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Rogue toy drones – a hot-selling Christmas gift this season and last – are starting to interfere with military operations at several bases across the country. With sales of consumer drones expected to approach 700,000 this year, military officials say they are bracing for the problem to get worse and are worried about the potential for an aviation disaster. Continue reading
Small-deck ships such as destroyers and frigates could greatly increase their effectiveness if they had their own unmanned air systems (UAS) to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and other capabilities at long range around the clock. Current state-of-the-art UASs, however, lack the ability to take off and land from confined spaces in rough seas and achieve efficient long-duration flight. Continue reading
Frank Carollo, a longtime member of the City Council in Miami, had worked for several weeks fine-tuning a proposal to limit the use of recreational drones, the increasingly popular remote-controlled flying devices. Minutes before the start of the vote on the rules this month, lawyers from the Federal Aviation Administration called him. Continue reading
Vietnamese television and other media reports have revealed Vietnam’s largest indigenous high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to date, indicating that it will eventually perform civil and military missions over the South China Sea. Continue reading
In view of threats to security during the ongoing tourist season, the flying of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) — commonly known as drones — for civil purposes, sans the requisite permissions, is likely to be banned. Continue reading
The 2016 will be the beginning of the end for the MQ-1 Predator. Now 20 years old, the Predator has been an ubiquitous part of America’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the ageing platform is starting to be replaced by more of the MQ-9 Reapers, which have a longer flight time, wider range and bigger payload. Continue reading
Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. Aerospace Systems, El Segundo, California, has been awarded a $93,076,636 Other Transaction Agreement for prototype project – Tactically Exploited Reconnaissance Node (Tern) program, Phase III.