Aviation Week & Space Technology

To get to Mars, astronauts will need tasty nutritious food that can withstand the demands of space travel.

Reasons for the decline in pilot numbers include retirement age and dismally low salaries, but organizations such as AOPA and GAMA are offering some solutions to help boost private pilot numbers.

Thales Alenia Space is leading development of Stratobus, a high-altitude platform that could perform many of the same functions of telecommunications and remote-sensing satellites, but closer to Earth.

As Chinese local airlines proliferate, they are increasingly adopting the budget model.

Boeing 727-200 finds a new role as aerial spray aircraft to combat oil spills at sea.

Brussels Airlines CEO Bernard Gustin: “We are more than ever assuming the role of Belgium’s national carrier, but we’re not government owned and we are not a legacy, old-style airline. We’re a successful hybrid.”

California Polytechnic—and a Florida high school—are working together to test a cubesat specifically designed as part of an experiment to wirelessly transmit payload data from launch to deployment.

NASA is beginning UAS testing that deliberately plans close encounters with “intruder” aircraft.

Open rotor on supercomputer; Vanilla’s 100-hr. UAS; AusPost delivers by drone; Improving composites manufacturing; Reinventing design tools.

Ab initio programs—training a student from scratch specifically to be an airline pilot—are gaining traction in the U.S. as regional and major carriers anticipate shortages ahead.

Honeywell names president/COO | Aerojet Rocketdyne appoints VP/general counsel/corporate secretary | AAR appoints treasurer

May 2-5—AUVSI’s Xponential 2016. Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. New Orleans. See xponential.org/auvsi2016/public/enter.aspx May 2-6—IEEE Radar Conference. Loews Hotel. Philadelphia. See radarconf16.org/#/

Airlines, particularly those in emerging economies, are being forced to overhaul their strategies to attract expatriate captains on the global market.

In negotiations, U.S. pilots have leverage. But union leaders are still nervous, given concerns about foreign competition and reversing givebacks made in the past.

Allegiant increases advertising, invests in customer service in new markets. The carrier also plans to replace its MD-80s by 2020 with A319s and A320s.

Whether you buy a UAS from Lockheed Martin or Amazon, the essential components of the system are the same.

Drones, UAS or RPAs—what’s the good word?

The airline industry needs new ideas about running a long-haul carrier efficiently, and incumbents’attempts to block such new models is short-sighted.

Boeing plans to keep production costs viable by closely integrating the 747 and 767 programs as orders for the larger aircraft slow.

Manning remotely piloted aircraft | U.S. space program: Conflicting goals? | Assessing age of military aircraft.

Commercial tiltrotor could shrink fleets, reduce the need for outlying bases and lower costs for oil and gas operations.

Bell’s 280-kt. V-280 Valor tiltrotor is in final assembly, and parts manufacture is in full swing for Sikorsky/Boeing’s 250-kt SB-1 coaxial rigid-rotor compound helicopter. Teams are making progress toward the Army’s Joint Multi Role flight demo in 2017.

Software design highlights the tension in the mammoth multinational F-35 program—how to achieve independence without disrupting interoperability.

Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson, a pilot rated in multiple aircraft, was impressed by how quickly a variety of companies worked to get his band’s tour plane back in action after an ground-handling accident.

Chairman hopes his idea will speed defense bill passage | Will F-22s resume production? | Key NASA programs in line for more money | Flying without registration