The Avenger General Atomics Aeronautical Systems
Future airplane flocks would require a trained corps of pilots who intimately know their aircraft and their partners' flying habits. Drone flocks would be a different task, however. Drones are not as smart as pilots, and cannot tell what other aircraft will do. But the military would like to change that. Read more »
A Rendering of Raytheon's Laser Weapon System A Raytheon-U.S. Navy team is working to add a solid-state laser to the Phalanx Close-in Weapon System. Raytheon
Raytheon revealed its next-gen directed energy weapon at the Farnborough Air Show today, releasing video showing its Laser Weapons System (LaWS) -- a six-laser weapon that focuses on a single target -- engaging and then destroying an unmanned aerial vehicle from the deck of a Navy vessel at sea. Read more »
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Better Sub Sonar
Carbon nanotubes could provide better stealth technology for submarines, helping them to "see" other undersea objects while remaining invisible to enemy subs. A report in ACS Nano Letters details a new application of a previously-known property of sheets of carbon nanotubes just a fraction of the width of a human hair that nonetheless can generate sound and cancel out noise far better than current sound-generating tech. Read more »
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The Autonomous Boeing Little Bird Sanjiv Singh
An Army-funded research group at Carnegie Mellon University, working with engineers at Piasecki Aircraft Corporation, has made a huge leap forward -- or perhaps skyward -- for the future of autonomous flight. In mid-June, the team launched an unmanned helicopter and watched it land several minutes later, after negotiating an in-flight obstacle course. But unlike previous unmanned helo flights, this one required no human input whatsoever; for the first time ever, a full-sized helicopter made a fully autonomous flight. Read more »
The Terahertz Remote Detector Nature Photonics
If those new airport X-ray scanners offend your modest sensibilities, you may not want to read this. A new terahertz remote sensor may soon be able to see through walls, packaging materials, and even clothing from thousands of feet away, identifying materials contained inside through their unique spectral signatures.
Terahertz waves exist in the part of the spectrum between infrared and microwave light, but they were largely thought to be a dead end for remote sensing tech because they are absorbed and degraded by moisture in the air, making them highly unreliable at distances beyond just a few inches. Read more »
The Patriot Missile System Has an App Because you don't want to forget a step when firing this bad boy.
There's an app for everything, Apple says, and apparently that rule does not exclude "the operation ofadvanced missile defenses." Raytheon has developed an app for the Patriot anti-missile system that helps troops stay sharp on the weapons platform even when they are called away from their primary peacetime duties for combat tours. Read more »
Tapping Gravity to Locate Threats Underground Lockheed Martin
Having had limited success catching America's enemies by "smoking them out of their holes," Lockheed Martin and the DoD are turning to an airborne sensor-based platform to map the subterranean world and identify possible threats hiding there. As part of DARPA's Gravity Anomaly for Tunnel Exposure (GATE) program, Lockheed will develop a system that identifies underground targets by analyzing gravity signatures for the sign of man-made tunnels, bunkers, or caches. Read more »
Stealth Paint New Israeli nanotech paint purportedly turns any airplane or missile into a stealth aircraft.
Some innovations in flight are huge; for instance, this week we've already seen concepts for a flying car and caught wind of the first fully-autonomous helicopter flight.
But other aviation innovations are as simple as a fresh coat of paint. An Israeli nanotech company is claiming that it has created a special paint that makes planes, missiles, drones, and other aircraft invisible to radar. Read more »
Not that soldiers on the North Korean side of the demilitarized zone can read this tale of Western decadence, but if they could they would do well to take note: South Korea has deployed two $334,000 robotic sentries armed with automatic weapons and 40-millimeter grenade launchers along the tense border region bisecting the Korean peninsula.
The robots are fitted with surveillance equipment, tracking and voice recognition systems, and heat and motion detectors that can identify threats approaching from the other side. If they prove successful they could be deployed along the entire DMZ, augmenting South Korea's strong military presence already in place. Read more »
AVX's Transformer Candidate Takes to the Sky AVX Aircraft
Just after the new year, DARPA put out a broad agency announcement requesting a flying car, specifically a one-to four-person, vertical takeoff and landing-capable vehicle that can negotiate off-road conditions as well as take to the skies. Today, Fort Worth-based AVX Aircraft has responded with a proposal, releasing some mock-ups of a dual-rotor, ducted-fan driven aircraft that's also road-ready. Read more »
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