Has Lockheed Martin found the right mix of advanced design and conventional thinking with its Hybrid Wing Body airlifter concept? Wind-tunnel tests confirm its efficiency promise and a demonstrator is on the cards.
Highly accurate performance tests on Lockheed Martin’s HWB airlifter design stress the National Transonic Facility’s capability to reproduce near-flight-like aerodynamic conditions.
DEFENSE After years of delays, the U.S. Army and Navy have awarded Lockheed Martin a $66.3 million contract to develop a dual-mode millimeter-wave-radar/semi-active-laser guidance section for the Hellfire II air-to-surface missile under the Joint Air-to-Ground Missile program.
The Air Force is sending F-22s to Europe, airline pilots prepare for a stopgap FAA bill, Pakistan is making 20 nuclear weapons a year and a blunt solution to unwanted drone flights.
Silicon Valley startup is investigating using additive manufacturing techniques to enable fabrication of large structures in space that would collapse under their own weight on Earth
The Southwest Research Institute is working on a set of eight microsatellites designed to improve hurricane tracking by measuring GPS signals reflected off the ocean surface beneath the gathering storm.
Aviation Week flies with Tom Schnell, director of the University of Iowa's Operator Performance Lab, in Schnell's Mi-2 Hoplite avionics testbed to sample the Lab's degraded visual environment research
Working on a shoestring budget, NASA Armstrong’s “model lab” is testing potentially game-changing aerodynamic innovations as well as designs that could one day be the first aircraft to fly over Mars
What if commercial pilots never had to learn to fly IFR? The distinction between instrument flight rules and visual flight rules (VFR) may go away in the not-too-distant future. What if the Black Hawk successor offered military pilots a 360-degree, all-weather view on a touch screen that could easily be reconfigured? These are the sort of things we might see in next-gen cockpits. Join Aviation Week editors Jim Asker, John Croft and Graham Warwick in peering into the future.
If the FAA can’t keep UAVs away from airports, maybe Congress can. The Pentagon plans more UAV patrols. Air Line pilots prepare for a decision on open skies, and Democrats plead for budget talks.
Japan probably has the third or fourth largest sigint establishment in the world, ranking behind the U.S. and Britain but possibly ahead of Russia and China, say Australian researchers.
