Comments on: Boeing's Hummingbird UAV hums along

Turbine-powered unmanned rotorcraft hovers high and keeps going and going in recent performance tests. Plus: A test shot for the Advanced Tactical Laser.

[ronzorelli]

It's a C130H aircraft, not a C-301H aircraft.

[Jon Skillings]

Arrrrgh. I knew that, of course. My fingers hit the keyboard out of order, and then I simply missed the typo in proofing the story. Thanks for the catch!

[jsmith2007.lol]

When should we deploy UAV for wild fire fighting here in California, instead of developing and sending these plane to kill.

[Jon Skillings]

Although the military has taken the lead in developing UAVs for wartime purposes, unmanned aircraft have already been put into service for preventing and fighting wildfires.

For instance, NASA has used a Predator B drone, rechristened Ikhana, in California and elsewhere:
http://news.cnet.com/2300-11397_3-6207078-1.html

And the smaller ScanEagle has been used to map wildfire fuels in Alaska:
http://news.cnet.com/2300-11397_3-6194563-3.html

[Galaxy5]

We do deploy UAVs for fire fighting. Google "Ikhana NASA fire".

[hackian]

It would be nice to have thousands of these dropping supplies into Myanmar! We could give a lot of humanitarian aid with these unmanned tools.

[benjaminstraight]

Cool toy. It takes 14 months to train an Army soldier how to fly a UAV.