BAE Develops Smart Skin Technology to Detect Damage on Aircraft

UAV-Smart-Skin-TechnologyWork is underway at BAE Systems to give aircraft human-like ‘skin’, enabling the detection of injury or damage and the ability to ‘feel’ the world around them. Engineers at BAE’s Advanced Technology Centre are investigating a ‘smart skin’ concept which could be embedded with tens of thousands of micro-sensors. When applied to an aircraft, this will enable it to sense wind speed, temperature, physical strain and movement, far more accurately than current sensor technology allows.

Continue reading

EC Initiative Concerning Civil Use of RPAS

logo_Eusurvey

Aviation technologies continue to evolve and to offer ever more opportunities to deliver services to citizens and to contribute to creating jobs and growth. At the same time, the growing use of new technologies deserves public debate and often requires appropriate intervention of the regulator in order to protect essential public interest. This is the case for remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS), commonly known as drones. Such unmanned aircraft have the potential to support in the coming years a wide development of civil applications. Continue reading

UAS Journalism in Kenya


The pilot African SkyCAM project funded by the Africa News Innovation Challenge is using these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Kenya, and a follow-up initiative, africanDRONE, is planned to agree safe community standards for ‘drone journalism’ across Africa. Filming from a high vantage point helps bring a sense of scale to stories that might otherwise be unavailable to journalists in developing countries, says Dickens Olewe, African SkyCAM’s founder. Continue reading