The technology of things that fly
Boeing engineers at an airfield in Manassas, Virginia, are testing the autonomous flight of an air taxi Uber aims to make available on its mobile application around 2023 to ferry people between cities and suburbs.
Read more
Air traffic controllers will be able to get updates from airliners flying over oceans every second when a constellation of Iridium NEXT satellites reaches its final position to relay aircraft location and velocity data worldwide.
Read more
Aviation safety officials in Indonesia announced on Monday that divers in the Java Sea retrieved the cockpit voice recorder from Lion Air Flight 610, a discovery that could indicate what pilots did just before the crash on Oct. 29 when 189 people died.
Read more
Airlines around 2035 could save money on fuel with Boeing-built airliners designed to reduce drag with long, thin wings extending from the top of the fuselage that are braced by trusses jutting up from the bottom of the aircraft.
Read more
Boeing and Embraer aim to gain approval from regulators and shareholders to complete a joint venture between their companies by the end of 2019 now that Brazil’s government announced it will not oppose the deal.
Read more
A team of aerospace companies led by Bell are building an electric-powered vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that could be ready to fly commuters from suburbs into cities by 2023 if they can win the trust of consumers and safety regulators.
Read more
A team of UK-based companies led by Rolls-Royce aims to build the fastest completely electric-powered plane ever to prove that eliminating fossil fuel emissions from aircraft doesn’t have to come at the cost of speed.
Read more
China on Thursday became the first nation to land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon with the goal of unlocking the mysteries of the lunar surface region that never faces Earth, including how the moon formed billions of years ago.
Read more
The two pilots of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo earned their commercial astronaut wings on Thursday by firing the plane’s rocket for 60 seconds after being dropped from a larger airplane and launching to the boundary of space 51 miles above Earth’s surface.
Read more
NASA on Monday said the asteroid Bennu was once in contact with water, based on molecules containing hydrogen and oxygen bonded together detected by the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft in numerous places on the asteroid. Bennu may have once belonged to a much larger asteroid that carried water, the agency announced in a press release, adding these measurements are a promising start.
Read more