The U.S. Air Force accidentally sent e-mails that were meant to go to its base in Mildenhall, England, to a tourism Web site with a similar address.
Gary Sinnott had created a Web site, Mildenhall.com, in the 1990s to promote his hometown. But not long after that, he reportedly began to be bombarded with e-mails from Air Force members who were trying to contact people on the base, according to the BBC.
Sinnott contacted Air Force officials, who told him not to be concerned about it and assured him they would tell their staff to use the correct address. But what started off as some personal e-mails and jokes later devolved into some pretty classified information, including military procedures.
At one point, Sinnott received information about a presidential flight, so he contacted the Air Force again and an official, as expected, "went nuts," he told the BBC.
Sinnot has since closed down the Web site to avoid receiving any more of the e-mails.
(Credit:
AeroVironment)
The U.S. Air Force has gone all-in by authorizing full production of the AeroVironment backpack-sized Wasp III micro air vehicle, which will soon to be standard issue for combat controllers and USAF special ops, according to the Pentagon. This follows the U.S. Marine Corps' purchase of a Wasp III system, which it plans to deploy at the platoon level as a complement to the Raven (PDF).
Weighing in at a mere 1 pound, the plane's diminutive 29-inch wingspan can still loft a variety of hefty payloads in addition to its infrared cameras that stream video directly to ground control. The Wasp is launched by hand and can be operated either manually or programmed for auto-pilot with autonomous GPS navigation, according to AeroVironment. The Wasp III is part of Air Force's Battlefield Air Targeting Micro Air Vehicle program (BATMAV), which will allow troops to scan enemy targets from 5 kilometers away for up to 45 minutes at a time, according to the company.
A Reaper lands at Creech AFB in March.
(Credit: U.S. Air Force photo)A next-generation unmanned aerial vehicle piloted from Nevada has fired a weapon in Afghanistan in its first-ever strike on enemy combatants.
The MQ-9 Reaper on Saturday launched a Hellfire missile in a location known as Deh Rawod. The strike, the Air Force reports with great understatement, was successful.
A bigger, more heavily armed follow-on to the Predator UAV, the Reaper has been flying missions in Afghanistan since the last week of September. Until this weekend, however, it had been limited to its secondary role as a tool for surveillance and reconnaissance. With the missile-firing sortie, it has now lived up to its primary job description as a "persistent hunter-killer" that not only finds the bad guys, but takes them out.
The Air Force hasn't said how many Reapers are in Afghanistan, only that at the moment it has nine of the UAVs in its inventor. ("Reaper" is the Air Force's dark term of endearment for the aircraft; when it's flying peacetime missions, such as fighting wildfires, it's known as the Predator B.)
The Reapers fly their missions out of Kandahar Air Base, Afghanistan. The pilot for the remote-controlled aircraft is thousands of miles away at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.
The next U.S. Air Force maverick may be talking to her plane instead of looking at its dash for updates.
The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, which the Air Force plans to roll out in 2008, will be the first U.S. fighter to respond to voice commands, the Air Force announced Wednesday.
F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter.
(Credit: Department of Defense/Joint Strike Fighter Program Office)The Air Force Research Laboratory's Human Effectiveness Directorate has been working on the idea for some time, trying out different systems from a variety of companies.
After years of testing, it now has a speech-recognition system that works from a microphone within a pilot's oxygen mask in spite of loud ambient noise in the cockpit.
The DynaSpeak speech recognition software the Air Force decided to go with was developed by SRI International in conjunction with Adacel Systems. The system, which ties in to the plane's onboard computer, will be used to give commands for both communication and navigation. The requested data will then come up in the pilot's helmet display.
The advantage of voice recognition is that pilots will be able to stay focused on maneuvering their planes and not will not have to pause that focus to flip switches or press buttons to retrieve information, according to the Air Force.
Unlike many speech-recognition programs, the DynaSpeak system for the military requires no learning curve on the part of the system for a particular person's voice. Any pilot flying the F-35 could begin using it immediately.
The system was first tested in flight simulators in which data was collected on which words were optimal for commands.
The Warfighter Interface Division of the Human Effectiveness Directorate is now testing the system in real planes and collecting data on its accuracy to make sure it's ready for operational tests, evaluation and implementation in 2008.
Remember the scene in Independence Day where the alien invaders blow up the White House with some sort of interstellar death ray? We Earthlings are still a long, long way from that sort of weaponry--just how far will depend, as so many things do, on budget battles in Washington.
The Airborne Laser aircraft at Andrews Air Force base on June 20, 2007.
(Credit: Air Force photo by Bobby Jones)The Pentagon's premier "directed energy" weapons system is a missile-zapping laser that could someday soon be tooling around in a modified 747, if all goes right for a program valued at $3.8 billion. This week, the Airborne Laser aircraft paid a visit to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland--well known, of course, as a commuter airport of sorts for the president--as the destination of what the Pentagon says was the plane's first-ever cross-country flight.
Washington area residents need not worry about a misfire. The plane isn't yet equipped with the "megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser beam" weapons system; that work is slated for sometime later this year. The Pentagon says the chemical laser has had 70 successful firings (on the ground, that is) over the past three years, and it is preparing for what it hopes will be the first takedown of a ballistic missile target in mid-2009. Eventually, the battle-ready chemical load would be sufficient to destroy an unspecified "many" missiles.
"We are going to put that big laser in the back...and then we're ready to shoot a missile down," Air Force Col. John Daniels, program director, said in a statement. "The biggest challenge we have right now is integration. The optics system is working. The battle management system works well. We even tracked an (intercontinental ballistic missile) with the sensors on the airplane."
Daniels continued: "When you put those big pieces together, and you get the software talking to each other and the systems, that's not trivial. It's really an integration challenge."
The political challenge, meanwhile, is to keep the funding alive. Reuters reported Thursday that preliminary votes in Congress have slashed between $200 million and $250 million from the program's $549 million portion of the proposed defense budget for fiscal 2008. Cuts on that level, Reuters said, would set the program back three years.
Daniels told reporters that the current level of budget cuts would delay the shootdown attempt by at least two years, according to Reuters.
Whatever happens in Congress, it's a long road ahead for the Airborne Laser as a truly battle-ready system. From this one plane so far, the Air Force aims to build a "production representative" model. The eventual goal is for the Air Force to have seven laser-equipped aircraft, all based in the U.S., that would cost about $1.5 billion apiece.
From Andrews Air Force Base, the Airborne Laser prototype plane was set to fly back to Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., where flight tests are set to wrap up this summer. The program is based at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico and is managed by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.
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