My colleague Steve Trimble went to the Society of Experimental Test Pilots' annual symposium this year, and met some of my personal heroes like Eric "Winkle" Brown. I wanted to go, but a least he brought me back a video. So I have picked a couple of my favourite clips.
The first is of NASA Dryden's F-15 modified to test Gulfstream's Quiet Spike telescoping nose boom, which is intended to reduce the sonic boom of a supersonic business jet (and apparently it worked as designed).
The second is of NASA Dyrden's F-18 completing a "hands-off" contact with the drogue during the first ever autonomous aerial refuelling demonstration, conducted jointly with DARPA (it was a dry run, no fuel was exchanged).