Absolute Radio has aired a video interview with Richard Branson from the V Festival in the UK this past weekend. Check out the Virgin Galactic Comments from 1:46 to 3:54.
Branson: "Rocket testing is going on as we speak"
Branson: "We're months rather than years away from the first test flights into space"
Branson: "Within two years, I'm going to be fortunate enough to be able to go up"
As reported by the New York times and other news outlets yesterday and today, a Northrop Grumman Firescout unmanned air vehicle (UAV), an unmanned helicopter to be exact, apparently strayed into the Washington DC Special Flight Restrictions Area (SFRA), a large swath of airspace around DC and formerly know as the DC ADIZ.
In the picture to the left, which I grabbed from SkyVector.com, the SFRA is is the area bounded by what looks like a sprocket with white shading.
The Navy was operating the aircraft out of Webster Field, which is just south of the Patuxent River Naval Air Station, when they apparenty lost communications. The aircraft, 
apparently continued flying north by northwest on its own, despite fault detection designs that are supposed to trip and fly the aircraft back to a known location or make it land if in fact communications were lost.
But why were comms lost? I fly in that exact area, and during a recent flight, I was attempting to speak to air traffic controllers and could not get them to hear me no matter what I tried. I had assumed the problem was my radios, but it very well could have been some type of interference brought on by all the security assets in place around DC. In my case, I could hear air traffic controllers perfectly fine, but they couldn't hear me. Didn't matter which of my two radios I tried. There are other trouble spots around the SFRA as well, places where the radios just seem to go haywire. Time will tell what happened to the Firescout, but I'm guessing RF phenomena will be part of the investigation.
There's a comical moving staircase in the Denver Convention Centre, giving attendees at the 2010 AUVSI conference something to smile about (after they realize the laugther isn't directed at them!)
Rockwell Collins has published a series of videos that show the power of its damage tolerant flight control systems. The work was done as part of the third phase of a DARPA program, with all flights taking place at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in northern Maryland.
Here are a few shots of the various unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) being set up in the convention hall in downtown Denver as part of this year's Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) trade show, which starts tomorrow and runs through Friday.
You can follow the action on the FlightGlobal website.
Evergreen Scan Eagle
Aurora GoldenEye 80
Arcturus T20
Honeywell T-Hawk MAV
Saab Koax X240
UAS Dynamics Skylark 2
AAI's Flying Jeep!
...More on the Flying Jeep
A great big blue bear trying to break into the convention hall!!
Recent Comments