Unmanned Vehicles

A Boeing 737 appears to have sustained damage after striking a drone during approach into Mozambique’s main airport on Thursday. It could be among the first confirmed collisions between an airliner and unmanned aircraft, but details were scarce regarding the type of drone and whether any witnesses on board saw it.LAM Mozambique Airlines, the nation’s […]

A passenger-carrying drone being tested in Israel could be on its way to becoming the first multi-use flying vehicle on the market. As reported this week by Reuters, the Israeli tech firm Urban Aeronautics completed early test flights of what the company calls an unmanned “flying car,” which could be in service by 2020. The […]

Did you get a drone for Christmas? I know some of you did and I know a lot more people will be interested in the video I’m publishing in today’s blog. I predict a range of reaction from slack-jawed wonder to spittle-spewing high dudgeon that people like this are now invading our sacred airspace. (Better […]

Bell Helicopter recently unveiled its new design for an autonomous tiltrotor, the V-247 Vigilant, which will have a 65-foot wingspan and will be capable of carrying a payload of up to 6.5 tons of fuel, armament and sensors. The aircraft, designed for military use, will be able to operate from land or sea, and will […]

Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by tech billionaire Jeff Bezos, announced Monday a new family of heavy boosters capable of putting manned and heavy cargo payloads into earth orbit and beyond. Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, said there will be both two- and three-stage versions of the booster and that one version will be capable of […]

Drones hovering over fires have often been the bane of firefighters, but now special versions of the unmanned aircraft are going to be put to work on emergency response teams. The New York City Fire Department is training some of its crews to deploy bright red drones to view fires using video and infrared cameras,according […]

There’s been a lot of talk lately about a shortage of pilots for both military and civilian jobs, and now the U.S. Air Force says it has to hire private contractors to fly its drones. The contract drone pilots are not allowed to fire weapons, but they can operate reconnaissance missions, according to a story […]

As an aviation journalist, my job description isn’t exactly to cheer when a flying machine craters, runs amok, blows up or otherwise goes awry. Hey, two wings, one love, right? So it was with a little guilt when, like a beer burp you can’t quite keep down, I had this moment of so there, when […]

The late and much-celebrated fighter pilot General Robin Olds delighted in telling the story of sitting in the front seat of an F-4 headed into visual-range combat in Vietnam and telling his younger backseater that he had it on good authority that what they were seeing wasn’t actually happening. That is, the F-4 design brief […]

Facebook’s new high-altitude drone flew for the first time and its mission, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is nothing short of changing the world. But first the frail high-altitude solar electric aircraft had to get off the ground. Zuckerberg was in Yuma, Arizona, on June 28 when Aquila, riding a dolly down the runway, was […]