Preparations for my Auto ACAS flight began the previous day with training and equipment fitting at Edwards AFB.

Simulation Key Enabler for Auto ACAS Flight Testing Designed to save aircraft from collision with just seconds to spare, Auto ACAS is meant to operate in a highly dynamic environment in which time and space become quickly compressed. Long before such a system could be flight tested with real aircraft, it had to be developed, evaluated and proved on the ground in some of the most sophisticated high fidelity flight simulators yet designed.

Unmanned aircraft are most often viewed as augmenting manned aircraft, perhaps eventually replacing some of them, but a more likely future lies in their becoming intimately essential to each other. Two new U.S. research notices give hints of such an outcome.

Real-time strain sensing allows small unmanned aircraft to redistribute lift in flight, paving the way for lighter, more flexible wings.

Lockheed Martin has crafted a new, reduced cost plan to “optionally man” its U-2.

Flying far is more important than flying fast, Japanese fighter technologists have found in studies aimed at defining their country’s next combat aircraft. Researchers are also emphasizing that Japan’s next fighter should share targeting data and carry a big internal load of large, high-performance missiles.

The inevitable has happened in the U.S. attempt to move the economy off the planet. That it happened twice in a week is driving a needed element of reality into the endeavor.

It has been decades since anyone reengined an in-service jetliner. Can engine retrofits make a comeback?