Tag: AIRCRAFT

Today's high-profile celebrities may have perfected the art of avoiding paparazzi on the streets of Beverly Hills, but they might want to turn their attention skyward, as well. That's because celebrity photo agency Splash News is developing a camera-equipped drone aircraft to track the rich and famous from above. "It would strike fear in the hearts of every celebrity having a birthday party," ...

As part of a DARPA initiative, Boeing is developing a search-and-rescue aircraft that combines a helicopter's hovering capabilities with an airplane's long flight range. According to Aviation Week, Boeing will test a 20-percent scale model of the disc-rotor aircraft, called the CSAR DiscRotor, in a wind tunnel sometime next year. The aircraft uses rotor-mounted blades, much like a chopper, so ...

A University of Toronto engineering graduate student recently set a new world record for man-powered flight. According to Physorg, Todd Reichert flew an ornithopter -- an aircraft that flaps its wings like a bird -- over a field in Tottenham, Ontario, Canada for about 19.3 seconds at 16 mph. It's the first recorded, sustained, man-powered ornithopter flight in history. Reichert filed a claim for ...

We Americans have a penchant for borrowing traditions from other cultures and making them our own. For example, on Saturday, 90,000 gathered on the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota to watch people compete in flugtag. As part of flugtag, which is German for "flight day," teams build awesome homemade aircrafts, and launch them off a platform in order to see who can glide the ...

While the debate over using unmanned aircrafts in military combat continues, Britain's Ministry of Defence recently unveiled its latest unmanned aircraft prototype. Named after the Celtic god of thunder, and just as ready to bring it, the Taranis is a long-range strike plane that's designed to invade enemy airspace. According to the BBC News, the plane, which took more than 3 million man-hours to ...

The Solar Impulse is one of the most ambitious projects we've ever seen. The ultimate goal is to fly a solar-powered plane around the world, relying for power solely on the rays of the sun. That might still be a ways off, but the Impulse took to the sky Wednesday morning with an intermediary goal: to survive 24 hours aloft in the night sky (read: often with no sun) without plummeting to the ...

For their new airship design, Swiss researchers looked underwater for inspiration. According to New Scientist, researchers at the EMPA, which is the Swiss federal laboratory for materials testing and research, developed a 26-foot-long Airfish that's filled with helium and mimics the movements of a rainbow trout to "swim" across the sky. Rather than engines, Christa Jordi and her team used ...

According to Wired, a new U.S. Army aircraft takes the best elements of helicopters, drones and snipers, and wraps them into one package. Dubbed the Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System (ARSS), it's an unmanned Vigilante helicopter with a high-powered sniper rifle mounted onto a highly stabilized turret. Originally, the ARSS was designed for urban warfare, since it can hover down small streets ...

A "routine test flight" for a U.S. Navy Fire Scout helicopter drone recently turned into three hours of surveillance and a successful drug bust. According to Popular Science, the MQ-8B Vertical Take-off and Landing UAV (VTUAV) drone caught a boat suspected of carrying cocaine on its radar. With the aid of the remote surveillance, the USS McInerney and U.S. Coast Guard vessels were able to close ...

Share At possible risk to the user's health, many a geek's dream is finally coming true. According to the Daily Mail, the world's first commercial jet pack will hit the market this year. Costing a cool $75,000, the jet pack is much more than the usual DIY projects we've told you about. That's right; it's not just a rocket strapped to your back! The unnamed machine will be manufactured by ...

Trust us, there's nothing we'd like more than to zoom around the skies in a personal, electric aircraft. Of course, we've never held our breath. Some aerospace engineers at NASA, though, have given us reason to salivate. According to DVICE, NASA has designed an experimental, one-man, electric aircraft called Puffin. It's ten times quieter than a helicopter, can fly 300 mph, and has a range of 50 ...

A New York couple will soon take the term "destination wedding" to another level. On June 20th, New York couple Noah Fulmor and Erin Finnegan will marry 36,000 feet in the air aboard a Boeing 727 that simulates weightlessness, according to the Telegraph. The flight will depart from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Richard Garriott, a space tourist and son of an astronaut, will preside over the ...

We've had a lot of fun with Terrafugia over the last year or so, but we weren't exactly holding our breath in anticipation of the Transition's maiden flight. That said, we're definitely psyched to hear that the "roadable aircraft" went airborne in a super-secret test flight that took place in the early hours of March 5th at Plattsburgh International Airport. The vehicle left the ground for a ...

Could this finally be it? We've been promised flying cars since the 1950s, but so far nothing has made it past the prototype and demo film stages. The father and son team of Chris and Jame Milner seem to think they can bring this dream to reality by 2010. At the New York International Auto Show later this month the pair will unveil their prototype convertible car / plane. The vehicle is small, ...

What's big, green, and flies through the air at incredible speeds? No, not the Hulk being carried by Superman (we know, comic dorks, one is DC, one is Marvel, relax), but the new A2 supersonic jet. Dubbed the "son of Concorde", the jet will revolutionize air travel if it ever takes flight. The large, windowless vehicle looks more like a missile than a passenger plane -- and moves more like one ...