, in fiscal year 2021 dollars. 

Rudolph says that they had hoped to display a space shuttle in this way starting as early as three decades ago. “I actually have a rendering from 1992 showing a space shuttle in launch position,” he says. With any luck, the shuttle will be moved into place in January of 2024. 

Watch a short video about the new facility, below.

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Traffic mapping apps allow you to choose the fastest route, avoid highways or tolls, and even determine the most eco-friendly paths.  But the newest choice could provide commuters a completely different peace of mind: the safest drive possible.

According to their paper published in Analytic Methods in Accident Research, a team at the University of British Columbia has designed an algorithm capable of analyzing real-time traffic data to determine which routes offer the least risk of accidents and road hazards. To test their system, researchers deployed 10 drones over downtown Athens, Greece to monitor the area’s vehicle speeds, acceleration rates, and positions. That data, which included “near-miss” assessments, was then fed into their newly crafted algorithm to assess the safety of various routes and options.

“This research is the first to use real-time crash risk data to provide navigation directions and give you the safest possible driving route through a city,” said Tarek Sayed, a civil engineering professor at UBC said in a statement. “The algorithm is capable of adjusting directions in real-time, suggesting detours to avoid hazardous locations. This helps enhance road safety for all users. For instance, companies will be able to route their fleet efficiently, prioritizing safety and reducing crash risk.”

[Related: Bug brains are inspiring new collision avoidance systems for cars.]

Interestingly, the researchers also discovered that a map’s fastest routes frequently did not overlap with its safest directions. In one section of the Athens roadways, for example, just 23 percent of its fastest routes were also considered its safest. On average, the area’s safest options used a little over half of the same roads determined for the quickest routes.

“There was a clear trade-off between safety and mobility,” explained Tarek Ghoul, a PhD student involved in the study. According to Ghoul, their algorithm’s safest routes were on average 22 percent less hazardous than its fastest route alternative, “suggest[ing] that there are considerable gains in safety on the safest routes with just a small increase in travel time.” Additionally, “intermediate routes” that balance both safety and drive times could offer pathways whose benefits “by far outweigh” any minor increased roadtimes. 

Such safety-focused algorithms aren’t only limited to vehicles, say Sayed and Ghoul. In the future, the same systems could also be applied for cyclists who often face less-than-hospitable road conditions. The team hopes such real-time information could soon be implemented into popular map apps to provide travelers with safer routes—be it by car, bike, or simply on foot.

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This article was originally published on KFF Health News.

What do kidney and pancreas transplants have to do with airplane regulations?

Tucked into the hundreds of pages of legislative language to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration is a provision to change the life-or-death process by which human organs are flown commercially from donor to recipient.

But where on the plane organs are stowed during flights has been a long-standing issue for organ procurement organizations.

The sweeping measure, which is pending in Congress and faces a Sept. 30 deadline, aims to change regulations and move organs to the cabin from an aircraft’s cargo hold. Organizations managing organ transport consider it an opportunity to secure legislative relief from a system they say adds more hurdles to the task of shipping organs.

It used to be that a member of a transplant team could take a packaged organ to a plane’s gate and hand it off to the aircraft’s crew, who would stow it in the cockpit or on the flight deck. This access “allowed us to really expedite the process,” said Jeff Orlowski, president and CEO of LifeShare Oklahoma, a nonprofit organ procurement organization in the state. But the terrorist attacks of 9/11 led to tighter security protocols, including a rule that permitted only people with tickets to go through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints.

“In our case, we don’t have a ticket,” said Casey Humphries, logistics service line leader of the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit contracted by the federal government to manage the nation’s transplant system. “We’re not booked as a passenger on a plane,” she said. Instead, they’re part of the relay network bringing the organs to people in need. Airport employees who work behind security checkpoints have an airport badge and usually get in through a designated entrance.

Another consequence of the 2001 policy changes was that donor organs flown on commercial airplanes—which are mostly kidneys—were stashed in cargo spaces below the wing along with boxes and luggage, said Humphries.

But shipping organs as cargo requires they be at the airport for loading one to two hours before takeoff. “That’s a significant time before the wheels go up for the plane,” said Orlowski. And that variable—the “hours that the organ is going to just sit, going nowhere”—has to be factored into decisions about where it can be sent, he said. Donated organs can’t be treated like a golf bag or an Amazon box. They are delicate and have an imminent expiration date, which for kidneys is usually within 24 hours of surgical removal.

Since January 2022, around 80 percent of organs recovered in Oklahoma were sent to another state to be transplanted, Orlowski said. And of the organs LifeShare recovers, about 35 percent of them are flown commercially. Since kidneys can survive in a cooler longer than other organs, nearly all organs that travel on commercial flights are kidneys.

The first choice for transporting an organ, he said, is usually to drive it to its destination; it’s cheaper, and the transplant team can be more watchful.

But that’s not always an option, especially in rural areas. Orlowski said there are only two transplant centers within driving distance of LifeShare’s Oklahoma City base, in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. So his team relies on commercial airlines for transportation.

The current air travel security rules also cause geographic disparities, as fewer cargo-carrying planes fly in and out of smaller airports in rural areas, compared with airports in bigger cities.

“We need something that is available 24 hours a day because organs are available 24 hours a day,” Humphries said.

Charter planes can be a backup option, but one flight can cost organ procurement organizations thousands of dollars, whereas cargo shipping costs usually come in at less than $500 per flight, Orlowski said.

Although the security protocol has been in place for more than two decades, transplant advocates say this is the first time they have sought a legislative reversal, and they are optimistic about the outcome.

The provision to allow organs back in cabins is included in both the Senate and House versions of the reauthorization bill. Some hot-button parts of the bill, though, such as an increase in the mandatory retirement age for pilots, could stall progress. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved its version on June 14, and at press time it was being debated on the House floor. The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation is expected to consider its version this month, according to Senate staffers.

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The jet engines on commercial airplanes can be absolutely huge. Technically known as turbofans, these machines have massive spinning fans in the front that create thrust by sending air out the back. One specific engine model has a fan that measures about 11 feet across. The engines burn jet fuel, create huge amounts of thrust, and are very loud. 

But what if you could point a ray gun at them and shrink them way down, make them electric, and better yet, very quiet? That’s the goal of a company called Whisper Aero, which was founded in 2021. However, their propulsors aren’t intended to power large airliners. Instead, the company aims to have their innovative electric machines power military drones, perhaps a small nine-passenger jet, or even take on other, non-aerial tasks—like move the air in leaf blowers or HVAC systems. 

“Whisper’s all about delivering the next generation of cleaner, quieter, more efficient thrust—for drones, for jets, and anything that moves a lot of air,” says Ian Villa, the company’s co-founder and COO. He compares the company to “an electric Pratt & Whitney, plus a Dyson, combined.” In other words, merge a maker of aircraft engines with a company famous for vacuums, and you’ve got Whisper. 

[Related: The metallic guts of GE’s massive jet engines, in photos]

The company’s CEO and co-founder is Mark Moore, a veteran of NASA (and its X-57 program) and Uber Elevate, where Villa also worked. (Joby Aviation acquired Uber Elevate, which focused on flying taxis and urban air mobility, in 2020.) Moore notes that the result of the design is a “very rigid, very lightweight, high-performing fan unit.” 

Technically, what the company is working on is called an electric ducted fan, which just means that a spinning fan is enclosed within a duct. (For another take on ducted fans and flight, check out Lilium.) But Whisper’s version of this device involves some tweaks. For one, the tips of the fan blades are all connected with a circular shroud. Villa compares the setup to the wheels on a bike, with the fan blades being a bit like spokes and the shroud being like the outer wheel itself. And that means that the fan blades can be held in tension between the hub they are attached to at their base, and the shroud, or rim, at their tips. “We’re using tension to our benefit in order to be able to get to these high blade counts,” he says. 

The other aspect to know about the device is that those fan blades spin relatively slowly, at least when measuring the speed of their tips, and there are a lot of them. “We have so many blades that our fan looks like a solid disc, if you look at it from the front,” Moore adds. 

Because of the shroud that connects all the fan blade tips, “you’re also eliminating the tip vortex noise from the blade, which is a high contributor of noise,” says Villa. (Counterintuitively, the motor spinning the fan blades operates at a high RPM, but because the blades are small, their tip speeds are relatively pokey.)

“The combination of a lot of blades, with a high RPM on the motor, gets the tonal frequencies up to the ultrasonic, so people don’t even hear any tonal noise whatsoever,” Moore says. “That’s one of the reasons we’re so quiet.” Below is a video that demonstrates a Whisper propulsor in action:

Whisper currently shows off two different sized propulsors on their website. One has a fan diameter of just over 6 inches, and the other, nearly 10 inches. Moore notes that the small size of their thrusters swims against the current in the world of airplane engines, which like to be large to get better fuel efficiency. “Aircraft have essentially gone to fewer and fewer engines, that are bigger and bigger, to get to the highest possible efficiency and the lightest weight,” Moore adds. “The technology that we’ve developed has essentially broken that truth.”

So what can you do with such a highly engineered ducted fan? For one, you could put it on a drone. Whisper Aero has created and flown their own 12-foot-wide drone, which is powered by one of their propulsors. They have “shown that it’s inaudible from 200 feet away, [during] overflight,” Villa says. A quiet drone like that would be useful for a military that wants to carry out tasks focused on ISR, which stands for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. 

“Our goal is to actually get a DOD application—a DOD-focused propulsor—out the door later this year, early next year, for first flight probably next year,” Villa adds. 

The company also envisions that their propulsors could power something they call the Whisper Jet (the jet doesn’t actually exist) that would have 11 of their ducted fans on each wing, for a total of 22. That nine-passenger aircraft would be designed to take off in a conventional way, by speeding down a runway, as opposed to vertically, like the flying machines from other companies, such as Joby. When it comes to hypothetically using their propulsors to power aircraft that could carry people, the appeal is that the flying machines would be relatively quiet. 

And back down on the ground, these shrouded, ducted fans could do less glamorous work, like power leaf blowers that are also less of a noise nuisance in your neighborhood. 

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Stinger missiles are Cold War relics, and like many such relics, have seen action to lethal effect in Ukraine’s war against the Russian invasion. Nations like the United States and other NATO allies have given Ukraine their Stingers, putting the venerable human-portable surface-to-air missile to use against Soviet-designed aircraft, as it was originally designed to do. But the Stinger missile design is so old, and the stockpiles of the missiles being expended so quickly, that Stinger-maker Raytheon is asking for its retired missile makers to teach current workers how to restart production, Defense One reported in late June.

The US Army announced it was looking for a new Stinger missile replacement in March 2022, just a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The announcement came after the Biden administration had already announced the planned transfer of hundreds of Stinger missiles to the country. The Department of Defense’s June 27 factsheet on security assistance to Ukraine records over 1,700 Stinger anti-aircraft systems sent to the country. The missiles, which can be shoulder-fired or mounted on vehicles like Humvees, are being put to use, depleting what was already a finite supply of the weapons.

“Stinger’s been out of production for 20 years, and all of a sudden in the first 48 hours [of the war], it’s the star of the show and everybody wants more,” said Wes Kremer, the president of Raytheon parent company RTX, reports Defense One. Kremer’s remarks came at the Paris Air Show in June, an annual gathering and exhibition of aircraft and aircraft-related technologies. Kremer continued: “We were bringing back retired employees that are in their 70s … to teach our new employees how to actually build a Stinger. We’re pulling test equipment out of warehouses and blowing the spider webs off of them.”

The relevance of the Stinger to modern combat, combined with the manufacturing know-how being bound up in the minds of retirees, frames the machine as something of a useful relic. To understand the drive to restart Stinger production now, it is helpful to understand the circumstances under which the missile was first made.

Take the Redeye

The Army’s search for an anti-air missile can be traced back to 1951, after years of experimenting with anti-air guns found the weapons had insufficient range and accuracy to stop newer and faster planes. The HAWK missile, which has also seen action in Ukraine, is one of the early anti-air developments, but it is big, and needs vehicles to transport and launch it. Putting a missile in the hands of soldiers and marines on foot allows infantry to shoot down low-flying aircraft, including attack planes and increasingly helicopters. 

The first shoulder-fireable missile developed by the United States for this purpose was the Redeye, which used an infrared seeker to chase after the hottest object in the sky. It was first deployed for combat in 1967. The Soviet Union, working on a similar problem, developed the Strela shoulder-fired anti-air missile, which has seen use by both Ukraine and Russia.

The Redeye’s seeker meant it was easy to throw off targets with flares or even just the sun on a bright day, limiting the weapon’s usefulness, and it could not distinguish between friendly and enemy aircraft, meaning anyone firing a Redeye risked the missile turning and hitting a nearby friendly plane. The original Redeye was also slow, making it a weapon that could hit a low-flying plane after an attack run, but not stop it before an initial pass. 

The Stinger’s evolution

What became the Stinger started its development as the Redeye II. The program was renamed in 1972 and the missile became operational in 1981. The Stinger included a system that let the missile attempt to distinguish between friendly and hostile aircraft, by matching a coded friendly radio signal from the allied planes. The guidance system of the Stinger is still infrared, but once it gets close to a target the missile can navigate to hit other parts of the aircraft. 

The Stinger received significant upgrades over the course of its production, ensuring the weapons would remain useful for the duration of their service life, but the weapon is fundamentally based on technology and components from decades ago. While all military production is to some extent bespoke products, they exist in an ecosystem of parts that match commercial capabilities available at the time. 

Raytheon bringing back retirees to teach the basics of Stinger production will likely help with a lost transfer of knowledge, until the Army’s desired Stinger replacement is designed, tested, and improved. In the meantime, another option for the Army would be to reach out to allies like Japan and the United Kingdom, and see if their respective Stinger updates (Japan’s Type 91) or replacements (the UK’s Starstreak) are available for production. 

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On June 27, defense giant Northrop Grumman announced that it had successfully flown a plane with a new navigation system. Designed to work in situations where GPS signals may be difficult or impossible to get, this Embedded Global Positioning System (GPS) / Inertial Navigation System (INS) Modernization, or EGI-M, is a tool that could someday help fighter jet pilots and other aircraft fight through the jammed skies of a future war. 

For the May flight test, instead of trying the system on a fancy fighter or high-end military craft, the EGI-M was reportedly flown on a Cessna Citation V business jet.

“This flight test is a major step forward in developing our next generation airborne navigation system,” Ryan Arrington, a Northrop Grumman VP, said in a release. “The EGI-M capability developed by Northrop Grumman enables our warfighters to navigate accurately and precisely through hostile and contested environments.”

There’s many ways that a sky can be made inhospitable to intruding aircraft. Anti-aircraft weapons, primarily missiles and rockets but also fighter jets and sometimes anti-air guns, can all try to shoot a plane out of the sky. Jammers, or other tools and electronic warfare systems designed to interfere with signals in the electromagnetic spectrum, can block the information that pilots or drone operators need to operate their aircraft. The former kind of interference is referred to by the military as “kinetic” or physically destructive, the latter broadly is “electronic warfare.” Both kinds of interference can make for a hostile and contested sky.

The United States military has, for decades, operated in skies it could quickly and reliably control.

“Last time an American soldier died from an enemy aircraft was April 15th, 1953,” said James Hecker, a general in the U.S. Air Force, on a recent episode of the War on the Rocks podcast. “We’ve gotten a little bit spoiled, especially in the last 30 years. Desert storm, we had to fight for air superiority, but we got it really quick. Other wars that we’ve been in in the last 20 years, we got it uncontested.”

Hecker was speaking alongside Air Marshall Johnny Stringer of the British Royal Air Force, in a discussion about lessons learned about air superiority in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

“The biggest lesson learned that really the world has gotten out of this is what happens if you can’t get air superiority. What we’ve seen on both sides is that neither one was able to get air superiority,” said Hecker, who went on to note that the reason neither side can claim air superiority is because both sides have very good integrated air and missile defense systems.

While these defense systems are primarily missiles, being able to block out some of the signals used by planes and drones also impedes the aircraft’s ability to function. GPS systems, originally developed for military use, depend on aircraft receiving and using signals from space, and then being able to match that to a physical position on or above the earth. 

The EGI-M is designed to operate in GPS-contested and GPS-denied environments, or places where the signals face interference and complete obstruction. To get around that, an inertial navigation system uses sensors like gyroscopes to instead track changes and speed of movement from a known point, allowing the aircraft’s movement to locate it in space. To help in GPS-contested environments, the system can receive GPS-M signals, which is a higher code of GPS signal specifically reserved for military functions; it is designed to be harder to obstruct and more secure in transmission. 

In the May flight, the Cessna testbed carried three models of the system, which it used to capture three different kinds of navigational information. As outlined in a conference abstract, found by The Aviationist, the three types of navigational data were inertial only, GPS only, and a blended GPS/inertial management system that used both at once.

As designed, the EGI-M system will go into two planes upon launch. One of these is the F-22 Raptor, a stealth air superiority fighter exclusively flown by the United States Air Force, which will be crucial to flying into and fighting to open any contested sky. In addition, EGI-M is designed to launch on the E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, a prop-driven plane operated by the Navy that features a large radar in a disk mounted above the plane’s fuselage. The Hawkeye is a command and control aircraft, used to perceive allied and enemy movement and direct battle while airborne. 

New navigation systems will not guarantee that US or allied aircraft can permanently clear a sky in the face of hostile foes, but they can expand the window in which such aircraft can reliably operate, and can make reasserting air superiority easier.

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Small planes have one propeller, bigger ones have two, and helicopters have a giant rotor on top and a smaller one on the tail. Then there’s an electric aircraft from Joby Aviation, which has a whopping six propellers. They can all tilt to allow the flying machine to take off and land vertically, or cruise in forward flight. 

The California-based company, which has been developing electric air taxis for years, officially took the wraps off its first production prototype aircraft today. It looks similar to pre-production aircraft that the company has flown before, but this one is destined to be delivered to Edwards Air Force Base in California after Joby finishes testing it. “We have the approval to fly that plane now legally, and we will fly it very soon,” says Jon Wagner, a veteran of Tesla who is the company’s lead for the powertrain and electronics team. That FAA certification to fly the plane, which has the word “experimental,” written on its side, is not the same type of certification that the company needs to fly paying customers. That comes later, if all goes according to plan.

The schedule holds for Joby to bring the aircraft to the Edwards Air Force Base in 2024, but the company will conduct tests that include flying it before sending it to the military base. “We expect very, very soon it will be in the air,” Wagner says. “We’ll be flying it in Marina [California] here, and then it will be moved to Edwards, and complete its official flight test plan with the US Air Force as a partner.” 

Joby Aviation and other electric aviation companies like Beta Technologies have a relationship with the Air Force through a program called Agility Prime. The purpose behind this program is for the military to help out the companies working in the field, while also learning from the tech and exploring how it could help the military. In a press release, Joby said after the aircraft arrives at Edwards, “it will be used to demonstrate a range of potential logistics use cases.”

“We’re super excited about taking this aircraft to Edwards Air Force Base in California to begin testing with the DOD,” the company’s CEO, JoeBen Bevirt, told Bloomberg News. “That is just a spectacular opportunity for us to begin building the operational muscle and begin moving goods and people around military airbases before we have FAA certification.” 

Joby’s production aircraft could be a way to transport cargo or people someday; it can hold four passengers, plus a pilot. The company’s goal is to carry people beginning in 2025. “I believe what we’re showing here is going to revolutionize aviation forever,” Wagner says. Joby also has a planned collaboration with Delta Air Lines, which could provide a way for passengers to make a short hop from somewhere in the New York City area, for example, to John F. Kennedy International Airport, before embarking on a regular plane to someplace further away.

Wagner says that the production aircraft that they’ve just unveiled appears, superficially, to resemble the pre-production aircraft the company has fabricated already. It “looks substantially similar to the very first aircraft we built, six years ago,” he says, “and especially [similar] to the last two aircraft we built.” 

But he says that even if it looks similar, the flying machine that came off the production line has been subjected to iterations to improve it. “The biggest difference is that we’ve now invested in the manufacturing systems, and we can make multiple of these aircraft, over and over now, and that’s because we’ve gained the confidence in that design,” he says. 

The industry as a whole has seen setbacks, as has Joby. A company called Kitty Hawk, which was working on a single-seat self-flying aircraft, closed its doors last year. And, an uncrewed, remotely piloted aircraft from Joby crashed in February of 2022, after it “experienced a component failure over an uninhabited area near Jolon, California,” the NTSB said in its preliminary report. “There were no injuries, and the aircraft was substantially damaged.” Plus, earlier this month, NASA said that it wouldn’t fly its electric X-57 plane, due to safety concerns and time constraints. 

In the US, Joby’s competitors include Beta Technologies, Archer, and Wisk, which is owned by Boeing.

Take a look at the sleek new aircraft, below:

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About 80 miles north-northwest of the Las Vegas strip, sits Groom Lake. The smooth, flat, dry lakebed is one of several across the Nevada desert, with more than a superficial similarity to Rogers Dry Lake, next to California’s Edwards Air Force Base. These spots in the desert, hospitable to people only with great effort, served as an ideal found resource for the United States in the 20th century. On lakebeds dry enough to land planes and far from the prying eyes of civilian life, the Air Force could test new and novel planes, with secrecy baked into the dusty earth around them. If Groom Lake sounds unfamiliar, that’s because it is also known by another name: Area 51.

For decades, the Air Force operations at Groom Lake and Area 51 were shrouded in deliberate secrecy. The base was established in 1955, but it would take until 1998 for the Air Force to acknowledge its existence. Previously, it has stated tersely: “Neither the Air Force nor the Department of Defense owns or operates any location known as ‘Area 51.’ There are a variety of activities, some of which are classified, throughout what is often called the Air Force’s Nellis Range Complex. There is an operation location near Groom Dry Lake. Specific activities and operations conducted on the Nellis Range, both past and present, remain classified and cannot be discussed publicly.”

But even before that, Area 51 had already made multiple appearances in a major series of arcade games by Atari (released in 1995), as a major plot point in the 1996 blockbuster alien invasion movie Independence Day, and it remains a staple in fiction and conspiracy theories about secret extraterrestrial research. It’s second perhaps only to Roswell, New Mexico, in the imagination of people who believe the US government is covering up the existence of aliens. However, aside from its notorious reputation, Area 51 instead has a long history as the holder of far more mundane, terrestrial secrets. Keeping that aura of secrecy up was partly what allowed speculation as to the true nature of the facility to run wild. During this time, the Air Force and CIA were able to test spy planes in the open desert with some degree of privacy.

All that U-2 can’t leave behind

In the early 1950s, the United States Air Force, recently spun off as an independent wing from the Army, set out looking for a high-altitude, long-range, long-endurance spy plane. This was early in the Cold War, and previous attempts to surveil the Soviet Union with balloons had produced extremely limited success. A plane offered far more control, and the reasoning at the time was that a high-altitude plane could stay beyond the range of Soviet radar and missiles. 

This plane ultimately materialized in the form of the U-2, which is still in service today (though the history of its development saw it built on CIA funding instead of Air Force money). While looking for a place to test and develop the new plane, the early U-2 design team spied Nevada’s Groom Dry Lake from the air and landed on the lake bed, proving the inherent viability of the site. Eventually, a paved runway was built. The purchase of land was made by the Atomic Energy Commission, and the boundaries of Area 51 are adjacent to what would become the Nevada Test Site, where the US would detonate nuclear warheads first in open air, then underground.

“The outlines of Area 51 are shown on current unclassified maps as a small rectangular area adjoining the northeast corner of the much larger Nevada Test Site. To make the new facility in the middle of nowhere sound more attractive to his workers, [Lockheed engineer] Kelly Johnson called it the Paradise Ranch, which was soon shortened to the Ranch,” reads a CIA history of the U-2 program, written in 1998 and declassified in 2013.

[Related on PopSci+: A CIA spyplane crashed outside Area 51 a half-century ago. This explorer found it.]

Secrecy was baked into Area 51 from the start, though it became hard to completely disentangle spy plane flights from UFO sightings. In 1947, a flying saucer panic led to public reports and inquiries into unknown aircraft, which helped make a surveillance balloon crash outside Roswell, New Mexico an enduring story. Project Blue Book, an official inquiry by the Air Force into UFOs, collected reports of official sightings, most of which could be dismissed as natural phenomena. One category the Air Force could dismiss internally, but not acknowledge publicly until 1992, was the number of U-2 flights reported as UFOs.

Stealth technology, now a defining feature of jets like the F-22 and F-35 family, was developed and tested at Area 51. In 1977, the US Air Force Special Projects Office tested HAVE BLUE, a stealth demonstrator, at Area 51. The two versions of HAVE BLUE both suffered crashes in their testing, and the wrecked planes were buried in the desert. Before the crashes, enough information was gleaned such that development of other stealth aircraft could continue. The F-117, the first stealth fighter, would be first tested at Area 51, before moving to a different, larger base in Nevada that could accommodate a full squadron.

Beyond developing new technologies, Area 51 has played host to foreign aircraft, acquired at times from defectors, allowing the US military to see just what tech other countries were flying and fighting with. One such incident was the loan from Israel to the United States of a MiG-21 in 1968, flown by an Iraqi pilot who had defected. This let the US get a close look at the most widely produced jet fighter in history, and one that was at the time serving capably in the skies above Vietnam.

In March 1994, Popular Science published “Searching for the Secrets of Groom Lake,” a dive into the development and history of Area 51, spurred by an Air Force’s ultimately successful request to give the Department of the Air Force control over 4,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management-owned territory around the site. This was an effort in part to deter people on the ground from spying on their operations at a distance. That story featured both a 1968 aerial photograph of the site taken by the US Geological Survey, and a 1988 photo taken by a Russian spy satellite that was then made commercially available. 

In October 2006, “New Secrets of Area 51” by Popular Science looked at the kinds of drones and other aircraft that might have been in development at the site. Among these is a sort of white whale for secret plane waters: the Aurora, a long-theorized ramjet powered hypersonic craft.

What, no aliens?

While Groom Lake and Area 51 has hosted plenty of secrets, there’s nothing to suggest it hosts the secret technology most synonymous with the name from popular culture: anything to do with aliens. Some of those claims can be traced back to a 1989 broadcast on Las Vegas television station KLAS, in which a man named Bob Lazar appeared “claiming to be a physicist hired by the government to reverse-engineer the propulsion systems of saucer-shaped alien spacecraft.”

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US wireless providers are on schedule to boost 5G service strength on July 1, but that expanded coverage may come at a cost. As Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg warned over the weekend, some airline companies who haven’t yet upgraded their fleets’ radio altimeters to withstand an increased 5G C-Band data could soon face new flight delays, adding to an already frequently chaotic airscape. 

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Friday, Secretary Buttigieg explained that portions of some airline companies’ fleets could still experience radio altimeter issues stemming from 5G interference despite an 18 month advance warning.

[Related: Pete Buttigieg on how to improve the deadly track record of US drivers.]

“There’s a real risk of delays or cancellations,” Buttigieg said. “This represents one of the biggest—probably the biggest—foreseeable problem affecting performance this summer.”

A plane’s radio altimeter uses radio waves to calculate a plane’s height above the ground—an often crucial measurement when needing to land during inclement weather conditions. Although overseas wireless companies use different radio frequencies, their American counterparts can overlap within the telecommunication industry’s chosen spectrum. As such, travelers could potentially begin seeing an influx of delays and cancellations as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) bars pilots from landing non-updated planes during low-visibility circumstances.

Although The WSJ explained the necessary altimeter retrofits are relatively easy to implement, the process still takes time, and overhauling active fleets of planes adds more complications. Buttigieg confirmed that over 80 percent of domestic airlines and roughly 65 percent of international planes have already retrofitted their radar altimeters to handle boosted 5G signals. United and Southwest Airlines have both stated their mainline fleets are ready ahead of the deadline, while American Airlines told The WSJ its own retrofits will be completed by the end of the month.

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

Meanwhile, however, companies such as Delta claim supply-chain issues are preventing it from finishing its retrofits of roughly 190 narrow-body planes, including all of its Airbus A220 jets and some of its Airbus fleet. JetBlue doesn’t expect all of its 17 A220 jets to be upgraded until October, but believes the delay will only incur a “limited impact” to its services.

The rapidly approaching deadline is only the latest in a longstanding spat that has seen the Federal Communications Commission and FAA face off against telecommunication companies such as Verizon and AT&T, who insist 5G signals pose minimal issues to planes. As The Verge noted on Sunday, a full expansion to 5G C-Band coverage was first delayed to January 2022 before regulators kicked the deadline back to July 5, 2022—and yet again to the current July 1 cutoff.

Airlines currently face a hard deadline of February 2024 for finishing their radio altimeter retrofits, barring any additional delays.

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NASA said today in a conference call with reporters that it would not ever be flying its experimental electric aircraft, the X-57, citing safety concerns that are insurmountable with the time and budget they have for the project. The X-57 program will wind down without the aircraft ever going up into the sky. 

The agency had previously hoped to fly the aircraft, which would be powered by batteries and electric motors, sometime this year. While the original plans had called for the research plane to eventually have more than a dozen propellers, NASA had scaled back those plans too, intending to fly the plane in what they called Modification 2 form. Mod 2 involved the plane having just two propellers, with one on each wing. The news today means that the plane will never fly, not even in Mod 2 form. 

NASA said that the reason behind permanently scrubbing the flight is safety and time. “Unfortunately, we recently discovered a potential failure mode in the propulsion system that we determined to pose an unacceptable risk to the pilot’s safety, and the safety of personnel on the ground, during ground tests,” Bradley Flick, the director of NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, said in the call. “Mitigation of that failure would take the project well beyond its planned end at the end of this fiscal year, so NASA has decided to end the project on time without taking the vehicle to flight.” 

[Related: NASA’s ‘airliner of the future’ is now officially an X-plane]

The project had previously seen challenges. For example, transistor modules in the electrical inverters kept failing and “blowing up” in testing, Sean Clark, the project’s principal investigator told Popular Science in January. That problem was solved, Clark said. 

The problem that led them to scrap the plan to fly the aircraft stemmed from motors that power the propellers. Clark said today that analysis of the issue is ongoing. “As we got into the detailed analysis and airworthiness assessment of the motors themselves, we found that there were some potential failure modes with the motors mechanically, under flight loads, that we hadn’t seen on the ground,” he said. “We’ve got a great design in progress to fix it, it’s just [that] it would take too long for us to go through and implement that.” 

The NASA team emphasized that they are still proud of the ways in which they’ve contributed openly to the broader industry—private companies continue to work on electric flight—pointing towards a raft of technical papers. “It doesn’t feel great to not go to flight,” Flick conceded. The sense of disappointment, he added, doesn’t lessen “the game-changing lessons that this project team has contributed to the industry.” 

NASA has two other X-plane programs in the works—a designation that means that the aircraft is experimental and for research, and that comes from the Department of Defense. (The X-57 received its X designation in 2016.) One of the others is the X-59, which NASA intends to fly this year, hopefully demonstrating that supersonic flight can be quieter than it has been in the past. The other is the newly-designated X-66A, which is also called the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator. The current timeline for that plane has it flying in 2028. 

Flick cautiously estimated that if they had more budget and more time to get the X-57 aircraft into the sky, they could have potentially done so safely. “We have a design that would have overcome the current difficulty that we’ve had—it has not been fully analyzed and reviewed yet,” he added. “We were confident that it could have solved this problem. Whether there were other problems out there that we haven’t discovered yet is unknown.”

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At the Paris Air Show this week, French defense contractor Turgis and Gaillard unveiled a new large drone: the AAROK. With over 24 hours of promised flight time, the drone is being heralded as Europe’s first Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) drone. It’s a form of uncrewed aircraft that is attempting to fulfill a similar role as drones like the MQ-9 Reaper and other drones of the War on Terror. AAROK’s debut in Paris offers a chance to consider what role such a drone may have in the decades to come.

The AAROK weighs 5.5 tons, can cruise at speeds of up to 287 mph, and reach altitudes of 30,000 feet. It has a wingspan of 72 feet, longer than the 66 feet of the MQ-9 Reaper. The Reaper, famously used by the United States for surveillance and targeted strikes as part of the War on Terror, is a direct comparison point to the AAROK, and already in service with the French military. The AAROK can carry up to 6,000 pounds of payload, of which half can be weapons. As promised, the AAROK is slightly faster than the Reaper, although with a lower service ceiling at present.

“We are proud to introduce our first prototype of remotely piloted aircraft, the AAROK unmanned aerial vehicle. Produced in our French factories, this UAV will meet the requirements of French and allies forces at a reduced cost, both in purchase and use,” said Fanny Turgis, president of Turgis and Gaillard Group, in a release.

What made the Reaper such a good fit for how the Pentagon used it is the way it combined powerful cameras, multiple missiles, and the ability to watch an area for targets for hours, with remote pilots and crews switching control of the vehicle mid-flight. In counter-insurgency warfare, where combat was dictated by looking for and tracking cells of insurgents operating in remote bases or moving in cities, the Reaper’s abilities shone, giving commanders enough information where they could feel comfortable making a kill order. (These orders did not, always, find the right targets, though the missiles certainly found people on the ground below.) 

But the Reaper was built for a specific kind of environment, one where the drone could operate in the sky for long stretches without fear of being shot down by hostile aircraft, and at most only experience a minor risk from human-portable anti-air missiles. As the grinding conventional war in Ukraine has shown, while plane-sized drones can play some role in scouting and targeting, they struggle against dedicated anti-air defenses, and especially against hostile air forces.

This makes the AAROK a curious new entry into the familiar Reaper pattern, loaded with sensors and bristling with bombs and missiles. “AAROK stands out with its robust design, its ability to take off and land from rough fields and operate on all weathers conditions as well as its flight endurance (more than 24 hours) and maximized payload,” Turgis and Gaillard Group said in a release. In addition, the company emphasized the drone’s powerful camera, radar, and communications detection and transmission tools.

Turgis and Gaillard expect the AAROK to be useful for patrolling “Exclusive Economic Zones,” or swaths of ocean claimed by countries that typically extend beyond territorial waters. France has overseas territories in the Indian and Pacific oceans, where over 1.5 million French citizens live. The French embassy in Malaysia notes that 93 percent of France’s exclusive economic zone is located in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

In addition to scouting and surveilling existing French claims to the ocean, Turgis and Gaillard pitch the AAROK as an important “asset for operational dominance (intelligence, reconnaissance, and support for high intensity strikes even in contested areas),” suggesting that the drone’s design is useful and durable enough to make it useful in the face of hostile defenses. It can also function as a communications node, with the drone operating as an airborne relay between forces over distance, ensuring commands and information get from headquarters to forces in the field. 

At present, the AAROK is a promise more than a reality, with Patrick Gaiilard, director general of the company, telling Breaking Defense that the prototype “was finished just a few weeks ago and hasn’t yet flown.”

Still, the idea is a compelling pitch for not just the French military but other countries France might sell weapons to, like partner states in Africa or NATO allies. The AAROK can perform much of the missions expected of a legacy drone like the Reaper, but is built on modern tech, with an understanding of modern threats baked in. Part of that understanding comes with cost: the AAROK is pitched as cheaper than other similar vehicles, which makes it both more accessible to smaller militaries, and also somewhat more expendable for militaries with means.

As the aircraft is still in the prototype stage, it remains to be seen how much of the promise can actually be delivered. But the promise itself is compelling, a drone capable of both counter-insurgency and anti-submarine operations, built to be used and lost if needed.

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Under a cloudy sky above Pula, Croatia, on April 21, drones took flight like high-tech clay pigeons. The quadcopters, launched against a coastal backdrop, were testing tools for US soldiers, hobbyist types of the kind that soldiers can now expect to encounter on battlefields. Learning to defeat these drones, and using specific tools for the task, was one goal of Exercise Shield, an air defense and electronic warfare exercise that ran from April 19 through April 21. As the drones flew, soldiers pointed blocky gun-shaped tools into the air, and sent the quadcopters back to the ground.

The tool used at Exercise Shield is the Dronebuster 3B, made by Flex Force. It comes in a tan-beige plastic reminiscent of computers from the early 1990s, with the pistol grip transforming it from an electronic novelty to an especially curious weapon.

“The Dronebuster Block 3, and Dronebuster Block 3B were designed to interrupt the control of the drone by overwhelming the control frequency,” reads the description from Flex Force. “This causes the drone to either stop and hover, or return to the operator, depending on the model of drone. The drone operator has no control of the drone while the command link is being overwhelmed with RF [Radio Frequency] energy.”

In other words, the gun can jam the drone to uselessness over radio frequency channels. Also, Dronebusters can overwhelm Global Navigation Satellite Systems, like GPS, though there are several others. That is important, as one of the main ways hobbyist drones can mitigate loss of control is by navigating to known home coordinates by GPS.

Hand-held drone jammers are relatively new for militaries, with many developed over the 2010s and the 2020s. They are one of the more straightforward attempts to meet the evolving threats on modern battlefields brought about by the abundance of cheap commercial drones in the hands of everyone from professional militaries to insurgent forces. Scouting and bombing aircraft used to at least be large enough to contain a pilot, making them a big target for missiles or guns, but small drones are orders of magnitude cheaper. Finding and stopping them means using everything from high powered microwaves to lasers to, like the Dronebusters, handheld jammers.

In June 2016, Popular Science reported on an exercise undertaken at West Point, where the Army Cyber Institute anticipated the coming preponderance of drones in war, and found a way to train cadets in their use and defeat. These cadets, all future officer candidates at the Army’s foremost military officer training school, traditionally have to engage in an “urban assault,” where a platoon of 40 or so cadets attack a compound defended by a squad of 10 or so underclassmen. 

This “urban” area was a half-dozen cinder block buildings in the woods in New York, and for the drone part of the exercise, the defenders (with an instructor operating the controls) would fly a commercial Parrot drone as a scout, letting them call in simulated artillery on their mock enemies. To stop it, the assaulting platoon could employ a specially set up jammer rifle, configured to knock out that specific Parrot drone.

While the 2016 West Point scenario involved a jammer set up to specifically defeat the drone fielded, the lessons are ones being applied broadly today. A small drone, like the Parrot or many others that can be bought off the shelf, is enough to direct artillery fire, to spy on troop movements, and to make life dangerous unless it is defeated. For soldiers on the ground, shooting it with bullets could be an option, but the drone overhead can see the bright flashes of a rifle muzzle, especially at night, revealing soldiers hoping to stay hidden. Taking out the drone with jamming, instead, makes it useless to the drone operators.

Ukraine has seen drones used at war since the start of the Donbas war in 2014, with quadcopters even used to drop bombs on trenches. Since the February 2022 invasion by Russia, what is really new is the scale of these drones used, with one British think tank estimating that as many as tens of thousands of commercial drones are lost in combat a month. While some losses are simply wear and tear or battery burn out, for people fighting below, stopping a drone as soon as it is found overhead can mean life or death. To that end, militaries will keep fielding and testing jammers soldiers can bring with them into combat. Especially ones that come in a familiar, gun-shaped package.

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This post has been updated.

Earlier this year, NASA announced that it would be working with Boeing to create an aircraft with a dramatic new look, and it could be strutting down a runway in about five years. Called the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator, it has long, thin wings that are supported by trusses to give them the stability they need. Between those wings and other efficiency tweaks, the plane could be 30 percent more fuel efficient than similar-sized aircraft today, like the single-aisle Boeing 737 or Airbus A320, according to the aeronautics and space agency. 

This week, NASA said that the aircraft, which doesn’t yet exist, has received an X-plane designation from the Department of Defense. It’s now officially the X-66A, meaning that it’s an experimental research aircraft. NASA already has two ongoing X-plane programs, so the X-66A makes three of them. Here’s what to know about all three. 

The X-66A aircraft aims for fuel efficiency

The purpose of the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator is baked into its name: to be as sustainable as it can be. While no aircraft that burns traditional fossil fuel can truly be thought of as sustainable, the goal is to make it as efficient as possible with the fuel it does consume. 

The aircraft will be the result of a collaboration between NASA and Boeing, and the agency stresses that one of the reasons they sought the X-plane designation from the Pentagon was to make the plane’s purpose apparent.

“We really wanted to make sure it was clear that this is a research airplane,” says Brent Cobleigh, the program manager for the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center. “We’re really trying to learn with this airplane—it’s not a prototype, it’s not a production airplane.”

Another reason for getting the X-name is to reflect the fact that the entire design of the aircraft is something new, as opposed to NASA testing out a smaller new technology on an existing aircraft design. 

“There’s a long history that goes along with the X-plane designation,” Cobleigh reflects. Projects that have carried that label have been “some of the most interesting and innovative airplane designs.” Take a look at a list of NASA X-planes here.

NASA had to apply to the Pentagon to receive that X label. The letters that are found in aircraft names imply something about that aircraft—the F in F-16 stands for fighter, and the B in B-21 is for bomber, and in this case, the X says something too. “It’s a research airplane,” Cobleigh says. “That’s what the X means.”

The plane’s most noticeable feature is its long, skinny trussed-braced wings, which are designed to create less drag as they move through the air while giving the plane the lift it needs to fly. That efficiency boost happens because a long wing can help mitigate the vortices you might sometimes notice forming at a plane’s wingtips. Those are “almost like a tornado coming off the wingtips—that’s a lot of energy created that doesn’t really do us much benefit,” Cobleigh says. The X-66A’s wings could weaken those. 

Another way it could be more fuel efficient comes from the engines. Because the wing on the X-66A will be higher off the ground than the wing on a plane like a 737, that means it could employ larger engines that don’t risk bumping their bottoms on the runway or inhaling debris. Colloquially known as jet engines, turbofan engines are at their most efficient when they can be large, so that they can have a high bypass ratio—when a great deal more air bypasses its core than goes through it. Or the fan that propels the air could possibly have no covering on it at all. 

The goal is to have the plane first fly in 2028, but it also makes sense to expect delays in programs like these.

The X-59 aircraft aims for quieter supersonic flight

If the X-66A’s first flight is at least five years away, the NASA X-plane most likely to fly this year is called the X-59. That plane, which NASA is creating with Lockheed Martin, exists to test a hypothesis: If an aircraft is designed the right way, could it fly faster than the speed of sound but do so quietly enough to not bother people below? 

Supersonic flight by civilian aircraft is not allowed over the United States because of the boom issue. Ideally, the X-59 could demonstrate that it’s possible for an aircraft to slice through the air faster than the speed of sound, but not create the powerful shock waves that lead to people hearing boom sounds. Here’s more on why supersonic flight creates sonic booms, and how the X-59 could change that.

A NASA spokesperson notes via email that the goal is still to get this bird airborne this year: “We are still targeting 2023 for the X-59’s first flight, and we’ll have a better idea of a date once we have completed some critical testing. We are currently gearing up for weight on wheels next and then moving to the flight line and planning to start ground vibration tests and structural coupling tests.”

The X-57 aircraft aims for electric flight 

The cleanest way for an aircraft to fly would be for it to produce no direct emissions whatsoever, and an electric plane can accomplish that. That is NASA’s target with the X-57. But batteries are heavy, and they are not as energy dense as fossil fuels are, meaning that an electric aircraft won’t have anywhere near the range their fuel-burning cousins have. The challenges of this new type of flight haven’t stopped companies from getting experimental electric flying machines airborne, though, with Beta Technologies repeatedly flying an electric aircraft, Joby Aviation doing the same and teaming up with Delta Air Lines, and Eviation flying the Alice aircraft for the first time last year, to name only three examples. (Another approach is to use hydrogen.)

But the X-57 Maxwell, NASA’s electric aircraft, has had technical issues to cope with. The agency had originally wanted for the plane to undergo several different design phases, or modifications, but now plans for it just have a simple design: one propeller, powered by electricity, on each wing. 

While the plan had held for NASA to get the plane in the sky in that configuration this year, a NASA spokesperson cast a shadow of doubt on that timeline in an email to PopSci: “We are working to overcome technical challenges associated with flight tests for this aircraft and are currently evaluating our schedule and budget to determine when first flight would occur. In the meantime, the X-57 project continues to produce knowledge that benefits the aviation industry, researchers, and regulators.”

Update on June 23, 2023: NASA has officially announced that the X-57 will not be flying.

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In Head Trip, PopSci explores the relationship between our brains, our senses, and the strange things that happen in between.

USUALLY, pilots can navigate through cloudy and foggy conditions. They’re trained to do this. Substantially lowered visibility leaves them needing clarification and direction, and for that their instruments are essential. But in very rare cases, disagreement between their sensory experiences and reality can spell disaster. 

Sometimes a pilot can sense that the plane is descending, but feel confused as to why. The instruments could also indicate that the plane is drifting left or right while the pilot’s senses are pulling them in a different direction, throwing their instincts into chaos and preventing them from correcting the flight’s orientation quickly enough. The plane is turning and heading downward and the pilot isn’t helping. They have entered a death spiral. 

“It’s a catastrophic sensory illusion that can end up in a crash because someone relied on their perception of the plane’s orientation,” explains Jason Fischer, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. This is what happens when the pilot is tricked by their vestibular sense, “which allows you to perceive how your body is oriented in space when you don’t have enough visual information to go on,” he adds. A death spiral, or graveyard spiral, as it’s otherwise known, is caused by our innate impulse to rely on our sensory instincts. 

It is the way our brains are wired that can cause such a chaotic scenario. To traverse our world, we rely on several different senses. The strongest cues are visual. There is also the somatosensory system that senses temperature, pain, and, in this case, pressure, as in the “seat of the pants” feeling of being pushed down into your plane seat when the aircraft gains altitude. And then there’s the neurovestibular system. The brain relies on fluid moving through the inner ear’s small canals to help establish where the body is oriented in space and where it is going. Our vestibular sense works fine on solid ground and registers rapid changes in the speed and direction of our movement. But slow changes in movement can go unnoticed, as when the plane first begins to spiral off course. Because this fluid can settle in the ear canals during flight, a pilot might believe they’re level even as they are getting closer and closer to the ground, tuning all the while.

All this spatial confusion and the lack of clear sightlines leave the pilot bewildered and trusting their tragically mistaken instincts rather than their instruments. 

Fischer explained that the discombobulation that can result in a death spiral relates to how people combine information across the senses. For most of our worldly experiences, humans use multiple sources of information from different senses and collate that experience to emphasize the strengths of each piece of sensory data—as with smell and taste working together to create our experience of flavor. 

“Oftentimes, one given sense that has the most precise information will dominate perception,” says Fischer. “This kind of thing happens all the time with vision and audition, like when you try to judge the location of something based on hearing it. The signals coming from the front of you can be perfectly identical to those coming from behind you if you make those spatial judgments based on sound. At that point, you can have a rough sense of the location of the sound, but then you use vision to try to dial it in—which has the more powerful effect on localizing.” In a way, your eyes correct your ears.  

A death spiral is caused by similar sensory misunderstanding. The vestibular signals coming from the organs and canals in our ears are essentially accelerometers, providing a sense of our body’s movement through space and whether we’re starting to move faster. These signals also give us an idea of how we’re tilted relative to the ground due to gravity, a force that can cause acceleration. Our inner ears are fantastic at judging sudden movements, but gradual change? Not so much. 

“The problem is that they’re just accelerometers,” says Fischer. “They can’t really tell the difference between the acceleration due to gravity and the acceleration due to actual movement through space. As far as those organs are concerned, your own motion or acceleration through space has the same signal as acceleration due to gravity.” In other words, it is hard to tell the difference between going forward and down and just going forward. Fischer adds, “In order to disambiguate those things, you then need information from another sense.” 

Although a pilot may not be able to see the ground, they should be able to see the readings on their instruments. It is far safer to trust what the instruments say rather than what the body feels. It can mean the difference between life and death. 

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THE NEXT TIME you travel on an airplane, consider the giant engines that muscled it into the sky. Technically known as turbofans, they inhale massive amounts of air and blow it out the back to generate enormous thrust. In fact, one of the engines that General Electric creates has even set a world record: In 2017, the GE9X model produced 134,300 pounds of thrust. Picture about 10 African elephants; their collective weight is equivalent to the force that one engine made.

That record-breaking moment happened at a sprawling, 7,000-acre wooded location in southern Ohio called Peebles, which is the perfect place to fire up engines without bothering any neighbors. There GE carries out a number of different types of tests. Before it delivers an engine to an aircraft maker, the company puts each turbofan through its paces, spinning it up and mimicking what the engine might do on a typical flight. And for engines still in development, they simulate other, more extreme scenarios, like how it might handle inhaling hail—or even a bird. 

The purpose of all the testing is to ensure that when an airliner carrying hundreds of people accelerates down the runway and lifts gracefully into the sky, the turbofan under each wing functions as it should. And not just then, but at every moment of a long flight. Take a look at what goes into this high-stakes operation.

↑ The gray globe composed of hexagonal, screen-like sections serves a smooth purpose: to streamline the air that flows into the GE9X engine mounted next to it so the data the company collects isn’t distorted by air turbulence. One day, engines of this type will propel Boeing’s 777X aircraft.

↑ Engines like this GE90 are capable of gulping down 8,000 pounds of air in a single second. While most air bypasses the engine’s core and is blown straight out the back, some of it goes through the center, where it’s compressed and combined with fuel, powering the super-hot inner workings of the turbofan.

↑ Filled with 19 electric fans, this enormous structure—the inlet alone is about 75 feet tall—can produce winds of 50 mph or more. With that air current, GE can examine how an engine handles crosswinds, for example, which an airliner can experience during takeoff or landing.

↑ The inside of the turbulence control dome reveals the mouth of the GE9X engine being tested. Its fan, seen near the top of the ladder, measures just over 11 feet in diameter and holds 16 blades that propel the air.

↑ This giant 75-foot-long contraption looks like it might be at home in the Star Wars universe, but it’s actually the wind tunnel seen from the side. Because the entire assembly is on tracks, the company can tweak the precise angle at which it blows air at the engine being tested.

↑ The intricate core of a GE9X is at the engine’s center. Turbofans work by inhaling air, compressing it, igniting fuel, and then using that energy to turn turbines. The result is a machine that can produce more than 100,000 pounds of thrust.

↑ The complex and colorful guts of a GEnx engine are tangled together like metal spaghetti. The turquoise casings will be removed before the engine hits the skies. Inside turbofan engines are two turbines: a low-pressure turbine and a high-pressure turbine. The former powers the compression stage of the machine, while the latter drives the fan blades up front.

↑ Twenty-two elegant, curvy fan blades sit at the mouth of the GE90 engine. Made out of carbon-fiber composite with a titanium edge, they inhale air and propel it out the back, producing most of the engine’s incredible thrust.

↑ If an engine inhales something it shouldn’t—like a bird—it needs to be able to handle the incident without failing in a catastrophic way. These colorful tanks hold compressed air, and when connected with a matching barrel, the tubes fire objects like hailstones or birds (which have been euthanized, frozen, then thawed out before the test) into a stationary test engine.

↑ This illuminated test cell is one of the spots where GE lets its largest engines stretch their legs. The concrete walls measure an astounding 20 feet thick. A turbofan can spend up to six hours in testing, during which time engineers put it through situations that mimic flight to ensure it’s ready to carry planes full of passengers through the sky.

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At a conference last week, a group of engineers presented a fascinating new drone capable of flying through the air—and operating underwater. While it’s only a prototype, the researchers had to solve interesting problems in order to create a working aerial-aquatic quadcopter. 

A large group of researchers from seven universities and laboratories throughout China and Hong Kong contributed to what they’ve dubbed the TJ-FlyingFish. In the paper presented at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2023 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in London, they described how they developed the 3.6-pound quadcopter. 

According to the research paper, there have been previous multi-rotor aerial-aquatic hybrid prototypes, however, they have mostly relied on “standard aerial hardware constructions with water resistance.” In other words, instead of creating a drone truly capable of flying through the skies and also operating underwater, most researchers have designed aerial drones with some waterproofing so the machines don’t stop working when they splash down. 

The issue is that while both water and air are technically fluid mediums, they have vastly different properties. The different viscosities and densities affect how the propulsion system should operate, as well as the overall design of the drone. To operate in the air, the drone needs to be able to overcome gravity. To operate effectively underwater, the drone needs to be neutrally buoyant and able to generate enough thrust to overcome water resistance. 

As a result, achieving effective thrust is different in both mediums. The propulsion force is determined by the amount of mass that the propellers move. To fly, the drone needs high-speed propellers to throw a lot of lightweight air around as fast as possible. To move through the much denser water, though, the drone needs slower speed high-torque propellers. Instead of using two sets of propellers, the engineers designed an innovative system that uses one motor and two separate gearboxes: one rigged for aerial flight and the other for underwater movement. This has the advantage of keeping weight low, though it makes for an inherently complex system.

[Related: The Army’s Black Hawk helicopter replacement is a speedy tiltrotor aircraft]

When the drone takes off, it works like a regular quadcopter. The propellers force air down and give it enough lift to fly, and they are able to tilt and rotate independently so it can maneuver and hover. It has enough battery power to hover for six minutes. But it’s when it lands in water that things get interesting. 

The drone is slightly negatively buoyant, so when it hits the water it slowly starts to sink. Then, one way for it to travel underwater is for the whole drone to rotate, so the propellers pull it sideways through the water. Alternatively, the drone’s body can stay upright, and it can maneuver by tilting the props in different ways. These two systems enabled by the tilting propellers and dual gearbox allow it to operate effectively underwater and maneuver in three dimensions (just as it can in air) in a way that a waterproof drone equipped solely with traditional aerial propellers can’t. 

A huge amount of the researchers’ effort went into making the drone efficient underwater, rather than just designing a waterproof quadcopter. As a result, the prototype’s underwater performance is surprisingly good. It can spend around 40 minutes submerged and has a maximum dive depth of just under 10 feet. It was designed to be lightweight, so there was a tradeoff with waterproofing. Future prototypes will likely be able to go deeper. 

Most impressively, the drone can also take off from the water. By rising to the surface and rotating its propellers, it generates enough lift to get back into the sky. 

Although only a prototype, it’s hard not to imagine uses for a drone like this. The researchers suggest remote sensing operations and disaster rescue, but it could also be used to conduct civil and military surveys, capturing incredible video footage, and inspire sci-fi authors. It could also lead to waterproof drones, which could save some people a lot of money. 

Take a look at this cool aerial-aquatic drone in action, below.

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On May 31, the Department of Defense announced $300 million worth of additional military aid to Ukraine. In this latest package are four kinds of anti-air missiles—meaning missiles meant to shoot down threats in the air—including the AIM-7 air-to-air missile.

The Air Intercept Missile-7 (AIM-7) Sparrow is a guided missile with its origins in the 1940s. It saw its first deployment in 1958, though the missiles of that era are a far cry from the weapons deployed today. The modern version, AIM-7M, substantially improved from early days, has been in service since 1982. It’s used by the US, NATO allies like Italy, Spain, Canada, and others, as well as countries like Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.

The AIM-7 is carried by aircraft to destroy other aircraft. In the May 31 package authorized for Ukraine, it is joined by three ground-based anti-air systems. These include Patriot missiles, which can target planes or cruise missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, which are human portable and especially useful against low-flying targets like attack helicopters or strafing jets, and Avenger air defense systems. The Avenger mounts multiple Stinger launchers on a turret on the back of a HMMWV (better known as a Humvee) vehicle, and pairs those weapons with a heavy .50 caliber machine gun. This gives it range and flexibility against both aircraft in Stinger range, as well as a cheaper weapon that can hit other flying enemies, like small drones.

“Russia has continued to wage a brutal, completely unprovoked war against Ukraine, launching yet more airstrikes and bombarding Ukrainian cities across the country,” said National Security Council spokesman John F. Kirby during a briefing at the White House. The release from the Pentagon paired that statement with the note that Russia recently launched 17 separate air assaults against Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, in May.

“One of Ukraine’s most urgent requirements is ground-based air defense,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in the same briefing. “And this contact group will continue driving hard to help Ukraine defend the skies. In recent weeks, Russia has intensified its sordid bombardment of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. And the Kremlin’s cruelty only underscores Ukraine’s need for a stronger, layered ground-based air defense architecture.”    

The three ground-based air defenses make sense in light of this specific call. The AIM-7, which fits into an overall approach of arming Ukraine against Russian aircraft, requires aircraft to launch it. This May, several months after Ukrainian’s president Zelensky asked for artillery, tanks, planes, and Patriot missiles, the Biden administration joined other nations in agreeing to provide F-16 fighter-bombers to the country. These single-engine fighters, used widely across the world, are more than capable of carrying AIM-7 missiles, and while the US models may feature more advanced weapons, the AIM-7 is able to get the job done.

While the exterior form of the Sparrow has remained largely the same for its decades of service, how the missile finds and tracks targets has changed massively over the years. The first Sparrow missiles “used a beam-riding guidance system, in which an aircraft’s fire-control radar would lock on to a target and the missile would fly along the radar beam,” wrote Norman Friedman, in a history of the weapon. That fixed-beam path meant pilots had to keep their plane and radar directed in the same path as when they fired the weapon. It was a plausible use case for jets against propeller-powered bombers, but locking a pilot into a fixed route against a maneuvering plane like an enemy jet would render the missile easily beatable.

In April 1959, Popular Science boasted of an early improvement to the Sparrow III, noting the supersonic guided missiles “packs 50 percent more wallop than its predecessor.” Sparrow IIIs saw action in Vietnam, but the missiles were designed as a way for fighter pilots to shoot down bombers beyond visual line of sight. Over the skies of Vietnam, instead, pilots encountered fast flying and turning fighters.  

The AIM-7M version in use today uses better radar and maneuvering, allowing it to track targets more closely and without requiring the firing jet to maintain a lock on the target. It’s a weapon that had success when used by US pilots in 1990’s Persian Gulf War, and one that would likely prove straightforward to use by Ukraine, once the weapon is attached to planes that can launch it.

This latest military aid is the 39th transfer of such equipment to the country, dating back to August 2021, when Ukraine’s war was limited to reclaiming the Donbas. That was before Russia’s full invasion in February 2022 transformed the ongoing war into an existential threat to Ukraine.

The post What to know about the anti-air missiles the US is sending to Ukraine appeared first on Popular Science.

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A UK-based design consortium has unveiled a promising new prototype that could dramatically ease flight travel for wheelchaired passengers with mobility restrictions. At this week’s Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg, Germany, a design and accessibility rights collaborative called Air 4 All showcased its patented alternative airliner seat which can easily convert as needed to fit travelers’ personal wheelchairs.

According to the US Department of Transportation, airline company personnel mishandled or damaged nearly 11,400 travelers’ wheelchairs in 2022 alone. As Insider also noted earlier this month, many of these devices can cost thousands of dollars, and are often  specifically tailored to individual owners. Meanwhile, disabled airline passengers often must transfer multiple times across wheelchairs and other various transportation methods from arrival, to airport terminal, to plane seating.

[Related: How different wheelchair designs can help Paralympians excel.]

Air 4 All’s prototype, however, could vastly simplify this process by allowing many to use their same wheelchair throughout the majority of their travels, including boarding and sitting within a plane. “An innovation like this in air travel provides those with reduced mobility a safe and comfortable way for them to travel and remain in their own power wheelchair,” Chris Wood, an Air 4 All partner and founder of the Flying Disabled consultancy group, said in a statement.

The new patented prototype seat features multiple pieces which are able to convert into a wheelchair-accessible configuration, such as a seat that can flip up and a removable back cushion. From there, a wheelchair can easily be backed into the open space and attached in place. What’s more, the convertible seat doesn’t sacrifice standard plane amenities, such as a headrest, console tray tables, or cocktail tables. Additionally, anyone can sit in the space regardless of accessibility needs, and each seat can be installed into planes without changing existing cabin configurations.

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

Following its exhibition this week, Air 4 All’s new seat is scheduled to head for final design and validation. Once certified, the consortium plans to begin testing and certifications processes, after which passengers could soon see the seats arriving on Delta planes.

Of course, actually flying within the current airline ecosystem is another situation entirely. Despite the recent launch of 169 new flight routes along the East Coast, the airline industry has faced serious criticism for outdated technology and procedures—most notably the massive wave of cancellations that hit Southwest travelers over the 2022 holiday season. Still, the pending installation of wheelchair accessible seating is a welcome addition to any plane… whether or not it takes off on time.

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On May 9, under partly cloudy skies at Travis Air Force Base in California, the military invited an autonomous driving and flying robot to roll into a hangar and deliver a package. The machine, half of Elroy Air’s Chaparral delivery drone, was all exposed wires and metal brackets on four tall stands, and is a testbed for their autonomous driving program. With the demonstration, the Air Force got one step closer to adapting a useful cargo drone for military resupply missions, all without further strain on human pilots.

The Chaparral is a vertical takeoff and landing drone, with a large fixed wing, propellers for vertical thrust, and rotors that can provide vertical lift, enabling it to operate from small landing pads. None of that was present in the demonstration at Travis AFB, which was part of the Golden Phoenix Exercise. Instead, the ground autonomy system was mounted on a freestanding rig, with motors and wheels and sensors to steer around any obstacles it might encounter on a runway. Beneath it, and central to the Chaparral’s function, was a detachable cargo pod.

“One of the things that we showed at the event was our robotic ground tester, what we call ground bot. That demonstrated our autonomous taxing capability as well as our cargo pod pickup and drop off, and our cargo handling capabilities that we would use on the Chaparral,” says Amisah Prakash, director of customer programs at Elroy Air.

Autonomy for delivery on the ground is an important part of the overall vision for the drone, as it keeps the burden on human operators low while ensuring that the goods carried can get where they need to be. A runway is a complex environment, with planes and people and other vehicles moving around, to say nothing of the possibility of animals interloping on some of the more remote environments the drone is expected to operate. Getting the goods from point A to point B without incident is especially important when a runway collision might involve cargo that explodes.

“One of the use cases that we’ve been talking a lot with the Air Force on is logistics resupply types of missions, like, bringing cargo back and forth from different locations, whether that is fuel or munitions, anything that is needed for the ground troops to be able to do what they need to do,” says Prakash.

While shipping munitions is a more uniquely military mission, the Chaparral is intended as a truly dual-use aircraft, with an eye towards the commercial cargo market. As Popular Science reported last year, FedEx was interested in the plane, specifically taking advantage of the cargo pod’s 300-to-500-pound capacity, or about half the weight of what a typical delivery truck can carry. The drone will be able to deliver this at a range of up to 300 miles, and do so while flying faster than 100 mph.

If the comparison point for ground transport is a delivery truck, for remote delivery to small military bases a good point of comparison is a helicopter. During the US war in Afghanistan, both crewed and autonomous helicopters would deliver supplies to forward operating bases, austere outposts located where the fighting was and far from regular access to supplies. 

Imagine, says Clint Cope, chief product officer and co-founder for Elroy Air, that a mission commander is trying to send supplies somewhere, and triaging what is the most important use for an aircraft. “That decision-making gets a lot simpler when you can send a cheaper, in some ways expendable air asset, when you’re using an uncrewed system,” he says.

Cope offers as a comparison point a single helicopter making one supply run with 5,000 pounds of cargo. If that helicopter is shot down, it’s all lost in one go, and in order to make the mission, that full 5,000 pounds of load has to be assembled before any of it can go out for delivery. “You can go and load up a Chaparral [drone] and send a much smaller, almost right-sized amount of supplies where they’re needed and be able to have that much more rapid turnaround,” says Cope. 

In that way, using the drones changes resupply from fewer, higher-stakes missions, to more of managing a logistics flow through drones.

The Chaparral runs on jet fuel, like much of the Air Force, and has a generator to power its electric motors. It still needs human refueling, but the drone’s design, especially the pivot on its wing, is made so it can be transported inside larger cargo aircraft, like a C-130 or C-5, and flown from almost anywhere. 

While autonomous driving is useful for getting between the runway and the hangar, the loading ramp of a cargo plane is not a place to risk automated driving.

“We demonstrated how you can manually remote control the vehicle as well,” says Matt Michini, director of robotics at Elroy Air. “So if somebody on the ground wants to taxi it into a hangar or they want to move it to move it outta the way so that a plane can drive by or something, we want it to demonstrate how that’s possible as well without too much rigamarole.”

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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.

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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

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 

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

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

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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.

The post The best FPV drones for 2023 appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.”

The post Before the Artemis II crew can go to the moon, they need to master flying high above Earth appeared first on Popular Science.

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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.

The post A Cold War spy plane now tracks humanity’s greatest threat for NASA appeared first on Popular Science.

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