an independent online news service for the Unmanned Aircraft Systems world
Bird-like Aquiline drone prototype by McDonnell Douglas
The CIA’s Project Aquiline was a drone with a ten-foot wingspan which would carry out spy missions deep into the Soviet Union. The CIA has declassified a new stash of documents about the project from the early 1970s, revealing among other things, plans to fit nuclear propulsion and have it operating out of the celebrated Area 51. Continue reading
MQ-4C Tritons at a Northrop Grumman test facility in Palmdale, California
The US Department of the Navy plans to award Northrop Grumman’s aerospace systems business a delivery order to provide analysis support for demonstration activities involving the MQ-4C Triton unmanned aerial system. Continue reading
Researchers at the Delft University of Technology, TU Delft, have produced a 98-Page research thesis on ‘Predicting helicopter damage caused by a collision with an Unmanned Aerial System using explicit Finite Element Analysis‘. Continue reading
This was the performance that won the Swedish Air Force pilot and plane the King Hussein Memorial Sword for best overall flying demonstration at the RIAT 2019 air show. Continue reading
PrecisionHawk, Inc., has announced that it has been awarded two patents for technologies it has developed for unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM). The patents, titled ‘Automated Unmanned Air Traffic Control System,’ are designed to enable collision avoidance between drones and manned aircraft. This is achieved by transmitting real-time flight data from drones to a UTM server prior to and while in-flight. Continue reading
Researchers Chuhao Liu and Shaojie Shen from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology revealed an intriguing new way to control drones that uses holographic augmented reality hardware to create live 3D terrain maps, enabling drone pilots to simply point at targets visualized above any flat surface. Continue reading
Drones are now more or less routinely used by farmers across the globe to determine soil characteristics, check crop conditions, monitor irrigation systems and spray crops. But not for harvesting crops, yet. Continue reading
uAvionix announced the release of pingRX Pro, a new Detect and Avoid (DAA) ADS-B Receiver for professional Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). pingRX Pro detects private and commercial aircraft operating on 978 MHz and 1090 MHz. The received aircraft identity, position, and altitude are visualized on a moving map in real-time allowing the UAS operator or autopilot to remain well clear. Continue reading