Aeronautics

Northrop Grumman has unveiled a long-endurance unmanned spy plane which, in addition to surveillance gear, can carry pilots, potentially allowing it to fly in civil airspace.

The Firebird performed its first flight in February 2010. It can fly up to 30,000 feet and has an endurance of up to 40 hours in unmanned mode. It has a payload of 1,240 pounds and a wingspan of 65 feet.

It has high-def video, electro-optical and infrared sensors as well as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and ground moving target indicator (GMTI) systems. There are two weapons points on the wings.

Northrop's Scaled Composites designed the aircraft, which has an interface like a memory stick in that it can be plugged into a PC without the need of additional software.

Firebird will be demoed May 23 - June 3, 2011 at Empire Challenge 2011, held by U.S. Joint Forces Command in Arizona. If you can't make it, there's a promo video here. … Read more

There is no plane I feel safer in than a Boeing 747. Its sheer size and its apparent effortlessness offer something no other plane seems to manage: the ability for passengers to relax.

And they don't seem to drop out of the sky all that often either.

However, Boeing is introducing a new and more economical version of the jumbo jet, the 747-8. So, in order to test its capabilities and secure safety certification, Boeing conducted an experiment to see just how well the new plane could abort takeoff.

They loaded it with almost 1 million pounds of weight … Read more

Boeing said today that its Phantom Ray unmanned aircraft has flown on its own for the first time.

The prototype unmanned airborne system, which sports a striking flying-wing design, flew for 17 minutes on April 27, reaching a speed of 178 knots and an altitude of 7,500 feet. More flights will take place in the coming weeks, Boeing said.

"The UAS bar has been raised," Craig Brown, Phantom Ray program manager for Boeing, said in a statement. "Now I'm eager to see how high that bar will go."

Usually, when someone says "this is the coolest thing I've ever seen," you know that no matter what they're looking at, they're resorting to a little hyperbole.

But today, when I saw two videos taken from the window seat of a Virgin America flight that show Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo flying alongside in tandem (give the video about 35 seconds before the spaceship appears), my reaction was, well, "this is the coolest thing I've ever seen."

And that was before hearing the audio of the person shooting the video saying … Read more

TOKYO--Japanese authorities are planning to use a Honeywell T-Hawk micro air vehicle to check radiation levels at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, while unmanned drone helicopters from France are also joining the effort.

Small enough to fit in a backpack, Honeywell's T-Hawk can do vertical takeoffs and landings and hover in place while monitoring a target. The U.S. government apparently proposed it for checking radiation levels at spent nuclear fuel pools at the plant, according to a Kyodo News report.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has been trying to cool the spent fuel in the pools with water. Radiation around the pools is believed to be very high, hindering workers' efforts to restart cooling systems. There are over 10,000 spent fuel rods at the site.

The 17-pound T-Hawk can fly to 10,000 feet and work in 20-knot winds, with a top speed of 46 mph and operating time of 56 minutes. It can operate autonomously or by remote control. Check out the vid below for details. … Read more

Almost from the very beginning seven decades ago, flying wings have been something of a specialty for the aircraft company founded by Jack Northrop.

The 1940s saw the XB-35 experimental aircraft. The late 1980s brought the B-2 bomber.

Now Northrop Grumman is pushing ahead with the X-47B UCAS (for unmanned combat air system), a prototype going through its fledgling stage en route to the goal of demonstrating in 2013 that an unmanned, tailless, strike fighter-size aircraft can land on and take off from an aircraft carrier.

Earlier this month, the X-47B made just the second and third flights (from dry … Read more

U.S. Pacific Air Forces is sending an unmanned Global Hawk reconnaissance drone to Japan to help authorities understand the scope of damage from last week's massive earthquake and tsunami.

Kyodo News reported that a Japanese government source said the high-altitude drone may be deployed Thursday to take a closer look at the damaged reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where workers are trying to prevent a full-scale meltdown.

Images taken by the RQ-4 Global Hawk based at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam may provide a better picture of what's happening at the plant's reactors, … Read more

The phrase "fill 'er up" is being redefined for the age of robotic aircraft.

Northrop Grumman said yesterday that in a flight test earlier this year, it took a big step closer to an eventual autonomous aerial refueling between unmanned aerial vehicles as part of the $33 million DARPA KQ-X program.

In the "risk reduction flight test," which took place January 21, a Global Hawk UAV from NASA played the role of the aerial tanker, and Northrop Grumman's Proteus test aircraft--a manned UAV surrogate, we should point out--was the one in search of the refueling … Read more

There's nothing the world likes more than a good radiation scare. Mobile phone health panics are quiet at the moment--which could be permanent, like the microwave oven cancer flap that went into spontaneous remission and stayed there. Instead, the burgeoning world of in-flight entertainment beckons as the next fear factory.

Take this story from the generally sensible Flight Global publication: "Wi-Fi interference with Honeywell avionics prompts Boeing action." Sounds quite scary, especially since it's a report on a problem uncovered during certification for Aircell's Gogo, an in-flight passenger Internet system. In-flight Internet is the next … Read more