On May 31, the Department of Defense announced $300 million worth of additional military aid to Ukraine. In this latest package are four kinds of anti-air missiles—meaning missiles meant to shoot down threats in the air—including the AIM-7 air-to-air missile.

The Air Intercept Missile-7 (AIM-7) Sparrow is a guided missile with its origins in the 1940s. It saw its first deployment in 1958, though the missiles of that era are a far cry from the weapons deployed today. The modern version, AIM-7M, substantially improved from early days, has been in service since 1982. It’s used by the US, NATO allies like Italy, Spain, Canada, and others, as well as countries like Australia, Saudi Arabia, and Japan.

The AIM-7 is carried by aircraft to destroy other aircraft. In the May 31 package authorized for Ukraine, it is joined by three ground-based anti-air systems. These include Patriot missiles, which can target planes or cruise missiles, Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, which are human portable and especially useful against low-flying targets like attack helicopters or strafing jets, and Avenger air defense systems. The Avenger mounts multiple Stinger launchers on a turret on the back of a HMMWV (better known as a Humvee) vehicle, and pairs those weapons with a heavy .50 caliber machine gun. This gives it range and flexibility against both aircraft in Stinger range, as well as a cheaper weapon that can hit other flying enemies, like small drones.

“Russia has continued to wage a brutal, completely unprovoked war against Ukraine, launching yet more airstrikes and bombarding Ukrainian cities across the country,” said National Security Council spokesman John F. Kirby during a briefing at the White House. The release from the Pentagon paired that statement with the note that Russia recently launched 17 separate air assaults against Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, in May.

“One of Ukraine’s most urgent requirements is ground-based air defense,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in the same briefing. “And this contact group will continue driving hard to help Ukraine defend the skies. In recent weeks, Russia has intensified its sordid bombardment of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. And the Kremlin’s cruelty only underscores Ukraine’s need for a stronger, layered ground-based air defense architecture.”    

The three ground-based air defenses make sense in light of this specific call. The AIM-7, which fits into an overall approach of arming Ukraine against Russian aircraft, requires aircraft to launch it. This May, several months after Ukrainian’s president Zelensky asked for artillery, tanks, planes, and Patriot missiles, the Biden administration joined other nations in agreeing to provide F-16 fighter-bombers to the country. These single-engine fighters, used widely across the world, are more than capable of carrying AIM-7 missiles, and while the US models may feature more advanced weapons, the AIM-7 is able to get the job done.

While the exterior form of the Sparrow has remained largely the same for its decades of service, how the missile finds and tracks targets has changed massively over the years. The first Sparrow missiles “used a beam-riding guidance system, in which an aircraft’s fire-control radar would lock on to a target and the missile would fly along the radar beam,” wrote Norman Friedman, in a history of the weapon. That fixed-beam path meant pilots had to keep their plane and radar directed in the same path as when they fired the weapon. It was a plausible use case for jets against propeller-powered bombers, but locking a pilot into a fixed route against a maneuvering plane like an enemy jet would render the missile easily beatable.

In April 1959, Popular Science boasted of an early improvement to the Sparrow III, noting the supersonic guided missiles “packs 50 percent more wallop than its predecessor.” Sparrow IIIs saw action in Vietnam, but the missiles were designed as a way for fighter pilots to shoot down bombers beyond visual line of sight. Over the skies of Vietnam, instead, pilots encountered fast flying and turning fighters.  

The AIM-7M version in use today uses better radar and maneuvering, allowing it to track targets more closely and without requiring the firing jet to maintain a lock on the target. It’s a weapon that had success when used by US pilots in 1990’s Persian Gulf War, and one that would likely prove straightforward to use by Ukraine, once the weapon is attached to planes that can launch it.

This latest military aid is the 39th transfer of such equipment to the country, dating back to August 2021, when Ukraine’s war was limited to reclaiming the Donbas. That was before Russia’s full invasion in February 2022 transformed the ongoing war into an existential threat to Ukraine.

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On May 9, under partly cloudy skies at Travis Air Force Base in California, the military invited an autonomous driving and flying robot to roll into a hangar and deliver a package. The machine, half of Elroy Air’s Chaparral delivery drone, was all exposed wires and metal brackets on four tall stands, and is a testbed for their autonomous driving program. With the demonstration, the Air Force got one step closer to adapting a useful cargo drone for military resupply missions, all without further strain on human pilots.

The Chaparral is a vertical takeoff and landing drone, with a large fixed wing, propellers for vertical thrust, and rotors that can provide vertical lift, enabling it to operate from small landing pads. None of that was present in the demonstration at Travis AFB, which was part of the Golden Phoenix Exercise. Instead, the ground autonomy system was mounted on a freestanding rig, with motors and wheels and sensors to steer around any obstacles it might encounter on a runway. Beneath it, and central to the Chaparral’s function, was a detachable cargo pod.

“One of the things that we showed at the event was our robotic ground tester, what we call ground bot. That demonstrated our autonomous taxing capability as well as our cargo pod pickup and drop off, and our cargo handling capabilities that we would use on the Chaparral,” says Amisah Prakash, director of customer programs at Elroy Air.

Autonomy for delivery on the ground is an important part of the overall vision for the drone, as it keeps the burden on human operators low while ensuring that the goods carried can get where they need to be. A runway is a complex environment, with planes and people and other vehicles moving around, to say nothing of the possibility of animals interloping on some of the more remote environments the drone is expected to operate. Getting the goods from point A to point B without incident is especially important when a runway collision might involve cargo that explodes.

“One of the use cases that we’ve been talking a lot with the Air Force on is logistics resupply types of missions, like, bringing cargo back and forth from different locations, whether that is fuel or munitions, anything that is needed for the ground troops to be able to do what they need to do,” says Prakash.

While shipping munitions is a more uniquely military mission, the Chaparral is intended as a truly dual-use aircraft, with an eye towards the commercial cargo market. As Popular Science reported last year, FedEx was interested in the plane, specifically taking advantage of the cargo pod’s 300-to-500-pound capacity, or about half the weight of what a typical delivery truck can carry. The drone will be able to deliver this at a range of up to 300 miles, and do so while flying faster than 100 mph.

If the comparison point for ground transport is a delivery truck, for remote delivery to small military bases a good point of comparison is a helicopter. During the US war in Afghanistan, both crewed and autonomous helicopters would deliver supplies to forward operating bases, austere outposts located where the fighting was and far from regular access to supplies. 

Imagine, says Clint Cope, chief product officer and co-founder for Elroy Air, that a mission commander is trying to send supplies somewhere, and triaging what is the most important use for an aircraft. “That decision-making gets a lot simpler when you can send a cheaper, in some ways expendable air asset, when you’re using an uncrewed system,” he says.

Cope offers as a comparison point a single helicopter making one supply run with 5,000 pounds of cargo. If that helicopter is shot down, it’s all lost in one go, and in order to make the mission, that full 5,000 pounds of load has to be assembled before any of it can go out for delivery. “You can go and load up a Chaparral [drone] and send a much smaller, almost right-sized amount of supplies where they’re needed and be able to have that much more rapid turnaround,” says Cope. 

In that way, using the drones changes resupply from fewer, higher-stakes missions, to more of managing a logistics flow through drones.

The Chaparral runs on jet fuel, like much of the Air Force, and has a generator to power its electric motors. It still needs human refueling, but the drone’s design, especially the pivot on its wing, is made so it can be transported inside larger cargo aircraft, like a C-130 or C-5, and flown from almost anywhere. 

While autonomous driving is useful for getting between the runway and the hangar, the loading ramp of a cargo plane is not a place to risk automated driving.

“We demonstrated how you can manually remote control the vehicle as well,” says Matt Michini, director of robotics at Elroy Air. “So if somebody on the ground wants to taxi it into a hangar or they want to move it to move it outta the way so that a plane can drive by or something, we want it to demonstrate how that’s possible as well without too much rigamarole.”

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In April, the Air Force took its Angry Kitten out for a spin in the skies above Nevada. The feline-monikered system is a tool of electronic warfare, developed originally to simulate enemy systems in testing and training. Now, the Air Force is exploring using the system as an offensive tool, and as a weapon it can bring to future fights. This testing included putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone.

Electronic warfare is an increasingly important part of how modern militaries fight. The systems generally operate on the electromagnetic spectrum outside the range of visible light, making their actions perceived primarily by their resulting negative effects on an adversary, like lost signals or incorrect sensor information. What makes Angry Kitten especially valuable as a training tool, and as a future weapon, is that it uses a software-defined radio to adjust frequencies, perceiving and then mimicking other aircraft, and overall making a fussy mess of their signals.

“Electronic Attack on the MQ-9 is a compelling capability,” said Michael Chmielewski, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron commander, in a release. “15 hours of persistent noise integrated with a large force package will affect an adversary, require them to take some form of scalable action to honor it, and gets at the heart of strategic deterrence.”

In other words, putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper drone means that the jamming system can be airborne for a long time, as Reapers are long-endurance drones. Any hostile air force looking to get around the jamming will need to attack the Reaper, which as an uncrewed plane is more expendable than a crewed fighter. Or, it means they will need to route around the jammed area, letting the Air Force dictate the terms of where and how a fight takes place.

Reapers were developed for and widely used during the long counter-insurgency wars waged by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars saw the drones’ long endurance, slow speed, and ability to loiter over an area as valuable assets, especially since the drones rarely had to contend with any anti-air missiles. They were operating in, to use Pentagon parlance, “uncontested” skies. As the Pentagon looks to the future, one in which it may be called upon to use existing equipment in a war against nations with fighter jets and sophisticated anti-air systems, it’d be easy to see Reapers sidelined as too slow, vulnerable, or irrelevant for the task.

Putting an Angry Kitten on a Reaper is a way to make the drone relevant again for other kinds of war.

[Related: The Air Force wants to start using its ‘Angry Kitten’ system in combat]

“The goal is to expand the mission sets the MQ-9 can accomplish,” said Aaron Aguilar, 556th Test and Evaluation Squadron assistant director of operations, in the same release. “The proliferation and persistence of MQ-9s in theater allows us to fill traditional platform capability gaps that may be present. Our goal is to augment assets that already fill this role so they can focus and prioritize efforts in areas they are best suited for.”

Putting the Angry Kitten on a Reaper turns a counter-insurgency hunter-killer into a conventional-war surveillance platform and jammer. It emphasizes what the tool on hand can already do well, while giving it a different set of ways to interact with a different expected array of foes. 

An earlier exercise this spring saw the Air National Guard test landing and launching a Reaper from a highway in Wyoming, expanding how and where it can operate. The ability to quickly deploy, refuel, rearm, and relaunch Reapers, from found runways as well as established bases, can expand how the drones are used.

In addition to testing the Angry Kitten with Reapers, the Air Force tested the Angry Kitten in Alaska on F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Thunderbolts, both older planes originally designed for warfare against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In the decades since, Fighting Falcons—known more colloquially as vipers—have expanded to become a widely used versatile fighter in the arsenal of the US and a range of nations. Meanwhile, the Air Force has long worked to retire the A-10s, arguing that they lack protection against modern weapons. That process began in earnest this spring, with the oldest models selected for the boneyard.

In the meantime, putting the Angry Kitten on drones and planes still in service means expanding not just what those planes can do, but potentially how effective they can be against sophisticated weapons. Targeting systems, from those used by planes to find targets to those used by missiles to track them, can be disrupted or fooled by malicious signals. An old plane may not be able to survive a hit from a modern missile, but jamming a missile so that misses its mark is better protection than any armor.

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In the desert plain south of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and just north of the Isleta Pueblo reservation, the Air Force defeated a swarm of drones with THOR, a powerful microwave weapon. THOR, or the Tactical High-power Operational Responder, is designed to defend against drone swarms, frying electronics at scale in a way that could protect against many flying robots at once.

THOR has been in the works for years, with a successful demonstration in February 2021 at Kirtland Air Force Base, south of Albuquerque. From 2021 to 2022, THOR was also tested overseas. 

This latest demonstration, which took place on April 5, saw the microwave face off against a swarm of multiple flying uncrewed aerial vehicles. The event took place at the Chestnut Range, short for “Conventional High Explosives & Simulation Test,” which has long been used by the Air Force Research Lab for testing.

“The THOR team flew numerous drones at the THOR system to simulate a real-world swarm attack,” said Adrian Lucero, THOR program manager at AFRL’s Directed Energy Directorate, in a release earlier this month. “THOR has never been tested against these types of drones before, but this did not stop the system from dropping the targets out of the sky with its non-kinetic, speed-of-light High-Power Microwave, or HPM pulses,” he said.

Crucial to THOR’s concept and operation is that the weapon disables and defeats drones without employing explosive or concussive power, the kind derived from rockets, missiles, bombs, and bullets. The military lumps these technologies together as “kinetics,” and they make up the bread and butter of how the military uses force. Against drones, which can cost mere hundreds or even thousands of dollars per vehicle, missiles represent an expensive form of ammunition. While the bullets used in existing counter-rocket weapons are much cheaper than missiles, they still create the problem of dangerous debris everywhere they don’t hit. Using microwaves means that only the damaged drone itself becomes a falling danger, without an added risk from the tools used to shoot it down.

“THOR was extremely efficient with a near continuous firing of the system during the swarm engagement,” Capt. Tylar Hanson, THOR deputy program manager, said in a release. “It is an early demonstrator, and we are confident we can take this same technology and make it more effective to protect our personnel around the world.”

The THOR system fits into a broader package of directed energy countermeasures being used to take on small, cheap, and effective drones. Another directed energy weapon explored for this purpose is lasers, which can burn through a drone’s hull and circuitry, but that approach takes time to hold focus on and melt a target.

“The system uses high power microwaves to cause a counter electronic effect. A target is identified, the silent weapon discharges in a nanosecond and the impact is instantaneous,” reads an Air Force fact sheet about the weapon. In a video from AFRL, THOR is described as a “low cost per shot, speed of light solution,” which uses “a focused beam of energy to defeat drones at a large target area.”

An April 2023 report from the Government Accountability Office is much more straightforward: A High Power Microwave uses “energy to affect electronics by overwhelming critical components intended to carry electrical currents such as circuit boards, power systems, or sensors. HPM systems engage targets over an area within its wider beam and can penetrate solid objects.”

Against commercial or cheaply produced drones, the kind most likely to see use on the battlefield in great numbers today, microwaves may prove to be especially effective. While THOR is still a ways from development into a fieldable weapon, the use of low-cost drones on the battlefield has expanded tremendously since the system started development. A report from RUSI, a British think tank, found that in its fight against Russia’s invasion, “Ukrainian UAV losses remain at approximately 10,000 per month.”

While that illustrates the limits of existing drone models, it also highlights the scale of drones seeing use in regular warfare. As drone technology improves, and militaries move from adapting commercial drones to dedicated military models made close to commercial cost and scale, countering those drones en masse will likely be a greater priority for militaries. In that, weapons like THOR offer an alternative to existing countermeasures, one that promises greater effects at scale.

Watch a video about THOR, which also garnered a Best of What’s New award from PopSci in 2021, from the Air Force Research Laboratory, below:

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On May 18, the United States Department of the Air Force announced that it is looking to award a contract for the Next Generation Air Dominance Platform in 2024. The name, shortened to NGAD, is a jumble of Pentagon concepts, obscuring what is actually sought: a novel fighter jet representing the newest era of military aircraft—a sixth-generation fighter. 

“The NGAD Platform is a vital element of the Air Dominance family of systems which represents a generational leap in technology over the F-22, which it will replace,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in a release. “NGAD will include attributes such as enhanced lethality and the ability to survive, persist, interoperate, and adapt in the air domain, all within highly contested operational environments. No one does this better than the U.S. Air Force, but we will lose that edge if we don’t move forward now.”

The solicitation to industry for the NGAD is classified, making the details of what, exactly, the Air Force wants hard to know at this time. But jet fighters have, for decades, been classified into generations. So what makes a fighter generation, and what makes a sixth-generation fighter?

“In calling NGAD a sixth-generation fighter, that’s an important signal that it’s moving into a new level of capability, and it has to, because the threats are really evolving,” says Caitlin Lee, senior fellow at Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Aircraft generations, explained

Fighter planes date to the first World War as a distinct concept, and ever since that time observers have grouped fighters into generations, or models built at similar times around similar technologies. Fighter evolution in war happened rapidly, as the first exchanges of pistol-fire between the pilots of scout planes gave way to aircraft built for combat, with dedicated machine guns firing first around and then even through propellers. As hostile planes got better, new aircraft were built to let pilots win fights. Once enough of these changes were accumulated in new models of planes, those aircraft could be grouped by sets of features into different generations.

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

This is true for the earliest fixed-wing and biplane fighters, up through the piston-powered patrollers of World War II and into the jet era. In October 1954, Popular Science showed off four fighter generations flying in formation for ceremonies at an Air Force gunnery competition. This snapshot of generations captured two propeller-driven planes: the SPAD biplane from World War I and the F-51 fighter from World War II. They are joined by two distinct jet fighters: the F-86 Sabre, a type which saw action in the Korean War, and F-100 Super Sabre, a model that would go on to see action in the Vietnam War.

The attributes that go into an aircraft generation

What separates fighter generations, broadly, is their speed, weapons, sensors, and other new features as they become part of the overall composition of a plane. Sticking to jets, fighters with that method of propulsion have gone from straight-wing planes flying at top speeds below the sound barrier, with guns, unguided rockets, and bombs, all the way to sensor-rich stealth jets capable of carrying a range of anti-air and anti-ground missiles.

There is no one agreed-to definition of exactly what fighter generations are, though jet fighters are generally grouped separately from propeller predecessors. Historian Richard Hallion expressed a version, published in the Airpower Journal’s Winter 1990 issue, that outlines six generations as defined primarily by speed and maneuverability. Hallion’s definitions precede not just the Next Generation Air Dominance plane, but also the F-35 and F-22, which have become widely accepted as definitive fifth-generation fighters.

First generation

• Feature: The propulsion comes from jet engines. Weapons, wing shapes, and sensors are similar to preceding and contemporary propeller-driven plane designs.
• Models: Germany’s Me 262, which saw action in World War II. The P-80 Shooting Star, flown by the United States from 1945 to 1959.

Second generation

• Features: The wings are swept backwards, planes are now equipped with onboard radar, and they are armed with missiles.
• Models: The F-86 Sabre, flown by the US in Korea, and the MiG-15, flown by China and North Korea in the Korean War.

Third generation

• Features: The jets can now achieve supersonic speed for short bursts and are equipped with missiles that could hit targets beyond line of sight.
• Models: The MiG-21, designed by the USSR and still in service today, and the F-4 Phantom, developed for the US Navy and still in service with a few countries today.

Fourth generation

• Features: These jets have reduced radar signatures, better radars, and even more advanced missiles.
• Models: France’s Mirage 2000, a delta-wing fighter still in service today, and the F/A-18, used by the US Navy and Marine Corps. Plus, the US Air Force’s F-15 and F-16.

Fifth generation

• Features: Jets are built for stealth, use internal weapons bays, fly with high maneuverability, have better sensors, and have the ability to sustain cruise at supersonic speeds.
• Models: The F-22 and F-35 family developed by the US, and the J-20 made by China and the Su-57 developed by Russia.

Tirpak defined a fifth-generation fighter as having “All-aspect stealth with internal weapons, extreme agility, full-sensor fusion, integrated avionics, some or full supercruise,” and pointed to the F-22 and F-35 as examples. 

To unpack the jargon above, “stealth” is a set of technologies, from the coating of the plane to the shape it takes, that make it hard to detect, especially with radar. Sensor fusion combines information from a plane’s sensors, like targeting cameras and radar, as well as other avionics, to create a fuller picture of the environment around the aircraft. “Supercruise” is flight at above supersonic speed, for sustained time, without having to dump extra fuel into the engines, a previous way of achieving supersonic bursts.

[Related: How fast is supersonic flight? Fast enough to bring the booms.]

All of these changes are responses to the new threat environment encountered by previous fighters. Stealth is one way for plane design to mitigate the risk from advanced anti-air missiles. Enhanced sensors are a way to allow fighters to see further and better than rival aircraft, and rival air-defense radars. Fighter design is about both building with the threats of the day, while anticipating the threats of the future, and ensuring the plane is still capable of surviving them.

One way to think of this is that the NGAD will be one among several kinds of aircraft the Air Force intends to use in the future, the way it might use wings of fighters today. This could include fighting alongside the Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a combat drone the Air Force plans as part of its Next Generation operations model.

“What’s next-generation about CCA is that they will have more autonomy than the current UAVs in the Air Force inventory like Reaper. And the question is how much more autonomy will they actually have,” says Lee. “And I think what the Air Force is interested in is starting with having that manned fighter aircraft, whether it’s NGAD or something else, be able to provide inputs and certainly oversee the operations of the CCA.”

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Pilots can experience forces while flying that punish their bodies, and they can also find themselves in disorienting situations. A military pilot in a fighter jet will endure G-forces as they maneuver, resulting in a crushing sensation that causes the blood to drain downwards in their bodies, away from the brain. And someone at the controls of a plane or helicopter, even in more routine flights, can have their senses become discombobulated. One of the causes of the crash that killed Kobe Bryant in 2020 was “spatial disorientation” on the pilot’s part, according to the NTSB. 

Then there’s being launched in a rocket up into space. One astronaut recalled to PopSci that when flying in the space shuttle, the engines shut down, as planned, 8.5 minutes after launch. “It felt like the shuttle stopped, and I went straight through it,” he said. “I got a tremendous tumbling sensation.” Another astronaut noted in a recent NASA press release that he felt like he “was on a merry-go-round as my body hunted for what was up, down, left, and right,” in the shuttle as well.

And of course, anyone down on Earth who has ever experienced vertigo, a sensation of spinning, or nausea, knows that those are miserable, even frightening sensations. 

To better understand all the uncanny effects that being up in the air or in space has on humans, NASA is going to employ a Navy machine called the Kraken, which is also fittingly called the Disorientation Research Device—a supersized contraption that cost $19 million and weighs 245,000 pounds. Pity the poor person who climbs into the Kraken, who could experience three Gs of force and be spun around every which way. NASA notes that the machine, which is located in Ohio, “can spin occupants like laundry churning in a washing machine.” It can hold two people within its tumbling chamber. As tortuous as it sounds, the machine provides a way to study spatial disorientation—a phenomenon that can be deadly or challenging in the air or in space—safely down on dry land. 

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

The NASA plan calls for two dozen members of the military to spend an hour in the Kraken, which will be using “a spaceflight setting” for this study. After doing so, half of them, the space agency says, “will perform prescribed head turns and tilts while wearing video goggles that track their head and eye movements.” The other half will not. All of them will carry out certain exercises afterwards, like balancing on foam. Perhaps, NASA thinks, the head movements can help. “Tests with the Kraken will allow us to rigorously determine what head movements, if any, help astronauts to quickly recover their sense of balance,” Michael Schubert, an expert on vestibular disorders at Johns Hopkins University and the lead researcher on this new study, said in the NASA release on the topic.

The study will also involve civilians who have pre-existing balance challenges (due to having had tumors surgically removed), who thankfully won’t have to endure the Kraken. They will also perform the head movements and carry out the same balance exercises. The goal of all this research is to discover if these head movement techniques work, so that “astronauts could adopt specific protocols to help them quickly adapt to gravitational changes during spaceflight,” NASA says. 

Additionally, the same techniques could help regular people who aren’t going to be launched into space but do struggle with balance or dizziness down on Earth. Watch a video about the Kraken, below. 

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On April 30, an MQ-9 Reaper drone landed on Highway 287, north of Rawlins, Wyoming. The landing was planned; it was a part of Exercise Agile Chariot, which drew a range of aircraft and saw ground support provided by the Kentucky Air National Guard. While US aircraft have landed on highways before, this was the first time such a landing had been undertaken by a Reaper, and it demonstrates the continued viability of adapting roads into runways as the need arises. 

In a video showing the landing released by the Air Force, the Reaper’s slow approach is visible against the snow-streaked rolling hills and pale-blue sky of Wyoming in spring. The landing zone is inconspicuous, a stretch of highway that could be anywhere, except for the assembled crowds and vehicles marking this particular stretch of road as an impromptu staging ground for air operations. 

“The MQ-9 can now operate around the world via satellite launch and recovery without traditional launch and recovery landing sites and maintenance packages,” said Lt. Col. Brian Flanigan, 2nd Special Operations Squadron director of operations, in a release. “Agile Chariot showed once again the leash is off the MQ-9 as the mission transitions to global strategic competition.”

When Flanigan describes the Reaper as transitioning to “global strategic competition,” that’s alluding to the comparatively narrower role Reapers had over the last 15 years, in which they were a tool used almost exclusively for the counter-insurgency warfare engaged in by the United States over Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as elsewhere, like Somalia and Yemen. Reapers’ advantages shine in counter-insurgency: The drones can fly high over long periods of time, watch in precise detail and detect small movements below, and drone pilots can pick targets as the opportunity arises.

But Reapers have hard limits that make their future uncertain in wars against militaries with substantial anti-air weapons, to say nothing of flying against fighter jets. Reapers are slow, propeller-driven planes, built for endurance not speed, and could be picked out of the sky or, worse, destroyed on a runway by a skilled enemy with dedicated anti-plane weaponry.

In March, a Reaper flying over the Black Sea was sprayed by fuel released from a Russian jet, an incident that led it to crash. While Wyoming’s Highway 287 is dangerous for cars, for planes it has the virtue of being entirely in friendly air space. 

Putting a Reaper into action in a war against a larger military, which in Pentagon terms often means against Russia or China, means finding a way to make the Reaper useful despite those threats. Such a mission would have to take advantage of the Reaper’s long endurance flight time, surveillance tools, and precision strike abilities, without leaving it overly vulnerable to attack. Operating on highways as runways is one way to overcome that limit, letting the drone fly from whenever there is road. 

“An adversary that may be able to deny use of a military base or an airfield, is going to have a nearly impossible time trying to defend every single linear mile of roads. It’s just too much territory for them to cover and that gives us access in places and areas that they can’t possibly defend,” Lt. Col. Dave Meyer, Deputy Mission Commander for Exercise Agile Chariot, said in a release.

Alongside the Reaper, the exercise showcased MC-130Js, A-10 Warthogs, and MH-6M Little Bird helicopters. With soldiers first establishing landing zones along the highway, the exercise then demonstrated landing the C-130 cargo aircraft to use as a refueling and resupply point for the A-10s, which also operated from the highway. Having the ability to not just land on an existing road, but bring more fuel and spare ammunition to launch new missions from the same road, makes it hard for an adversary to permanently ground planes, as resupply is also air-mobile and can use the same improvised runways.

Part of the exercise took place on Highway 789, which forks off 287 between Lander and Riverton, as the setting for trial search and rescue missions. “On the second day of operations, they repeated the procedure of preparing a landing zone for an MC-130. Once the aircraft landed, the team boarded MH-6 Little Birds that had been offloaded from the cargo plane by Soldiers from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The special tactics troops then performed combat search-and-rescue missions to find simulated injured pilots and extract them from the landing zone on Highway 789,” described the Kentucky Air National Guard, in a statement.

With simulated casualties on cleared roads, the Air Force rehearsed for the tragedy of future war. As volunteers outfitted in prosthetic injuries were transported back to the care and safety of landed transports, the highways in Wyoming were home to the full spectrum of simulated war from runways. Watch a video of the landing, below.

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To fly at supersonic speeds is to punch through an invisible threshold in the sky. Rocketing through the air at a rate faster than sound waves can travel through it means surpassing a specific airspeed, but that exact airspeed varies. On Mars, the speed of sound is different from the speed of sound on Earth. And on Earth, the speed of sound varies depending on the temperature of the air an aircraft is traveling through. 

Breaking the so-called sound barrier in 1947 made Chuck Yeager famous. But today, if a person in a military jet flies faster than the speed of sound, it’s not a significant or even noticeable moment, at least from the perspective of the occupants of the aircraft. “Man, in the airplane you feel nothing,” says Jessica Peterson, a flight test engineer for the US Air Force’s Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. People on the ground may beg to differ, depending on how close they are to the plane. 

Here’s what to know about the speed of supersonic flight, a type of travel that’s been inaccessible to civilians who want to experience it in an aircraft ever since the Concorde stopped flying in 2003. 

Ripples in the water, shockwaves in the air 

Traveling at supersonic speed involves cruising “faster than the sound waves can move out of the way,” says Edward Haering, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center who has been researching sonic booms since the 1990s.

One way to think about the topic is to picture a boat in the water. “If you’re in a rowboat, sitting on a lake, not moving, there might be some ripples that come out, but you’re not going any faster than the ripples are,” he says. “But if you’re in a motorboat or a sailboat, you’ll start to see a V-wake coming off the nose of your boat, because you’re going faster than those ripples can get out of the way.” That’s like a plane flying faster than the speed of sound.

But, he adds, a supersonic plane pushes through those ripples in three-dimensional space. “You have a cone of these disturbances that you’re pushing through,” he says. 

The temperature of the air determines how fast sound waves move through it. In a zone of the atmosphere on Earth between about 36,000 feet up to around 65,600 feet, the temperature is consistent enough that the speed of sound theoretically stays about the same. And in that zone, on a typical day, the speed of sound is about 660 mph. That’s also referred to as Mach 1. Mach 2, or twice the speed of sound, would be about 1,320 mph in that altitude range. However, since a real-world day will likely be different from what’s considered standard, your actual speed when attempting to fly supersonic may vary.

[Related: How high do planes fly? It depends on if they’re going east or west.]

If you wanted to fly a plane at supersonic speeds at lower altitudes, the speed of sound is faster in that warmer air. At 10,000 feet, supersonic flight begins at 735 mph, NASA says. The thicker air takes more work to fly through at those speeds, though.

For the record books: the first supersonic flight

Chuck Yeager became the first documented person to fly at supersonic speeds on October 14, 1947. He recalled in his autobiography, Yeager, that he was at 42,000 feet flying at 0.96 Mach on that autumn day. “I noted that the faster I got, the smoother the ride,” he wrote. 

“Suddenly the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to .965 Mach—then tipped right off the scale,” he recalled. “I thought I was seeing things! We were flying supersonic!” He learned afterwards that he had been going 700 mph, or 1.07 Mach. 

Over the radio, from below, Yeagar wrote that people in a “tracking van interrupted to report that they heard what sounded like a distant rumble of thunder: my sonic boom!” 

Sonic booms happen thanks to shock waves forming off different features on the aircraft. For example, the canopy of a fighter jet, or the inlet for its engine, can produce them. The problem occurs because of the way those various shock waves join up, coalescing into two. “When they combine, they just get higher and higher pressure,” says Haering. The way they combine is for one shock wave to come from the front of the plane, and one from the rear. People on the ground will detect a “boom, boom,” Haering says. 

Interestingly, the length of the aircraft matters in this case, affecting how far apart those booms are in time. The space shuttle, for example, measured more than 100 feet long. In that case, people would notice a “boom… boom,” Haering says. “And a very short plane, it’s booboom. And if it’s really short, and really far away, sometimes the time between those two booms [is] so short, you can’t really tell that there’s two distinct booms, so you just hear boom.” 

[Related: How does a jet engine work? By running hot enough to melt its own innards.]

The issue with these booms is leading NASA to develop a new experimental aircraft, along with Lockheed Martin, called the X-59. Its goal is to fly faster than the speed of sound, but in a quieter way than a typical supersonic plane would. Remarkably, instead of a canopy for the pilot to see the scene in front of them, the aviator will rely on an external vision system—a monitor on the inside that shows what’s in front of the plane. NASA said that the testing wrapped up in 2021 for this design, which helps keep the aircraft sleek. The ultimate goal is to manage any shock waves coming off that aircraft through its design. “On the X-59, from the tip of the nose to the back of the tail, everything is tailored to try to keep those shock waves separated,” Haering says. 

NASA says they plan to fly it this year, with the goal of seeing how much noise it makes and how people react to its sound signature. The X-59 could make a noise that’s “a lot like if your neighbor across the street slams their car door,” Haering speculates. “If you’re engaged in conversation, you probably wouldn’t even notice it.” But actual flights will be the test of that hypothesis.

The X-59 has a goal of flying at Mach 1.4, at an altitude of around 55,000 feet. Translated into miles per hour, that rate is 924 mph. Then imagine that the aircraft has a tailwind, and its ground speed could surpass 1,000 mph. (Note that winds in the atmosphere will affect a plane’s ground speed—the speed the plane is moving compared to the ground below. A tailwind will make it faster and a headwind will make it slower.) 

Supersonic corridors 

At Edwards Air Force Base in California, supersonic corridors permit pilots to fly at Mach 1 or faster above certain altitudes. In one corridor, the aircraft must be at 30,000 feet or higher. In another, the Black Mountain Supersonic Corridor, the aircraft can be as low as 500 feet. Remember, the speed to fly supersonic will be higher at a low altitude than it will be at high altitudes, and it will take more effort to push through the denser air.

“From a flight-test perspective—so that’s what we do here at Edwards, and we’re focusing on testing the new aircraft, testing the new systems—we regularly go supersonic,” says Peterson, the flight test engineer at the US Air Force’s Test Pilot School. 

[Related: Let’s talk about how planes fly]

The fact that one of the supersonic corridors is over the base means that sonic booms are audible there, although the aircraft has to be above 30,000 feet. “We can boom the base, and we hear it all the time,” she adds. 

She notes that in a recent flight in a T-38, when she broke the sound barrier at 32,000 feet, her aircraft had a ground speed of 665 mph. But at 14,000 feet, she was supersonic at a ground speed of 734 mph.

But there’s a difference between flying at supersonic speeds in a test scenario and doing it for operational reasons. Corey Florendo, a pilot and instructor also at the US Air Force Test Pilot School, notes that he’d do it “only as often as I need to,” during a real-world mission.

“When I go supersonic, I’m using a lot of gas,” he adds. 

Supersonic flight thus remains available to the military in certain scenarios when they’re willing to burn the fuel, but not so for regular travelers. A Boeing 787, for example, is designed to cruise at 85 percent the speed of sound. However, one company, called Boom Supersonic, aims to bring that type of flight back for commercial travel; their aircraft, which they call Overture, could fly in tests in 2027. You may not want to hold your breath. 

Joe Jewell, an associate professor at Purdue University’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, reflects that supersonic flight still has a “mystique” to it. 

“It’s still kind of a rare and special thing because the challenges that we collectively referred to as the sound barrier still are there, physically,” Jewell says. Pressure waves still accrue in front of the aircraft as it pushes through the air. “It’s still there, just the same as it was in 1947, we just know how to deal with it now.”

In the video below, watch an F-16 overtake a T-38; both aircraft are flying at supersonic speeds, and a subtle rocking motion is the only indication that shock waves are interacting with the aircraft. Courtesy Jessica Peterson and the US Air Force Test Pilot School.

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In the future, the US Air Force may employ drones that can accompany advanced fighter jets like the F-35, cruising along as fellow travelers. The vision for these drones is that they would be robotic wingmates, with perhaps two assigned to one F-35, a jet that’s operated by a single pilot. They would act as force multipliers for the aircraft that has a human in it, and would be able to execute tasks like dogfighting. The official term for these uncrewed machines is Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and the Air Force is thinking about acquiring them in bulk: It has said it would like to have 1,000 of them. 

To develop uncrewed aircraft like these, though, the military needs to be able to rely on autonomy software that can operate a combat drone just as effectively as a human would pilot a fighter jet, if not more so. A stepping stone to get there is an initiative called VENOM, and it will involve converting around a half dozen F-16s to be able to operate autonomously, albeit with a human in the cockpit as a supervisor. 

VENOM, of course, is an acronym. It stands for Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model, with “Viper” being a common nickname for the F-16 Fighting Falcon, a highly maneuverable fighter jet.  

The VENOM program is about testing out autonomy on an F-16 that is “combat capable,” says Lt. Col. Robert Waller, the commander of the 40th Flight Test Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.

“We’re taking a combat F-16 and converting that into an autonomy flying testbed,” Waller adds. “We want to do what we call combat autonomy, and that is the air vehicle with associated weapons systems—radar, advanced electronic warfare capabilities, and the ability to integrate weapons—so you loop all of that together into one flying testbed.” 

The program builds on other efforts. A notable related initiative involved a special aircraft called VISTA, or the X-62A. Last year, AI algorithms from both DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory took the controls of that unique F-16D, which is a flying testbed with space for two aviators in it. 

[Related: Why DARPA put AI at the controls of a fighter jet]

The VENOM program will involve testing “additional capabilities that you cannot test on VISTA,” Waller says. “We now want to actually transition that [work from VISTA] to platforms with real combat capabilities, to see how those autonomy agents now operate with real systems instead of simulated systems.” 

At a recent panel discussion at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies that touched on this topic, Air Force Maj. Gen. Evan Dertien said that VENOM is “the next evolution into scaling up what autonomy can do,” building on VISTA. Popular Science sibling website The War Zone reported on this topic last month. 

The project will see them using “about six” aircraft to test out the autonomy features, Waller tells PopSci, although the exact number hasn’t been determined, and neither has the exact model F-16 to get the autonomy features. “If we want the most cutting-edge radar or [electronic warfare] capabilities, then those will need to be integrated to an F-16C,” Waller says, referring to an F-16 model that seats just one person. 

The role of the human aviator in the cockpit of an F-16 that is testing out these autonomous capabilities is two-fold, Waller explains. The first is to be a “safety observer to ensure that the airplanes always return home, and that the autonomy agent doesn’t do anything unintended,” he notes. The second piece is to be “evaluating system performance.” In other words, to check out if the autonomy agent is doing a good job. 

Waller stresses that the human will have veto power over what the plane does. “These platforms, as flying testbeds, can and will let an autonomy agent fly the aircraft, and execute combat-related skills,” he says. “That pilot is in total control of the air vehicle, with the ability to turn off everything, to include the autonomy agent from flying anything, or executing anything.” 

Defense News notes that the Air Force is proposing almost $50 million for this project for the fiscal year 2024. 

“These airplanes will generally fly without combat loads—so no missiles, no bullets—[and] most, if not all of this, will be simulated capabilities, with a human that can turn off that capability at any time,” Waller says. 

Ultimately, the plan is not to develop F-16s that can fly themselves in combat without a human on board, but instead to keep developing the autonomy technology so it could someday operate a drone that can act like a fighter jet and accompany other aircraft piloted by people. 

Hear more about VENOM below, beginning around the 42 minute mark:

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The Air Force is asking Congress for 1,000 new combat drones to accompany planes into battle. The announcement, from Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, came March 7, as part of a broader push for Air Force modernization. It fits into a broader plan to combine crewed fighters, like F-35s and new designs, with drone escorts, thus expanding the scope of what the Air Force can do without similarly increasing the demand for new pilots.

Kendall spoke at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium in Aurora, Colorado. The speech focused on what the Air Force can and must do to remain competitive with China, which Kendall referred to as “our packing challenge.” While the Air Force can outline its expectations and desires in a budget, it is ultimately up to Congress to set the funding sought by the military. That means Kendall’s call for 1,000 drones isn’t just an ask, it has to be a sales pitch.

“The [Department of the Air Force] is moving forward with a family of systems for the next generation of air dominance, that will include both the NGAD platform and the introduction of uncrewed collaborative aircraft to provide affordable mass and dramatically increased cost-effectiveness,” said Kendall. By NGAD (Next Generation Air Dominance), Kendall was referring to a concept for future fighter planning, where a new crewed fighter plane heads a family of systems that includes escort drones. One of these potential drone escorts is called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA.

This Collaborative Combat Aircraft fits with the broader plans of the Air Force to augment and expand the number of aircraft it has by having drones fly as escorts and accessories to crewed and piloted fighters. These fighters include the existing and expanding inventory of F-35A stealth jets, as well as the next generation of planes planned for the future.

Kendall broke down the math like this: “[General Charles Q. Brown] and I have recently given our planners a nominal quantity of collaborative combat aircraft to assume for planning purposes. That planning assumption is 1,000 CCAs,” said Kendall. “This figure was derived from an assumed two CCAs per 200 NGAD platforms [equalling 400 drones], an additional two for each of 300 F-35s, for a total of a thousand.” 

One reason for the Air Force to pursue drone escorts is because they can expand what the planes can do, without requiring another expensive craft of a vulnerable pilot. Stealth on an F-35A jet fighter protects the pilot and the $78 million plane. If a drone can fly alongside a plane, help it on missions, and costs a fraction of the crewed fighter, then it may make more sense for the drones to be, if not disposable, somewhat more expendable.

Previously, the Air Force referred to this as “attritable,” a term coined to suggest the drones could be lost to combat (attrition), without emphasizing that the drones were built specifically to be lost. In Kendall’s remarks on March 7, he instead used the term “affordable mass,” which emphasizes the way these drones will increase the numbers of aircraft an enemy has to defeat in order to stop an aerial attack.

“One way to think of CCAs is as remotely controlled versions of the charting pods, electronic warfare pods, or weapons now carried under the wings of our crude aircraft. CCAs will dramatically improve the performance of our crude aircraft and significantly reduce the risk to our pilots,” said Kendall.

In this way, a drone escort flying alongside a fighter is just an extra set of bombs, cameras, missiles, or jammers, all in a detached body flying as an escort to the fighter. In 2017, the Air Force announced an attritable drone escort, using the Valkyrie built for the task by target drone maker Kratos. 

The first Valkyrie is already a museum piece, but it represents a rough overview of the kind of cost and functions the Air Force may want in a Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Priced at around $2 million, a Valkyrie is not cheap, but it is much cheaper than the fighters it would fly alongside. As designed, it can fly for up to 3,400 miles, with a top speed of 650 mph. That would make it capable of operating in theater with a fighter, with escorts likely delivered to bases by ground transport and then synched up with the fighters before missions.

Getting drones to fly alongside crewed planes has been part of the Air Force’s Loyal Wingman program, which shifts the burden of flying onto onboard systems in the drone. Presently, drones used by the US, like the MQ-9 Reaper that crashed into the Black Sea, are labor-intensive, crewed by multiple shifts of remote pilots. To make drones labor-saving, they will need to work similar to a human compassion, receiving commands from a squad leader but independent enough to execute those commands without human hands on the controls. The Air Force is experimenting with AI piloting of jets, including having artificial intelligence fly a crewed F-16 in December.

Whatever shape these loyal wingmates end up taking, by asking for them in bulk, Kendall is making a clear bid. The age of fighter pilots in the Air Force may not be over, but for the wars of the future, they will be joined by robots as allies.

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ON THE COLORADO PLAINS just below the Rocky Mountains, near the quaint town of Berthoud, lies the headquarters of a space company called Ursa Major. There, just about an hour’s drive north of Denver, the company regularly test-fires rocket engines straight out the back of an onsite bunker. 

These engines, which are mostly 3D printed, aren’t just for launching satellites into space: They’re also of interest to the US military for propelling hypersonic vehicles. And their dual-use nature is a modern manifestation of the two faces that rocket technology has always had, which is that it is simultaneously useful for defensive and offensive purposes, and for cosmic exploration.

With this technology in hand, the company hopes to get both civilian and military projects off the ground.

3… 2…1… liftoff

Joe Laurienti, who founded Ursa Major in 2015, grew up not too far from Berthoud. His father worked for Ball Aerospace—the cosmic arm of the company that makes a whole lot of aluminum cans, and the former owner of Ursa Major’s current 90-acre site. “He was always working on satellites,” says Laurienti. But when Laurienti went to see one of his father’s payloads launch, he thought, “The thing my dad worked on is really important. It’s on top of this rocket. But the fire coming out the bottom is way more exciting.”

Laurienti has been chasing that fire ever since, his life consumed by propulsion: the technology that makes rockets go up fast enough to counteract gravity and reach orbit. As an adult, he joined SpaceX’s propulsion team, then slipped over to Blue Origin—hitting two of the trifecta of space-launch companies owned by famous billionaires. (The third is Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.)

Soon, Laurienti saw others in the industry trying to start commercial rocket companies. He, perhaps biased, didn’t think that was a good idea: The heavy hitters that were founded first would obviously win, and the others would just be also-rans.

Nevertheless, he thought he had a startup to contribute to the mix: one that wouldn’t make entire rockets but just engines, to sell to rocket companies—much like General Electric makes engines that propel aircraft from Boeing or Airbus. “I spent my career on the engines, and that was always kind of a pain point” for the industry, says Laurienti.

Rocket engines, of course, are pretty important for heaving the space-bound vehicle upward. “A little over 50 percent of launch failures in the last 10 years are propulsion-related,” explains Bill Murray, Ursa’s vice president of engineering, who’s known Laurienti since they were both undergrads at the University of Southern California. You can take that to mean that half the complexity of a rocket exists inside the engines. Take that out of some rocket maker’s equation for them? Their job theoretically gets a lot easier.

“That’s the next wave of aerospace,” thought Laurienti. “It’s specialization.” 

With that idea, he sold his SpaceX stock in preparation for his new venture. “Instead of buying a house and starting a family, I bought a 3D printer, started the company, and made my mom cry,” he says.

3D printing engines—and entire rockets

The 3D printer was key to Laurienti’s vision. Today, 80 percent of a given Ursa engine is 3D printed with a metal alloy—and printed as a unit, rather than as separate spat-out elements welded together later. Most space companies use additive manufacturing (another way to refer to 3D printing) to some degree, but in general, they aren’t 3D printing the majority of their hardware. And they also aren’t, in general, designing their space toys to take advantage of 3D printing’s special traits, like making a complicated piece of hardware as one single part rather than hundreds.

That kind of mindset is also important at another company, Relativity Space, which has 3D printed basically an entire rocket—including the engines. Its Terran 1 rocket is the largest 3D printed object on Earth. The team attempted to launch the rocket on March 8 and 11, but it ultimately scrubbed the shots both times due to issues with ground equipment, fuel pressure, and automation systems.

Like Laurienti, Relativity founder Tim Ellis noticed a reluctance to fully embrace 3D printing tech at traditional space companies. At Blue Origin, his former employer, Ellis was the first person to do metal 3D printing; he was an intern desperate to finish creating a turbo pump assembly before his apprenticeship was over. Later, as a full employee, Ellis would go on to start and lead a metal 3D printing division at the company. 

But the way traditional space companies like Blue Origin usually do 3D printing didn’t work for him, because he felt that it didn’t always include designing parts to take advantage of additive manufacturing’s unique capabilities. “Every 3D printed part that Relativity has made would not be possible to build with traditional manufacturing,” says Ellis. The result of that approach has been “structures that ended up looking highly integrated, [because] so many parts of our rocket engine, for example, are built in single pieces.” Those one-part pieces would, in traditional manufacturing, have been made of up to thousands of individual pieces.

He thought more people would have come over to this side by now. “It’s been a lot slower than I’ve expected, honestly, to adopt 3D printing,” he says. “And I think it’s because it’s been slower for people to realize this is not just a manufacturing technology. It’s a new way to develop products.”

Five times the speed of sound

Initially, Ursa Major’s business model focused on space launch: getting things to orbit, a process powered by the company’s first engine, called Hadley. The design, currently still in production, slurps liquid oxygen and kerosene to produce 5,000 pounds of thrust. That’s about the same as the engines on Rocket Lab’s small Electron vehicle, or VirginOrbit’s LauncherOne spaceplane. 

But then an early customer—whose name Laurienti did not share—approached the company about a different application: hypersonics. These vehicles are designed to fly within Earth’s atmosphere at more than five times the speed of sound. Usually, when people discuss hypersonics, they’re talking about fast-moving, maneuverable weapons. 

“Hey, we were buying rocket engines from someone else, but they’re not really tailored for hypersonics,” Laurienti recalls this customer saying. “You’re [in] early development. Can you make some changes?” 

They could, although it wouldn’t be as easy as flipping a switch. Hypersonic vehicles often launch from the air—from the bottom of planes—whereas rockets typically shoot from the ground on their way to space. Hypersonics also remain within the atmosphere. That latter part is surprisingly hard, in the context of high speeds.  

Just like rubbing your hand on fabric warms both up, rubbing a hypersonic vehicle against the air raises the temperature of both. “The atmosphere around you is glowing red, trying to eat your vehicle,” says Laurienti. That heat, which creates a plasma around the craft, also makes it hard to send communications signals through. Sustaining high speeds and a working machine in that harsh environment remains a challenge.

But the company seems to have figured out how to make Hadley, which is now in its fourth iteration, work in the contexts of both launching a rocket to space and propelling a hypersonic vehicle that stays within Earth’s atmosphere. As part of one of Ursa Major’s contracts, the military wanted the engine to power an aircraft called the X-60A, a program run by the Air Force Research Lab. The X-60A was built as a system on which hypersonic technologies could fly, to test their mettle and give engineers a way to clock the weapons’ behavior.

Hypersonic weapons—fast, earthbound missiles—aren’t actually faster than intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which carry nuclear warheads and arc up into space and then back down to their targets. But they’re of interest and concern to military types because they don’t have to follow trajectories as predictable as ICBMs do, meaning they’re harder to track and shoot down. Russia, China, India, France, Australia, Germany, Japan, both Koreas, and Iran all have hypersonic weapon research programs.

To intercept these fast-moving weapons, a country might need its own hypersonics, so there’s a defensive element and an offensive one. That’s partly why the Department of Defense has invested billions of dollars in hypersonics research, in addition to its desire to keep up with other countries’ technological abilities. That, of course, often makes other countries want to keep pace or get ahead, which can lead to everyone investing more money in the research.

A long-standing duality

Rocket technology, often touted as a way for humans to explore and dream grandly, has always had a military connection—not implicitly, but in a burning-bright obvious way. “[Nazi Germany’s] V-2 rocket was the progenitor to the intercontinental ballistic missiles,” says Lisa Ruth Rand, an assistant professor of history at Caltech, who focuses on space technologies and their afterlives.

Space-destined rockets were, at least at first, basically ballistic missiles. After all, a powerful stick of fire is a powerful stick of fire, no matter where it is intended to go. And that was true from the Space Age’s very beginning. “The R-7 rocket that launched Sputnik was one of the first operational ICBMs,” says Rand. The first American astronauts, she continues, shot to space on the tip of a modified Redstone ballistic missile. Then came Atlas rockets and Titan rockets, which even share the same names as the US missiles that were souped up to make them.

Rockets and flying weapons also share a kind of philosophical lineage, in terms of the subconscious meaning they impart on those who experience their fire. “They really shrunk the world, in a lot of ways, in time and space,” says Rand. “Accessing another part of the world, whether you were launching a weapon or a satellite, really made the world smaller.”

Today, in general, the development of missile technology has been decoupled from space-launch technology, as the rockets intended for orbit have been built specifically for that purpose. But it’s important not to forget where they came from. “They still all descend from the V-2 and from these military rockets,” says Rand. “And also most of them still launch DOD payloads.”

In a lot of ways, a 3D printed rocket engine that can both power a hypersonic vehicle and launch a satellite into orbit is the 21st-century manifestation of the duality that’s been there from the beginning. “Maybe it’s just saying the quiet part out loud,” says Rand. “What’s happening here—that was always kind of the case. But now we’re just making it very clear that, ‘Yeah, this has got to be used for both. We are building a company and this is our market and, yes, rockets are used for two main things: satellites and launching weapons.’”

‘A shock hitting your chest’ 

It’s no surprise that hypersonic capabilities have gotten their share of American hype—not all of it totally deserved. As defense researchers pointed out in Scientific American recently, the US has for decades put ballistic missiles on steerable maneuvering reentry vehicles, or MaRVs. Although they can only shift around toward the end of their flight, they can nonetheless change their path. Similarly, the scientists continued, while a lower-flying hypersonic might evade radar until it approaches, the US doesn’t totally rely on radar for missile defense: It also has infrared-seeking satellites that could expose a burning rocket engine like Hadley.

Still, the Air Force has been interested in what Ursa Major might be able to contribute to its hypersonic research, having funded seven programs with the company, according to the website USA Spending, which tracks federal contracts and awards. In fact, the Air Force is Ursa’s only listed government customer, having invested a few million in both the hypersonic and space-launch sides of the business. It’s also responsible for two of four of Relativity’s federal awards. 

Also of national security interest, of late, is decreasing the country’s reliance on Russian rocket engines for space launch. To that end, Ursa Major has a new engine, called Arroway, in development, which boasts 200,000 pounds of thrust. “Arroway engines will be one of very few commercially available engines that, when clustered together, can displace the Russian-made RD-180 and RD-181, which are no longer available to US launch companies,” the company said last June. It is also developing a third, in-between engine called Ripley, a scaled-up version of Hadley. 

Today, Ursa Major tests their 3D printed engines up to three times daily. On any given day, visitors in Berthoud might unknowingly be near six or nine high-powered experiments. When the static rocket engine begins its test, huge vapor clouds from the cryogenics can envelop an engineer. 

“When it lights, it’s just a shock hitting your chest,” says Laurienti. A cone of flames shoots from the back of the engine, toward a pile of sand in the field behind the bunker. Onlookers face the fire head-on, their backs to the mountains and their eyes on the prize.

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This post has been updated on March 16 to include video of the incident released by the US Department of Defense. The story was originally published on March 14, 2022.

At 7:03 am Central European Time on March 14, one of a pair of Russian Su-27 fighter jets flying over the Black Sea struck the propeller of an MQ-9 reaper drone piloted by the United States. According to US European Command, the strike against the propeller required the drone’s remote pilots to bring it down into international water. It is hardly the first takedown of a Reaper drone, nor is it even the first time Russian forces have caused the destruction of such a plane, but any confrontation between military aircraft of the world’s two foremost nuclear-armed states can understandably feel tense.

Since 2021, the United States has based MQ-9 Reaper drones in Romania, a NATO ally that borders both Ukraine and the Black Sea. These Reapers, as well as Reapers flown from elsewhere, were part of the overall aerial surveillance mission undertaken by the United States and NATO on the eve of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

What happened over the Black Sea?

The basics of the incident are as follows: “Our MQ-9 aircraft was conducting routine operations in international airspace when it was intercepted and hit by a Russian aircraft, resulting in a crash and complete loss of the MQ-9,” said US Air Force general James B. Hecker, commander of US Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa, in a statement about the incident published by US European Command. “In fact, this unsafe and unprofessional act by the Russians nearly caused both aircraft to crash. US and Allied aircraft will continue to operate in international airspace and we call on the Russians to conduct themselves professionally and safely.” (Watch video of the incident here.)

This is language that emphasizes the incident as a mistake or malfeasance by the two Russian Su-27 pilots. It is not, notably, a demand that the loss of a Reaper be met with more direct confrontation between the United States and Russia, even as the US backs Ukraine with supplies and, often, intelligence as it fights against the continued Russia invasion. In the years prior to Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine, Russian jets have harassed US aircraft over the Black Sea. It is a common enough occurrence that the think tank RAND has even published a study on what kind of signals Russia intends to send when it intercepts aircraft near but not in Russian airspace.

“Several times before the collision,” according to European Command, “the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner.”

Russia’s Ministry of Defence also released a statement on the incident, claiming that the Reaper was flying without a transponder turned on, that the Reaper was headed for Russian borders, and that the plane crashed of its own accord, without any contact with Russian jets.

In a press briefing the afternoon of March 14, Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder noted that the Russian pilots were flying near the drone for 30 to 40 minutes before the collision that damaged the Reaper. Asked if the drone was near Crimea, a peninsula on the Black Sea that was part of Ukraine until Russia occupied it in 2014, Ryder said only that the flight was in international waters and well clear of any territory of Ukraine. Ryder also did not clarify when asked about whether or not the Reaper was armed, saying instead that it was conducting an ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) mission.

The New York Times reported that the drone was not armed, citing a military official.

What is an MQ-9 Reaper?

The Reaper is an uncrewed aerial vehicle, propelled by a pusher prop. It is made by General Atomics, and is an evolution of the Predator drone, which started as an unarmed scout before being adapted into a lightly armed bomber. The Reaper entered operational service in October 2007, and it was designed from the start to carry weapons. It can wield nearly 4,000 pounds of explosives, like laser guided bombs, or up to eight Hellfire missiles.

They measure 36 feet from tip to tail and have a wingspan of 66 feet, and in 2020 cost about $18 million apiece. 

To guide remote pilots for takeoff and landing, Reapers have a forward-facing camera, mounted at the front of their match-shaped airframes. To perceive the world below, and offer useful real-time video and imaging, a sensor pod complete with laser target designator, infrared camera, and electro-optical cameras pivots underneath the front of the drone, operated by a second crew member on the ground: the sensor operator. 

Reapers can stay airborne at altitudes of up to 50,000 feet for up to 24 hours, with remote crews guiding the plane in shifts and trading off mid-flight. The Reaper’s long endurance, not just hours in the sky but its ability to operate up to 1,150 miles away from where it took off, lets it watch vast areas, looking for relevant movement below. This was a crucial part of how the US fought the counter insurgency in Iraq and especially Afghanistan, where armed Reapers watched for suspected enemies proved an enduring feature of the war, to mixed results.

While Reapers have been used for well over a decade, they have mostly seen action in skies relatively clear of hostile threats. A Reaper’s top speed is just 276 mph, and while its radar can see other aircraft, the Su-27 air superiority fighter can run laps around it at Mach 2.35. In seeking a future replacement for Reapers, the US Air Force has stated an intention that these planes be able to defend themselves against other aircraft.

Have drones like the Reaper been shot down before?

The most famous incident of a US drone shoot-down is the destruction of an RQ-4 Global Hawk by Iran in June 2019. This unarmed surveillance drone was operating in the Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz, a highly trafficked waterway that borders Iran on one side and the Arabian Peninsula on the other. Iran claimed the Global Hawk was shot down within Iran’s territorial waters; the United States argued instead that the drone was operating in international waters. While the crisis did not escalate beyond the destruction of the drone, it was unclear at the time that this incident would end calmly.

Reapers have been shot down by militaries including the US Air Force. In 2009, US pilots lost control of an MQ-9 Reaper over Afghanistan, so a crewed fighter shot it down proactively before it crashed into another country.

In 2017 and again in 2019, Houthi insurgent forces in Yemen shot down US Reapers flying over the country. Reapers have also been lost to jamming, when the signals between operators and drone were obstructed or cut, as plausibly happened to a Reaper operated by the Italian military over Libya in 2019.

Ultimately, the March 14 takedown of the Reaper by Russian fighters appears to be part of the larger new normal of drones as a part of regular military patrols. Like with the US destruction of a surveillance balloon in the Atlantic, the most interesting lesson is less what happened between aircraft in the sky, and more what is discovered by whoever gets to the wrecked aircraft in the water first.

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Before the jet fuel that powers an aircraft’s engines can be burned, it begins its life in the ground as a fossil fuel. But the US military is exploring new ways of producing that fuel, synthetically, and on site, where it needs to be used. They’ve just announced a contract for as much as $65 million to Air Company, a Brooklyn-based company that has developed a synthetic fuel that doesn’t take its starting materials from the ground. 

In announcing the contract, the Department of Defense notes that it has an eye on both security concerns and the environment. Getting airplane fuel where it needs to go, the DoD notes, “often involves a combination of ships, tanker planes, and convoys.” And these same transport mechanisms, the military adds, can “become extremely vulnerable.” 

Here’s how the fuel works, why the military is interested, and what the benefits and drawbacks are of this type of approach. 

The chemistry of synthetic jet fuel 

This DOD initiative is called Project SynCE, which is pronounced “sense,” and clunkily stands for Synthetic Fuel for the Contested Environment. By contested environment, the military is referring to a space, like a battlefield, where a conflict can occur.

The building blocks of the fuel from Air Company involve hydrogen and carbon, and the process demands energy. “We start with renewable electricity,” says Stafford Sheehan, the CTO and co-founder of Air Company. That electricity, he adds, is used “to split water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, so we get green hydrogen.” 

But fuel requires carbon, too, so the company needs carbon dioxide to get that element. “For Project SynCE specifically, we’re looking at on-site direct-air capture, or direct ocean-capture technologies,” he says. But more generally, he adds, “We capture carbon dioxide from a variety of sources.” Currently, he notes, their source is CO2 “that was a byproduct of biofuel production.” 

So the recipe’s ingredients call for carbon dioxide, plus the hydrogen that came from water. Those elements are combined in a fixed bed flow reactor, which is “a fancy way of saying a bunch of tubes with catalysts,” or, even more simply, “tubes with rocks in them,” Sheehan says. 

[Related: Sustainable jet fuel is taking off with commercial airlines]

Jet fuel itself primarily consists of molecules—known as paraffins—made of carbon and hydrogen. For example, some of those paraffins are called normal paraffins, which is a straight line of carbons with hydrogens attached to them. There are also hydrocarbons present called aromatic compounds. 

“You need to have those aromatic compounds in order to make a jet fuel that’s identical to what you get from fossil fuels,” he says, “and it’s very important to be identical to what you get from fossil fuels, because all of the engines are designed to run on what you get from fossil fuels.”  

Okay, enough chemistry. The point is that this fuel is synthetically made, didn’t come out of the ground, and can be a direct substitute for the refined dinosaur juice typically used in aircraft. “You can actually make jet fuel with our process that burns cleaner as well, so it has fewer contrails,” he says. It will still emit carbon when burned, though.

Why the Department of Defense is interested 

This project involves a few government entities, including the Air Force and the Defense Innovation Unit, which acts as a kind of bridge between the military and the commercial sector. So where will they start cooking up this new fuel? “We plan to pair this technology with the other renewable energy projects at several joint bases, which include solar, geothermal, and nuclear,” says Jack Ryan, a project manager for the DIU, via email. “While we can’t share exact locations yet, this project will initially be based in the Continental US and then over time, we expect the decreasing size of the machinery will allow for the system to be modularized and used in operational settings.” 

Having a way to produce fuel in an operational setting, as Ryan describes it, could be helpful in a future conflict, because ground vehicles like tanker trucks can be targets. For example, on April 9, 2004, in Iraq, an attack known as the Good Friday Ambush resulted in multiple deaths; a large US convoy was carrying out an “emergency delivery of jet fuel to the airport” in Baghdad, Iraq, as The Los Angeles Times noted in a lengthy article on the incident in 2007. 

“By developing and deploying on-site fuel production technology, our Joint Force will be more resilient and sustainable,” Ryan says.

[Related: All your burning questions about sustainable aviation fuel, answered]

Nikita Pavlenko, a program lead at the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit organization, says that he is excited about the news. “It’s also likely something that’s still quite a ways away,” he adds. “Air Company is still in the very, very initial stages of commercialization.” 

These types of fuels, called e-fuels, for electrofuels, don’t come in large amounts, nor cheaply. “I expect that the economics and the availability are going to be big constraints,” he says. “Just based off the underlying costs of green hydrogen [and] CO2, you’re probably going to end up with something much more expensive than conventional fuel.” In terms of how much fuel they’ll be able to make synthetically, Ryan, of the DIU, says, “It will be smaller quantities to begin with, providing resiliency to existing fuel supply and base microgrids,” and then will grow from there. 

[Related: Airbus just flew its biggest plane yet using sustainable aviation fuel]

But these types of fuels do carry environmental benefits, Pavlenko says, although it’s important that the hydrogen they use is created through green means—from renewable energy, for example. The fuel still emits carbon when burned, but the benefits come because the fuel was created by taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the first place, or preventing it from leaving a smokestack. Even that smokestack scenario is environmentally appealing to Pavlenko, because “you’re just kind of borrowing that CO2 from the atmosphere—just delaying before it goes out in the atmosphere, rather than taking something that’s been underground for millions of years and releasing it.” (One caveat is down the line, there ideally aren’t smokestacks belching carbon dioxide that could be captured in the first place.) 

For its part, the Defense Innovation Unit says that they’re interested in multiple different ways of obtaining the carbon dioxide, but are most enthused about getting it from the air or ocean. That’s because those two methods “serve the dual purpose of drawing down CO2 from the air/water while also providing a feedstock to the synthetic fuel process,” says Matt Palumbo, a project manager with the DIU, via email. Palumbo also notes that he expects this period of the contract to last about two to five years, and thinks the endeavor will continue from there.

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On February 14, geostationary communications satellite company Astranis announced that it had been awarded a contract with the US Space Force worth over $10 million. The contract is to first demonstrate a secure comms technique on the satellite hardware in a terrestrial test setting, and also includes the possibility of testing it in space. 

Space remains a useful place for countries to place sensors that look down on other nations. Many of these satellites reside in low Earth orbit, or about 1,200 miles above the surface, which is easier for satellites to reach and lets satellites circle the globe rapidly. Geostationary orbit, which is 22,200 miles above ground, is harder to get to. Plus, satellites at all altitudes risk having signals jammed, or being disrupted by other objects in orbit, which has led the US military to pursue satellite constellations, or formations of smaller satellites, as a way to ensure that some functionality persists in the event of attack or disaster. 

“We build small satellites for higher orbits, starting with geostationary orbit, which is quite a higher orbit,” says Astranis co-founder and CEO John Gedmark. “It’s the special orbit where you can park a single satellite over a part of the world or over a country and provide continuous service with just that one satellite.”

Over Alaska and Peru

Geostationary satellites have been used to provide communications and television broadcasts, and Astranis’ primary aim for both commercial and military customers is to use smaller geostationary satellites to provide continuous broadband-level internet connections. For two demonstrations of commercial uses, Gedmark points to upcoming launches placing satellites above Alaska (scheduled for early April), and one later this year that will put a satellite above Peru.

“This is a satellite that’ll go up over Peru and also provide some coverage in Ecuador. We will basically allow them to go and deploy and upgrade a number of cell towers out in some of the most remote parts of the country,” said Gedmark. “There’s a lot of parts of Peru where the terrain is just super rough and pretty extreme in the jungles, they have Andes mountains, they have a lot of things that make it very hard to get connectivity out to some of these remote areas.”

In both these places, the satellites will augment existing telecommunications infrastructure on the ground, letting remote towers connect through space instead of over land. Peru, like Alaska, contains vast stretches of varying terrain, where infrastructure such as wires, cables, or fiber internet connections can be hard to place. Freestanding cell phone towers can be set up, powered locally, and then route their communications through satellites instead of over-land wires, bringing 3G and 4G levels of internet to places people could not previously access it.

For military use

Those same traits, for connecting local rural infrastructure to wider data networks through space, are part of what makes Astranis satellites so appealing to the military.

“We realized that the military has this real problem right now for milsatcom and for some other capabilities around resiliency, right? They are really dependent on a small handful of these giant geo satellites, some of which cost billions of dollars. And those satellites are, as we like to quote General Hyten on this, big fat and juicy targets,” said Gedmark.

In 2017, Air Force General John Hyten was the head of US Strategic Command, and announced that he would no longer “support the development any further of large, big, fat, juicy targets,” referring to those types of satellites. Hyten retired in 2021, but the Department of Defense has continued to push for smaller satellites to fill the skies, as a more resilient option than all-in-one massive satellites of the present. Many of these constellations are aimed at low earth orbit.

“Without getting into specific pricing, we could put up about a dozen or more of our satellites for the cost of one of the big ones,” says Gedmark. Since 2018, Astranis has attracted venture funding on its premise to put satellites into geostationary orbit. 

“It’s hard to design all the electronics for the harsh radiation environment of geo, you’re right in the thick of the Van Allen belts,” says Gedmark. The Van Allen belts contain charged particles that can damage satellites, so anything built to survive has to endure the heavy ion strikes and radiation dosages inherent to the region. “These higher orbits are harder to get to, so you have to solve that with some clever onboard propulsion strategies. We solve that by having an electric propulsion system, and having an ion thruster on board.”

When launched, the satellites are aimed towards geostationary orbit, and then use their own power to reach and maneuver in space. Gedmark says the satellites are designed to stay in geostationary orbit for between 8 and 10 years, with the ability to relocate up to 30 times in that period.

The speed at which the satellites can be maneuvered from one orbit to another depends on how much fuel the satellite operators are willing to expend, with repositioning possible in days, though Gedmark expects moving to a new location in weeks will be the more typical use case. 

Once in orbit, the satellites need to communicate securely. The Protected Tactical Waveform is a communications protocol and technique developed by the US military, which Astranis aims to demonstrate can be run on the software-defined radio of its satellites. (A software-defined radio  is a computer that can change its parameters for transmitting and receiving information with code, while a more traditional radio requires analog hardware, like modulators and amplifiers, to encode and decode information from radio signals.) 

The Protected Tactical Waveform is “a set of techniques that are programmed into the radio so it can automatically avoid jamming and interference,” says Gedmark. “We’re gonna start by doing that as a demo in our lab, and then with the future satellites do that as an on orbit demo.”

Because this protocol will run on software radio, rather than hardware that is fixed on form once launched, it likely means that should the need arise, Astranis could adapt existing commercial satellites to carry the Protected Tactical Waveform, while it remains in orbit, facilitating the surge communications as events arise and to meet military need.

For now, the promise is that private investment in communication tech can yield a tool useful both for expanding internet connectivity across the globe, and for providing communications to US military forces in the field faster than it would take to set up ground-based infrastructure. For the Space Force, which is tasked with ensuring reliable communications across the heavens, more durable satellites that can be maneuvered as needed would allow it to redeploy assets across the skies to win wars on Earth.  

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A striking photo released on February 22 by the Department of Defense reveals a unique aerial scene: The image shows the Chinese surveillance balloon as seen from the cockpit of a U-2 spy plane on February 3, along with the pilot’s helmet, the aircraft’s wing, and even the shadow of the plane itself on the balloon. 

While the subject of the photo is the balloon, which was later shot down by an F-22, the aircraft that made the image possible is referenced in the image’s simple title: “U-2 Pilot over Central Continental United States.” Here’s a brief primer on that aircraft, a high-flying spy plane with a reputation for being tough to operate and land.  

The U-2 aircraft is designed to operate at “over 70,000 feet,” according to an Air Force fact sheet. That very high altitude means that it flies way higher than commercial jet aircraft, which tend to cruise at a maximum altitude in the lower end of the 40,000-foot range. 

The U-2’s ability to climb above 70,000 feet in altitude “makes it, I believe, the highest flying aircraft that we know about in the Air Force inventory,” says Todd Harrison, a defense analyst with Metrea, a firm formerly known as Meta Aerospace. “That becomes important for a mission like this, where the balloon was operating around 60,000 feet.”

[Related: Why the US might be finding more unidentified flying objects]

The plane features wings that stretch to a width of 105 feet, which is about three times longer than the wingspan of an F-16. “It is designed for very high altitude flight, and it has a very efficient wing—[a] very high aspect ratio wing, so that makes it very long and slender,” Harrison says. Long, slender wings are indeed more efficient than shorter, stubbier ones, which is one of the reasons NASA and Boeing are planning to have truss-supported skinny wings on an experimental commercial aircraft called the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator that would be more fuel efficient than existing models. 

On the U-2, those long wings, which are an asset in the sky, make for a real challenge when trying to get it back down on the ground. “This jet does not want to be on the ground, and that’s a real problem when it comes to landing it,” Matt Nauman, a U-2 pilot, said at an Air Force event in 2019 that Popular Science attended. To land it, “we’ll actually slow down, and that nose will continue to come up until the plane essentially falls out of the sky,” at just about two feet off the ground.  

[Related: Biden says flying objects likely not ‘related to China’s spy balloon program’]

A few other aspects figure into the landing. One is that the aircraft has what’s known as bicycle-style landing gear, as opposed to the tricycle-style landing gear of a regular commercial plane. In other words: It has just two landing gear legs, not three, so is tippy, side-to-side, as it touches down. To help with those landings, a chase car literally follows the plane down the runway as it’s coming in to land, with its driver—a U-2 pilot as well—in radio contact with the pilot in the plane to help them get the bird on the tarmac. This video shows that process. 

Because the plane is designed to fly at such high altitudes, the pilot dons a heavy space suit like this daredevil wore in 2012, while the cockpit is pressured to an altitude of about 14,000 or 15,000 feet. Having that gear on makes landing the plane even more challenging, as another U-2 pilot said in 2019, reflecting: “You’re effectively wearing a fishbowl on your head.” But having the suit means the pilot is protected from the thin atmosphere if the plane were to have a problem or the pilot had to eject.  

[Related: Everything you could ever want to know about flying the U-2 spy plane]

The point of the aircraft is to gather information. “It is used to spy, and collect intelligence on others,” says Harrison. “It has been upgraded and modernized over the years, with airframe modernization, obviously the sensors have gotten better and better.” The U-2 famously used to shoot photographs using old-school wet film with what’s called the Optical Bar Camera, and stopped doing so only in the summer of 2022. 

As for the recent photo of the surveillance balloon from the U-2, a reporter for NPR speculates that it was taken specifically “just south of Bellflower” Missouri, as did a Twitter user with the handle @obretix. 

“It’s a pretty incredible photo,” Harrison reflects. “It does show that the US was actively surveilling this balloon up close throughout its transit of the United States. It’s interesting that the U-2 pilot was actually able to capture a selfie like that while flying at that altitude.”

On February 6, a Popular Science sibling website, the War Zone, reported that the US had employed U-2 aircraft to keep tabs on the balloon. And on February 8, CNN reported before this photo’s official release that a “pilot took a selfie in the cockpit that shows both the pilot and the surveillance balloon itself,” citing US officials.

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Today, President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced that the country would suspend participation in New START, the last standing major arms control treaty between the country and the United States. Putin clarified that the suspension was not a withdrawal—but the suspension itself represents a clear deterioration of trust and nuclear stability between the countries with the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. 

Putin’s remarks precede by a few days the anniversary of the country’s invasion of Ukraine, an entirely chosen war that has seen some concrete Russian gains, while many of Russia’s biggest advances have been repulsed and overtaken. At present, much of the fighting is in the form of grinding, static warfare along trenches and defended positions in Ukraine’s east. It is a kind of warfare akin to the bloody fronts of World War I, though the presence of drones and long-range precision artillery lend it an undeniably modern character.

Those modern weapons, and the coming influx of heavy tanks from the United States and other countries to Ukraine, put Putin’s remarks in some more immediate context. While New START is specifically an agreement between the United States and Russia over nuclear arsenals, the decision to suspend participation comes against the backdrop of the entirely conventional war being fought by Russia against Ukraine, with US weapons bolstering the Ukrainian war effort.

A follow-up statement from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified that the country would still notify the United States about any launches of Intercontinental or Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs and SLBMs), and would expect the same in reverse, in accordance with a 1988 agreement between the US and the USSR. That suggests there is at least some ongoing effort to not turn a suspension of enforcement into an immediate crisis.

To understand why the suspension matters, and what future there is for arms control, it helps to understand the agreement as it stands.

What is New START?

New START is an agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation, which carries a clunky formal name: The Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. The short-form name, which is not really a true acronym, is instead a reference to START 1, or the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, was in effect from 1991 to 2009, and which New START replaced in 2011. New START is set to expire in 2026, unless it is renewed by both countries.

New START is the latest of a series of agreements limiting the overall size of the US and Russian (first Soviet) nuclear arsenals, which at one point each measured in the tens of thousands of warheads. Today, thanks largely to mutual disarmament agreements and the limits outlined by New START, the US and Russia have arsenals of roughly 5,400 and 6,000 warheads, respectively. Of those, the US is estimated to have 1,644 deployed strategic weapons, a term that means nuclear warheads on ICBMs or at heavy bomber bases, presumably ready to launch at a moment’s notice. Russia is estimated to have around 1,588 deployed strategic weapons.

As the Start Department outlines, the treaty limits both countries to 700 total deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons. (Bombers are counted under the treaty in the same way as a missile with one warhead, though nuclear-capable bombers like the B-52, B-2, and soon to be B-21 can carry multiple warheads.) In addition, the treaty sets a limit of 1,550 nuclear warheads on deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments, as well as 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments

In its follow-up statement to the suspension of New START, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs clarified it would stick to the overall cap on warheads and launch systems as outlined in the treaty.

What will change is the end of inspections, which have been central to the “trust but verify” structure of arms control agreements between the US and Russia for decades. The terms of New START allow both countries to inspect deployed and non-deployed strategic systems (like missiles or bombers) up to 10 times a year, as well as non-deployed systems up to eight times a year. These on-site inspections were halted in April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and their resumption is the most likely act threatened by this change in posture.

It is unclear, yet, if this suspension means the end of the treaty forever, though Putin taking such a step certainly doesn’t bode well for its continued viability. Should New START formally end, some analysts fear it may usher in a new era of nuclear weapons production, and a rapid expansion of nuclear arsenals.

While that remains a possibility, the hard limits of nuclear production, as well as decades of faded production expertise in both Russia and the United States, mean such a restart may be more intensive, in time and resources, than immediately feared. Both nations have spent the last 30 years working on production of conventional forces. Ending an arms control treaty over nuclear weapons would be a gamble, suggesting nuclear weapons are the only tool that can provide security where conventional arms have failed. 

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In December, a special fighter jet made multiple flights out of Edwards Air Force Base in California. The orange, white, and blue aircraft, which is based on an F-16, seats two people. A fighter jet taking to the skies with a human or two on board is not remarkable, but what is indeed remarkable about those December flights is that for periods of time, artificial intelligence flew the jet. 

As the exploits of generative AI like ChatGPT grip the public consciousness, artificial intelligence has also quietly slipped into the military cockpit—at least in these December tests.  

The excursions were part of a DARPA program called ACE, which stands for Air Combat Evolution. The AI algorithms came from different sources, including a company called Shield AI as well as the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Broadly speaking, the tests represent the Pentagon exploring just how effective AI can be at carrying out tasks in planes typically done by people, such as dogfighting. 

“In total, ACE algorithms were flown on several flights with each sortie lasting approximately an hour and a half,” Lt. Col. Ryan Hefron, the DARPA program manager for ACE, notes to PopSci via email. “In addition to each performer team controlling the aircraft during dogfighting scenarios, portions of each sortie were dedicated to system checkout.”

The flights didn’t come out of nowhere. In August of 2020, DARPA put artificial intelligence algorithms through their paces in an event called the AlphaDogfight Trials. That competition didn’t involve any actual aircraft flying through the skies, but it did conclude with an AI agent defeating a human flying a digital F-16. The late 2022 flights show that software agents that can make decisions and dogfight have been given a chance to actually fly a real fighter jet. “This is the first time that AI has controlled a fighter jet performing within visual range (WVR) maneuvering,” Hefron notes.

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

So how did it go? “We didn’t run into any major issues but did encounter some differences compared to simulation-based results, which is to be expected when transitioning from virtual to live,” Hefron said in a DARPA press release. 

Andrew Metrick, a fellow in the defense program at the Center for New American Security, says that he is “often quite skeptical of the applications of AI in the military domain,” with that skepticism focused on just how much practical use these systems will have. But in this case—an artificial intelligence algorithm in the cockpit—he says he’s more of a believer. “This is one of those areas where I think there’s actually a lot of promise for AI systems,” he says. 

The December flights represent “a pretty big step,” he adds. “Getting these things integrated into a piece of flying hardware is non-trivial. It’s one thing to do it in a synthetic environment—it’s another thing to do it on real hardware.” 

Not all of the flights were part of the DARPA program. All told, the Department of Defense says that a dozen sorties took place, with some of them run by DARPA and others run by a program out of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). The DOD notes that the DARPA tests were focused more on close aerial combat, while the other tests from AFRL involved situations in which the AI was competing against “a simulated adversary” in a “beyond-vision-range” scenario. In other words, the two programs were exploring how the AI did in different types of aerial contests or situations. 

Breaking Defense reported earlier this year that the flights kicked off December 9. The jet flown by the AI is based on an F-16D, and is called VISTA; it has space for two people. “The front seat pilot conducted the test points,” Hefron explains via email, “while the backseater acted as a safety pilot who maintained broader situational awareness to ensure the safety of the aircraft and crew.”

One of the algorithms that flew the jet came from a company called Shield AI. In the AlphaDogfight trials of 2020, the leading AI agent was made by Heron Systems, which Shield AI acquired in 2021. Shield’s CEO, Ryan Tseng, is bullish on the promise of AI to outshine humans in the cockpit. “I do not believe that there’s an air combat mission where AI pilots should not be decisively better than their human counterparts, for much of the mission profile,” he says. That said, he notes that “I believe the best teams will be a combination of AI and people.” 

One such future for teaming between a person and AI could involve AI-powered fighter-jet-like drones such as the Ghost Bat working with a crewed aircraft like an F-35, for example. 

It’s still early days for the technology. Metrick, of the Center for New American Security, wonders how the AI agent would be able to handle a situation in which the jet does not respond as expected, like if the aircraft stalls or experiences some other type of glitch. “Can the AI recover from that?” he wonders. A human may be able to handle “an edge case” like that more easily than software.

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Since February 4, United States aircraft have shot down four objects passing over North American skies. The first of these, a massive high-altitude surveillance balloon traced to China, meandered over the country for four days before becoming the first air-to-air kill for the high-end F-22 stealth jet fighter. The other three, however, have not yet been identified, except for their size, altitude, and ability to stay aloft seemingly on wind power alone.

President Joe Biden addressed the topic in remarks delivered today. “Last week, in the immediate aftermath of the incursion by China’s high altitude balloon, our military, through the North American Aerospace Defense command, so called NORAD, closely scrutinized our airspace, including enhancing our radar to pick up more slow-moving objects above our country and around the world,” he said. “In doing so they tracked three unidentified objects—one in Alaska, Canada, and over Lake Huron in the Midwest.” 

“They acted in accordance with established parameters for determining how to deal with unidentified aerial objects in US airspace,” he added. “At their recommendation, I gave the order to take down the three objects, due to hazards to civilian commercial air traffic, and because we could not rule out the surveillance risk of sensitive facilities.”

[Related: How high do planes fly? It depends on if they’re going east or west.]

Given the short timeline between the tracking of China’s high altitude balloon and the following shootdowns, expanding the aperture of existing sensors was the most expected way to widen what swaths of the sky could be observed. One effect of that is suddenly detecting objects previously unobserved. Notably, Biden highlighted that the newly found objects were slow-moving. NORAD’s sensors, for decades trained to track fast moving planes and missiles, are not calibrated by default to look for balloons, which drift through the sky.

“Our military, and the Canadian military, are seeking to recover the debris so we can learn more about these three objects,” said Biden. “We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were but nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country.”

Minutes before Biden gave his remarks, Aviation Week published a plausible explanation of the objects. The story notes that the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, a hobbyist club, had tracked a high-altitude pico balloon they had launched to the coast of Alaska at just under 40,000 feet on February 10. Predicted wind direction would have brought that balloon over the Yukon on February 11.

That, notes Aviation Week, was “the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an unidentified object of a similar description and altitude in the same general area.”

“Launching high-altitude, circumnavigational pico balloons has emerged only within the past decade,” continues the story. “At any given moment, several dozen such balloons are aloft, with some circling the globe several times before they malfunction or fail for other reasons. The launch teams seldom recover their balloons.”

While Biden did not name what the downed objects were, he said that the intelligence community’s most likely estimate was that these three objects were most likely balloons with ties to private companies, recreation, or research institutions.

“I want to be clear: We don’t have any evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky, we’re now just seeing more of them partially because of the steps we’ve taken to increase our radar, and we have to keep adapting to dealing with these challenges,” he said.

While the larger surveillance balloon from China was easier to track based on its mass alone, the existence of small, potentially hobbyist or commercial balloons riding high-altitude winds appears to come as something of a surprise. 

“In the U.S., academic and commercial balloons have to include transponders that let the FAA know where they are at all times,”Jeff Jackon, a US representative from North Carolina, shared in his notes on a congressional briefing with NORAD on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). “These UAPs did not appear to have transponders, and that was also a factor in the decision to shoot them down.”

Transponders are a key tool for larger aircraft, as they make air traffic visible to people in the sky and on the ground. For something as light as a hobbyist research balloon aiming at high altitude, the weight of a transponder and the batteries to power it could strain the craft. Finding a different solution, one that allows air traffic controllers and pilots to avoid such balloons, is a likely first step to ensuring the skies remain safe and the objects don’t go unidentified. 

Transponders wouldn’t solve the problem of balloons sent with malicious intent, but it does at least allow those with purely peaceful purposes to be affirmatively identified as safe. Biden outlined a set of policies to avoid shootdowns like those experienced this month. One improvement would be an accessible inventory of objects in the airspace above the US, kept up to date. Another would be improving the ability of the US to detect uncrewed objects, like small high-altitude balloons. Changing the rules for launching and maintaining objects would also help the US get hobbyist launches, like that from the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, on its radar, metaphorically and perhaps literally. Finally, Biden suggested the US work with other countries to set out better global norms for airspace.  

“We’re not looking for a new Cold War,” said Biden. “But we will compete, and we will responsibly manage that competition so it doesn’t veer into conflict.”

In the history of high-altitude surveillance from the last Cold War, efforts to spy by balloon and plane led to crisis. The rules and norms allowing countries to share space, instead, allowed countries to keep spying on each other, while also fostering tremendous economic and scientific developments alongside the spycraft.

Watch the address, below:

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On February 4, a pilot in an F-22 Raptor stealth fighter jet scored the plane’s first air-to-air kill, firing a missile at the Chinese surveillance balloon drifting off the coast of South Carolina. The shot, an AIM-9X Sidewinder fired from 58,000 feet above the ground, hit the balloon at an altitude of up to 65,000 feet, and ended a week-long incident in which the military, the public, and Congress all followed the course of the balloon with great interest.

“The balloon, which was being used by the PRC [People’s Republic of China] in an attempt to surveil strategic sites in the continental United States, was brought down above US territorial waters,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said in a written statement. 

The balloon entered the sky above Montana on February 1, where it caused a halt to flights in and out of Billings International Airport. For four days, from Wednesday to Saturday, the balloon followed the wind across the US, until ultimately meeting its missile-induced end over the ocean. 

At a press conference February 2, a senior defense official noted that the US had tracked the balloon and “had custody” of it ever since it entered the country’s airspace. This includes previous fly-bys of the balloon with F-22s over Montana, although the decision was made not shoot it down then out of a concern for risk to those below.

The defense official repeatedly identified the balloon as created and operated by China, acknowledging when a reporter highlighted that Montana houses siloed nuclear ICBMs. The location of the silos is by design not secret—part of Cold War nuclear strategy that dictated the placement of the silos set them far away from dense urban centers, in part to ensure some incoming nuclear missiles would aim for the silos instead of cities. The day-to-day operation of missile silos can still contain some fresh information, so it is possible that is what was targeted by the balloon’s sensors.

[Related: The Air Force wants to modernize air refueling, but it’s been a bumpy ride]

“Our best assessment at the moment is that whatever the surveillance payload is on this balloon, it does not create significant value added over and above what the [People’s Republic of China] is likely able to collect through things like satellites in low-Earth orbit,” said the official. “But out of an abundance of caution, we have taken additional mitigation steps.  I’m not going to go into what those are.  But we know exactly where this balloon is, exactly what it is passing over. And we are taking steps to be extra vigilant so that we can mitigate any foreign intelligence risk.”

At the same briefing, the official noted that this was not the first time “that you had a balloon of this nature cross over the continental United States.  It has happened a handful of other times over the past few years, to include before this administration.”

While this event garnered widespread national fascination—it was even fodder for a skit on Saturday Night Live—the use of balloons for gathering intelligence dates back centuries. Here’s what to know about their history. 

Trial balloons

Balloons have been used in military surveillance since 1794, when revolutionary France employed them to watch movements of people and cannons from above. In the US Civil War, the Union and Confederate forces used balloons, flying as high as 1,000 feet, to document activity below. Communication with balloons then was tricky, with balloonists using either signal flags or telegraph wires to report what they observed. These balloons were tethered, allowing crews on the ground to draw the balloons back into place. In this sense, the balloons were more like deployable observation towers, rather than true scouting vehicles.

Later, World War I saw balloons used to photograph battlefields below. While film took time to develop, the long static fronts of the Great War ensured that such information was useful, or at least useful if the balloonists collecting it were not shot down by early fighter planes. In World War One, Frank Luke Jr was a US Army pilot who earned the nickname “Arizona Balloon Buster” for shooting down 18 German observation balloons. 

World War I also saw the use of dirigibles, or rigid airships, which flew as bombers as well as spotters. Airships could move under their own power and without tethers, allowing them deadly access to the skies above enemy lines. 

In World War II, Japan built high-altitude balloons that were lofted into the newly discovered jet stream, and then carried by the high-altitude wind across the pacific. More than 9,000 FuGo balloons were launched into the jet stream, complete with incendiary bombs designed to burn down cities and forests. The FuGo attacks were limited in effectiveness because they relied on winds that were strongest in November through March, when the Pacific Northwest was wet and cold, limiting the ability of fires to spread. Indeed, apart from fires, the only deaths directly attributed to FuGo attacks were that of a picnicking family, investigating a mysterious device.

Eyes floating in the sky

Long-range balloon surveillance is limited by how the balloon can be directed and what information it can communicate. Weather balloons, launched hourly, record atmospheric conditions. The famous 1947 balloon crash at Roswell, New Mexico, was of an instrument carrying acoustic sensors, designed to listen for the sounds of Soviet nuclear detonations.

[Related: Is the truth out there? Decoding the Pentagon’s latest UFO report.]

One reason to use balloons is that they can carry large payloads, as a lighter-than-air body of sufficient size floats in the sky, instead of needing to generate lift. The US general responsible for North America described the balloon as “up to 200 feet tall, with a payload the size of a jetliner.”

As for what the balloon was actually recording, that remains to be seen. It is possible that its high-altitude flight allowed for greater surveillance of radio and other wireless transmissions than can a satellite, though that is more speculative than proven.

Recovery of the downed balloon, and especially its sensor package, could prove revelatory, though it should be assumed that any sensitive information and technology taken into military possession will be classified, only parts of which may be selectively released. Given the widespread interest of other militaries in developing surveillance balloons, as well as the revelation that these overflights have happened before, it is likely that the modern balloon race is only just beginning. 

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On January 17, DARPA announced the next steps of a program to create an aircraft designed to fly entirely on control surfaces that lack the moving parts that airplanes typically use to maneuver. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, specializes in blue-sky visions, investing in research towards creating new possibilities for technology. In this program, it seeks to change how aircraft alter direction in the sky.

The program is called Control of Revolutionary Aircraft with Novel Effectors, or CRANE. DARPA first started the program in 2019, with a request for proposals to “design, build, and flight test a new and novel aircraft that incorporates Active Flow Control (AFC) technologies as a primary design consideration.”

AFC is a kind of control paradigm that replaces moving parts like ailerons and rudder of an aircraft. Planes change their positions by redirecting airflow with ailerons attached to the wings, an elevator at the tail, and a rudder. These controls are what let planes roll side to side, pitch upwards to take off and downwards to land, as well as or yaw left to right. Extendable slats and flaps on wings can also allow planes to generate more lift at low speeds, and to slow the plane as it angles down for a landing. (Here’s more on exactly how wings generate lift.)

With “Active Flow Control,” aircraft can use plasma actuators or synthetic jet actuators to move air, instead of relying on physical surfaces. With plasma actuators, this is achieved through changing the electrical charge of air passing over the actuators mounted in the wing, in turn changing the flow of that air. Meanwhile, synthetic jets can inject air into the airflow over the wing, changing lift. In 2019, NASA patented a wing control system that combined both plasma and synthetic jet actuators, with the goal of creating actuators without any moving parts, and which were “essentially maintenance free.”

In DARPA’s 2019 call for proposals, it emphasized that this technology could lead to “elimination of moving control surfaces for stability & control,” improvements in “takeoff and landing performance, high lift flight, thick airfoil efficiency, and enhanced high altitude performance.”

With improved takeoffs and landing, such a control system could allow for “extreme short takeoff and landing” (ESTOL), where a plane or drone operates from runways even smaller than those present used for short takeoff and landing. The Department of Defense and NATO define short takeoff as being able to land on a runway 1,500 feet long, with a 50-foot obstacle at either end. 

Because these new flow controls could increase the angle of lift for takeoff and improved braking for descent, it’s possible that a plane with it could land in an even smaller area. That expands how and where such planes can operate, and matters especially with future wars and operations at sea, where the military has to bring its own runways on ships, or on small islands.

Another area where these controls can help is in making it harder for aircraft to be observed, as it reduces the number of surfaces on an aircraft that would reflect radar signals. The controls can also be quieter, minimizing detection from audio sensors, and can improve aircraft stability and lift at high altitudes. The controls also allow for thicker plane wings, which can hold more fuel.

In December, Aurora Flight Sciences (which is a part of Boeing) was awarded over $89 million for the CRANE program, or roughly the cost of a single F-35A stealth jet fighter. In Phase 1, which is already completed, Aurora created an aircraft that was able to use active flow control to demonstrate control in a wind tunnel test. Phase 2, which was announced this month, will focus on designing and developing the software and controls of an X-plane demonstrator that “can fly without traditional moving flight controls on the exterior of the wings and tail.”

Should DARPA decide to continue the contrast, there’s the option for Phase 3, in which DARPA will fly a 7,000 pound X-plane that incorporates active flow control and relies on it for controlled flight.

In starting the design from a new kind of control paradigm, DARPA hopes to spark new thinking about how planes can fly and maneuver. DARPA’s long record of X-plane design includes everything from long endurance drones to stealth aircraft to hypersonic designs, all of which have led to changes in military design and planning. The ability of aircraft to use active flow control to operate from smaller runways expands not just the areas where the military can fight, but even the size of ships that could launch long-flying drones. 

DARPA, on the innovation edge of research, has focused the project on making sure the technology can work in demonstration, first. Should it prove successful, it will be up to other parts of the military to best determine how they want to employ it.

Correction on Jan. 31, 2023: This article was updated to change “1,5000 feet long” to “1,500 feet long” and “active follow control” to “active flow control.”

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On January 12, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the 2022 Annual Report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs. The term “UAP,” which is largely synonymous with the original usage of Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO, is designed to be a broad category for reporting observed but unexplained sights in the sky, a kind of “see something, say something” for pilots. 

The report, mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act for 2022, includes the work of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was originally created within the Department of Defense in 2020 as the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. “All domains” means the phenomena need not be flying in the sky, but could also occur at sea, in space, or on land. 

This is the second report on UAPs since the creation of the task force, following a preliminary report released in 2021. In the preliminary report from two years ago, the task force identified 144 sightings over the previous 17 years. In the new report, there are a total of 510 sightings, including those 144 already documented, 247 new ones made since the first report, and 119 reports of events prior to 2021 but that were not included in the initial assessment, for a total of 366 newly identified reports.

[Related: UFO research is stigmatized. NASA wants to change that.]

The majority of new reports come from US Navy and US Air Force “aviators and operators,” who saw the phenomena during regular operations, and then reported those sightings to the newly created appropriate channels, like the AARO. 

The official takeaway? “AARO’s initial analysis and characterization of the 366 newly-identified reports, informed by a multi-agency process, judged more than half as exhibiting unremarkable characteristics,” the document notes. Of those unremarkable reports: 26 were drones or drone-like, 163 were balloons or balloon-like, and six were clutter spotted in the sky.

That leaves 171 “uncharacterized and unattributed” remaining from the batch of newly identified reports, a group that is perhaps thought of more as unresolved than unexplainable. Of those, some “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities, and require further analysis,” though anyone looking for that analysis in the report will be sorely disappointed.

Tracking, cataloging, and identifying unexplained—or at least not immediately explainable—phenomena is tricky work. It has created persistent problems for the military since the first panic over “flying saucers” in the summer of 1947 (more on Roswell in a moment), and it persists to this day. Part of the impetus for a task force to study UFOs, or UFOs under the UAP name, came from a series of leaked videos, later declassified by the military, showing what appear to be unusual objects in flight.

Lost in observation

One of the more famous UAP sightings this century is the “Tic Tac,” spotted by Navy pilots flying southwest of San Diego on November 14, 2004. The pilots captured video of the object, which appeared small and cylindrical, and changed direction in flight in an unusual way. This video was officially released by the Navy in 2020, but which had found its way onto the internet in 2007, and was the centerpiece of a New York Times story about UFO sightings in 2017. New documents released by the Navy on January 13 show that formal reports of the so-called Tic Tac never made it beyond the 3rd Fleet’s chain of command, effectively leaving the report stranded within part of the Navy. 

As PopSci sister publication The War Zone notes, “the Navy and other U.S. military officials have publicly acknowledged that there were serious issues in the past with the mechanisms available, or lack thereof, through which pilots could make such reports and do so without fear of being stigmatized.” The released documents show that, indeed, the pilots faced stigma for the report afterwards.

None of that explains what the object in the “Tic Tac” video is, or what other still-unidentified phenomena might actually be. But it does suggest that the existence of an office responsible for collecting such reports has made it easier for such phenomena to be collected and analyzed, rather than kept quiet by pilots afraid of ridicule or having their judgment questioned.

Everything unidentified is new again

Part of the challenge of thinking about UFOs, and now UAPs, is that by asking people to report unusual sightings, people may interpret what they see as directly related to what they are being asked to find. Tell someone to take a walk in the woods and keep their eye out for rodent sightings, and every shadow or scurrying creature becomes a possible identification. 

The Army observation balloon that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 was discovered almost a month before it was reported to local authorities. The summer of 1947, early in the Cold War between the United States and the USSR, saw a major “flying saucer” panic, as one highly publicized sighting led people across the nation to report unusual craft or objects. 

These reports eventually became the subject of study in Project Blue Book, an Air Force effort to categorize, demystify, and understand what exactly people were reporting. When the Air Force concluded Project Blue Book in 1969, it did so noting that 90 percent of UFOs were likely explainable as ordinary objects, like planets in twilight or airplanes at odd angles. 

As documents later declassified in the 1990s revealed, the military knew even more of the sightings to be explainable, such as backyard observers documenting US spy plane flights and reporting them to the government. The Roswell crash, which a military officer first identified as a flying saucer before the Army clarified a day later that it was a weather balloon, wasn’t precisely a weather balloon. The object was indeed a balloon, but it carried acoustic sensors designed to listen for Soviet nuclear tests. In other words, letting the public think an object is mysterious or unexplained is a good way of disguising something that’s explainable but should be secret.

[Related: UFO conspiracies can be more dangerous than you think]

In the decades following the conclusion of Project Blue Book, the military tried to debunk sightings, rather than catalog them. Today, the work of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office is to take the sightings seriously, and to encourage reporting, in case there are in fact important aircraft sightings that would otherwise be shrugged off. The advent of drones, stealth technologies, uncrewed sea vehicles, and advanced ways for someone to interfere with sensors all make it possible, if not always plausible, that a given UAP sighting could be a deliberate act by a hostile group or nation.

Still, as the report already attests, most sightings can be dismissed and known phenomena. Balloons, decades after Roswell, still catch light in unusual ways, and can look surreal on the ground.

One takeaway from the report hints that some of the phenomena could be due to people or sensors being mistaken or not working properly. “ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] and AARO [All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office] operate under the assumption that UAP reports are derived from the observer’s accurate recollection of the event and/or sensors that generally operate correctly and capture enough real data to allow initial assessments,” notes the report. “However, ODNI and AARO acknowledge that a select number of UAP incidents may be attributable to sensor irregularities or variances, such as operator or equipment error.”

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On Sunday, January 15, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off to orbit with a payload for just the fifth time since the company began flying the 70-ton capacity vehicle in 2018.

Launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 5:56 p.m. EST, the partially reusable rocket carried USSF-67, a classified US Space Force mission consisting of two main payloads. The first held a military communications satellite destined for geosynchronous orbit, the Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM, or CBAS-2, according to a Space Force media release.

The second payload, the Long Duration Propulsive ESPA, or LDPE-3A, is a craft the Space Force uses for deploying multiple smaller payloads into low Earth orbit. In this case, the LDPE-3A carried five payloads, including a prototype of a secure space-to-ground communications device and another prototype designed for “enhanced situational awareness,” as per the Space Force announcement.

The most recent prior Falcon Heavy launch was also a Space Force mission, USSF-44, which launched from Kennedy Space Center on November 1. That was the first flight for the 229-foot-tall rocket since June 2019, a surprising slow pace given the sleeker Falcon 9 rocket launched a record-setting 48 times in 2022 alone.

What’s next for Falcon Heavy?

That the January 15 launch was only the fifth for the Falcon had nothing to do with Falcon Heavy itself, says Laura Forczyk, founder of the space industry analysis firm Astralytical. Instead, it was a result of delays in payloads for both NASA and the US military, including the USSF-44 mission launched in November, that kept the pace of launches low.

“It’s actually very common for payloads to be delayed,” Forcyzk notes. Meanwhile, the majority of SpaceX’s clientele don’t need a rocket as powerful as the Falcon Heavy, and so can fly on the more affordable Falcon 9, which the company uses to launch its own Starlink satellites. A Falcon 9 launch costs $67 million, according to SpaceX pricing, while a Falcon Heavy launch rings up to $97 million.

The Falcon Heavy is the most powerful launch vehicle SpaceX currently operates and consists of three of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket boosters strapped together side-by-side. The combined 27 Merlin engines provide 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, and when combined with an upper stage atop the middle booster, can lift up to 141,000 pounds into low Earth orbit.

That makes the Falcon Heavy “SpaceX’s current solution for launching medium- and large-sized payloads to orbit or beyond,” Forczyk says, but it’s not necessarily a long-term option. SpaceX’s massive Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster are still under development; as they become operational, there will be less and less need for Falcon Heavy launches. The company claims the more powerful Starship will generate 17 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and be capable of hauling more than 220,000 pounds into low Earth orbit.

[Related: SpaceX’s new Starshield program will supply satellite networks to the military]

But Starship has yet to fly in orbit, and in the meantime, Falcon Heavy launches are ramping up, with at least five scheduled so far in 2023. Those launches consist of another Space Force mission and two commercial satellite launches in the spring. NASA’s Psyche mission to an asteroid of the same name is also scheduled to launch sometime in October. That means we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of the Falcon Heavy before it fades away.

“The very fact that Falcon Heavy still exists and is still getting customers means there is a demand for it,” Forcyzk says. “They’re going to be launching more customer payloads, which is going to bring in more revenue for the company. They will absolutely need that as they are ramping up development of Starship.”

What’s next for SpaceX?

SpaceX is working steadily on developing the Starship vehicle, which when paired with the reusable Super Heavy Booster, will make it the largest rocket ever flown. Work had been delayed by years due to a prolonged Programmatic Environmental Review between SpaceX and the FAA necessary for the regulator to issue SpaceX a license for orbital Starship launches from Boca Chica, Texas. The process was finally completed in June 2022 with the FAA requiring some safety changes for the company’s site and protocols. 

The next major milestone for Starship would be an uncrewed orbital test flight, but it’s unclear when that may take place, according to Forczyk. “A year ago, in January 2022, I gave a prediction that SpaceX would have its first orbital launch of Starship in 2022. And I was wrong,” she says. “So I want to say that they’re gonna have their first successful orbital Starship mission in 2023, but I don’t want to be wrong again.”

[Related: Dark matter, Jupiter’s moons, and more: What to expect from space exploration in 2023]

The company will need to get a move on, however. Not only is SpaceX contracted to fly a group of private citizens around the moon in the 2024, but NASA has contracted the company to create a lunar lander variant of Starship for use by NASA astronauts during the Artemis III mission scheduled for 2025.

In the meantime, SpaceX will continue launching everything from satellites to Crew Dragon spacecraft bound for the International Space Station atop its Falcon 9 rockets. In August, its CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that the company was aiming for 100 Falcon 9 flights in 2023. Less than a month in, it’s already successfully completed four Falcon 9 flights.    

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On December 2, the Air Force revealed its first new bomber in 34 years: the B-21 Raider. The Raider most closely resembles its stealthy predecessor the B-2 Spirit, and both were built by defense giant Northrop Grumman. With only head-on views of the B-21 released and available to the press, it is hard to know all the features that distinguish it from its predecessor. Still, the head-on image is enough to identify some major changes. 

The Raider is a stealth flying wing, designed to carry an explosive arsenal deep into hostile countries while bypassing their radar systems. The B-2 could deliver deadly payloads from conventional explosives to nuclear weapons. Unlike the Spirit’s 1988 reveal, the B-21 arrived in a world with a very different geopolitical climate, one where the nuclear superpower over the horizon for the US to worry about is China, not the Soviet Union. 

The “Spirit” of the Cold War

The Spirit’s production, which the Air Force originally expected to reach 132 bombers, was stopped after just 21. This change matched the geopolitical and domestic expectations of the mid-1990s, when the dissolution of the USSR and the seemingly unchecked ascendancy of American power meant specialized aircraft to bypass advanced defenses seemed superfluous at best.

Stealth is a curious kind of protective technology. It is built into the physical form of the aircraft, with rounded shapes and smooth edges built to minimize the amount of surface that reflects radio waves back to radar receivers. That makes the shape both tremendously important as a secret during development, even if the ultimate form will be discernible by eyes and cameras. A 1988 memo from the CIA, declassified decades later, estimated that half of what the Soviet Union knew about stealth came from the public reporting on it by one Aviation Week writer in the United States.

[Related: Our first look at the Air Force’s new B-21 stealth bomber was just a careful teaser]

That was before Aviation Week pulled its biggest stunt to report on stealth aircraft. In 1988, for the B-2 rollout, the bomber was pulled by a tractor from a hangar into the open air, and then wheeled back again. Reporters with Aviation Week, knowing the location and time of the rollout, rented a Cessna plane to get photographs from overhead.

“One of the driving functions to get us into this mode was, ‘Hey, if they were going to pull this thing out of the hangar into the open, I can guarantee the Russians are going to have a satellite overhead. And if the powers that be don’t care if the Russians see the trailing edge, why should they care about the American people?’” William B. Scott, former Aviation Week editor, recalled in a recent piece.

While the Air Force and pre-merger Northrop revealed more about the B-2 over time, the stunt by Aviation Week to capture photographs of the plane’s whole outline and trailing edges was clearly remembered. The 1988 reveal took place outside a hangar, and during the daytime. The 2022 reveal of the B-21 took place at night, and it barely left the hangar.

Spot these differences

Even limited to the head-on view, there’s still striking details that stand out in the new bomber compared to the old one. The B-2 Spirit appears as two caverns and a mound arising from the flat plain of the wing. The B-21, instead, shares one generally rising approach to the middle, with a gentle slope for the narrower air inlets before a sharper incline to the peak of the cockpit. 

“Perhaps the most striking features of the B-21 are its slender, barely-there air intakes. Unlike the higher-rise, scalloped intakes on the B-2, the B-21’s are almost organically a part of its wing root,” reports Air & Space Forces Magazine. “That’s good for stealth—radar loves abrupt angles and big cavities—but the intakes are so thin and shallow, they seem hardly big enough to swallow enough air to feed the B-21’s engines.” 

The fact that it has slender inlets means that there would be less of a cavity for search radars to find. Moreover, the B-21’s engine fan blades are a huge radar reflector that are shielded from direct view. 

There are seven other notable differences spotted by Air & Space Forces, from depth of the bomber’s belly to its landing gear, color, and smoothness. Sensor technology has improved greatly in the decades since the first B-2 was introduced to the world, and protecting the bomber means stealth not just against radar, but from acoustic sensors, thermal imaging, and other detection strategies.

Many tests and, invariably, reveals are still ahead for the Raider, which has come a long way since the plane was first developed as the Long Range Strike Bomber. The Air Force also intends to roll the B-21 into full production, eventually replacing not just the existing B-2 Spirits but the B-1 Lancer bombers. It may even one day replace the still-in-service B-52 bomber, though that’s a lower priority for the Air Force.

The Air Force places to acquire at least 100 Raiders. Soon enough, observers both civilian and military will be able to catch it in the air, with its once carefully guarded form revealed against the undeniable clarity of the sky.

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Mayhem is an odd name for a spy, but it’s a pretty good name for a superfast jet. On December 16, the Department of Defense awarded contractor Leidos $334 million to develop a hypersonic flying scout. The award is technically for the “Expendable Hypersonic Multi-mission ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and Strike program,” but it’s also known as Mayhem. It will be uncrewed—a drone.

“The Mayhem system will use a scramjet engine to generate thrust, propelling the vehicle across long distances at speeds greater than Mach 5,” Leidos said in a release.

Hypersonic is the threshold defined as five or more times the speed of sound. Many of the recent developments in hypersonic technology have focused on weapons such as missiles that fly fast to evade detection and interception. Speed is profoundly useful for a weapon, as the force of a fast impact can be tremendously deadly even without a warhead on board.

What sets Mayhem apart from more outright destructive designs is that, while still intended to be expendable, the hypersonic Mayhem is a tool more for finding out than flying around. 

ISR, which stands for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance and is generally the Pentagon’s acronym for everything involved in discovering, observing, and monitoring activity below, is a mission often associated with slow-moving vehicles. Drones, like the medium-altitude Reaper or the ultra long-endurance Global Hawk, are built to keep watch on activity below, informing how soldiers, sailors, and pilots below all respond. Yet some missions cannot be done at the ponderous speeds of Reaper’s prop engine, or wait for an overhead satellite to be in place.

It is likely in that void, where the need is urgent and the information collection is dangerous, that Mayhem will work best. 

Past is prologue

One way to understand the role the Mayhem might have is to look at the history of superfast spy planes. The most famous of these is the SR-71 Blackbirds, and its single-seat, CIA-piloted predecessor, the A-12, also known as Oxcart. Both planes were designed to take photographs without being shot down by anti-air missiles, which had advanced considerably in power and accuracy into the Cold War. The Soviet Union used a ground-to-air missile to shoot down a U-2 spy plane in 1960, and while U-2s still fly today, there are certain missions better suited for a faster vehicle. The Oxcart flew missions for the US above North Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, before it was retired. The two-seat Blackbird, with room for a pilot and a person to crew the sensors, operated into the 1990s

“The SR-71 was designed to fly deep into hostile territory, avoiding interception with its tremendous speed and high altitude. It could operate safely at a maximum speed of Mach 3.3 at an altitude more than sixteen miles, or 25,908 m (85,000 ft), above the earth,” notes the National Air and Space Museum.

The Blackbird entered service in the late 1960s, and was retired in 1998. In April 1988, a decade before the Blackbird’s retirement, Popular Science highlighted what the Air Force would want in a replacement, including a speed of Mach 5 and a service ceiling of above 100,000 feet. 

There’s a third distant predecessor to Mayhem: the D-21 supersonic drone. Launched by planes, including the B-52, four D-21s were used to take photographs of China between 1969 and 1971. The drone was designed within the limits of the technology at the time, which meant film cases that had to be ejected and recovered, before they were to be processed in a darkroom. The D-21 flew a fixed path, and then detonated after its mission. None of the four flights over China produced recoverable images, and the program was abandoned. 

Developing a new hypersonic spyplane has long been a goal of the Air Force, with reports of new concepts sprouting periodically. 

Uncrewed is good news

What might make Mayhem a better bet in 2022 than any prior attempt at a Blackbird replacement is a conflux of factors, all of which have led to improved drone technology. Removing the need for a pilot onboard a plane can shrink its overall profile, and lets the aircraft operate without the constraints of having to keep people onboard alive.

Cameras, data processing, and wireless data transfer have all improved tremendously in the past decades. The era of using film cameras for aerial surveillance finally ended this summer, and with it the constraints of having to collect or process film negatives. The cameras that make possible drone sensors, like the far-seeing pods on Global Hawks, show an industrial community proficient in far-seeing sensors, though taking pictures with clarity and at speed has its own obstacles. The Blackbird included sensors for listening and recording signals, like radar and radios, and those too could be incorporated into a hypersonic drone.

Like the D-21 before it, Mayhem can be expendable, where the loss of the drone need not mean the loss of information it collected. But expendable doesn’t have to mean that the drone is destroyed at the end of every mission, and a drone that could be recovered and reused offers a boon to military brass looking for a way to confirm reports by photography 

“This program is focused on delivering a larger class air-breathing hypersonic system capable of executing multiple missions with a standardized payload interface, providing a significant technological advancement and future capability,” is all the detail provided by the contract announcement for what Mayhem actually will do.

However Mayhem ultimately develops, it will fill a void the Air Force has left open for almost thirty years. 

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On Friday, the public finally got a glimpse at the Air Force’s next bomber, the B-21 Raider. Northrop Grumman, which is producing it, rolled out the futuristic flying machine at a ceremony in Palmdale, California, on Dec. 2. It’s a stealthy aircraft, meaning that it’s designed to have a minimal radar signature. It’s also intended to carry both conventional and nuclear weapons. 

The new aircraft will eventually join a bomber fleet that currently consists of three different aircraft types: the old, not-stealthy B-52s, the supersonic B-1Bs, and the B-2 flying wing, which is the B-21’s most direct ancestor. 

Here’s what to know about the B-21 Raider.

A throwback to 1988

At the B-21’s unveiling, the US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, referred to the new plane as “the first bomber of the 21st century.” Indeed, the bomber models it will eventually replace include the 1980s-era aircraft, the B-2 Spirit. 

As Peter Westwick recounts in his history of low-observable aircraft in the United States, Stealth, two aircraft makers competed against each other to build the B-2. Northrop prevailed against Lockheed to build the stealth bomber, while Lockheed had previously beaten Northrop when it came to creating the first stealth fighter: the F-117. Northrop scored the contract to build the B-2 in late 1981, and rolled out the craft just over seven years later, in 1988. 

The 1988 roll-out event, Westwick writes, included “no fewer than 41 Air Force generals,” and an audience of 2,000 people. “A tractor towed the plane out of the hangar, the crowd went wild, the press snapped photos, and then the tractor pushed it back out of sight,” he writes. It flew for the first time in 1989.

[Related: The B-21 bomber won’t need a drone escort, thank you very much]

Today, the B-2 represents the smallest segment of the US bomber fleet, by the numbers. “We only bought 21 of them,” says Todd Harrison, a defense analyst at Metrea Strategic Insights. “One has crashed, one is used for testing, and at any given time, several others will be in maintenance—so the reality is we have far too few stealthy bombers in our inventory, and the only way to get more was to design and build a whole new bomber.” 

The new bomber

The B-21, when it does fly, will join the old group of bombers. Those planes, such as the B-1, “are really aging, and are hard to keep in the air—they’re very expensive to fly, and they just don’t have the capabilities that we need in the bomber fleet of today and in the future,” Harrison says. The B-52s date to the early 1960s; one B-52 pilot once told Popular Science that being at the controls of that aircraft feels like “flying a museum.” If the B-52 is officially called the Stratofortress, it’s also been called the Stratosaurus. (A likely future scenario is that the bomber fleet eventually becomes just two models: B-52s, which are getting new engines, and the B-21.)

[Related: Inside a training mission with a B-52 bomber, the aircraft that will not die]

With the B-21, the view offered by the unveiling video is just of the aircraft from the front, a brief vision of a futuristic plane. “They’re not likely to reveal the really interesting stuff about the B-21,” observes Harrison. “What’s most interesting is what they can’t show us.” That includes internal as well as external attributes. 

Publicly revealing an aircraft like this represents a calculated decision to show that a capability exists without revealing too much about it. “You want to reveal things that you think will help deter Russia or China from doing things that might provoke us into war,” he says. “But, on the other hand, you don’t want to show too much, because you don’t want to make it easy for your adversary to develop plans and technologies to counter your capabilities.”

Indeed, the way that Secretary of Defense Austin characterized the B-21 on Dec. 2 walked that line. “The B-21 looks imposing, but what’s under the frame, and the space-age coatings, is even more impressive,” he said. He then spoke about its range, stealth attributes, and other characteristics in generalities. (The War Zone, a sibling website to PopSci, has deep analysis on the aircraft here and has interviewed the pilots who will likely fly it for the first time here.)

Mark Gunzinger, the director for future concepts and capability assessments at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, says that the B-21 rollout, which he attended, “was very carefully staged.” 

[Related: The stealth helicopters used in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden are still cloaked in mystery]

“There were multiple lights on each side of the aircraft that were shining out into the audience,” he recalls. “The camera angles were very carefully controlled, reporters were told what they could and could not do in terms of taking photos, and of course, the aircraft was not rolled out all the way—half of it was still pretty much inside the hanger, so people could not see the tail section.” 

“The one word you heard the most during the presentation from all the speakers was ‘deterrence,'” Gunzinger adds. Part of achieving that is signaling to others that the US has “a creditable capability,” but at the same time, “there should be enough uncertainty about the specifics—performance specifics and so forth—so they do not develop effective countermeasures.”

The B-21 rollout concluded with Northrup Grumman’s CEO, Kathy Warden, who mentioned the aircraft’s next big moment. “The next time you see this plane, it’ll be in the air,” she said. “Now, let’s put this plane to bed.” 

And with that, it was pushed back into the hanger, and the doors closed in front of it. 

Watch the reveal video, below.

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This article originally published on Task & Purpose.

Master Sgt. Leah Curtin had four years of experience fixing F-15 fighter jets when she showed up to Luke Air Force Base, Arizona in 2014 to learn how to fix the much newer F-35 Lightning II. Despite her experience on the older jet, Curtin and her fellow maintainers soon realized that the F-35 is a different sort of beast.

“We were kind of trying to figure out how to maintain this brand new aircraft that is so different from legacy” aircraft, such as the F-15 or F-16, Curtin told Task & Purpose. What Curtin may not have known at the time was that the jet she was learning how to fix was not just a new platform to master — it was a new kind of maintenance that could have an impact on how the Air Force fights a possible war against China or other distant foes.

“We’ve had multiple units doing some really good things on how to take small teams and move forward,” as in closer to the fight, Lt. Gen. Michael Loh, director of the Air National Guard, told reporters in September at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air Space & Cyber Conference at National Harbor, Maryland. Loh pointed out Curtin, who can perform multiple maintenance specialties on the F-35.

“Now think about that. You’re only trained to be a crew chief or trained to be avionics or hydraulics or engines. She actually took the time to learn four specialties,” Loh said.

Back in 2014, Curtin was still learning the ropes of the F-35. Fighter aircraft are complicated machines, and mastering how to fix them takes time for both individual airmen and for maintenance squadrons. Curtin and her colleagues had to start building that knowledge base from the ground up.

“It was definitely a learning curve,” said the crew chief, who noted that the F-35 had its first flight in 2006 and arrived at its first base in 2011. It was practically an infant compared to the F-15s Curtin was used to, which first entered service in 1976. But the crew chief and her colleagues were ready to take on the challenge.

“With safety in mind, we were always like, ‘we’ll just figure it out,’” said Curtin, who pointed out that engineers from Lockheed Martin, the F-35 manufacturer, were also there to guide the way.

One of the biggest differences between the F-35 and older jets is that F-35 maintainers can simply hook a laptop up to the jet to test out its flight controls and other diagnostics.

“This jet actually reports faults, and it tells you what’s wrong,” said Curtin, who is currently assigned to the Vermont Air National Guard’s 158th Fighter Wing. “It’s not a perfect system. I don’t think there’s any perfect system out there. But it really can pinpoint if you have a bad sensor or bad filter or anything like that.”

One of the perks of a self-diagnosing jet is that it means maintainers do not necessarily have to get their hands dirty to find out what the problem is, which they might do with previous jets.

“Ask any crew chief who worked on an F-15 or an F-16 or an A-10, we would tell you that we don’t get as dirty as we used to on the older aircraft,” Curtin said. “When those jets broke, they broke hard, but people worked really hard to fix them.”

Part of the reason the older jets break so hard is simply that they are so old. It is similar to an old car, which might require more tender loving care and replacement parts than a car straight off the assembly line, the crew chief explained.

“Right now, we just don’t have a lot of breaks with the hydraulic system, fuel system,” or other components, Curtin said. “That could happen, you know, 20 years down the road. But at this point, these jets are already lasting pretty well.”

What makes the F-35 special is not just its young age or self-diagnosing software: it’s how all the subsystems talk with each other through software to improve the jet’s performance. That means sometimes F-35 maintenance involves simply updating the software. While the system integration improves the aircraft’s efficiency, it also blurs the lines between maintenance specialties.

“This jet is already like a flying computer and a lot of the systems already talk to each other,” Curtin said. “So why can’t our maintainers be able to do more than just what their training guideline is telling them to do?”

Curtin became one of the first airmen to participate in the F-35 nose-to-tail program, where maintainers pick up basic skills from outside their usual specialty. For example a fuels or avionics expert might learn the basics of how the F-35’s weapons systems work.

“We don’t actually load the munition, but we’re able to do troubleshooting on a [weapons] rack if a bomb did not drop or if it is having an issue communicating with the aircraft,” Curtin explained. “So I’m still an expert in my crew chief career field, but I’m kind of like a jack of all trades in everything else.”

The master sergeant particularly enjoys working on the F-35 engine, which she never had a chance to do on the F-15. Curtin explained that the new jet’s engine breaks down into five modules, each of which can be replaced if necessary. 

“That’s probably my favorite part — is working on the engines — where we can actually pull the engine modules apart and replace them,” she said. “When you put it back together and the aircraft flies you’re like ‘yeah, I put that motor together.’”

Curtin is not the only maintainer getting to know the F-35 from nose to tail. The airman said there are about 25 other maintainers picking up similar skills in Vermont. The advantage of an Air National Guard unit like Curtin’s is that air national guardsmen do not have to rotate to another duty location every few years like their active-duty counterparts. Instead, airmen can stay at one base and build up expertise on the aircraft there. That expertise could pay off in a major conflict where the military may have a limited number of seats to send deep into the Pacific or elsewhere.  

“When we are deployed somewhere and we have to go to X location for two weeks with six jets, we don’t have to bring such a huge amount of people,” Curtin explained. “We could have a weapons expert who has been trained to launch and recover a jet, or change a tire, or do some servicing.”

Figuring out how to get the job done with fewer people and aircraft is a major problem for the Air Force. Part of the impetus is funding: Air Force senior leaders do not expect the service to grow any time soon, both in terms of its enlisted force and in terms of an ongoing pilot shortage that makes trained aviators an increasingly scarce resource. The manpower shortage, plus a small fleet of aircraft that is generally older than the airmen flying and fixing them, means the service wants to pack each airman and aircraft with as much operational flexibility as possible.

Sometimes that flexibility takes the form of using B-52 bombers as transport aircraft or, vice versa, using C-17 transport aircraft as bomb trucks. But for many enlisted airmen, it takes the form of a concept called “multi-capable airmen,” which means the Air Force is encouraging airmen to become Swiss Army knives who can work outside their usual job specialty. Though some airmen have criticized the concept as being a fresh coat of paint on the phrase “do more with less,” service leaders say it will be an essential trait to help airmen survive a future fight. 

Multi-capable airmen is one tenet of a larger strategy called agile combat employment, where the Air Force wants to complicate an enemy’s targeting process by operating smaller airfields across the theater of war, in contrast to the sprawling air bases built up in the United States and in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Global War on Terror. 

The theory is that those large bases present juicy, all-eggs-in-one-basket targets for enemies in a future fight. Instead, the Air Force hopes to deploy smaller, more distributed airfields so that if any one airfield were destroyed, the operation as a whole could keep running. All of which is to say that the multirole maintenance airmen training at the Vermont Air National Guard are right in line with the larger Air Force’s preparations for a future fight.

“I would say one multi-capable airman could probably do the job of at least three people,” Curtin said. 

The Vermont air guardsmen tested out the concept this summer, when 35 airmen from the 158th Fighter Wing deployed from Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany to Amari Air Base, Estonia to see if they could operate with a smaller footprint than usual. The airmen completed 28 sorties and 76 flying hours, which was a success according to a press release about the exercise.

“The proof of concept was effective at showing NATO partners that the USAF was able to rapidly deploy to allied nations and perform 5th-generation fighter aircraft operations at non-USAF locations,” Tech. Sgt. Justin Oddy, 158th Operations Support Squadron airfield manager, said at the time. “The [agile combat employment] concept spans across the entire Air Force mission and when it comes to sortie generation, this small task force showed just how effective the concept is and will continue to be with allied support.”

The operation may not have been so successful without Curtin, who over the years has become a mentor for younger maintainers in her unit. Now that she is in a leadership/supervisor role, the crew chief does not get as much time working on the F-35 as she used to, but helping other airmen provides its own rewards.

“I don’t get to play with the jet as much as I would like, but being able to watch my airmen grow into who I was as an expert is awesome to see,” Curtin said “Knowing that I helped train them to be the best maintainers that they can be …  it just makes me really proud to be a crew chief in the Air Force.”

Jets are not the only things that need support: people do too. Curtin was thankful for her parents, sisters and her partner, David Cruson, a fellow maintainer with eight years of experience on the F-35 and 10 on the F-15, for their support.

“They have been my biggest cheerleaders and I couldn’t thank them enough,” she said.

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The U.S. military’s uncrewed space plane has set a record for its longest flight in orbit. The X-37B craft has now been circling the earth for 902 days, greatly exceeding its previous record of 780 days. And it doesn’t appear to be coming back to Earth any time in the immediate future. 

The X-37B current mission started more than two years ago, with the craft launching from Cape Canaveral on May 17, 2020. With this milestone, the space plane’s total record has been more than 3,700 days in orbit.

The mission is secretive, with only two pieces of its payload announced. It’s the sixth Orbital Test Vehicle mission with the space plane, and the military has been keeping its operation and what it is doing on this and past missions relatively secret. Speculation has ranged from testing surveillance systems to experiments on putting satellites in lower orbits. 

What is clear is that this is the first mission launched under Space Force command. The X-37 project started life under the Air Force. After the Space Force formed in December 2019, it took over authority on the program. 

“This important mission will host more experiments than any prior X-37B flight, including two NASA experiments,” then-Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett said in May 2020. “One is a sample plate evaluating the reaction of select significant materials to the conditions in space. The second studies the effect of ambient space radiation on seeds. A third experiment, designed by the Naval Research Laboratory, transforms solar power into radio frequency microwave energy, then studies transmitting that energy to earth.”

This flight is the first time the space plane has been equipped with a service module to carry additional pieces for experiments. During this mission, the X-37B launched a FalconSat-8, a satellite developed by the U.S. Air Force Academy that hosts five different experiments the academy will conduct. The space plane is also testing the effects of radiation and space on seeds, according to Space Force.

The X-37 project is also important because the space plane is reusable. Each launch uses a booster rocket, but the craft can safely land on its own The first flight, in 2010, lasted 224 days, and subsequent missions have pushed the longevity of its orbital capabilities. The space plane is powered by solar cells and lithium-ion batteries.

The United States is not alone in developing winged space planes. China has its own, smaller craft, which is also currently in orbit.

The military as a whole has been testing uncrewed vehicles or crafts, and some have set records for their time in operation. The X-37B however keeps beating its own results by significant margins each mission. It’s unclear when this current mission is set to end.

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In orbit, there are no obvious places for satellites to hide, except temporarily behind the bulk of Earth itself. Satellites, gravitationally bound to our planet, are visible clearly in the night sky. Discerning their movement, their patterns and actions, requires special tools for scanning the sky. On September 30, Australia’s Department of Defence announced the Space Surveillance Telescope—a special tool just for this kind of scanning—is operational.

“In an increasingly contested and congested space environment, The Space Surveillance Telescope will provide enhanced awareness of the space domain and contribute to greater Alliance cooperation,” Air-Vice Marshal Cath Roberts said in the release.

The main point of the telescope is to watch satellites in geosynchronous orbit, and to keep an eye out for unusual movement or activity among satellites. Satellites in geosynchronous orbit are used for everything from television transmission, GPS coordinates, communications, photography of Earth, and more. One possible way to disrupt assets in orbit would be with a satellite designed to move to attack and sabotage other objects in orbit. Watching the sky for unusual movement is the first step to detecting such an attack.  

The telescope started development in 2001 as a DARPA project. The first version was built and set up on the top of North Oscura Peak at White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, where it started watching the night sky in 2011. In 2012, the United States and Australia announced a plan to move the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) from its perch above White Sands to Australia, where it could scan the sky above the southern hemisphere instead. This move was designed “to strengthen the US Space Surveillance Network’s ability to track space assets and debris and provide warnings of possible collisions between space objects,” says Australia’s Department of Defense.

The US Space Surveillance Network is a collection of telescopes and radar installations across the globe, used to scan the skies for unusual activity. In some ways, watching space is straightforward, as most satellites typically travel on fixed trajectories, and cannot easily change them. There is no object besides the Earth to hide behind, though there are parts of the world where it is harder for the US to place sensors. This is specifically a challenge when it comes to northern Eurasia, where the US does not have access, and to the southern hemisphere, where telescopes in Australia help a great deal. 

Space is also vast. The realm of useful orbit is estimated to have a volume of some 24,000,000,000,000 cubic miles. What space surveillance entails is finding and cataloging satellites in that orbit. The expansive scope of the SST is designed to see a wide swath of the sky, and to generate data that makes it easy for analysts to see if objects in orbit are moving in ways beyond what would normally be expected with orbital deviations.

In October 2016, DARPA handed over control of the telescope to Air Force Space Command (which itself became a part of the Space Force in October of 2020), in a ceremony attended by the media. In 2017, the telescope was dismantled and then reassembled at Australia’s Harold E. Holt naval base on the continent’s north-west coast. It’s a whopping 9,845 miles from its first location at White Sands. 

The US Space Force will be responsible for part of the US operation of the SST, under the auspices of US Space Command.

“Reaching initial operational capability is a major achievement that underscores the importance of working together to secure the ultimate high ground,” U.S. Space Force Gen. John Raymond said. “My thanks and congratulations to our Australian partners and our [Space Force] Guardians and Airmen who have been collaborating for almost a decade to make this possible.”

When nations have taken action against objects in orbit, it has been through firing missiles from Earth at their own deorbiting satellites. So far, only the United States, China, Russia, and India have destroyed their own satellites this way, with Russia’s November 2021 destruction of the Kosmos-1408 satellite being the most recent. The debris created by satellite destruction can persist in orbit for years, risking collision with other satellites and threatening the continued usefulness of orbit for everyone. So far, two-thirds of the debris from the destruction of Kosmos-1408 has deorbited, but what remains may take a decade or more to stop being a threat.

But other means to damage or destroy satellites exist, with one of the most concerning possible threats being a satellite already in orbit that is designed to attack and sabotage or destroy other objects in orbit. Space has for decades been a place where militaries put useful sensors, like cameras or eavesdropping devices pointed at Earth. Beyond military utility, space carries communication across the globe, on both military and commercial channels. While for now nations have not yet overtly targeted the satellites of others in war, the possibility remains, which is what space surveillance is designed to find and, hopefully, deter.

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When it comes to equipping the aircraft carriers of the 21st century, the US Navy wants a mix of aircraft that is at least 60-percent uncrewed. This goal was “outlined by multiple officials during updates at the annual Tailhook Association symposium in September,” reports Aviation Week, referring to the conference held by a fraternal order of Naval Aviators, the pilots who presently and previously performed the kind of job that the Navy intends to shift mostly to robots.

The Navy has made no secret of its intentions to move towards more uncrewed aircraft flying on and off of carriers. In March 2021, Vice Adm. James Kilby told the House Armed Services committee that “we think we could get upwards of 40 percent of the aircraft in an air wing that are unmanned and then transition beyond that.”

Shifting from 40 to 60 percent is a substantial leap, though it’s of a piece with the overarching strategy for how the Navy intends to incorporate and expand the use of uncrewed vehicles in the coming decades. In the 2022 Navigation Plan, the Navy’s longer-term procurement strategy document, the Navy said that by the 2040s it is planning to field “Aircraft for anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare, to include helicopters and maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft, all augmented by unmanned aviation systems” with a capacity goal of “approximately 900.”

For the Navy, much of its uncrewed aviation plans hinge on the continued success of the MQ-25 Stingray tanker drone. The Stingray’s mission is to take off from a carrier deck, and travel with fighters like the F/A-18 jets part of the way to their mission. Then, the Stingray is supposed to top off the fuel tanks of the jets while they’re already airborne, extending the functional range of those fighters. This is a mission at present performed by specially equipped F/A-18s, but switching the refueling to a specialized uncrewed aircraft would free up the crewed fighter for other missions.

In June 2021, a Stingray successfully transferred fuel from an external storage tank to a fighter in flight for the first time, and testing of the aircraft continues, with the Navy expecting the drones to enter service in 2026. While not as flashy as the combat missions Navy drones may someday fly, the tanker missions require mastering the ability to take off from and land on carrier decks, as well as the ability for an uncrewed vehicle to coordinate with human pilots in close contact while airborne. If the airframe and its autonomous systems can accomplish that, then adapting the form to other missions, like scouting or attack, can come in the future. 

Adding uncrewed aircraft can potentially increase the raw numbers of flying machines fielded, as autonomous systems are not limited by the availability or capacity of human pilots. The uncrewed aircraft can also be designed from the start without a need to accommodate human pilots, letting designers build airframes without having to include space for not just cockpits but the pilot safety systems, like ejection seats, oxygen, and redundant engines. 

By saving the labor of piloting by shifting towards autonomy, and saving space on an aircraft carrier through denser uncrewed design, roboting wingmates could allow ships to put more flying machines into the sky, without needing to have a similar expansion in pilot numbers or carrier decks. 

[Related: The US Navy floats its wishlist: 350 ships and 150 uncrewed vessels]

The Navy’s intention has parallels across the Department of Defense. In September, DARPA announced ANCILLARY, a program looking for a versatile drone that could fly from rugged environments and ship decks, without any need for additional infrastructure. GAMBIT, a program by defense contractor General Atomics, is pitched to the Air Force as a way to develop four different drone models from one single core design, allowing cost savings and versatility with shared parts.

Beyond those speculative programs, the Air Force has worked to develop semi-autonomous drones that can receive orders from and fly in formation with human-piloted planes. This Loyal Wingmate program is aimed at expanding the number of aircraft, and in turn sensors and weapons, that can be flown in formation, again without expanding the number of pilots needed. It also allows the Air Force to develop a rotating cast of uncrewed aircraft around existing crewed fighters, with hoped-for shorter production timelines and rapid deployment of new capabilities once they’re developed.

[Related: A guide to the Gambit family of military drones and their unique jobs]

The Navy’s ultimate vision, one suggested at 40 percent uncrewed and necessitated at 60 percent, is that the new robotic planes perform well enough to justifying their place in carrier storage, while also being expendable enough that they can take the brunt of risk in any conflict, sparing human pilots from exposure to enemy anti-aircraft weaponry. A shot-down pilot is a tragedy. A shot-down drone is just lost equipment and the ensuing paperwork.

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The Air Force is testing a new tool for sinking ships with guided bombs, and this month released additional footage of a successful test of the system from April.

In the video captured from the deck of the derelict ship Courageous, the bomb hits as a plume of water and smoke, with the camera’s angle jolted skyward as the now-halved vessel splits and sinks. The footage, released September 19, offers a more complete picture of an Air Force Research Lab weapons test, which originally took place on April 28. Previous footage showed the ship sinking, from the sky. Now, with the footage from the onboard camera recovered, it is possible to see what would be a sailor’s eye view of the destruction, before the falling bomb permanently condemns them to what would be a long stay in Davy Jone’s locker.

The Air Force Research Laboratory describes its new Quicksink technology as a “low-cost, air-delivered capability for defeating maritime threats.” It is, in practice, a target-tracking system that can attach to existing bombs and bomb guidance systems, letting fighter jets and other planes sink ships from the sky with the accuracy and force typically reserved for seaborne torpedoes. 

In the April demonstration, an F-15E Strike Eagle released a roughly 2,000-pound JDAM bomb, hitting and sinking the ship set up as a target in the Gulf of Mexico. (JDAM means “Joint Direct Attack Munition,” and refers to a family of bombs with guidance systems used by both the Air Force and the Navy.) In the first footage released of the test, the target ship can be seen intact, then buckling upward as the bomb hits one-third of the length from the rear of the vessel. The whole of the ship is soon engulfed in a plume of smoke, debris, and blasted water, with the split sections mostly submerged by the time the cloud clears 20 seconds later. 

Sinking into history

Sinking ships with attacks from aircraft is a century old idea. In the summer of 1921, the US Navy and Army competed to see which pilots could sink captured German World War I warships used for target practice. (Previously, some of these warships had been used as target practice for battleship guns.) Planes sinking ships became a crucial part of World War II, with some dedicated planes carrying torpedoes, and others flying harrowing dive-bomb attacks to place bombs on ship decks. 

Precision guidance systems have improved dramatically since the end of World War II and especially since the 1970s, and anti-ship missiles have benefitted as well. 

Current options for sinking surface ships from planes “are the Harpoon AGM-84, Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM) AGM-158C, and laser guided bombs (GBUs). All achieve functional and mission kills, but sinking a ship may require multiple munitions and all require some level of intelligence knowledge of the ship for mission planning and targeting the critical nodes,” Kirk Herzog, AFRL program manager, told Popular Science via email.

These weapons can prove effective, but long-range flight, navigation, and guidance systems come at a cost. The Harpoon anti-ship missile can be air-, surface-, or submarine-launched, has seen action in Ukraine, and costs over $1 million per missile. The Long Range Anti Ship Missile, a cruise missile built to do what it says on the label, costs over $3.5 million per missile.

Bombs away

Bombs, on the other hand, are relatively cheap, even with guidance systems. In 2020, every JDAM purchased by the Air Force cost about $21,000 apiece. Herzog said that, as a technology demonstration program, there is no target cost per item, but the “objective of the program is to incorporate features, such as Weapon Open System Architecture and open competition, that drive down the overall life cycle cost.” This would make Quicksink a low-cost way for planes to sink ships with JDAMs.

Navy submarines, armed with torpedoes, already perform this patrol function to some degree. The AFRL says that Quicksink “aims to develop a low-cost method of achieving torpedo-like seaworthy kills from the air at a much higher pace and over a much larger area than covered by a lumbering submarine.”

Submarines are an odd direct comparison to aircraft, especially when planes like the Navy’s P-8 Poseidon already carry anti-ship weapons and are used for maritime patrol. What Quicksink offers when used from a stealth fighter, like torpedoes fired from a submarine, is surprise in sinking a vessel. Unlike submarines, which risk revealing themselves in an attack, a stealth plane retains a similar degree of stealth even as it flies away.

The latest video released features a 3D model of the Courageous resting on the seafloor. This 3D model was produced for the Okaloosa County Artificial Reef Office (explore it on their site), and the reefs, which include other wrecks, are promoted by the Office as “excellent sites for fishing, diving, and snorkeling activities.” To make the model, a company called Reef Smart Guides took images captured from an underwater uncrewed vehicle, and then fed it into software that produced a 3D video. “It’s the same technologies used for years to map the ocean bottom, inspect bridges, cables, and other underwater infrastructure,” said Herzog.

One of the videos released by the AFRL shows an animated segment representing a hypothetical future mission where having Quicksink would be important. In that scenario, a navy reconnaissance plane spots a “ship heading to the west coast armed with long range ballistic missile disguised as typical cargo containers,” then dispatches an already-flying F-35 on maritime patrol, which sinks it. 

In addition to its effectiveness at guiding a bomb through a target ship, Quicksink is designed as a “Weapon Open Systems Architecture” tool, or one that can easily plug into existing system. Should the US suddenly find itself beset by cargo ships secretly arming and launching ballistic missiles, the ability to easily and rapidly convert existing bombs into guided anti-ship weapons would prove a direct boon for national security. 

Watch the ship being sunk, below:

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On September 18, an all-electric aircraft sped down a runway in Washington state, its nose wheel lifting off the ground. It didn’t take off, though, by intention: The test was a predecessor to an actual first flight, which the company says is “imminent.” 

The 57-foot-long aircraft, which its makers call Alice, is just a prototype, although a pretty slick one at that. Someday, if a production version enters service with an airline like Cape Air, the goal will be for it to be able to carry nine passengers and their bags for flights lasting about an hour or two—think distances of about 170 to 230 miles. Up front in the commuter plane will be space for two pilots, although it will be certified to be flown by just one person. 

Other companies working on electric flight, which is one way that the industry hopes to become less carbon-intensive, are developing flying machines that don’t look like traditional aircraft. An air taxi by Joby Aviation, for example, is capable of taking off and landing vertically, and thus has a different design. But Alice, made by a company called Eviation, looks a lot more like a regular plane. Here’s how it works right now. 

Batteries in the belly

The plane’s motors need battery power to give them the juice they need. Not surprisingly, the batteries that do that are in the bottom of the plane, where the girth of the aircraft is also a little wider. 

Batteries are heavy, and they don’t have the same energy density as regular fuel does, which sets a major limit for electric flight. The batteries on this prototype weigh a total of 8,000 pounds, and these lithium-ion cells are cylindrical, which is the same shape that some automakers, like Tesla and Rivian, use. For luggage, the cargo compartment is behind the passenger cabin. 

Other attributes of the aircraft’s design are all about making it be able to accomplish its intended mission—commuter flights over relatively short distances—while harnessing battery power. “Building an electric aircraft is a war on weight, and it’s a war on drag,” notes Gregory Davis, the company’s CEO and president. “Our challenges are to get the best possible lift-over-drag ratio.”

The aircraft has long, narrow wings, which don’t sweep backwards; wings that are lengthy and skinny are referred to as possessing a high aspect ratio. “We need to have the most efficient wing that we can,” he says. (For a point of comparison, take a look at the wings on an aircraft like an F-16, which is designed for performance and supersonic speeds, as opposed to efficiency.) 

As for keeping the weight to a minimum where they can, the plane is made mostly out of carbon composite material, Davis says. The aircraft is also what is known as fly-by-wire, which Davis says also makes it lighter than it otherwise would have been. A non-fly-by-wire aircraft employs mechanical connections, like metal cables, to translate what the pilot does at the controls to the actual surfaces on the outside of the plane. A fly-by-wire aircraft uses computer signals to do the same, removing those cables or other physical connectors.

Props in the back 

At the rear of the aircraft are two electric motors that spin two propellers. Those motors are made by a company called magniX; an airline, Harbour Air, has also used a magniX motor to power a converted electric seaplane. 

In the case of the Alice aircraft, the power units in the back “can produce 650 kilowatts of power per side, so 1.3 megawatts of power for the aircraft during takeoff, which is great,” Davis says. 

Right now, there’s an understandable gap between where the company eventually expects to arrive with the range of its production-model aircraft and the prototype, which will soon be making its first flight. “The batteries aren’t there yet,” he says. “Battery technology is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest challenge in electric aviation.” The hope is that as development of the Alice aircraft continues, the industry—electric aircraft, electric ground vehicles—keeps innovating. 

He refers to this battery situation as “a challenge for the entire industry.” The prototype aircraft, he says, is good “for demonstrating that the technology works together.”

To be sure, Eviation and its Alice aircraft are not the only ones working in this new frontier. Companies like Beta Technologies and Joby Aviation are flying electric air taxis that are designed to take off and land like helicopters, although in recent flights with Air Force pilots at the controls, or a multi-leg journey to Arkansas, Beta’s demonstrator took off and landed conventionally. Others include Archer and Wisk. Finally, Kittyhawk was working on a one-person plane known as Heaviside, but just announced on September 21 that they would be shutting down the company.

And in related news, a company called Heart Aerospace is working on a hybrid-electric aircraft, the ES-30. The Air Current aviation website has more on why Heart recently pivoted away from an all-electric smaller craft to a larger, 30-seat machine that also has turbo-generators on board. 

For Eviation’s Davis, he compares their current stage of development to NASA’s Mercury program, which saw the first American in a sub-orbital flight in 1961, eight years before the moon landing of Apollo 11. “What we’re doing here with Alice is like Alan Shepard going into space on a Redstone [rocket]—it’s showing that we can do it,” he says. “Where we’re headed in terms of making electric aviation part of our world—something that our children will fly on and we won’t think twice about—that’s the destination here. We need to show that we can do it.” 

Watch the high-speed taxi test, below. 

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On Thursday, JetBlue, Virgin Atlantic, the US Air Force and others announced their commitment to purchase sustainable jet fuel from a New York-based startup called Air Company. 

JetBlue agreed to buy 25 million gallons of Air Company’s sustainable aviation fuel over five years, and Virgin Atlantic agreed to purchase up to 100 million gallons over 10 years. Boom Supersonic, a company trying to bring back supersonic passenger flight, plans to purchase up to 5 million gallons of this fuel on an annual basis through its Overture flight test program.

According to a press release, the US Air Force, which awarded the company a contract, has already completed a “first-of-its-kind unmanned flight using Air Company’s 100% unblended CO2-derived jet fuel.”

“Aviation as a whole represents 2-3% of global CO2 emissions and is widely considered one of the most ‘hard to decarbonize’ industries,” Air Company noted in a statement. “Using the same proprietary technology that mimics photosynthesis to create its consumer ethanol, Air Company has developed and deployed its single-step process for CO2-derived fuel production using renewable electricity.”

There has been a great deal of emerging research and investment into the development of sustainable aviation fuel, as more attention is directed at technologies that can help corporations reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. While electric and battery powered vehicles are also being looked into as alternatives for air transportation, they can come with their own challenges. Electric aircraft could work for short hops, but they aren’t feasible for long journeys. Thus, the need for more environmentally friendly ways to power the combustion engines on aircraft.

So what is sustainable aviation fuel?

Traditional jet fuel, or kerosene, is a mix of hydrocarbons made from a series of chemical reactions. But to make it sustainable, instead of using fossil fuels, engineers would instead integrate more renewable starting materials, like feedstocks, or waste products, such as used cooking oils (read PopSci’s explainer on sustainable aviation fuel here). In general, the idea is that even if they still emit carbon pollution when they are burned, since they took carbon out of the air in the production process, they end up being “carbon neutral.”

Sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) can be made from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. This subset of products are called synthetic SAFs. 

[Related: The truth about carbon capture technology]

“Application of our new carbon conversion process has the potential to replace legacy Fischer-Tropsch systems by simplifying a multi-step conversion into single-step CO2 hydrogenation to fuel-grade paraffin,” Air Company co-founder Stafford Sheehan said in a press release. (Fischer-Tropsch systems turn hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide into water vapor and hydrocarbons through reactions that rearrange the bonds between the compounds. The source of the carbon monoxide is usually coal or natural gas.) “Furthermore, with additional reactor modifications, we can produce a fuel composition that is able to be used in a jet engine without the need for any blending with fossil fuel, as demonstrated in our test flight with the U.S. Air Force. Our single-step process will make SAF more cost-effective, toward widespread use.”

The company laid out their full fuel production process in a white paper published in the journal ACS Energy Letters. Earlier this year, the company experimented on a smaller scale with making ethanol out of thin air through products like vodka, hand sanitizer, and perfume.  

The US has already approved the use of SAFs in a mix with traditional jet fuel. Researchers in Europe have been looking into ways to reconfigure the original jet fuel production process with renewable energy and non-fossil fuel starting materials. Efficiency, though, is a barrier, and so is cost. SAFs reportedly cost anywhere from two to four times more than traditional jet fuel, and Air Company is no exception to this problem. The company’s CEO told Axios that their SAF is “not close to cost parity with traditional jet fuel,” but SAF-specific incentives included in the Inflation Reduction Act should be able to cut some of the costs. Another obstacle is the availability of SAFs compared to traditional jet fuel.

Although a few companies have been testing small flights run on this greener jet fuel alternative, questions still remain about how compatible SAFs are with the materials that make up the aircraft in the long haul. 

However, despite skepticism and hurdles, many companies are still investing in this vision. In July, Alaska Airlines, Microsoft, and Twelve said that they were working towards a demonstration flight using fuels derived from recaptured CO2 and renewable energy. And last year, Lufthansa announced a similar agreement to produce and use synthetic jet fuel. 

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On September 19, defense giant General Atomics unveiled four related drone concepts, all under the family name of Gambit. The program, which was first announced in March, aims to take advantage of the possibilities afforded to uncrewed design, allowing several distinct aircraft to be built around a single core. Drones based on the Gambit Core would then join fighter wings and missions, under the direction of human pilots in F-35s or newer fighters, all working towards the same end.

The heart of the Gambit, as General Atomics says, is a “core platform that encapsulates a single set of common hardware: landing gear, baseline avionics, chassis, and other essential functions. A common Gambit Core accounts for roughly 70 percent of the price among the various models, providing an economy of scale to help lower costs, increase interoperability, and enhance or accelerate the development of variants.”

General Atomics, in its announcement, explicitly compares this to the assembly line style of automotive manufacture, in which both luxury sedans and family economy models start from the same base and then deviate only later in production. Gambit is pitched explicitly as a suite of useful drones, which will offer four useful versions and come in a line that can be expanded as production evolves.

Common core for four

The four initial Gambit models, as pitched, come complete with sketchpad-style illustrations. General Atomics announced them as each having a number, and each one is also intended to have a specific focus. Together, they will allow the military to use drones for everything from scouting to combat to advanced training to stealth missions.

Gambit 1

This is a scout and surveillance drone. This scout Gambit will take the core package and add “high aspect wings and a fuel-optimized engine,” letting it “spend more time patrolling a given box of airspace to provide early warning or surveillance.” This is the role most familiar to the pattern of drones like the Reaper or Global Hawk, made by General Atomics and Northrop Grumman respectively, though as described the scout Gambit is intended to watch for enemy planes, in addition to any watching movements below on the ground.

Gambit 2

This is an air-to-air fighter. This fighter drone will have less endurance than the long range scout. Instead, it will fight in packs, with sensors shared between multiple fighter-Gambits, all using shared signals to triangulate and find even stealthy targets. General Atomics says that this group could do multiple tasks: “They could alert human-piloted fighters farther away with a burst transmission. They could wave off to keep clear of the hostile fighter. They could attack with their own weapons using AI and machine learning to harass and trap the hostile fighter.” This theoretically lets drone aircraft be on the bleeding edge of a fight, with commanding human supervisors able to respond after the drones have already detected a hostile enemy.

Gambit 3

This aircraft is a training tool, a drone that will be able to emulate the powerful sensors of a modern crewed stealth fighter and pretend to be something it’s not, all without requiring actual pilots to fly training missions and masquerade as enemies. Training work is important and time-intensive, and the Air Force is already invested in using AI to evaluate pilots and pilot technique. Tools that are especially effective at training, like the Angry Kitten electronic warfare suite, can end up adapted to frontline service.

Gambit 4

Last but not least, this model is “a combat reconnaissance-focused model with no tail and swept wings,” which in the sketch resembles the flying wing B-2 bomber or the uncrewed RQ-170 drone. The General Atomics release for this drone is the least descriptive, offering only that the stealth Gambit is “optimized for long-endurance missions of a specialized nature, leveraging low-observable elements and other advanced systems for avoiding enemy detection.” As the B-2 and RQ-170 indicate, that kind of stealth is useful for bombing targets despite the presence of air defenses, or for surveillance in areas where another plane would risk getting shot down or being detected.

Teaming with possibilities

When General Atomics president David Alexander announced Gambit in March, he said that “Gambit will usher in a new era, where UAS [uncrewed aircraft systems] work collaboratively with manned aircraft to detect, identify and target adversaries at range and scale across the battlespace.”

The drone family is designed to work with and around existing and new crewed aircraft, letting autonomy take over many of the tasks presently done by remote pilots. Instead of multiple analysts gathering around a video feed from a drone while a remote crew steers it and directs sensors, the Gambit family is envisioned as self-sufficient but under human direction. That allows the fighter pilots in the sky to focus on missions, like clearing out anti-air missiles or intercepting enemy jets, without devoting their full energy and mental capacity to shepherding drones.

With programs like the Loyal Wingman, the Air Force has already indicated an interest in drone escorts for future fighters, and has worked with multiple contractors on designs that meet this need. Gambit, at a minimum, suggests that the defense industry is interested in providing whole families of potential drone escorts.

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The US Air Force is looking for a new way to win fights in the sky, and is turning to drones that can escort crewed fighters to do so. To explore the concept, the US Air Force is eyeing the idea of using a drone called the Ghost Bat, which was built for the Royal Australian Air Force. Speaking at an August event with the head of the Royal Australian Air Force, US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall suggested that the MG-28 Ghost Bat, or a variant, may fly into combat alongside future US fighters. The remark was first reported by Breaking Defense and hints at a future of international design for the loyal wingmate aircraft of tomorrow.

“I’m talking to my Australian counterparts in general about the [Next Generation Air Dominance] family of systems and how they might be able to participate,” Breaking Defense reports Kendall saying. In that context, Kendall continues, the Ghost Bat “could serve ‘as a risk reduction mechanism’ for NGAD’s drone capability.”

Next Generation Air Dominance is a long-in-development Air Force program and concept for designing aircraft that will fight in the skies of the 21st century. Historically, the Air Force has invested a great deal of effort into developing generations of fighter jets, with each wave flown alongside fighters from the previous and succeeding eras until deemed fully obsolete and phased out. 

Generations of jets

Consider the F-4 Phantom, a third-generation fighter that first entered military service in 1958, where it flew alongside the second-generation F-100 Super Sabre. The US retired the F-4 Phantom in 1996, after it flew alongside fourth-generation planes like the F-15 and F-16. Today, those fourth generation fighters fly alongside fifth-generation planes like the F-22 and F-35.

That pattern of development, which matched the pace and limits of aircraft development in the 1950s through 1990s, meant planes being flown for decades, despite becoming more and more obsolete as newer aircraft entered service at home and abroad.

“The Next Generation Air Dominance program is employing digital engineering to replace once-in-a-generation, mass-produced fighters with smaller batches of iteratively-upgraded platforms of multiple types,” declares an Air Force acquisition report from 2019-2020. 

Ghost Bat is a product of the Loyal Wingman program, which set out to design a dependable drone escort for fighters. This program is a way for the Air Force to iterate on plane design without committing to decades of service from the drones. 

Loyal wingmate

In the 2019-2020 report, the Air Force described Next Generation Air Dominance as a way to achieve air superiority in challenging conditions. At present, the air superiority mission is performed by crewed fighters like the F-22 and F-15, whose pilots risk their aircraft and their lives when fighting against enemy aircraft and anti-air weapons. Instead of building a single new fighter to replace F-15s and F-22s, the Air Force wants to borrow from the iterative design of the automotive industry, making drones with open architecture that can be more quickly developed, all in the name of improving the Air Force’s ability to survive, kill, and endure in the face of enemy aircraft and weapons. 

This survival will come as part of a mixed fleet of drones and crewed aircraft. Under the Loyal Wingman program, the Air Force has worked for years to develop a drone that can fly and fight alongside a crewed aircraft. Loyal wingmates, as envisioned, will fly alongside F-22s and F-35s, and any crewed aircraft that replaces the stealth jets may be designed with loyal wingmates in mind. 

What is the Ghost Bat?

The Ghost Bat is an uncrewed plane that is 38 feet long, with a flight range of 2,300 miles. Boeing, which makes it, says that the drone will incorporate sensor packages for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and expects it to perform scouting missions ahead of other aircraft, as well as being able to detect incoming threats. In addition, the plan is for the Ghost Bat to employ “artificial intelligence to fly independently or in support of crewed aircraft while maintaining safe distance between other aircraft.”

When the Royal Australian Air Force announced the Ghost Bat in March, they said it was the “first Australian-built aircraft in more than 50 years.” 

The name, selected from a pool of over 700 possibilities, is a tribute to the only carnivorous species of bat in Australia; they are hunters that use both eyes and echolocation to hunt prey. As the announcement from the RAAF explained, Ghost Bat was chosen as a name because ghost bats are the only Australian bat that can prey on both terrestrial and flying animals. In addition, the RAAF pointed to the drone’s possible use in electronic warfare, a mission already carried out in Australia by a unit with a ghost bat symbol. 

None of this offers a wealth of information on what the Ghost Bat actually does, but that’s sort of the point. What the Ghost Bat most needs to be able to do is be an uncrewed plane that can fly safely with, and receive orders from, crewed aircraft. To meet the goals of Next Generation Air Dominance, the Air Force wants planes that can be easily adapted to new missions and take on new tools, like sensors or electronic warfare weapons, or other tech not yet developed. 

Boeing built the Ghost Bat for the Loyal Wingman program, but it’s not the only loyal wingmate explored. The Kratos Valkyrie, built for the Air Force and tested as a loyal wingmate with the Skyborg autonomous pilot, has already seen its earliest models retired to be museum pieces.

While these are distinct aircraft, the flexibility of software and especially open-architecture autopilots means that an autonomous navigation system developed on one airframe could become the pilot on a different one. It is this exact modularity and flexibility the Air Force is looking at, as it envisions a future of robots flying alongside human pilots, with models numbered not in generations but years.

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The next time you scan a document and feel annoyed at the tedium of the process, consider the people in Kansas who have to scan in an entire Apache helicopter. A group at the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR), a part of Wichita State University, is creating a three-dimensional digital rendering of an Apache attack helicopter, a process that includes making a scan of each part. The project is set to take three years and is the result of an Army contract. 

Melinda Laubach-Hock, who is leading the massive scan job, estimates that the Apache could have around 5,000 to 6,000 parts. Her estimate is based on a similar project her team is wrapping up that involved scanning in around 5,000 parts of a Black Hawk helicopter.

“We are taking an airframe, disassembling it down to the detail parts, cleaning it up, scanning it in, [and] reverse engineering it,” she says, describing the process for the Apache aircraft. “We build detailed models at the manufacturing-quality level for every part, and then we basically digitally reassemble the airframe.” 

A three-year undertaking like this, which a NIAR describes as “tedious,” begs the questions: Why do this? And how?

So, why?

The purpose is two-fold, says Lauback-Hock. The first is to help with repairs, or “to improve the way we’re doing sustainment for the legacy Apache fleet,” she says. The variant of Apache that they’re working on is an AH-64D, or delta, model, and she estimates that the US Army has 800 of them in service. Having a high-fidelity digital representation of a part could help with the fabrication process when it comes to repairing or replacing a helicopter component. She also argues that a digitally designed repair solution for a part could be more enduring than just a one-off fix created by one person. It’s probably not going to be a digital version of a helicopter in a Dropbox folder, but you get the idea. 

The second involves exploring, more generally, the role that having a detailed digital version of an aircraft—a concept generally called a digital twin—might play in the future. Next-generation helicopters and tiltrotor aircraft are being born in the digital age (with both Sikorsky and Bell competing in two separate Army programs), setting them apart in some ways compared to older machines. 

[Related: Why Bell’s sleek new helicopter has detachable wings]

With the Apache program, beyond just scanning in the parts, the goal is to also put them together digitally so they represent a virtual version of the real aircraft, that can be used to model how loads or stresses might affect the real thing. She refers to the digital beast that they will create as a “high-fidelity engineering structural model.” 

“Basically, that’s an engineering model that says, ‘If I push here on the structure, this is how the load propagates through the structure,’” she adds. And then to make sure that that digital model is truthful, she says that they will procure a second Apache helicopter, which they will physically stress. “We’re going to push and pull, and measure the response, and we’re going to use those measurements to calibrate our engineering model,” she notes. 

[Related: Take a peek at Sikorsky’s scout helicopter prototype]

She also argues that in general, having a digital version of a helicopter could help with doing maintenance in a more predictive, proactive way. 

So why not just get the plans from the company that made the helicopter in the first place, which for the Apache is Boeing? “I don’t know whether they exist at Boeing or not,” Lauback-Hock says. (The Apache version Boeing produces today is the AH-64E, while the version being scanned in Kansas is an AH-64D. A Boeing spokesperson said via email: “Boeing keeps detailed records in a variety of formats of the D-model and E-model Apaches.” They also noted, regarding the NIAR project, that “Boeing has offered assistance.”)

But more generally, the ways that aircraft makers created the plans for flying machines in the past were different from the standards of today. “My experience is, we’ve received models on other legacy platforms that we’ve been building [digital] twins for,” Lauback-Hock says, “and there’s quite a substantial amount of work that has to go into upgrading them to today’s standards.” 

How does one scan in a helicopter?

The team is using an Apache helicopter they have on site in Kansas, although it’s not a complete aircraft. “There was an airframe involved in an incident, and it could not be repaired,” she says. “We started there, and then the Army is looking for ways to get us access to pieces we don’t currently have.” 

Any damaged parts are gone now, so what’s left is roughly 80 percent of the helicopter. But with a project as big as scanning an entire helicopter, it made sense to just start with what they have, she says. To scan in the parts, they use a device called a Hexagon Arm that can capture components in 3D. “You just kind of paint over the surface with the laser multiple times, and that creates a very dense, geometrically correct point cloud that can represent the outside shape of the article,” she says. 

The Apache is not the first aircraft to be subjected to this kind of digital intake. The Black Hawk project is about 95 percent complete, she says. They’re also scanning in a B-1 bomber and an F-16 fighter jet, the latter of which is about 15 to 20 percent done. Laubach-Hock notes that other programs exist in this arena that have not been publicly disclosed. 

Students are going to be helping out, too. Ultimately, Lauback-Hock says that about 65 people will be working on the Apache program, with 30 of those being students. One student told ksn.com that the project “looks incredibly great on my resume.”

This post has been updated to include comment from Boeing.

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South of Death Valley this spring, the Air Force experimented with electronic warfare. In tests that took place in April at China Lake, California, fighter jets flew 30 training missions, testing the efficacy of an electronic warfare training device called “Angry Kitten.” In an August 3 announcement, the Air Force recommended using Angry Kitten for actual combat.

“Given the success of the pod in training and demonstrated ability to be reprogrammed, Air Combat Command recommended four pods be converted into combat pods to provide attack capabilities against enemy radio frequency threat systems, instead of simulating them,” reads the announcement.

Electronic warfare is a crucial part of modern armed conflict. It involves, broadly, the transmission and obstruction of signals along the electromagnetic spectrum, primarily but not exclusively in the domain of radio waves. These signals are used for communication between pilots; with radar to perceive the location of enemies beyond visual sight; and for weapons guidance. If one side can block the signals of the other side, it can potentially prevent their pilots from communicating, their radar from perceiving, and their weapons from following radar guidance.

The Angry Kitten was developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute to simulate the electronic warfare devices of other country’s aircraft, the kind that the Air Force might encounter in the sky. It is a system that incorporates a software-defined radio, meaning its signal and frequencies can be changed by code. This is in contrast to traditional hardware-defined radio, which is limited by what frequencies the physical components can produce and receive. 

[Related: How electronic warfare could factor into the Russia-Ukraine crisis]

“The project, known as Angry Kitten, is utilizing commercial electronics, custom hardware development, novel machine-learning software and a unique test bed to evaluate unprecedented levels of adaptability in [Electronic Warfare] technology,” wrote Georgia Tech Research Institute in 2013.

An adaptable training tool allows the Air Force to train against a range of simulated foes. This work is done by aggressor squadrons, specialized pilots who train against USAF aircraft to try to prepare those pilots for forces they might encounter in a real war. Because the US does not have the highly sensitive top-end fighters built by countries like China’s J-20 and Russia’s Checkmate, it will instead use other aircraft to simulate them, and that means employing a tool to simulate how those jets will conduct electronic warfare.

Angry Kitten “offers the ability to collect realistic, representative jammer data on advanced waveforms. It can be used to represent virtually any known threat – and even hypothetical radar systems that don’t currently exist,” said Georgia Tech Research Institute in 2013.

While countermeasures for radar detection and jamming have existed for decades, the ability to switch techniques and frequencies makes it more likely that the jamming session succeeds. That adaptability was a crucial part of what the Air Force tested Angry Kitten on in April.

“The flight test at China Lake was our final operational assessment event,” said Keith Kirk, the experiment program manager for AERRES, a program examining in part how open software can lead to better electronic warfare tools.

[Related: BAE Systems Wants To Defeat Jammers With Thinking Machines]

“The software was updated within hours based on the performance they were seeing against certain threats and then was improved, and those improvements were verified during flight test the following day. That’s really tough to do with software and tools that are not designed to open standards,” Kirk continued. 

In a future war, the Air Force can be reasonably certain about what kinds of airplane its fighters will encounter, as airplanes are difficult to produce or store in secret. Besides, because fighter jets are often made for military export markets, the airframes are promoted at tradeshows and international arms expositions to be seen by prospective customers.

However, the specific systems of fighters are easier to keep secret. A jammer designed for the future, then, has flexibility if it can perceive and adapt to the specific signals it encounters in combat. If the data can be shared from one aircraft to the entire Air Force, a possibility with open standards and reliable, open bandwidth, then the second day of aerial combat against a hostile jammer could go much more smoothly than the first.

With the recommendation for Air Combat Command, Angry Kitten could move from a versatile training tool to an integral part of future combat. Operating in a contested electromagnetic spectrum is an all-but-given part of future warfare. For the Air Force, a dedicated sensor-and-jammer pod that can perceive the spectrum, adjust, and share what it learned could provide a significant edge across the sky.

Correction (August 16, 2022): The photo caption previously mentioned that the F-16 was in California. The photo was taken in Florida.

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In February, for the first time, a Black Hawk helicopter flew itself around with no humans on board. The self-flying military helo project involved both DARPA and Sikorsky, which makes the UH-60 helicopters. 

Meanwhile, in some places, companies like Zipline and Wing are delivering goods by drone. Other companies are working on electric air taxis to transport people or cargo, and of course normal air traffic—commercial flights out of big airports, general aviation airplanes zipping out of others—is flying around, too. Factor in helicopters, hot air balloons, and more, and there can be a lot going on up there.  

With all this busyness in the skies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon are working on an artificial intelligence pilot system that can carry out tasks like predicting what another aircraft might do, or keep an eye out for nearby planes using cameras on an aircraft. The idea is that an AI like this could help fly drones, assist a human pilot, or even someday fly a plane on its own. 

Right now, in a flight simulator, the AI is able to figure out what another aircraft is doing, or might do, and then figure out how to safely land the plane accordingly. Think of the way a driver behind the wheel of a car notices another vehicle approaching an intersection, and begins preemptively planning what to do if the other car were to run a stop sign, for example. 

In this case, the AI is looking out for another plane, not a car, of course. “It basically looks at their behavior for 10 seconds,” says Jay Patrikar, a doctoral student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “It tries to judge: ‘They are here. What are they potentially likely to do?’” 

In that sense, it’s like an AI that can play chess, says Patrikar, thinking about what its move would be in advance if its opponent were to take a certain action.

[Related: The Air Force plans to test an AI copilot on its cargo planes]

Artificial intelligence systems need data to learn from. In this case, the team is gathering data from two real-world airports, both of them in Pennsylvania. One has an air traffic control tower, and the other does not. Patrikar says that at those airports the data they hoover up includes visual information from cameras located on a hanger or near the taxiway, spoken communication from the radios, weather data, and more. “We record the entirety of it,” he says. The idea is for the AI to be able to learn cause and effect by paying attention to all this information. 

“It knows the causality of things,” he adds. That means that the AI could learn, for example, that “it was because of the weather that they [a pilot] decided to do this particular thing.” The training the AI received in these scenarios has helped it learn how to navigate a landing in simulation, Patrikar says. 

Plus, an AI bringing an aircraft in for a landing at a small, uncontrolled airport must both follow FAA rules as well as other norms when interacting with other planes, Patrikar points out. “One of the ways humans trust each other is with our shared understanding of rules—our social norms,” he says. People on a busy sidewalk might decide how to pass each other by moving to the right, for example, and rules like that apply in aviation that the AI pilot must follow. 

[Related: This company is retrofitting airplanes to fly on missions with no pilots]

Related work in the real world, not in simulation, has the team putting cameras on aircraft like a Cessna 172 or a hexacopter drone. Those cameras and the AI are able to spot other aircraft in the area, identify them, and figure out how far away they are with a greater than 90-percent accuracy rate at a distance of 700 meters (about 2,300 feet). This kind of tech could help a human pilot in a small plane visually spot other traffic in the area. “I would like to have that system on my plane,” says Patrikar, who has a private pilot license. After all, artificial intelligence doesn’t blink.

To be sure, the Carnegie Mellon researchers are not the only people exploring the new frontier of artificial intelligence that can fly, or help fly, aircraft. The Zipline drone company has been working on a way to use microphones on its drones to listen for other aircraft in the area and then take evasive action to avoid any potential collisions. And notably, a company called Merlin Labs has also developed a digital pilot that could take the place of a human copilot. As one example, it’s working with the Air Force on equipping C-130J cargo planes with their system, so instead of a human crew of two pilots, the aircraft could be flown by a single human paired with an artificial copilot. 

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On August 1, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) announced that the next plane in its inventory would be a single-engine prop aircraft. SOCOM will buy up to 75 AT-802U Sky Warden planes, built by L3Harris Technologies and Air Tractor. These planes will support special operations forces, like Delta Force or Navy SEALs, as they fight irregular wars.

The name of this program is “Armed Overwatch.” The contract announcement says it “will provide Special Operations Forces deployable, affordable, and sustainable crewed aircraft systems fulfilling close air support, precision strike, and armed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, requirements in austere and permissive environments for use in irregular warfare operations in support of the National Defense Strategy.”

Irregular warfare is a broad term that is easier to define by what it doesn’t include. Regular warfare is when the uniformed soldiers of one nation fight the uniformed soldiers of another. These conflicts usually involve the whole range of conventional military forces, from rifles through tanks and artillery to fighter jets and bombers. Irregular warfare, by contrast, involves fighting against insurgencies, rebellions, and tracking down people linked to terror operations. It can also involve helping other countries’ militaries do the same.

For example, in 2003, the US invaded Iraq with a conventional war, which lasted until the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s military. Armed resistance afterwards to the American military and to the new government of Iraq became irregular warfare, and to this day the US deploys forces in the country to assist in training Iraq’s military in irregular warfare. 

For SOCOM’s purposes, a plane that can support special operations forces doesn’t need to survive in a sky filled with hostile fighter jets or when the enemy brings dedicated anti-aircraft vehicles to the battle. Instead, what is most important is that the plane can fly easily, shoot what it needs to shoot, as well as take off and land if need be on rough runways and cleared fields, instead of dedicated airbases.

[Related: Navy SEALs could get new airborne backup. Here’s what the planes look like.]

Those characteristics, that rugged versatility, are likely why the Sky Warden won out over the four other planes SOCOM considered for the contract last summer. The contract initially awards $170 million, or about the price of two F-35A stealth jets, with a ceiling of $3 billion for the full fleet. L3Harris said in a statement that production will begin in 2023, for the initial lot of six Sky Wardens. 

“We want to deliver game-changing, modular solutions to U.S. special operators for their hardest missions, and Sky Warden does just that,” Christopher E. Kubasik, CEO of L3Harris, said in a statement.

“Armed Overwatch” is a role that involves both scouting for targets and attacking enemies on the ground. While SOCOM considered planes that could also perform a transport role for the special operators, the Sky Warden is built to scout and to attack. To that end, the Sky Warden can carry over 8,000 lbs of payload while armored. The wings can carry a range of weapons, from 500-pound bombs to small missiles to sensor pods, and the center of the aircraft can host two heavier systems as well. The wing station can fit a gun, like a .50-caliber machine gun or a 20mm cannon. With a full load of sensors and weapons, the plane can take off on a runway of just 1,400 feet, and it can land on one 1,200 feet long. The tandem cockpit seats two pilots.

The AT-802 (note the lack of a “U,” which denotes the latest variant, the AT-802U, that SOCOM is getting) first flew in 1990, where its rugged airframe and heavy payload capacity made it an ideal crop duster. As a crop duster, the plane was used to spray crops on counter-narcotics missions, an action that sometimes saw the planes shot at by farmers defending their crops. “Years of coca crop eradication missions in South America resulted in the development of lightweight composite ballistic armor for the AT-802U cockpit ‘bathtub’ and engine compartment,” notes the Air Tractor page for the plane.

In other words, SOCOM is getting a plane with crop duster origins, and one that can be used for the military missions of special operators. The Sky Warden is armored against attack, provided the enemy it is facing is armed mostly with small arms, like machine guns and rifles.

This was a concern 13 years ago, when the Air Force announced a plan to purchase 100 such planes in 2009. Skeptics of the Air Force’s 2009 plan for a light attack plane similar to the Sky Warden noted at the time that insurgent forces could get portable and effective anti-air weapons that could threaten the aircraft. With the award of the Armed Overwatch contract this week, former Popular Science contributor Peter W. Singer, now a fellow at New America, revisited an article he wrote that year, tweeting, “And note, since writing that in 2009, the cropduster [Sky Warden-style plane] has not improved, while both the enemy capabilities and the unmanned alternative has obviously drastically improved.”

As nations like Germany and the United States offload old anti-air missiles to Ukraine for use in its war against Russia, the possibility exists that some of these weapons will make their way onto the black market. While old anti-air missiles may struggle against modern jets or be overkill for modern drones, they are perfectly suited for attacking planes like the Sky Warden. As SOCOM makes a big bet on how to fight irregular wars from the sky, it is also gambling that the enemies it finds will lack anti-air weapons, even as war makes those weapons more available. 

Correction on August 3: This story has been updated to correct a typo that referred to the F-35 fighter jet as an F-25.

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Fifty feet into the April sky above Eglin, Florida, the drone wobbled, its passenger seat empty. The flying machine is the Hexa, made by LIFT Aircraft. Hexa is an electric, remotely piloted, vertical takeoff and landing aircraft capable of human transport. More than three months after that April 4 flight, the Air Force announced on July 14 that a second Hexa, Hexa 09, had recently completed a flight test, also at Eglin Air Force Base. Run by the Air Force’s 413th Flight Test Squadron, the Hexa flights are a way for the Air Force to learn what the utility of this specific vehicle is, and what vehicles like it might offer the service in the future.

Broadly described, the Hexa is a rotorcraft. The vehicle has 18 electric motors, each powering a separate rotor, in a canopy that looks like what would happen if a DALL-E-style AI was asked to draw a tree in the style of a drone. The rotors sit on a latticework canopy, with a rotor on each of the Hexa’s six arms and 12 rotors spaced evenly around the outer ring. Machines like these are also called eVTOLs, for electric vertical take-off and landing craft.

The many rotors are a big shift from the traditional one or two massive rotors of a traditional helicopter. They allow for greater redundancy and a small footprint. A helicopter like the UH-60 Black Hawks flown by the military has a rotor diameter that’s nearly 54 feet. The Hexa, instead, is just 15 feet in diameter. Even the much smaller MH-6 Little Bird helicopter has a rotor diameter of over 26 feet.

The Black Hawk and Little Bird both put their size to use as cargo transport for troops, resupply, and rescue, and both can also carry guns, bombs, and missiles, fighting like flying gunships. The Hexa has the capacity for a single occupant, one that is fully optional. In the test flights at Eglin, the Hexas flew under remote control.

Hexa is one of several projects funded by Agility Prime, an initiative specifically to develop electric vertical takeoff or landing (eVTOL) vehicles. Other projects supported by Agility Prime include the Heaviside electric plane, Joby, Archer, and Beta’s Alia.

Air Force testing of the Hexa “aims to accelerate and further develop HEXA for future public and military applications like emergency first response, personnel transport, base logistics, and search and rescue missions,” LIFT said in an April 7 statement.

Those are roles where a small-footprint aircraft offering high visibility could be especially useful. A human passenger acting as a spotter, especially one with access to sophisticated sensors mounted on the airframe, could look for people lost in unfriendly terrain. With the vehicle remotely piloted, the spotter could devote their full attention to looking below, telling the remote pilot where to steer the Hexa. Another advantage of a remotely piloted craft for search and rescue is that a Hexa could be flown empty to where it’s needed, letting a person climb inside while the remote pilot carries them to safety.

For personnel transport, it is easy to imagine the Hexa filling roles both vital and of convenience. A commander skipping the ground traffic to catch a ride to a meeting across base is certainly a possibility, and multiple Hexas could be kept in place, and charging, to ensure they are always available.

Using a Hexa for cargo likely would require cargo that either straps well into a seat, or a different airframe built around the same principle. Here, also, the small footprint of the rotor-lattice, combined with the redundancy of the many engines, could be appealing as an alternative to human couriers. 

What is unlikely is that a Hexa built as it presently is will see combat. Remote control is useful for medical evacuation or transporting emergency responders to the injured. But the Hexa’s open sides, oblong profile, and whirring rotors slot it into the long and frustrating history of single-personnel flying transports. 

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Department of Defense explored single-pilot rotorcraft that featured soldiers standing on a platform above spinning blades. The Hexa, which keeps people beneath its rotor array, is a massive improvement over that era of design. And, unlike the novelty of jetpacks explored by militaries specifically for combat, the Hexas initial test cases all seem within the bounds of existing technology, without risking catastrophic disaster from use under fire. (Should disaster come, the Hexa boasts a parachute and the ability to land on water.)

With the flight at Eglin, Hexa 09 reached 50 feet in altitude and was airborne for about 10 minutes (Hexa 05, which flew at Eglin in April, also reached 50 feet.) Any useful flying machine will need to fly both higher and longer, but sustained flight is a promising early sign of the vehicle’s potential. If the Hexa can remain as low-cost and easy to fly as LIFT promises and the Air Force expects, the vehicle could become a buzzing part of routine military operations, effectively moving people from place to place with all the flash and dazzle of an airborne Segway. 

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When the new B-21—the Air Force’s next-gen stealth bomber—goes to war, it will do so without a drone escort. The news, broken by Breaking Defense on July 16, is a sharp reversal from earlier plans that had included developing a drone fighter that could travel alongside the bomber and protect it. 

The story of the planned and then abandoned drone escort is a smaller part of the broader story about the B-21, the first new bomber developed by the United States in 30 years, and the first one developed entirely after the Cold War.

News of the cancellation of the drone escort came at the Royal International Air Tattoo, a massive military air show held in England every July.

“The idea of a similar range collaborative combat aircraft is not turning out to be cost effective, so it looks like we’re not going to go that direction,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told Breaking Defense in an interview at the event. Kendall had previously announced the possible drone escort in December 2021, with the intention of the drone fighters being a budget item for 2023.

Abandoning the concept of a fighter escort, even an uncrewed one, for the new bomber is part of the long history of failed attempts to protect bombers en route. Three separate but related programs are key to understanding the impact of this cancellation: the B-21 itself, escort fighters, and the Loyal Wingman drone fighter program.

The B-21

The B-21 Raider began its history as the Long Range Strike Bomber. Rebranded the B-21, and with its “Raider” name stemming from the Army Air Force’s 1942 raid on Tokyo, the aircraft will be the fourth bomber in service with the Air Force. These include the ancient B-52 bombers, which have fought in every US war since Vietnam, the supersonic B-1 bombers, which entered service in 1986, and the stealth B-2 bombers, which first saw combat in the Kosovo War in 1999. The B-21 will be closest in conceit to the B-2.

Those bombers all represent a range of abilities and design eras. While all were built to carry both conventional and nuclear weapons, today only the B-2 and B-52 do so. Nuclear capability was engineered out of B-1 bombers in upgrades done as part of arms control limits on total nuclear-capable bombers.

Early in the development of the Long Range Strike Bomber, the Air Force explored the possibility that the bomber could fly uncrewed, though that notion was roundly rejected for nuclear missions, and probably for other bombing runs, too.

As designed, the B-21 will be a stealth long-range bomber capable of carrying both conventional bombs and nuclear weapons. Long-range in this sense is intercontinental: the B-1 can fly almost 6,000 miles with a useful payload, while the B-2 can reach nearly 7,000 miles, and the B-52 can fly close to 9,000 miles. (Air refueling helps.) To replace existing bombers and accommodate planned future need, the Air Force is requesting that a minimum of 100 B-21s be built, with construction on the first six B-21s underway as of February 2022. (It has not yet flown.)

For countries that want to protect against bombers, the weapons they have historically turned to are anti-air missiles and fighter aircraft. Stealth features, which the B-2 was built around and the B-21 will incorporate as well, make it harder for sensors like radar to detect and track a plane, limiting the danger from anti-air missiles. 

Escort fighters

Fighter jets that can intercept and attack bombers are a hard threat to mitigate. In World War II, bombers, especially the “Fortress” line of which the B-52 is still a part, adopted on-board guns to shoot fighters. (The B-52’s tail guns saw use in Vietnam, but the guns were removed in October 1991, while the gun’s rear-facing radar systems were retained.) That defense strategy struggles against the threat of long-range anti-air missiles and especially at the high speeds of jet combat, which is where the possibility of an escort fighter is appealing. 

An escort fighter is one designed to fly alongside bombers and, in the event of interception, protect the bombers from the hostile fighters. A variant of escort is the “parasite” fighter, which rides attached to or inside a bigger plane, waiting to be released when needed. While the parasite fighters save on fuel, carrying one reduces a bomber’s effective payload and also requires the difficult task of landing a fighter back on a plane after the bombing is done. DARPA is exploring cargo planes that can launch drones, for a similar effect, but without having to worry about a pilot on board or their safety after the mission.

If the escort is to fly alongside the bomber, then, it needs to have the same range as the bomber, while still being in a small enough airframe to be useful and maneuverable as a fighter when it falls under attack. Removing the pilot from a cockpit saves some room in a fighter escort, but the plane would still need to carry enough fuel for an intercontinental journey, enough sensors and weapons to fight, and if the drone is designed for repeat use, enough fuel to carry it back afterwards. That is a tall ask, especially when crewed fighters like the F-16 Fighting Falcon have a one-way travel range of just over 2,000 miles, and a shorter combat effective range.

Mid-air refueling can extend the range of both bombers and fighters, but it would be another hurdle for a long-distance drone escort fighter. Before adding “autonomous mid-air refueling” to the list of tasks for a drone, it is likely the Air Force will want to try a shorter-range drone fighter first.

The Loyal Wingman

The Air Force is already working on a drone fighter of sorts, just not one built for the great distances of bomber flights. The Kratos Valkyrie, part of the Air Force’s “loyal wingman” program, is a drone designed as a relatively inexpensive complement to fighter squadrons.  And Skyborg, another Air Force program to create an autonomous pilot for aircraft, is an effort to enable uncrewed planes to fly alongside crewed craft.

These drones are designed to fly alongside fighters crewed by pilots, with the autonomous system of the drones possibly carrying out tasks like flying ahead. By keeping extra sensors and possibly even weapons in the loyal wingmates, pilots of expensive fighters like the F-35 could send drones in for riskier missions, like scouting and attacking hostile surface-to-air missile sites. 

Even as the prospect of a drone fighter escort for bombers is unlikely, the loyal wingman program remains a priority for the Air Force. The Air Force is still developing drones that can fly and fight alongside crewed planes, even if they are not yet bomber escorts. For now, the B-21 will have to rely on stealth and speed to keep it safe. 

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The middle of July saw a whopping three successful hypersonic missile tests by the United States—tests of missiles designed to go at least five times the speed of sound. On July 13, DARPA announced the successful test of the Operational Fires (OpFires) missile at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Also on July 13, the Air Force announced a successful test of the booster for the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), used in a flight off the California coast. And on July 18, Raytheon announced the second successful flight test of its Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) hypersonic missile for the Air Force.

While the first human-made objects to reach Mach 5 were launched in the 1940s, there has absolutely been a recent uptick in missiles built to go that fast. The other new aspect is that, while in the past hypersonic speeds were a feature of other weapons, today nations such as the United States, China, and Russia are specifically developing weapons to travel at this speed. “Hypersonic” has become a category term for the development of very fast and maneuverable weapons. 

To illustrate how we got to this hypersonic moment, below is a timeline of military hypersonic milestones, starting with ballistic rockets.

1944: Hypersonic descent

German V-2 rockets reached a speed of Mach 4.3 in ascent, and then became hypersonic in descent, clearing Mach 5 as they struck targets in England. The V-2 was the first long-range ballistic missile. With a range of about 200 miles, it carried a one-ton warhead. It was built using concentration camp labor, a process in which at least 10,000 people in those camps died. It was designed by Wernher von Braun, who would go on after the war to have a long career designing ballistic missiles for the US Army and rockets for NASA.

1949: Hypersonic ascent

A rocket launch called Bumper 5 was the fifth in a series of tests at White Sands. The Bumper series tested a kind of two-stage rocket built by putting one rocket on top of another. The rocket on top for the Bumper tests was a sounding rocket, or a small rocket designed to carry instruments into the upper atmosphere to collect data. For the base and booster, Bumper used a V-2 rocket, which functioned as the first stage, allowing the sounding rocket to reach a speed of Mach 6.7 and an altitude of 250 miles.

1959: Hypersonic weapon deployed

The Atlas was the first intercontinental ballistic missile fielded by the United States. Its life in service was short, with the missiles recalled from active duty in 1965. Atlas set the template for many ballistic-trajectory hypersonic weapons to follow. With a range of between 6,400 and 9,000 miles, Atlas could arc up into space and then continue its ballistic trajectory back towards Earth, reaching Mach 21 as it did so. 

Developing Atlas meant designing special heat shielding to ensure that the missile and its thermonuclear payload arrived intact to the target, as the friction and heat from traveling through air at such great speeds could damage the weapon and render it less useful. Today, the US still deploys Minuteman III ICBMs, which are hypersonic missiles like Atlas, but because they travel at detectable ballistic arcs they are not what policymakers or military planners refer to as “hypersonic weapons.”

1980: Hypersonic glide maneuvering

Much of the hypersonics research of the 1960s and 1970s was focused on vehicles that carried people, from the X-15 rocket plane to the proposed and never finished Dyna-Soar space plane. This crewed vehicle research led to the development of “lifting body” vehicles, most famously the Space Shuttle, in which the body of the plane would generate lift at hypersonic speeds (as it glided back towards Earth) the way wings work at subsonic speeds. 

When it comes to weapons development, one of the bigger hypersonic efforts built on this “lifting body” research and created the Maneuvering Reentry Vehicle (MaRV). The Air Force tested the Advanced MaRV in 1980, and it demonstrated the ability of a warhead-carrying reentry vehicle to change its flight pattern at high speed, allowing it to hit targets beyond the initial arc of ballistic trajectory. That maneuverability is crucial to the modern field of hypersonics. Advanced MaRVS were mounted on Pershing II missiles, before those missiles were withdrawn from service as part of an arms control treaty between the United States and the USSR in 1987.

1998: Joint hypersonic scramjet test

The Kholod was an experimental design, Soviet in origin, that ended up being tested by both the United States and the Russian Federation in a project of mutual research. Scramjets take in air at supersonic speeds, then combine it with fuel, ignite the fuel, and express the injected fuel out a back nozzle. To get to supersonic speeds, the Kholod needed to ride on the tip of an anti-air missile. In a 1998 test in Russia with NASA involved, the Kholod reached Mach 6.5.

2010: X-51 WaveRider ushers in modern hypersonics 

Building on previous scramjet knowledge, the Air Force tested the Boeing-built X-51 Waverider from 2010 to 2013. For these tests, the WaveRider was attached to a cruise missile that was carried aloft by a B-52 bomber. The missile worked as a first stage, with the WaveRider accelerating from there to at least Mach 5.

2011: Too fast for thick skin 

In October 2011, DARPA lost contact with its Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2 nine minutes into flight. A report published in April 2012 concluded that traveling at Mach 20 wore through its protective outer coating, damaging the ability of the vehicle to self-correct in flight. 

2014: Advanced hypersonic failure

In a 2014 test at the Kodiak Island launch facility in Alaska, the Army’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon failed. Later investigations revealed the flaws to be in the launch vehicle, not the hypersonic weapon itself. 

September 2021: HAWC

In September 2021, DARPA first tested the Raytheon-built version of the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, which reached speeds at or exceeding Mach 5. Then again in March 2022, DARPA tested the version of the HAWC built by Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne. In July 2022, Raytheon successfully flew its version of HAWC a second time. 

October 2021: Glide vehicle

In October 2021, China demonstrated an object launched partially into orbit that crashed back down at hypersonic speeds. It was most likely a glide vehicle known as a “fractional orbital bombardment system,” a kind of trajectory that can cross the globe without the high arc and sharp descent of a traditional ballistic missile.

May 2022: ARRW

In a test off the coast of California, the Air Force launched an Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon. This test checked the bare minimum of boxes for a successful flight: It detached successfully, its engine started, and it reached Mach 5, all feats that previous tests of the ARRW had failed to achieve. In July 2022, the ARRW again hit its mark.

July 2022: OpFires

In testing at White Sands, DARPA successfully deployed and launched an Operational Fires missile from a Marine Corps logistics truck using Army artillery controls. The intent of the program is to have a hypersonic weapon that can be fired from standard available trucks, hitting targets at speed and range that cannot be safely reached by aircraft.

Watch a video of OpFires below: 

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On July 13, Boston’s Merlin Labs announced that it would be working with the US Air Force to add autonomy to the C-130J Super Hercules cargo transport plane. Merlin’s technology is a kind of advanced auto-copilot, designed to take over the responsibilities of one crew member in flight while being supervised by a human pilot. If the technology delivers as promised, it will allow planes that normally fly with two human pilots to operate with just one, and could even allow single-seater planes to fly fully autonomously.

The same day that Merlin announced its partnership with the Air Force, it also announced a second round of $105 million in funding, which combined with a first round means the company has $130 million of runway to develop its technologies. (In Air Force terms, $130 million is enough money to buy one F-35A and have some change left over.) 

This funding, says Merlin Labs CEO Matthew George, will help the company continue to develop “the world’s most capable, safest and flexible pilot, that will eventually enable very large aircraft to fly with reduced crew and small aircraft to fly totally uncrewed.”

When George says “pilot,” he means it, drawing a distinction between traditional autopilots and Merlin’s product, the way that having cruise control in a car is different from having a driver. That means not just maintaining a course in flight, but also performing takeoffs and landings, responding to challenges like turbulence and storms as they come up, and even talking with air traffic control.

While such a pilot may conjure images of a humanoid robot sitting in a captain’s chair (or, to a certain generation, the goofy inflatable contraption from 1980 comedy Airplane!) Merlin’s pilot is software, plugged into the plane. This software will receive the same kinds of sensor information a pilot does, though it will get it directly as data instead of having to read it off instrument displays. 

[Related: This company is retrofitting airplanes to fly on missions with no pilots]

The Merlin Pilot is “a box that goes into the aircraft,” says George. “Depending on the aircraft, we have a bunch of different interfaces that allow the Merlin pilot and the Merlin intelligence to be able to go and control the aircraft surfaces.”

It may not have a literal hand on the yoke controlling roll, pitch, and yaw, but it is intended to steer the plane all the same by skipping the physical interface and going directly to the electrical controls. Or, on older aircraft that are not fly-by-wire, installing the Merlin pilot means adding servos and actuators so that the system can work with the plane.

As this technology is still in development, George says the company is hiring human factors scientists to figure out the best relation between the Merlin pilot-in-a-box and a human overseer. But even at this stage, the device is set up so that a human pilot can monitor what the Merlin pilot is doing, in much the same way a flight instructor would keep an eye on a student co-pilot.

“We haven’t announced how we’re gonna do that yet,” says George. “You can assume a tablet type device, where the human pilot is able to monitor the system to understand what the system is doing. If the human pilot doesn’t like what the system is doing, they’ll be able to take over for the aircraft.”

In addition to operating the plane mechanically, for Merlin’s pilot to function like a human pilot, it will need to take and follow commands from air traffic control. These commands are verbal, carried out around the world on a fairly uniform basis, but always with the expectation that a human pilot is talking to a human air traffic controller.

“Philosophically, we believe that air traffic control needs to be able to interact with an autonomous aircraft,” says George, adding that this includes not just uncrewed aircraft but also people-carrying planes flown by a crew that includes human and autonomous pilots. “The system present-day is designed to be talked to just like a human pilot and will respond just like a human pilot, albeit with a slightly funny voice.”

Merlin is working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the United States and the New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) as the first regulators for certifying its pilot, and is still figuring out if the autonomous system needs to identify itself as such to air traffic controllers when talking to them.

The Merlin pilot was trained on voice data from a wide variety of air traffic controllers around the world. This training was done through a machine learning process, with the intention of the AI being able to respond on its own, rather than just following a set script of fixed rules for speaking. This makes it more similar to Alexa or Siri than to a bot that simply reads a pre-recorded script.

Before certification comes something called certification basis, which gives the regulator a framework for later certification.“This is the first time ever that a regulator has issued a certification basis to a system that has a machine-learned element,” says George. “Everything in avionics prior to us has been rules based and deterministic.”

For air traffic controllers, and governments more broadly, to trust AI-enabled autonomous pilots means the rules have to accommodate the choices and actions of the AI. When it comes to air traffic control, those choices made by AI will be in spoken words, and will come with the added safety feature of a human pilot on board who is able to clear up any discrepancies.

Merlin plans to deploy its co-pilot on cargo routes in New Zealand first on Cessna Caravans, where relatively empty skies and rough terrain make it ideal for testing aerial supply lines. This will be a civilian air route, but the company intends to take lessons from these routes to flying US Air Force C-130 planes on cargo runs.

“In a world where pilots are becoming more scarce, we can enable pilots to be able to go perform other missions where human brains are even more needed,” says George. “The Air Force, I think, has picked the C-130J as the first testbed for this because it’s the most ubiquitous transport aircraft out there. It is a really good platform to start to think about autonomy in the cockpit in a very real and practical way.”

Merlin’s first task will be adapting the digital pilot to fly the plane, but once it has that figured out, the possibilities of a plug-in autonomous pilot for the Air Force are many. In an immediate sense, the Air Force could reassign human pilots to more sensitive missions while the autonomous pilot works with human crew on routine flights. In short, a cockpit of two human pilots is now just one.

“You can imagine, especially in the early days of the war in Ukraine, we two had areas of Ukraine that were cut off. If you were going to resupply those areas, having the fewest possible human crew members aboard to be able to go perform those vital humanitarian missions, to be able to resupply villages, cities, other places—that’s critical.” says George. “It gives the Air Force a really flexible tool in a way that they can use in a variety of different ways while still having that human in the cockpit and still having that human supervision of the autonomous system.”

As exciting as the possibility of autonomous co-pilots on wartime resupply missions are, George emphasizes that the tech at present is delivering an interesting future. Cargo running in the sky above New Zealand with an AI that can talk to air traffic control is not just a step to future technology—it is a feat in and of itself. With this week’s announcement, Merlin has more funding to make it possible. It remains to be seen how much future those investors are buying with $130 million.

Correction on July 15, 2022: This article has been updated to clarify that the cargo routes in New Zealand will utilize Cessna Caravans, not Beechcraft King Airs.

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South of Death Valley and north of Los Angeles, the Air Force is testing a new weapon designed not to kill. Together with the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Research Laboratory is conducting two months of testing on a device called the High-Powered Joint Electromagnetic Non-Kinetic Strike Weapon, or HiJENKS. It’s the culmination of a five-year project to create a machine that can destroy electronics in a targeted way. 

HiJENKS is the successor to a similar weapon, the Counter-electronics High-Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP. Both weapons were designed to disable electronics without using physical force, such as an explosive blast or the kinetic force from impact. Making a weapon that can disable electronics without causing physical damage to its target is hard, and it might be part of why the Air Force is open to new delivery systems, other than a missile, in this latest iteration.

In short, HiJENKS is a high-powered weapon that fries electronics with pulsed bursts of microwave energy. When it comes to targets, many weapon and sensor systems require smooth functioning of electronics to work, and a disruption that fries circuits could halt a threat while leaving the physical parts of the system untouched. 

CHAMP, which HiJENKS is designed to improve upon, was built to fit in the case of a bomber-launched cruise missile. Little about the exact form of HiJENKS is known at present, though it could be mounted on a new cruise missile. Alternatively, HiJENKS might be carried in a weapon pod that draws power from a plane, or it could even become the primary weapon system of a drone flown as a wingmate to a crewed fighter.

“We’ll start looking at more service-specific applications once we’ve done this test that demonstrates the technology,” Jeffry Heggemeier, chief of AFRL’s high-power electromagnetics division, reportedly told press at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

“Heggemeier said the program hasn’t yet designated a platform for the weapon, but noted HiJENKS’ smaller footprint means it could be integrated on a wider range of carrier systems,” reports C4ISRNET.

To grasp the full ambition the Air Force has for HiJENKS, it helps to first understand its predecessor, CHAMP. 

Thanks CHAMP

The origins of CHAMP, possibly the first non-kinetic-effect missile deployed by the Air Force, can be traced back to 2009. The Air Force was looking for a weapon that could disable electronics without causing physical damage. Functionally, CHAMP was a cruise missile that replaced an explosive payload for one that targeted electronics with high-powered pulsed microwaves. Possible targets for disruption could include the navigation computer in a missile, or the radar and targeting system of an anti-air missile installation. The Air Force demonstrated CHAMP in a test in Utah in 2012, but then the program stalled. 

In 2017, CHAMP briefly gained some wider attention as a possible tool for the United States to use against a North Korean nuclear launch, though that possibility had real limits. The first is that, while not all electronics are hardened against electromagnetic energy attacks, nuclear missiles and warheads tend to be. (This is because a nuclear blast is the one kind of weapon guaranteed to produce an electromagnetic pulse, which is part of the overall horror of a nuclear detonation, though not the primary risk to people.) 

Regardless of its specific limitations in that mission, CHAMP was designed to give the Air Force an option for neutralizing an electronics-dependent threat without having to kill people or destroy a building or vehicle. 

When a cruise missile outfitted with CHAMP was fired at a specific building, reports Popular Mechanics, “The resulting pulse of electromagnetic radiation would fry enemy electronics, rendering vital equipment worthless without, as the Air Force Research Lab put it, ‘damage to infrastructure and danger to life.’”

And HiJENKS ensue

In 2019, the Air Force retired the missile that carried CHAMP. HiJENKS could be in a new missile, or it could be in a range of weapons from drone payload, to plane-mounted weapon pod. Whatever the new form factor, HiJENKS appears to be developed to make it a more immediately useful weapon than CHAMP.

“HIJENKS will include improvements that ‘resolve operational issues’ that the CHAMP team experienced with the first airborne [high-powered microwave] system,” wrote Jack McGonegal of the Air Force in the spring of 2020, as part of an Air Force task force analyzing future weapons. “These improvements will most likely involve decreases in size and weight of the [high-powered microwave] payload while seeing an increase in maximum power.”

However HiJENKS develops, it carries with it some of the inherent risks in a new weapon loaded inside a familiar casing. Because the effect of the high-powered microwave is range-limited, a commander targeted by HiJENKS would be unable to tell if the missile fired is carrying deadly explosives, or tactically frustrating but nonlethal microwaves. When fired upon by HiJENKS, it would be reasonable to assume most people would respond as though under attack by a traditional weapon. 

In battle, that may not make much of a difference at all. But if commanders and presidents are hoping a non-kinetic weapon like HiJENKS may expand their options in a conflict, that assumption carries the risk that it will be seen as a conventional threat, regardless.

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Most people update their wardrobe every once in a while, and after 40 years, the Air Force is looking to do the same with one of the most important pieces in its catalog: the helmet aircrew members wear while performing the essential, often dangerous missions required of them.

After several years of searching, the Air Force announced on June 25 that it had selected a company to proceed with prototype development for a new flight helmet that could become standard issue for fixed-wing aircrew members across the service (except for F-35 pilots, who have their own $400,000 helmet). Though the Air Force did not give the helmet a specific name in its press release, LIFT Airborne Technologies, the company behind it, calls it the AV 2.2 Next Generation Fixed Wing Helmet. The helmet is said to be lighter, better ventilated, and more adaptable to helmet-mounted devices than the gray HGU-55/P helmets crews have worn since the 1980s.

While the new helmet still has to undergo more research, testing, and improvements, Air Force officials appeared excited about selecting it for prototype development. The legacy helmet currently in use “was not originally designed to support advances in aircraft helmet-mounted display systems,” Scott Cota, an aircrew flight equipment program analyst for Air Combat Command, said in a press release. Such devices add weight to the helmet and change its center of gravity, which leads to discomfort for air crew members. That discomfort is not just annoying: it’s a long-term health risk that has ended the career of many an expensively trained aviator.

The old 55/P helmet weighs 2.2 pounds, according to manufacturer Gentex. Though that sounds light, it adds up when pilots pull nine times that weight in a high-G maneuver. The average weight of a human head is about 10 or 11 pounds, so that, plus the helmet, equals about 120 pounds or more of weight sitting on your neck at nine Gs.

“Not only is that uncomfortable to be under nine Gs when you’re flying, but the biggest issue is later in your career when pilots start having neck and back issues,” said Air Force F-35 and F-16 fighter pilot Maj. Justin “Hasard” Lee in a video about aircrew helmets. “I know unfortunately a lot of pilots that have had to be medically retired because of that.”

American pilots are not the only ones who deal with this issue. According to a 2012 study, 72 percent of surveyed Royal Norwegian Air Force pilots experienced neck pain in relation to flying, while 35 percent experienced back pain. Neck rotation was a major cause of grief for the pilots, particularly “checking six,” meaning to look behind them, the study found. To help keep its dwindling number of fighter pilots in the service, the US Air Force actually contracts athletic trainers, strength coaches and massage therapists to help pilots better prepare their bodies for the strain of G-force.

“The idea behind the program is the preventive maintenance,” said F-15C pilot Maj. Clayton “Red Beard” Cruichshank about a physical training program at Nellis Air Force Base last April. “Rather than waiting until someone has a back or neck problem, we’re already training to be stronger before problems occur, so we’re better able to handle the stresses.”

The long-term neck and back health of aviators was one reason why the Air Force started looking for a new helmet. Guido Rietdyk, CEO of LIFT Airborne Technologies, said the goal “is to have the helmet not exceed 2.2 lbs in any size or configuration,” which could be great if “any configuration” includes the weight of helmet-mounted devices. Aviators have a lot of gear they often have to mount to their helmets to do their jobs. For example, fighter pilots use the Helmet Mounted Cueing System, which shows flying and targeting data on a heads-up display on the pilot’s visor. For night flying, they also wear night-vision goggles, but switching between the two with the old helmet was a real headache.

“I’ve flown a lot of night combat missions,” Lee said. “The thing was, you’d fly with the HMCS, until it got dark, you’d have to take off the helmet, take off the HMCS system, put on a bracket, put on your night vision goggles, and so that was a whole process.”

That’s a problem when you’re flying a close air support mission for ground troops under fire who don’t have time for you to adjust your headgear.

“That’s time you’re taking away from the troops on the ground,” Lee said. “So being able to streamline that process is important.”

The Next Generation Fixed Wing Helmet makes it easy to attach the NVGs, with no extra bracket required, Lee said. 

Another reason why the Air Force went looking for a new helmet is the fact that many of its aviators today do not look the same as their 1980s predecessors. Capt. Timothy James, a program manager at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, said that the new helmets will provide a “better fit for operators of all sizes, genders and ethnicities.”

Helmet fit seems to be a problem for many aviators wearing the old 55/Ps. 

“The current 55/Ps are terrible!” one C-17 cargo jet pilot told Task & Purpose in December. “Mine has never fit right since pilot training,” he added. On top of that, the old helmets are swampy pits after a long flight. 

“They don’t breathe at all,” he said. “It’s a huge relief when we get to take off the helmet after a flight or during pilot swap out.”

A navigator aboard a WC-130J weather reconnaissance plane shared his opinion of the old helmets. Like the C-17 pilot, Withee and his fellow WC-130J aviators don’t have to wear helmets very often, but when they do, it’s not the most pleasant experience.

“For me it doesn’t fit great around the ears so it doesn’t do a great job with isolating noise,” said Lt. Col. Mark Withee, a navigator with the 53rd Reconnaissance Squadron, in December. “After a while it’s also pretty uncomfortable with the way it’s squishing my head.”

The new helmets seem to address both the issues with fit and ventilation. Lee, the F-35 pilot, said the new brain bucket has a few knobs for adjusting various parts of the headwear so it fits just right. The pilot also custom-fitted the helmet on his own using an in-depth app that comes with it, he said.

A comfortable fit is more than a creature comfort. Having a helmet jostle around in the middle of a mission could be a potentially dangerous distraction. There are also certain heads-up display tools such as the Helmet Mounted Cueing System, where the pilot’s eyes have to be centered properly for him or her to see the signals within.

“They actually did a great job,” Lee said of the LIFT helmet, which also has vents in the back where sticky air can go out. “The helmet has this dynamic fit system which means it’s a lot more comfortable than the old helmet.”

Fit, ventilation and devices aside, another neat gimmick that the new helmet has is a pair of lights mounted to the sides. Those lights help aviators read maps or other documents in flight, but the really cool part is how you turn it on. In the past, pilots brought flashlights to read flight documents, but that meant they had to take a hand off their flight controls to hold the flashlight. Some pilots tried strapping lights to their fingers, or wearing tongue-activated lights on their oxygen masks, but Lee found those solutions clunky or unappealing. This new helmet is activated by a button which the aviator presses by clenching his or her jaw muscles. There are different activation settings pilots can choose, but Lee demonstrated using a short clench, followed by a long clench, to activate the pair of lights on his helmet.

“I was skeptical about this at first, but it actually works surprisingly well,” Lee said. “It’s probably the best solution that I’ve found to lighting up the cockpit.”

The helmet doesn’t just shine a light, it also blocks out loud engine noise, Lee said, which is “huge” on a six to eight hour mission.

LIFT’s helmet emerged ahead on top of more than 100 different design ideas the Air Force received since it first began working on a replacement in 2019. In fact, it was one of the first initiatives to go through AFWERX, an Air Force group dedicated to working with smaller “nontraditional” defense companies to help make their ideas a reality, the Air Force said in its press release.

If the helmet passes the next stage of research and testing, the Air Force will offer a production contract in 2024. After that, Air Combat Command plans on using a phased approach to deliver the new gear to fixed-wing aircrews across the service, starting with the F-15E Strike Eagle.

 “Every little piece of equipment you have, you want to make sure it’s updated so you can be as lethal and capable as possible,” Lee said. “They’ve gone through this helmet and made everything seamless for the pilot.”

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On May 14, above the sea off the coast of California, one of the Air Force’s oldest bombers tested one of its newest weapons. Carried by a venerable B-25H Stratofortress, the projectile the military released and successfully tested is officially called an AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW). After release, the ARRW blasted forward, reaching five times greater than the speed of sound, making it hypersonic.

“The team’s tenacity, expertise, and commitment were key in overcoming the past year’s challenges to get us to the recent success,” Heath Collins, the Air Force Program Executive Officer for Weapons, said in a release.

That tenacity likely refers to the previous failures of the ARRW in testing. In April 2021, an ARRW failed to leave the wing of the bomber carrying it. During a July 2021 test, the ARRW’s rocket engine failed to start after it was released from a B-52. In December 2021, an ARRW test was aborted with the missile still on the wing. This most recent successful test means the fourth time was the charm.

After this string of failed tests, the Air Force is celebrating that its hypersonic missile met the minimum requirements for a hypersonic missile: It was released from the plane carrying it, the engine started when it was supposed to, and it reached Mach 5.

[Related: The US flew its most iconic Cold War bomber over Europe]

The missile is distinct from other hypersonic weapons, most notably the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) tested by DARPA in 2021 and again in March. HAWC is a concept for a future weapon platform, making the project somewhat lower stakes because its promise is more firmly anchored in the future. But the ARRW has been envisioned as a weapon that could move straight from prototype to service and production once it has proven capable, giving the US an operational weapon.

The ARRW just needs to prove it is reliable, first.

By design, the ARRW system includes a booster rocket that reaches hypersonic speed, at which point the booster separates from the hypersonic glide vehicle, which would be the actual weapon. The ARRW’s test plan calls for this booster and glide vehicle separation to take place in testing, but, as noted by our colleagues at The War Zone, “It’s unclear if this flight test included the vehicle separation aspect.”

Lockheed Martin, the lead contract for the ARRW, emphasized in a release the safe separation of the test system from the bomber in flight, while not addressing if the glide vehicle had separated from the booster in the test. 

Lockheed Martin instead noted that “[T]he successful flight demonstrates the weapon’s ability to reach and withstand operational hypersonic speeds, collect crucial data for use in further flight tests, and validate safe separation from the aircraft to deliver the glide body and warhead to designated targets from significant standoff distances.”

That data should prove useful for future tests, as should finally having a successful release of the ARRW and ignition of its booster in flight.

[Related: DARPA quietly tested a hypersonic weapon last month]

“Significant standoff distances” means that the bomber carrying the missile can use it to hit targets far beyond the reach of any anti-air defenses. This is part of the role of the B-52 in tests. Not only is the plane a general workhorse of a bomber, it is an old machine, designed and first flown in an era with only limited anti-air missiles. In the 70 years since the first prototype B-52 took its first flight, anti-air weapons have improved immensely, making the kind of bombing Stratofortresses were designed for at best anachronistic, unless fighting against poorly supplied and equipped foes.

Putting a long-range missile on a B-52 allows the bomber to still attack enemies far away. Making that missile hypersonic decreases the flight time between the launch of an attack and lethal impact, and also makes the work of any interception and missile defense that much more difficult.

“ARRW is designed to enable the U.S. to hold fixed, high-value, time-sensitive targets at risk in contested environments from stand-off distances,” writes the Air Force. “It will also expand precision-strike capabilities by enabling rapid response strikes against heavily defended land targets.”

Should the ARRW continue to have success in tests, the missile will give the United States a weapon that its oldest bombers can use to destroy fortified and armored positions and buildings from a great distance. 

Weapons, especially ones as long-range and high-powered as hypersonics, can have geopolitical effects just by being tested. As indicated by the delay in announcing DARPA’s successful March hypersonic test until May, these weapons exist in the shadow of existing nuclear arsenals, and might change the nuclear launch calculus of leaders afraid they might no longer have a deterrent against hypersonic assassination. 

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This article was originally featured on Task & Purpose.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of War and Climate Week, a series of stories exploring how the U.S. military is coping with extreme weather, sea-level rise, and a warming globe.

Forget what you’ve seen in movies: flying low and slow in large fixed-wing aircraft is tough to do. It is even more difficult while flying through mountains, where the weather is unpredictable and the terrain forbidding. Now add to the picture crowded airspace where you might collide with another aircraft if you are not careful. Oh, and by the way, half the airspace is filled with smoke and there is a wildfire raging off your wingtip with flames reaching over 100 feet high.

That kind of delicate situation is why airmen with years of experience consider aerial firefighting to be one of their most challenging missions outside of combat. But it is a mission that members of the Air Force’s 302nd Airlift Wing often find themselves on when government officials need extra hands to contain the devastating fires that spark across the country all year round.

“It does require all six of us on an H-model C-130 to work together, to be supremely proficient in the aircraft and really in sync,” said Lt. Col. Richard Pantusa, chief of aerial firefighting for the 302nd. The wing flies the C-130 Hercules, a highly-adaptable four-engine transport plane that can be modified to land on snow, shoot 105mm cannon rounds, or fly into hurricanes. But even the C-130 needs its crew on point to safely execute a low, slow aerial firefighting mission.

“150 to 200 feet above the ground, going 120 knots or so  … those parameters are challenging,” Pantusa said. 120 knots is equivalent to about 138 miles per hour. In that situation, pilots must be laser-focused to make sure the aircraft is at the proper speed and altitude and headed in the right direction and in the correct configuration to prevent drag. The co-pilot meanwhile is busy looking out for hazards such as power lines, birds or smoke which can seemingly come out of nowhere so close to the ground. The navigator keeps an eye out for terrain hazards and makes sure the aircraft can get down to the target area; the engineer monitors the aircraft to make sure it is performing well and the loadmasters in the back operate the Modular Airborne Firefighting System, the 11,000-pound system of metal tubes and tanks that drops 3,000 gallons of fire retardant in less than five seconds.

“They all have a job to do and it’s all critical in nature,” Pantusa said.

But this is a military aircrew we’re talking about, right? Aren’t they trained to do this sort of thing in their sleep while getting shot at by rocket-propelled grenades? Not quite. While the crews qualified to fly aerial firefighting missions are well-trained to do the job, it is not their primary mission. The 302nd is a combat-ready tactical airlift and airdrop unit, and tactical airlift is a different ballgame from aerial firefighting.

There’s a good reason why these combat-ready aircrews have to switch up their tactics to help with wildfires at home: the Laguna Fire of September 1970, when a 175,000-acre wildfire swept through southern California, killing 16 people and destroying nearly 400 buildings. In response to the disaster, Congress created the MAFFS program, ordering the U.S. Forest Service to provide the MAFFS system and the fire retardant while the Department of Defense provides the aircraft, crews and maintainers to fly the mission. 

Though this article is about Air Force crews, most of the country’s aerial firefighting is carried out by a large fleet of civilian contractors such as 10 Tanker and Coulson Aviation. The MAFFS program authorized the Air Force to set up eight C-130s and their crews to be ready to help with the firefighting mission in case the civilian contractor fleet was stretched too thin by an intense fire season. One such season was June 2021, when seven out of 10 Federal Emergency Management Agency regions were experiencing large wildfire activity requiring federal assistance.

“The contract fleet was stretched to the limits,” Pantusa said. “We’re the surge force, so when we’re called in to surge, that’s what we do.”

The 302nd Airlift Wing is one of four wings in the Air Force trained and equipped to do the MAFFS mission, though the 302nd is the only unit in the Air Force Reserves that can do so. The others are all Air National Guard: California’s 146th Airlift Wing, Nevada’s 152nd Airlift Wing and Wyoming’s 153rd Airlift Wing. Each wing has two C-130s and the necessary crews trained to answer the National Interagency Fire Center’s call at a moment’s notice. 

“We have 48 hours from the time they notify us to get wherever they need us to go,” Pantusa said.

Since Air Force crews like those from the 302nd are the backup, the scene is already lively when they arrive. The airspace over a fire is usually crowded with other aircraft lining up to drop retardant to help crews working on the ground. To make things more complicated, there might also be Air Force RC-26 surveillance planes collecting intelligence on the fires; helicopters scooping water for direct attacks on the fire, and other manned or unmanned planes providing support and coordination to the rest of the effort. Though the aircraft come from all over the region and even all over the world, they spend time beforehand brushing up on the same standard tactics and procedures to minimize the chance of an accident and to make the operation as efficient as possible.

“It is like a NATO operation,” in terms of getting a large number of air crews from a wide range of backgrounds on the same page, Pantusa said.

When an Air Force C-130 takes off to fight fires, it is at the disposal of the incident commander, the firefighter on the ground who comes up with the strategy for containing and knocking down the fire. Despite what it might look like from pictures, the purpose of a MAFFS mission is not to put out a fire by dropping fire retardant directly onto it. Instead, the purpose of a MAFFS mission is to drop the retardant on the place where the incident commander does not want the fire to spread, so that the ground teams can more easily contain it. After all, it’s called fire retardant, meaning to prevent or inhibit, not fire putter-outer.

“We don’t put fires out, we slow the rate of spread and cool down fire as it progresses so ground forces can get ahead of it,” Pantusa said. 

The reason C-130s and other aircraft have to fly so slow and low to drop fire retardant is because it is essentially “just enhanced water,” which needs to fall to the ground vertically like rain in order to effectively coat the plants, logs and other flammable material below, the airman said. 

MAFFS is an impressive system: it can drop 3,000 gallons of fire retardant weighing about 28,000 pounds through a tube out the back of the aircraft in less than five seconds. The retardant, also called “slurry” or “mud,” is 80 to 85% water and 10 to 15% ammonium sulfate, a jelling agent, and red coloring, according to the Air Force. Why red? Because it helps pilots see where they dropped previous loads. While 3,000 gallons sounds like a lot, it can cover an area only a quarter-mile long and 60 feet wide. That’s a good amount of ground, but sometimes an incident commander wants several miles covered as he or she sets up a line of containment. When that happens, “we get into a loop where we launch, drop, refill and do it again,” Pantusa said.

The maintenance crews waiting at the flightline are trained like a NASCAR pit crew, the officer explained: the plane can land, take on a fresh supply of fire retardant and take off again in as little as 15 minutes. A hard day’s work might involve six to eight drops, but crews have performed as many as 15 in a single day. Remember, each of those drops involves an intense amount of concentration to pull off, but it also requires a significant amount of flexibility.

“All it takes is the wind to shift 90 degrees and everything we’re working on can be called off,” Pantusa said. For example, if smoke blows over the drop zone, it might limit visibility, which makes it too dangerous for MAFFS crews to fly into. Luckily they do not fly alone: it’s standard procedure for C-130s and other firefighting aircraft to follow a smaller lead plane, often flown by federal or state pilots, which makes sure the conditions and wind speed are good and that the escape route is clear for the aircraft to climb back up.

“They show us where the retardant goes, we fly right behind him,” Pantusa said. “They help before you take a 150,000-pound aircraft through.”

The wing rotates out crews every week to avoid burnout, the officer explained. But fighting wildfires is still a demanding task, especially last year when all eight of the military’s MAFFS aircraft helped fight the Dixie fire. The largest single wildfire in California history, the Dixie fire covered 963,300 acres and destroyed 1,300 buildings in northern California last summer.

“We found ourselves in the situation of kind of scrambling to put together another month worth of a second crew that we didn’t know we were going to need,” Lt. Col. Patrick McKelvey, a C-130 pilot with the Nevada Air National Guard, told Air Force Magazine last year. A former Navy F/A-18 fighter pilot, McKelvey said dropping fire retardant is as challenging as a nighttime carrier landing.

“Every situation we go into is unique … You’ve never flown that line. You have absolutely no idea what you’re getting into,” he said. “And we’re going down to 150 feet and doing it far slower than we would normally do an airdrop because of the way the retardant comes out of the airplane. So, it’s lower, you’re heavier at max gross weight, you’re using far more power. It’s hot, you’re at high altitude up in the mountains, canyons, obstacles, trees. Next to flying around the aircraft carrier at night, this is probably some of the most high-risk flying I’ve ever done.”

The fires could get worse in future summers. Multiple studies show that climate change is making wildfires season longer and more devastating, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Part of the reason why the season is longer is due to warmer springs, longer summer dry seasons, and drier soils and vegetation, the EPA said.

“Climate change threatens to increase the frequency, extent, and severity of fires through increased temperatures and drought,” the agency wrote. “Earlier spring melting and reduced snowpack result in decreased water availability during hot summer conditions, which in turn contributes to an increased wildfire risk, allowing fires to start more easily and burn hotter.”

However, it is unclear whether that means Air Force crews like those of the 302nd Wing will find themselves fighting more fires. Many factors affect whether Air Force MAFFS crews are sent in to help, and it’s not just the amount of acreage burning, Pantusa explained. For example, the most intense year for Air Force MAFFS in terms of sorties flown was 1994, and no military crews flew MAFFS missions in some years as recently as 2019, he said. 

“There are a lot of variables: the contract civilian fleet gets larger and smaller based on federal funding,” the airman said. “And it’s not just that fire is burning, it’s where it burns, so significant risk to population centers is another factor.”

No matter what happens this summer, MAFFS crews like Pantusa’s are trained to respond when needed. The missions can bring up a strange mix of emotions, because while it is rewarding to pull off a MAFFS drop, it is also heartbreaking to meet people who lost their homes. 

“We sometimes end up eating breakfast with folks whose house burned down,” Pantusa said. “It’s a spectrum of emotions, both rewarding and tragic.”

Hopefully there are far fewer folks with burned homes thanks to the efforts of the Air Force MAFFS program and the larger fleet of civilian contractors who do the mission year-round.

“It’s a culmination of a lot of training and cooperation because we do work with so many partners in both government and industry,” Pantusa said. “There’s a level of trust and competency which combine to do something really useful.”

The post Why fighting wildfires is so dangerous for Air Force pilots appeared first on Popular Science.

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An unexploded bomb is a terrible threat, and the Air Force is investing in armored vehicles with powerful lasers and robot arms to safely clear them off runways. In February, the service branch announced that in the fall of 2022 it will start fielding these new bomb disposal vehicles. These machines, and the people inside them, will work to ensure runways, both at home and nearer to combat abroad, are able to launch and receive aircraft without sending pilots into an accidental inferno on the ground.

These vehicles are called “Recovery of Airbase Denied By Ordnance” or “RADBO,” and they are based on MRAPS, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles that the Pentagon used for patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan. MRAPs are already built to ensure the survival of their passengers against explosives, with special v-shaped hulls directing the blast force away. There is enough of a surplus of MRAPs that NASA has some, and the military has offered many to police departments as overqualified crowd control vehicles.

Bombs can end up on runways for a host of reasons. The most dramatic are enemy attacks, with cruise missiles cratering the surface from afar, or hostile air forces flying close enough to try bombing an airbase from the sky. Ground attacks, too, can place explosives on pavement, like army artillery or bombardment by nearby mortars.

Also possible, while less flashy, is the Air Force accidentally having a loose bomb on takeoff or landing end up on the tarmac. In every instance, clearing the runway of explosives, however those explosives got there, is essential for returning the runway to service so aircraft can safely take off and land.

An explosion on a runway is an immediate problem, and provided the debris can be cleared, has an easy fix: repair the runway, and continue moving. An unexploded bomb is more complicated, as the explosive ordinance disposal (EOD) crews may not know if the bomb is a dud, or if the process of clearing it will cause it to explode. 

“Current procedures require an EOD technician in a bomb-resistant suit to place a charge on unexploded ordnance or to attempt to defuse it, a procedure that is ‘time- and manpower-consuming’ as well as highly dangerous,” an Air Force Life Cycle Management Center spokesperson told Air Force Magazine in February.

Instead of sending a highly skilled human in a protective suit to defuse a bomb by hand, what RADBO proposes is: What if a truck shot it with a laser instead? The RADBO MRAP will mount a three-kilowatt Zeus III laser and a robotic arm, in a vehicle that weighs approximately 18 tons.

Together with the Army, the Air Force started exploring the laser part of RADBO vehicles in 2015, with a vision for both battlefield and air base use cases. As a 2015 press release noted, RADBO vehicles were also proposed for immediately clearing the live fire area after a practice bombing run, allowing more pilots to train for attack runs without having to wait for the target area to be reset. 

With enough power and time, a laser could burn through a bomb casing, blowing up the explosive from a safe distance for humans and vehicles. The robot arm on the vehicle is there to allow crews to investigate craters without physically getting in them, and to move bombs to places where it is better to detonate them.

Much of this work can be done, in part, with human crews or ground robots, but the process is time intensive. The RADBO vehicle as designed becomes a holistic answer to clearing potentially explosive detritus from a space it should not be.

For now, the Air Force envisions RADBO vehicles as better safety equipment at existing bases. In the future, a conflict could call for the creation of new runways closer to the front of that conflict, and RADBO vehicles could ensure those ad-hoc and rapidly assembled airstrips remain operational even in the face of hostile attacks.

“We have an air superiority mission,” said Tony Miranda, RADBO program manager. “If we are in a high threat environment, and there are unexploded ordnance on the airfield, maintainers can’t take care of the aircraft and the aircraft can’t get off of the runway. These RADBO vehicles will be utilized by Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technicians to detonate the unexploded ordnance (UXO) from a standoff range, so we can get back to the business of flying planes.”

In the meantime, having the vehicles on hand can turn an dropped or otherwise inadvertent unexploded ordnance on a base into an imminently solved problem, instead of a hazard that persists for weeks, years, or even decades.

The post Trucks with lasers and robotic arms will help the Air Force handle bombs appeared first on Popular Science.

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On March 2, the US Navy pulled an F-35C from the ocean. The $94.4 million jet came in hard for a landing on January 24, then skidded across the deck, injuring sailors before it plummeted off and into the sea. The pilot ejected and survived, but the incident raises an ominous question over aircraft operations: What can the military do to ensure pilots land safely as many times as they take off, and help all aviators avoid the mistakes of their peers?

The F-35C is a Navy plane, and aircraft carrier landings are notoriously hard. But no branch of the military is immune to crashes, and both the Marines and Air Force have crashed planes this year. Post-crash investigations, pulling from the recorded avionics and telemetry data of the planes, can reveal the specific causes of error, from mechanical failure to choices made by pilots.

In 2020, the Air Force turned to artificial intelligence to catch unusual flight patterns during training, before they become a costly or even tragic error. To better understand outliers in flight patterns, the Air Force is working with Crowdbotics, an artificial intelligence/machine learning firm, to analyze and process the data that planes already collect. This data processing and analysis is done with custom software, which both the company and the Air Force refer to as a specific tool.

“Fighter aircraft are one of the biggest investments in the American military. They are super advanced pieces of technology with a human being attached to them,” says Crowdbotics CEO Anand Kulkarni. Fighters are “extremely well instrumented with data production machinery, and all of that data more or less is thrown away at the end of every flight.”

Planes capture this data, the avionics and flight telemetry, many times a second, creating a record of time, speed, and position. It’s a massive data set produced by every flight, and one that is hard for humans to process without the aid of data analysis tools. At present, that data can be used in debriefings, where pilots sit after a mission and watch the flights play out on a monitor in the space of a couple hours. That’s enough time to catch any big changes, like a jet’s sudden break with formation, but the data has the potential to reveal much more. 

“Typically at the end of the debrief the student keeps some notes, but we erase our tapes,” says Major Mark Poppler, of the 4th F-15E training squadron. “We erase our shot sheets and all the data gets flushed. That’s how this project came about. My predecessor recognized this and thought, given the advances we’ve made in computing in recent decades, how can we automate a lot of this process to make debrief more efficient and then to flush less data?”

At present Crowdbotics’ work with the Air Force is limited to the F-15Es in the training squadron at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. The program is in the Phase 2 stage, with much more of its potential awaiting success and expansion to other aircraft.

Takeoffs and landings

Even limited to just the training flights of F-15E pilots, Crowdbotics’ prototype analytical tool appears to make it possible to catch performance deviations before they become a major problem. Consider the work of landing an aircraft, something every flight should include, which ideally are routine events, not disasters. Data collected by planes and processed through the prototype tool built by Crowbotics can see if anything is amiss.

“What air speed you execute an approach and a landing in a Strike Eagle [an F-15E] is dependent on your fuel weight,” says Poppler. “And so [the prototype tool] can actually calculate final approach speed based on your fuel weight. And then grade you to the same standards that an evaluator pilot would grade you: Was your approach on speed? Did you touchdown fast? Did you touchdown in the appropriate portion of the runway?”

[Related: Everything to know about the Air Force’s new fighter jet, the F-15EX Eagle II]

Those are all questions that can be easily answered with avionics data, but are hard for an instructor in another plane or on the ground to make sense of. In training, if a pilot is found to consistently take a landing angle too sharp, the data could catch it before the instructor, and the instructor could adjust accordingly. By processing flight data from the same pilots over time and across a program, the Air Force could use the tool to assess how an individual improves. By looking at flight data collected across a squadron, the data can detect if a pilot is doing something different than everyone else.

“The way that I look at this and the way that the software looks at it, whenever we see outliers, we don’t necessarily start by saying this is good or bad,” says Kulkarni, of Crowdbiotics. “We say ‘this is different from the book’ or different from the norm of what most pilots do.” But different in this case could mean worse—or better.

Catching errors is important for preserving the safety of the pilots and the aircraft. Spotting innovation allows new techniques to disseminate much faster than waiting for a pilot to complete a career and return as an instructor. It has the potential to move the transfer of knowledge from a generational exchange to a peer exchange. 

The execution of all things

Crowdbotics’ contract with the Air Force is formally for “Standardizing and Optimizing USAF Pilot Training With Machine Learning and Deep Maneuver Analytics.” The tool can analyze flights in a simulator the same way it can analyze flight recorder data, and bring greater understanding of normal operations and deviations to flight analysis. With optimization, it can also break from a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching pilots. Every year, the training squadron takes in 40 to 50 pilots, with the expectation of graduating as many as possible to then serve 10-year commitments in the Air Force. It’s a kind of batch processing training that endures in giant bureaucratic organizations like the military.

Using specific data from each pilot, the Air Force can instead better allocate instructor time among all those pilots, perhaps identifying those who need more help and then focusing on them than focusing on teaching the top performers. 

The data can help find which pilots need help, which pilots have already demonstrated mastery, and which trainees may be best suited to a different aircraft. It is still early in the program, but having the data means the Air Force can use actual flight analytics to assess the readiness of pilots, supplementing instructor evaluations and hopefully promising better outcomes than existing methods.

This can also apply to getting pilots ready for missions. If a specific mission calls for the F-15Es to be used as ground bombers, a commander could look at the record from her squadron and pick pilots based on how well they have flown those missions in the past. (The F-15 was originally designed as purely an air-to-air fighter, but the two-seater F-15E variant is designed to attack targets on the ground, while retaining the fighting ability of the class.)

Right now, the prototype is “proving that they can recognize and create maneuvers,” says Poppler. “What we chose to start with is really single-ship [one aircraft], unclassified, maneuvers, takeoffs, landings, instrument approaches, loops, kind of more aerobatics, things like that.”

In the future, the tool may be used to examine the more complex maneuvers that show up in training for air-to-air combat. For now, the Crowdbiotics tool is building a body of data to capture what regular flight looks like, what outlier flights look like, and what if anything can be done to train pilots to reach the best outcomes in their planes.

“So if you are flying and if you’re coming in too hot, if your angle attack is angle of attack is too high on the ending, or if in a combat situation, you responded improperly to an attacker or to a defender, or in a way that was suboptimal, the system will tell you that. It’ll identify what you should have done, and then tell you exactly what the deviation was from it,” says Kulkarni. “That’s whether it’s simulated data or real, the only difference between simulator data and real data is you get more data points in the real data stream.”

Should the technology prove valuable to the Air Force, it could expand to other aircraft types, and Crowdbotics is open to exploring it for commercial flight analysis as well. Flying is a data-rich activity, and pilots can gain by learning from that data before they’re in a crash.

The post How AI could help new Air Force pilots avoid costly mistakes appeared first on Popular Science.

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Last week, on the morning of Wednesday, March 9, an electric aircraft with a 50-foot wingspan called Alia took flight out of Plattsburgh, New York. The plane, powered by two motors driving a propeller in the rear, flew for about an hour. Later that day, it flew again. The Alia aircraft is an experimental flying machine that produces no emissions while in the air, and it’s made by a Vermont-based company called Beta Technologies. What made these flights notable is that for the first time for this company and others in an Air Force program called Agility Prime, at the controls and on board the aircraft were Air Force aviators who both have a long history as test pilots.

Beta isn’t the only company working on electric aircraft: A number of others are as well, such as Joby, Kitty Hawk, Wisk, and Archer. Those startups and others are in the process of creating planes that can take off and land vertically, like a helicopter, and then fly like typical airplanes, powered by batteries, motors, and propellers in different configurations. The industry term for these new experimental flying machines is eVTOLs, for electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft. 

Beta and a number of other firms in the space are also part of an Air Force program called Agility Prime, an initiative that focuses on trying to help accelerate the work these companies are doing; it also gives the Air Force an inside look at what possible uses these new kinds of airplanes could serve for the military. “It allows us to take a look at these early prototypes from all the companies, and say, ‘Is there a military use case?’” says George Griffiths, a former F-16 and F-35 test pilot with the Air Force who also goes by the callsign “Hog,” and one of the pilots who flew Alia last week.

The flights by Griffiths and another Air Force aviator were notable for being the first time that Air Force pilots have flown an electric aircraft in the Agility Prime program while on board it—previously, an Air Force Reserve pilot operated a different electric aircraft from Kitty Hawk, but did so remotely, while on the ground. 

[Related: The Air Force wants to modernize air refueling, but it’s been a bumpy ride]

For Beta last week, the day’s first flight saw Major Jonathan Appleby at the controls, who also had an instructor pilot sitting to his left in the cockpit. “Flying it was very unique,” he reflects. One of the main reasons for that is the way the controls are arranged: a control stick was positioned to his right, which allowed him to command the plane to move its nose up or down, or bank side to side. Interestingly, that stick also allows pilots to twist it to have the plane yaw left or right. Other planes do that with rudder pedals. To his left was a wheel that he could operate with his thumb to control how much thrust the propeller in the back provides. “Imagine a donut that rotates,” he says. Setting that donut allows the pilot to control the amount of torque the motors are providing. 

Another key sensory difference was that it wasn’t loud the same way an airplane like a 737 with traditional engines is. “You hear some of the aerodynamic aspects of the wind hitting the windshield, or even the pusher [propeller] making some noise, but it’s a very soft hum behind you,” Appleby says. “I’d say it’s kind of like sailing, versus using a big powered boat.”

Griffiths, the other Air Force test pilot, says that his experience in the electric plane was similar to Appleby’s. “If you’ve driven an electric car, or even a golf cart on a golf course, as soon as you press that pedal down, you’ve got instant torque,” he says. “Same exact thing when we hit that thumbwheel, we can go from zero to 100 percent instant power.”

While these air mobility companies, including Beta, are focused on making planes that don’t need to take off by speeding down a runway to get into the air, the specific experimental aircraft that both Appleby and Griffiths operated last week was actually configured more like a traditional plane than an eVTOL. That’s because this aircraft did not have the additional propellers mounted on top of it to pull it vertically into the air or help it land that way. Instead, it was driven just by a pusher propeller in the back, and took off and landed just like a regular plane, albeit an experimental electric one. 

Griffiths reflects on the possible uses for an aircraft like this for the Department of Defense. “Maybe it’s just as simple as moving cargo from one base to another base,” he wonders. “Or is there a military mission that we can do? Maybe it’s in orbit [in the sky] somewhere, with some type of a sensor pod that we can actually mount to the airplane.” The goal, when considering uses like this, is to have government eyes on the prototypes, he says, as opposed to just having the individual companies report their progress. 

Safety looms large when piloting a new kind of aircraft, as these novel eVTOL-type planes certainly are; the pilots had parachutes and other safety gear. In fact, an uncrewed electric flying machine from a different company, Joby, crashed in February, and the National Transportation Safety Board has so far issued a preliminary report. No one was hurt, as Joby reported to the SEC. 

“We’ve done as much as we can to mitigate a lot of those risks of the unknown,” Griffiths reflects. “But you gotta go and fly it.” 

Watch moments from the Air Force’s testing, below:

The post The Air Force just soared past an electric aircraft milestone appeared first on Popular Science.

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The first F-22 approaches from behind our KC-10 tanker aircraft, subtly camouflaged and eerily quiet thanks to the tanker’s ambient noise. We’re cruising thousands of feet above the Atlantic, going hundreds of miles per hour, and the F-22—a stealth fighter jet known as the Raptor—slowly closes the gap, sliding up toward a refueling boom that hangs from the rear and bottom of our plane. 

The KC-10 tanker is a flying gas station, a cargo aircraft capable of offloading thousands of pounds of fuel into receptacles atop planes like the Raptor. Holed up in a cozy compartment in the tanker’s rear, a human—in this case Sebastian Dewsnap, a member of the Royal Australian Air Force on exchange in the US—watches through a rear-facing window to operate the telescoping delivery system.

This is how the Air Force has handled refueling for decades: with a person like Dewsnap looking out through glass at a thirsty plane. But KC-10s like the one we’re flying for this training mission in November of 2021—and the KC-135s the Pentagon deployed to the EU just this week—are at a point of transition: The KC-10 is set to be retired over the next two years, with the KC-135 flying off into the sunset sometime long thereafter. The intended replacement, called the KC-46, relies on a higher-tech tactic: A remote-vision solution will replace Dewsnap’s rear window. Someday, tankers like this could do away with boom operators entirely in favor of partially, or fully, robotic systems.

An aging fleet filled with aging tech 

After that first Raptor arrives, over the next seven minutes or so, and through multiple attempts, the pilot tries to maneuver his stealth aircraft in the right place below the tanker. Meanwhile, Dewsnap plays the role of attendant at the flying gas station. Using his right hand on a joystick-like controller, he can manipulate the boom’s position—side to side, up and down—and with his left, he can telescope a portion of it outward to insert into the fighter. Eventually, having connected enough to take on some 4,900 pounds of fuel, the fighter falls back and banks away. 

“Here comes the other one,” Dewsnap says, as another Raptor floats in and approaches the boom. 

You may not have considered the fact that air refueling exists, because it never happens on commercial flights: Airliners lack the necessary hardware to receive fuel in the air, and there would be no reason for them to take on the extra risk of fueling in the sky when they can just gas up on the ground for their routine, predictable journeys. But for the military, it’s a long-established way to give a fighter jet, bomber, or other aircraft the petroleum product it needs to keep going for very long distances without landing. “It’s a fundamental enabling capability for all militaries that operate an air force,” says Todd Harrison, the director of the aerospace security project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Indeed, four US Air Force KC-135s have just arrived in Germany following Russia’s Ukraine invasion, though the Pentagon’s statement doesn’t specify what aircraft the tankers may support.

[Related: I flew in an F-16 with the Air Force and oh boy did it go poorly]

It’s a transitional time for these fuel-schleppers. The KC-10 that Popular Science caught a ride on has been in the Air Force’s inventory for some 40 years. The KC-135, which makes up the majority of the Air Force’s fleet of more than 400 tankers, has an average age of about 60, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office. “You just can’t keep [the KC-135] planes flying that much longer—they have reliability problems, they have maintenance challenges, they’re expensive to operate,” Harrison says. 

Between the KC-10s and the KC-135s, “we have a small fleet that’s old, and we have a large fleet that’s extremely old,” Harrison says. In the KC-135s—which despite their advanced age will stay in service for many more years for logistical reasons (although some will be retired as new aircraft come online)—boom operators lay down at the rear of the aircraft and look out through windows at the scene below them. But while they’re slightly newer, the Air Force is retiring the KC-10s first: There are far fewer of them (just 47) than the KC-135s, so it’s easier for the military to phase them out, in part because smaller fleets are more expensive to maintain on a per-plane basis. The KC-10s will fly only through 2024.

“The KC-10 has been definitely a workhorse for the US Air Force,” Dewsnap said before takeoff that day, standing on the tarmac, arms crossed. “It’s sad to see it go to pasture.” 

The quirks of the decades-old KC-10 were on full display before it lifted off the ground from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey to fly south to meet the Raptors. The first problem was a fuel leak in one of the engines; the ground crew fixed it. The second problem occurred after the aircraft had already started taxiing. Each of its three engines has a generator, and those generators are supposed to operate in sync with one another. But they weren’t parallel with each other. After troubleshooting it, and nearly not being able to take off, the cockpit crew finally fixed the glitch by resetting the generators. 

The new bird is the Pegasus 

That isn’t to say that the KC-10’s looming replacement is perfect. Anything but. The KC-46 has been entering the fleet like the glitchy robotic new kid on the block. The Pegasus has been very problematic for the Air Force, mainly because of a major design change: instead of sitting at the back of the aircraft and looking through a window, operators get their information from a remote-vision system by way of a screen. 

That remote vision system, or RVS, has been tough to refine. “The biggest problem that it had was, as it began to be developed and fielded, camera technology was not where we thought it might be,” says Brig. General Ryan Samuelson, who heads the Air Force’s acquisition and operations process for the KC-46. “When we fielded it, we realized under certain sun angles, under certain reflections off of water, clouds, the cameras would start to wash out.”

Boeing concedes that the tech is now dated; the company received the contract over a decade ago. “We had basically 2010 technology that we had to build and produce [the aircraft with],” says Mike Hafer, Boeing’s business development senior manager on the KC-46 program. In 2020, Boeing and the Air Force agreed that the airplane maker would put in a new vision system. Specifically, the RVS includes two regular-vision cameras, plus two infrared ones to employ during nighttime refueling. Boeing promises a better system is coming. “This will be 4K, ultra-high-def cameras and displays, as well as the video processors, with fiber optic cable in between,” Hafer adds. 

[Related: Inside a training mission with a B-52 bomber, the aircraft that will not die]

The KC-46 originally arrived with what’s now called RVS 1.0, and the final goal is to start fielding the new system with those 4K cameras, RVS 2.0, in 2023 and 2024. A bridge system that the Air Force calls “enhanced RVS” will use software changes to mitigate the problems before the new hardware arrives. The current setup is reportedly hard to use. As one reporter said after flying in a Pegasus last year: “It’s hard to really describe the challenges boom operators have with the current set up.”

“Big picture on the KC-46 program,” Harrison, of CSIS, reflects, “is Boeing thought that it would require less development work to produce an aircraft to the Air Force’s requirements than it ended up being—not only did it cost more, it also took longer—much longer than anticipated.” 

Even today, the KC-46 has a total of seven major problems and has been the subject of multiple reports from the Government Accountability Office. These “critical deficiencies,” as the GAO describes them in its most recent report on the tanker, “are shortfalls that could cause death, severe injury, or illness, or otherwise cause loss or damage to the aircraft.” Two of those critical problems pertain to issues with the remote vision system. 

“The majority of those will either be certified and/or closed this year, to next year,” Hafer, of Boeing, adds. “RVS is the long pole in that tent, and we’re on path with the Air Force to close that by 2024.”

Boeing has lost more than $5.4 billion on the jet, which they boast offers a much more modern tanker for the Air Force—from better mission planning, to more advanced data sharing, to protection against an electromagnetic pulse, to armor that shields the flight deck. “It’s ready to go to war,” says Hafer. The caveat to that statement is that right now, the Air Force isn’t comfortable using the tanker to refuel fighter jets like F-35s or F-22s during actual military scenarios (as opposed to training exercises) for fear that the wonky boom system could scratch those aircraft’s fancy stealth coatings. 

Could automation do the job?

All of this raises the question: Why shift away from the simplicity of a window in favor of a newfangled remote vision system? Harrison speculates that this is meant to pave the way for completely automated future systems. “First step towards an automated boom is using a camera—using a synthetic system—for control of it,” he says. “That’s what I think it’s really a first step towards, is getting towards automated boom operations, and completely remotely piloted aircraft.” 

Right now, the Navy is trying out an aircraft for just that: a Boeing-made refueling drone called the MQ-25. And a tanker from Airbus has a similar setup to the KC-46, with the boom operator sitting up front. They already have transferred fuel from the tanker to a receiver using their automated system. 

[Related: What it’s like to rescue someone at sea from a Coast Guard helicopter]

Samuelson, of the Air Force, says his service branch could see more automation in his lifetime. He reflects that “it is absolutely in the art of the possible” that “automation—whether it be automation in the flight control systems or automation in offload of data or fuel—will be something that the US will have in its inventory.” 

Boeing echoes that assessment more decisively. “As we revamp that entire system, we are installing the architecture that will allow a transition into autonomous air refueling,” Hafer says, “so that you can either have the boom operator assisted by the computer, and/or have the computer fly and do the air refueling in and of itself.”

Automating a tanker completely is something that Harrison, of CSIS, thinks makes sense. “Aerial refueling is very tedious and routine and boring, and so if we can make this uncrewed, we absolutely should.” 

‘I grew up with this airplane’

That day in November, aboard the KC-10, the air refueling operation proceeded through its intricate dance. Dewsnap spent more than an hour gassing up the F-22 Raptors—which had call signs like Bobcat 2 and Oxen 1—offloading a total of around 75,000 pounds. It took place at some 28,500 feet, cruising at around 500 mph. 

Speeding through the air while other aircraft maneuver close behind you is enough to make one wonder if the operation is dangerous. “Anytime you fly two aircraft close together is risky,” Dewsnap says, before takeoff. “There is potential for stuff to go wrong, and that’s why we train so much.” 

Later, in a break between refueling the Raptors—after Bobcat 2 drifts away, and before another arrives—Dewsnap reflects for a moment. “That was hard work,” he says. There were a lot of communications over the radio to juggle, and one of the receivers “wasn’t staying on the boom.”

We finish giving the fighter jets the fuel they need, then practice with another KC-10 tanker (the vessels are also capable of receiving fuel in flight). We fly up close behind the other large metal bird, visible right there through the cockpit windows. Its colorful boom hangs below. We go through the motions, though no liquid changes hands. 

In the early afternoon, after about four hours in the air, we come in for a landing. The KC-10’s shadow flies across the trees below, visible through a window on the left side of the cockpit. An automated voice calls out our altitude over the ground as we descend. We make contact with the runway. Everything shakes. We are back on the ground in an aircraft that isn’t too long for this world. 

Lt. Col. Paul Murphy, one of the pilots and the aircraft commander that day, reflects on the KC-10 after we land. “I grew up with this airplane,” he says. “I chose this airplane to fly out of pilot training. It’s kind of hard to see it go.”

Watch footage from the flight, below.

The post The Air Force wants to modernize air refueling, but it’s been a bumpy ride appeared first on Popular Science.

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This story originally featured on Task & Purpose.

As the Air Force equivalent of military police, security forces airmen have to be ready to face a range of threats. There could be gate runners, intruders on the flight line, or just the bitter cold and blazing heat that comes with standing on post all day. But in Alaska, airmen face one more danger: enormous, six-foot tall creatures that weigh more than 1,000 pounds sporting massive antlers that can stretch up to six feet wide.

Forget China and Russia. These creatures are the real threat, and they are known as “moose.”

“I would certainly not be first in line to stop one of those bio-tanks from going wherever the hell it felt like going,” wrote one commenter on the unofficial Air Force subreddit, where a member of the Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson, Alaska community posted an image of a moose blocking traffic outside the base on Thursday.

“Oh I’ve spent my time at JBER,” said another. “I’m aware of how scary moose are.”

A moose did indeed block traffic on Thursday at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson, Staff Sgt. Michael Pfeiffer, of the 673rd Air Base Wing Public Affairs shop, confirmed for Task & Purpose. Lights and sirens were used to safely remove the animal from traffic when it became clear it would present a danger to motorists.

“Typically, [security forces] are not supposed to move wildlife unless in a serious emergency or endangerment of life, as an agitated moose is very unpredictable,” Pfeiffer explained, citing a game warden on the base. “Use of lights and sirens is the method utilized, although optimally Fish and Game will be called.”

The moose was of “solid size,” but it was difficult to get its exact dimensions, Pfeiffer said. From the photo, it looks like it dwarfs a nearby truck, but that could be because it was standing on a median or was closer to the camera than the vehicle.

“Every time I see one emerge from the wild it’s like seeing a whale surface,” wrote the Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson member who posted the photo to Reddit. “Never really gets old.”

To be clear, moose are herbivores and are unlikely to devour you, your battle buddies or your family and friends. But God help you if you get on the wrong side of these gentle giants. In fact, on the base’s website, there is a section devoted to advice on how to behave safely around the animals. Tip number one: do not approach moose, especially female moose, called cows, who can be aggressive when they have calves around. Also do not feed moose, which is dangerous and illegal, and be careful not to let dogs approach, as the moose may feel threatened by them.

“The key to coexisting with moose is to avoid confrontations by giving moose plenty of space,” wrote the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “Never approach a moose!”

The body language of a moose is also telling: when one has its ears up, it may be curious but not threatened. However, when its ears are back, the hair on its neck is up, or it’s licking its lips, it may feel stressed or threatened and could charge. When that happens, all you can do is “hide behind something, such as a tree” or “run if you have a head start,” according to the base website.

“If you are knocked down by a moose: Curl into a ball, protect your head, and keep still until the moose retreats,” the base website warns.

This background information makes it all the more impressive for the security forces airmen who had to somehow convince this massive ungulate—a hoofed mammal—to clear the road. In fact, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game says that sometimes you just have to wait it out.

“The moose will move away in time,” the department wrote on its website. “It may take half an hour or more, but it is usually worth waiting. Sometimes a loud noise or movement will startle a moose into moving, but moose that are used to people are not easily chased away.”

In fact, they seem to wander onto Alaska bases with some regularity. Moose blocked traffic six times there in 2021, Pfeiffer explained, and they’re not the only grande-sized critters to do so.

“Bears will sometimes wander into the roadways or onto sidewalks,” Pfeiffer said, citing the game warden. “They are more predictable than a moose and have a greater range of vision so are easier to draw away.”

It’s not just that the moose are stopping by to inspect the base. Sometimes they are drawn in by the flavor of road salt carried by melting ice, Pfeiffer explained. They’ll even be drawn to people’s sidewalks for that reason. Unfortunately, sometimes the encounters become unsafe: Seven moose were hit by vehicles in 2021, the airman said.

Besides making guest appearances at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson, moose actually have a wide presence in the Air Force. The C-17 Globemaster III, the 30-year-old cargo jet that can do anything from drop paratroopers to carry a 69-ton M1 Abrams Battle Tank, is big, strong and slow-moving, but that’s not why it’s nickname is The Moose. No, it’s because of the sound the aircraft’s pressure relief vents make during ground refueling, which some say resembles the sound of a female moose in heat.

“It is a popular nickname, with squadron posters and t-shirts dedicated to it,” Darrell Lewis, the historian for the 437th Airlift Wing, told Task & Purpose last year.

“It’s pretty common to hear the C-17 called the Moose at work,” one Air Force pilot told Task & Purpose. “We are all part of the Moose Gang. Just as the C-130s are the Herc Gang, and the KC-135 are the Gas Wagon Mafia. It’s a cool uniter amongst aircrew.”

Who knows, maybe moose keep wandering onto Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson because they hear the C-17s of the base’s 144th Airlift Squadron being refueled there. Stranger things have happened, like that time a raccoon chased a fire team of US soldiers out of their Stryker.

Bottom line: if you’re visiting Alaska and come upon a giant creature with antlers, give it the right of way.

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With its rotors pointed towards the ground, the Heaviside plane by Kitty Hawk looks like an almost-complete hobbyist project. As the rotors spun into action for flight testing in December 2021, the plane lifted off and wobbled, looking not unlike a model of a spacecraft pulled skyward by fishing line in an old sci-fi movie.

Once airborne, with the rotors pivoted for forward flight, the aircraft looked as smooth as any other, an elegant machine gently circling a mountain valley just outside Tres Pinos, California. On the landing approach, rotors again pivoted for a descent, the landing appears almost gentle, with just a little of the touch-and-go familiar to helicopter pilots.

The Heaviside electric plane is not quite a drone, not quite a crewed aircraft, and certainly not a flying car, though Kitty Hawk CEO Sebastian Thrun describes it as similar to all three. The vehicle can only transport a single person, it can be remotely piloted, and it has many autonomous features. It is, in its loftiest visions, floated by the company as a way to reduce ground traffic by taking advantage of the open space of the sky.

What makes the December 2021 flight tests so compelling is not just the work on the plane, but that the Air Force was so involved with a civilian craft.

During the flights between December 13 – 17, Terrence McKenna, an Air Force Reserve pilot with the 370th Flight Test Squadron, participated on behalf of Afwerx. Afwerx is a technology accelerator within the US Air Force, designed to explore a range of technologies that could someday be incorporated into the military.

As part of his participation with Kitty Hawk and Afwerx, McKenna successfully flew the Heaviside remotely. 

[Related: Kitty Hawk’s electric airplane will fly you around—with no pilot]

“What we’re trying to do is develop a training pipeline in the Air Force to understand these types of aircraft,” McKenna said in an Afwerx release. “If we can get a joint Air Force-industry experimentation team, we can now open the aperture on engagements for these types of aircraft dramatically.”

The Heaviside is best thought of as a single-seat transport. It can carry a passenger who weighs no more than 176 pounds, a constraint that means that in the present form, it could carry fewer than half of US adults, including many who meet military fitness standards. The ability to take off vertically and land vertically, thanks to those pivoting rotors, gives the plane tremendous flexibility in where it can travel. Kitty Hawks boasts the plane as having a speed of 180 mph, meaning the Heaviside could plausibly travel from Kitty Hawk’s testing site in Tres Pinos to its headquarters in Palo Alto in about 27 minutes, or about a third the time of a car traveling that same route.

While flying at at least 1,500 feet above the ground, the Heaviside is quiet for an aircraft, with a given noise of just 35 decibels, or “slightly louder than a whisper and about 100 times quieter than a helicopter,” according to Afwerx.

[Related: The Barracuda puts a wild spin on aircraft design]

Helicopters are the default aircraft used for rescue operations, for good reasons: the technology is familiar, refined, and helicopters such as the Black Hawk can carry 11 passengers seated, or 6 in stretchers. Yet helicopters are loud, and require an on-board crew, so it’s possible to imagine a scenario where the military would want to extract a person via a small, silent vehicle.

McKenna noted to Afwerx “that potential military and industry use cases largely overlap for the Heaviside: the aircraft could transport injured personnel, evacuate people from hostile territories, deliver cargo or first aid, make emergency medical services more accessible in rural areas or congested cities, and assist with firefighting or search and rescue operations, among many other potential scenarios.”

Proving the aircraft can work, remotely piloted and silent, is a good first step towards building it into a tool that can someday function as a utility truck in the sky. Aviation history is full of haphazard concepts, with deeply limited capacity, being expanded into useful and almost mundane forms. 

Kitty Hawk’s tests of the Heaviside are one of several partnerships with Agility Prime, this one designed to develop a syllabus for how to fly the plane. (Joby, another eVTOL company, is also an Agility Prime partner.) By being involved in the development of the craft and its piloting from the earliest stages, the Air Force can learn the limits and the potential of the technology in real time, leading to a day where the military could start to augment or replace its existing helicopter fleets with electric planes that don’t need runways to take off.

Watch the Heaviside in flight below:

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This story originally featured on Task & Purpose as part of What’s Next In War, a special issue breaking down what’s on the horizon for the US military.

If you’ve ever grimaced watching the gas meter run up while filling your 12-gallon car, keep in mind that the Air Force runs through approximately two billion gallons of gas every year, at the cost of about $7 billion.

It costs more than just dollars to keep the Air Force’s 5,625 aircraft aloft. For every fighter jet flying over the Middle East or the western Pacific, there’s a long, vulnerable supply chain that often stretches all the way back into foreign oil wells, a dependency that the Pentagon is eager to shake.

“Transporting fuel—whether by air, land or sea— is a necessary risk. But the more we use, the more of a risk it becomes,” wrote Roberto Guerrero, the deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for operational energy in a 2019 op-ed. “If we face external constraints like oil shortages, adversary attacks or interrupted access, our vulnerabilities become even greater.”

With those worries in mind, the Air Force is chasing a slew of new technologies to reduce its dependence on foreign oil, to make its engines more efficient and use less gas, and to make it easier to keep bases and aircraft gassed up downrange. Those technologies include designing better engines, analyzing jet fuel use, and even washing down engines differently so that they run better. But there is one technology that could have dramatic implications not just for the Air Force but for society in general: renewable jet fuel.

The Air Force currently uses Jet Propellant-8 (JP-8), a colorless, kerosene-based fuel rich in hydrocarbons that were baked into it by millions of years of high pressure and high temperature acting on dead plants and algae. Those long chains of hydrocarbons are what make jet fuel so potent, but the Air Force wants to whip them up a few million years faster than nature can. That’s why last October, the service announced it had endorsed a private company called Twelve, which is working to pull carbon dioxide out of the air and transform it into jet fuel.

“What if you could access fuel from anywhere on the planet, at any time, no tanker required?” the service wrote in a press release. “The Air Force thinks it’s possible with ground-breaking carbon transformation technology.”

Twelve says it has a new electrochemical reactor with a special catalyst that electrifies carbon dioxide and water, which creates a synthesis gas (a.k.a. syngas) that can then be refined into jet fuel, which the company calls E-Jet. That may sound like science fiction, but the process of turning syngas into fuel is actually nearly a century old. German inventors Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch developed the Fischer-Tropsch process for doing so in the 1920s, and the Air Force successfuly tried using it to supplement fuel for heavy bombers and transport jets in the early 2000s. However the service discontinued the project in 2013, partly because the fuels were not yet cost-competitive, according to Inside Defense.

The Air Force hopes E-Jet could push the concept further by allowing airmen to produce the syngas down range and refine it into jet fuel, eliminating the need for vulnerable supply chains.

“Twelve’s carbon transformation platform could allow deployed units to create fuel on demand, without the need for highly skilled fuel experts on site,” The Air Force wrote in its press release last year. 

E-Jet would also be renewable, since it would require just carbon dioxide from the air and water, the Air Force wrote. It sounds amazing, but two propulsion experts were skeptical. After all, there simply is not that much carbon in the air, explained Jay Gore, the Reilly Chair Professor of Combustion Engineering at Purdue University’s School of Mechanical Engineering.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere is nearly 412 parts per million, according to NASA. While that’s enough to retain heat from the sun and drive global climate change, it’s still a very thin amount if you are trying to make a hydrocarbon-rich substance like jet fuel.

“It’s a big haystack and we know there is a needle, but the probability of finding that needle will require a lot of effort, a lot of work,” Gore explained.

And it would require a lot of air. Vikram Mittal, an engineering professor at West Point, estimated that it would take 13,000 cubic meters of air to make just one gallon of jet fuel, and about 100 million cubic meters of air (about the volume of the Empire State Building) to fill up the tank of a C-130 Hercules transport plane. There is a lot of air in the atmosphere to draw from, but the more air you draw, the greater chance that pollutants in the air “can damage the sensitive catalyst materials that extract the carbon dioxide,” Mittal wrote for Forbes in November.

Even if you could get enough unpolluted air into your reactor, there’s another big problem: generating enough energy to pull the carbon dioxide out of the air. Mittal estimated that it would take a solar array about the size of 38 football fields to generate enough fuel to fill a C-130, though it would likely have to be bigger as energy is lost in the conversion process. While the military is experimenting with mobile nuclear reactors that could provide tremendous amounts of power to forward bases, it still might not be enough to pull jet fuel out of the air.

“Unfortunately, even one of these nuclear reactors running constantly for 24 hours would only be able to produce half the fuel necessary to fill a C-130,” the professor wrote.

Gore shared similar doubts about E-Jet.

“It requires a lot of energy to be invested in that separation” of carbon dioxide from air, he said. “We make liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen from air, there are large factories for that, but those factories consume a lot of energy to make that process occur.”

Even the Air Force admitted there were questions left to answer about E-Jet, particularly how to power the process in remote areas. How Twelve and the Air Force hope to tackle those challenges is unclear, as neither organization was able to comment by deadline. But Twelve’s technology has shown promise in the past.

Frederick Baddour, a senior scientist at the Catalytic Carbon Transformation & Scale-Up Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, said the company’s carbon dioxide electrolysis system, which converts carbon dioxide into syngas, demonstrated a high and efficient conversion rate. The company has also partnered with organizations like Mercedes-Benz, Proctor & Gamble and NASA, which want to use Twelve’s carbon transformation technology to reduce emissions by making products and fuels that are normally made from petroleum.

Twelve has demonstrated in the past its capability to make syngas out of carbon dioxide and the October press release from the Air Force seems to highlight Twelve’s ability to turn that syngas into jet fuel. “What they’re showing is closing the loop: not just converting CO2 into syngas but that the syngas can be refined downstream into a certifiable jet fuel,” Baddour said. Based on Twelve’s past success, the project seems very feasible, he added.

It could be even more feasible when the process draws in carbon-rich sources to feed the electrolysis system. For example, if the air feeding into Twelve’s system comes from right outside a bioethanol plant, there will be oodles more carbon dioxide in the air that the system could draw from, Baddour explained.

In its October press release, the Air Force said Twelve had successfully produced jet fuel from CO2 in small quantities and that December would mark the end of a project producing larger quantities of the fuel. The Air Force also said there would be a report on the company’s findings, but that report was not immediately available. Regardless, “the team sees this is a positive first step in a truly innovative program,” the service wrote.

In the meantime, there are plenty of other alternative fuels the Air Force is looking into. One of the most promising is biomass, where organic material from plants and animals is treated under high temperatures and pressures to create jet fuel. In 2018, the Defense Logistics Agency wrote about how the University of Maine was turning recycled paper and cardboard into jet fuel, and they were awaiting certification to be used for aviation purposes.

“These fuels can be generated from a range of sources including waste oils and agricultural products, both of which are readily available around the globe,” Mittal wrote in his op-ed.

Gore, the Purdue professor, said the Department of Energy is also trying to use a concept called exergy, which Stanford University defines as “the useful portion of energy that allows us to do work and perform energy services.” Examples of utilizing exergy include using the exhaust gases coming out of a power plant, or making fuel out of the carbon dioxide-rich air put out by a combustion engine.

“How do we claim some of that energy back so that the yields from fuels are more efficient?” Gore asked.

If anything, the carbon dioxide-thick exhaust streams from automobiles or airplanes could provide much better fodder for Twelve’s E-Jet reactor than other, cleaner chunks of air, he reasoned.

Whether the Air Force’s next tank of jet fuel comes from used cardboard, food waste, a truck tailpipe or the air around us is still unclear. But no matter what, whatever’s next in fuel will have a big impact on the rest of what’s next in war.

“History has taught us that our logistics supply chains are one of the first things the enemy attacks,” Guerrero, the deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for operational energy, said in October. “As peer-adversaries pose more and more of a threat, what we do to reduce our fuel and logistics demand will be critical to avoid risk and win any potential war.”

The post The Air Force’s plan to go green starts with sustainable jet fuel appeared first on Popular Science.

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What might it take to rebuild an Air Force base after a direct hit? In 2018, Hurricane Michael tore through Tyndall Air Force Base on the Florida panhandle, damaging planes and facilities alike. Restoring the place, while safeguarding against future disasters, is an ongoing task, and it’s one the Air Force is treating as a learning exercise. To that end, it’s experimenting with how laser sensors, on drones and robot dogs, can map damage before a human even has to set foot in a collapsing building.

“Imagine being able to see the components of a potentially dangerous situation in live 3D and in fine detail without even having to survey the area,” says Brian Goddin, from the Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center public affairs, in a video produced by the military.

As he speaks, the video highlights the interior of a garage. The laser-constructed vision is surreal, almost unearthly, with objects visible not as whole forms but instead reflected lines adjacent to each other in space. The imaging tool is lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging, and while the results are a little weird, it’s clear enough to showcase roof damage in the garage. Also visible is construction around the facility, and a large armored vehicle parked at the end. 

Putting lidar on drones and on ground robots gives the military a way to map the interior of a building with a machine. With that lidar data transmitted to the computers in a command center, or even just the tablet of an operator sitting outside the building, a human can see what the robot sees, and direct the robot accordingly. (In the civilian world, lidar sensors are commonly used on self-driving cars as one tool for the vehicles to perceive the world around them.) 

[Related: DARPA’s solution to the military’s plastic trash problem? Eat it.]

Goddin’s presentation, released online December 9, 2021, shows lidar mounted on Spot, the Boston Dynamics dog-shaped robot. Ghost Robotics Q-UGV machines, also dog-shaped and sensor-rich, have been used to patrol the perimeter of Tyndall AFB, making Spot the second breed (or brand) of robot dog to serve the needs of the base.

While all of this mapping at Tyndall is happening in the wake of Hurricane Michael, creating a virtual 3D model of the buildings as they stand can guide future repair. Such a virtual model is a useful tool for regular maintenance and repair, and it provides a record of a prior state should disaster strike again.

Such techniques could also allow better investigations of failure after the fact. By comparing lidar scans of downed or wrecked craft to those before launch, and to surviving aircraft that made it back from a fight, the Air Force could understand how to better make more durable craft. Scanning a wrecked plane with lidar also lets rescue workers and recovery teams know if and how they should act to save pilots and passengers, suggested Javier Rodriguez, a technician stationed at Tyndall.

[Related:  Air Force’s new guard dogs are robots]

“Lidar is the gold standard, because we can get information we couldn’t get from just pictures,” said Sean Cloud, Air Force program manager for the Rapid Airfield Damage Assessment System, describing a use case in the same video for fixing a runway after an attack. “We can calculate how much material we need to repair based on the craters and fill volume.”

Calculating the amount of concrete needed to fix a pothole isn’t the flashiest use of robots and lasers. Yet it’s that kind of routine work, thoroughly unglamorous, that lets runways stay functional and keeps planes in the sky.

Watch the video below:

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This story originally featured on Task & Purpose.

The 172-foot-wide B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, which costs nearly $2 billion in today’s dollars, can sneak past enemy air defenses with the same radar signature as a small bird, but you can also spot it on Google Earth as long as you have an internet connection.

“It’s pretty funny, you’ve got a stealth bomber flying over a farmer’s house, into his field, it looks like he’s a crop-duster,” said the host of My Garden Channel, a YouTube channel that’s usually dedicated to gardening and plant care. But on Monday, the channel posted a video showing how viewers can use Google Earth to spot the stealth bomber for themselves.

A screenshot of the bomber flying over a field in Missouri took off on Reddit, where it received more than 109,000 upvotes and caught the attention of airmen on the unofficial Air Force subreddit.

“Lol ‘stealth,’” wrote one commenter.

“What are you trying to say? I don’t see anything,” joked another.

“Looks like a weather balloon to me,” wrote a third, referring to when the Army announced in 1947 that it had found a “flying disc” near Roswell, New Mexico, only to later retract the statement and say it was a weather balloon.

Unlike a UFO though, it’s not surprising to see a B-2 bomber flying over Missouri. After all, the only B-2 base in the world is at Whiteman Air Force Base, just about 20 miles south of the spot the aircraft was spotted flying over on Google Earth.

Still, with its flying-wing design, its ninja-like ability to penetrate enemy air defenses, and its reputation for flying all the way around the world to kill ISIS fighters in the dead of night, the aircraft gives an aura that makes spotting it in daylight with a simple tool like Google Earth or Google Maps a real treat.

“The B-2 is designed to fly into the maelstrom when Los Angeles is burning and GPS signals have been jammed,” wrote William Langewiesche in a 2018 article for The Atlantic about a B-2 mission to bomb ISIS fighters in Libya. “It is made to defeat the world’s most advanced air-defense systems. In addition to its conventional navigational capabilities, it has autonomous systems that operate independently from any ground- or space-based transmitters.”

Besides being deadly, it’s also cozy: the Spirit has a toilet, a microwave, a few coolers for storing snacks, just enough room for one of its two pilots to lie down and take a catnap, and even “extremely comfortable” cockpit seats, Langewiesche wrote. 

Still, the Atlantic writer questioned the US government’s decision to use the B-2, each of which cost $44.27 million a year to maintain as of 2018. That makes it the most expensive aircraft to maintain in the Air Force inventory, and it was used to bomb no more than 100 men camped in the desert in a country that does not even have air defenses. 

“Bombing ignorant gunmen camped out in a desert of a non-country is a far cry from launching an attack against a modern military adversary,” Langewiesche wrote. “But the high cost of the mission was perhaps an attraction by bureaucratic if not military logic—you may lose money if you don’t spend it—or the B-2s might have just needed some work to do.”

Whatever the reason for using the B-2 over Libya, concepts like stealth and strategic bombing are returning to the fore as the Air Force prepares for a possible war with China or Russia. In fact, the service wants to spend an estimated $203 billion developing the B-21 Raider, a new flying wing strategic stealth bomber that closely resembles the B-2 and is designed to replace the older aircraft. 

“Designed to operate in tomorrow’s high-end threat environment, the B-21 will play a critical role in ensuring America’s enduring airpower capability,” the Air Force wrote on its website about the Raider.

Part of the reason why the Air Force is putting so much money into the B-21 is because it wants to buy at least 100 of the bombers. By comparison, only 21 B-2s were built. One of those was destroyed in a non-fatal crash in 2008, and another was damaged in September after sliding off the runway at Whiteman. The Air Force estimates each B-21 will cost about $639 million in 2019 dollars.

So perhaps someday we will also see images of B-21s mid-flight on Google Earth. Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted a red-and-blue blur effect on the image of the B-2. According to NASA, that’s because satellite images are different from typical photographs. While photographs are made “when light is focused and captured on a light-sensitive surface,” a satellite image “is created by combining measurements of the intensity of certain wavelengths of light, both visible and invisible to human eyes,” NASA wrote online. 

Most visible colors can be created by combining red, green and blue, so satellites combine red, green, and blue-scale images to get a fill-color image of the world, NASA explained. However, Newsweek pointed out that aircraft in flight may blur the colors due to how fast they are moving.

“If you put on the old 3D glasses with the red and blue lenses you can actually see this in 3D. Try it,” wrote one cheeky commenter on the Air Force subreddit.

It just goes to show that capturing a Spirit is difficult, but with a sky full of satellites, an internet connection, and a little bit of luck, anything is possible.

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A wise fighter pilot once said that he feels the need, the need for speed. But every so often he also feels the need to pee. Historically, that’s been a tricky piece of work in a cramped fighter jet cockpit, where a parachute harness, full-body flight suit and survival vest make it tough to access the necessary body parts and take a leak without making a mess. But a new “in-flight bladder relief” device being tested by the Air Force might make things easier, especially for female pilots.

Developed by Omni Defense Technologies, “Skydrate” involves a pad for women and a cup for men. Pilots put on the cup or pad beneath a special pair of underwear. When it’s time to go, the pilot connects the cup or pad with a tube leading to a pump outside the flight suit. The battery-operated pump pulls the urine through the tube to a collection bag, where the pee is stored until the end of the mission.

The pump could be an improvement over previous systems, where pilots unzipped their flight suits and peed directly into a plastic bag called a piddle pack. The system was especially awkward for female pilots, some of whom had to shimmy forward onto their seat or raise themselves up to pee into the bag and avoid spillage. Because it’s such a hassle, some women just don’t drink water beforehand to avoid having to pee mid-flight.

“[M]any female aircrew resort to “tactical dehydration” to avoid the difficulties and potential dangers of having to relieve themselves inflight,” the Air Force wrote in a 2020 solicitation for better piddle packs. “During flights, dehydration negatively impacts pilots by lowering their G-tolerance by up to 50 percent,” and leading to possible headaches, altered vision, and “reduced physical and cognitive performance.”

“It affects everything from reaction time to vision, which of course you want both of those when you’re landing on the ship at night,” Alex Dietrich, who flew F/A-18F Super Hornets in the Navy, told Task & Purpose. “Just like sleep and nutrition, you’ve got to stay hydrated.”

When Dietrich flew the Super Hornet in the early and mid-2000s, she would give her back-seat weapons systems officer (also called a ‘wizzo’) a heads-up, set her aircraft’s speed and altitude on autopilot, shimmy forward in her seat, undo a velcro strap in her flight suit, use a piddle pack, seal it off, then secure it in a saddle bag. That routine worked for her, but she said it worked only because her squadron’s aircrew survival equipment gear shop went out of their way to replace the zipper in hers and other female aviators’ flight suits with velcro, and because they made an extra effort to get non-standard issue female versions of the piddle pack.

“We had such a supportive squadron to come up with this solution, so we made it work and nobody around me had to tactically dehydrate,” Dietrich said. Meanwhile, her male colleagues had it much easier. 

“I’d make fun of my wizzo for peeing an hour into the flight,” she said. “Like ‘seriously, you couldn’t have just gone before we took off?’ It was so easy for them.”

At least one Air Force pilot agreed with that sentiment.

“For 99 percent of missions piddle packs work just fine,” said Trevor “Dozen” Aldridge, a former F-15C pilot who also flew with the Thunderbirds demonstration team. Skydrate, he said, “seems like any other modern military acquisition. Buy something because it’s high-tech, costs a lot more than the alternative, and will most likely under deliver.”

Still, even for male pilots, peeing in a cockpit can sometimes be risky business. Air Force Maj. Justin “Hasard” Lee, an F-35 pilot with experience in the F-16, wrote for Sandboxx that the process was like “driving a car while unwrapping a bag and peeing into it while staying in your lane and avoiding traffic,” he said. “Now take that and amplify it in a 3-dimensional world while flying just under the speed of sound with an enemy that’s potentially trying to shoot you down.”

You need to be in steady flight to use a piddle pack, but sometimes life comes at you fast.

“There have actually been times when I was unstrapped and unzipped and I get a radio call to respond to a ‘troops in contact,’” one anonymous Air Force F-15E pilot said of requests for close air support from soldiers under fire. “Talk about awkward fumbling, trying not to drop a half-full bag of piss on the floor while I point the jet in the right direction and start moving.”

Piddle packs are more than just an inconvenience: they have also cost lives. At least nine fatal crashes involving F-16 fighter jets and an A-10 attack jet were blamed on male pilots fumbling with piddle packs, according to The War Zone. One pilot killed was the friend of retired Air Force A-10 driver Gregg Montijo. The pilot was flying three sorties in one day on January 17, 2002. In between sorties, the pilot ‘hot pit’ refueled on the ground, which is when aircraft are refueled while their engines are still running.

“On one of the ground services, he undid his parachute harness leg straps to use his piddle pack and forgot to hook them back up,” Montijo explained. 

The pilot got back in the air and later collided with another A-10. He ejected and cleared the aircraft, but when he separated from the ejection seat and opened his parachute, his lower leg straps were not connected, so the parachute pulled the harness off his body and he fell to his death, Montijo explained.

“Very tragic and sad and totally preventable (both the collision and the subsequent ejection),” the pilot said.

Montijo said piddle packs were not too difficult to use with normal flight gear, but the real challenge was to do it while wearing an anti-exposure suit, a full-length rubber impregnated suit with booties that’s kind of like a diver’s wetsuit.

“You had to wear them for missions over water when the water was so cold, you would not normally survive being in it too long before you die of exposure,” Montijo said. “It had a tiny zipper encased in rubber that you had to manipulate open, then attempt to urinate into your piddle pack without suffering injury or getting wet.”

Accidents always happen, but you’d think after millions of years of urinating, more than a century of military aviation and nearly 30 years of having female Air Force fighter pilots, the Pentagon would find a better solution for mid-flight potty breaks. But while a piddle pack or another device might work fine for some people, others just can’t hang. For example, Dietrich tried using adult diapers at one point, but “psychologically I just couldn’t bring myself to go,” she said.

In 2008, the Air Force bought 300 Advanced Mission Extender Devices from Omni, which appears to be the same company that now makes Skydrate. Much like Skydrate, the AMXD starts with a cup or pad that goes under the flight suit. That device attaches to a hose, which attaches to a pump, which then attaches to a bag. However, the AMXD received mixed reviews from pilots.

“It was over-engineered, like a vacuum,” said Dietrich. “That’s the opposite end of the spectrum from my primitive solution of velcro and a piddle pack.”

The Navy pilot cited another female aviator who said that “the first generation AMXD used six triple-A batteries and was a giant pain in the ass.”

Everyone has their own preferences, but some female pilots appear to still be using piddle packs, as shown by one pilot using it in a 2020 video for Military Times. And there must have been enough of a challenge with existing systems that the Air Force solicited better pee-pee tech in August that same year.

“Addressing female-specific equipment and female aviators’ wellbeing is a top USAF priority,” the branch wrote at the time. “The outcomes of this challenge will help improve retention rates, advance recruitment practices and eliminate gender gaps.”

While the difference between Omni’s old AMXD system and its new Skydrate system were not immediately clear, the new tech seems to be winning the Air Force’s favor. According to the November 30 Air Force news release, Skydrate’s improvements include “a larger collection bag, improved flow rate, multiple hose lengths, one-hand operation for on/off functionality, and more interface (pad) sizes to account for anatomical differences in the wearer.”

Though there are male and female versions of Skydrate, the Air Force said the system was developed with “an emphasis on engineering solutions for female aircrew” and Omni included 30 such aviators and nine pilots in testing, the Air Force wrote. One female pilot is glad to help out.

“It’s important to provide feedback because it’s that feedback that drives change,” said Maj. Nikki Yogi, an F-35A fighter pilot who participated in the Omni device tests, in the press release. 

Yogi at one point had “a poor experience” with a mid-flight urine device while deployed as an A-10 pilot in 2017, the release said, but as a junior pilot she did not immediately raise the issue. She doesn’t want future women to go through the same thing.

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With an open door and a gentle shove, the crate falls into the sky from a cargo transport. Once clear of the plane, the craft’s wings unfold, and the crate transforms from a falling box to a controlled glider. The cargo crate, aided by stable flight and directed navigation, lands miles and miles from where it was released, ready to resupply the soldiers who open it.

Resuppling forces in the field is a perpetual hardship facing militaries. To facilitate a new kind of air supply–and at greater distances than before–the Air Force announced an award of a contract for 15 “Precision Guided Cargo Delivery Drones,” from dronemaker Silent Arrow on November 29. 

This contract is, formally, “Guided Bundle Derivative of Silent Arrow for Side Door and Palletized Swarm Deployment at High Speeds and Altitudes,” with the drones themselves deemed Precision Guided Bundles. That’s a mess of a program name, but it tells a story in pieces. In 2019, Silent Arrow exhibited a large version of their cargo drone that could be released from the loading ramps of large transport planes.

[Related: Drones could help save soldiers’ lives by delivering blood on demand]

The new contract is for a similar style of vehicle, roughly one fourth the volume and just under half the length of their existing cargo drone. “Palletized Swarm Deployment” is about launching multiple of these drones at once, from the side and rear doors of cargo planes, so that the cargo can travel in several small bundles instead of one big package.

The Precision Guided Bundles will have a maximum weight of 500 pounds apiece, with capacity for 350 pounds of cargo inside, as set out in the new specifications. The drone bundles will be at most 39 inches long, or just a little over 3 feet, and they can be released from a cargo plane at high altitudes and speeds, though exactly what altitudes and speeds was not specified. 

What is most striking is the drone’s proposed range. Silent Arrow’s existing cargo glider drone can land 40 miles away from where it is launched. That’s the same distance that military parachutists can travel in high-altitude high-opening drops. (These are distinct from High Altitude Low Opening, or HALO, drops, where the plane has to be relatively close to the ultimate landing zone).

When soldiers and special forces jump from a plane at high altitude and distance, they can guide their parachutes to a landing zone miles and miles away. Putting guidance systems on the cargo that launches with the troops means when soldiers arrive, they can have some of what they need for a sustained fight or a longer mission. 

For years, the military has explored different technologies to bring meals, ammunition and other supplies on such long-distance jumps. In the 1990s, the Air Force and Army started developing the Joint Precision Airdrop System, which attached to cargo parachutes and could steer them by pulling guidelines and following GPS. That system first saw use in Afghanistan in 2006.

Silent Arrow offers a smaller payload than some of the parachute drops, but makes up for it by being able to launch from smaller aircraft. This specifically includes the Cessna Caravan, a single-engine light transport that serves as the basis for the AC-208 Combat Caravan, a military version used by Special Operations Command. The flexibility to launch from small planes gives the military the option to send discreet support that doesn’t involve  screaming jet engines.

[Related: Navy SEALs could get new airborne backup. Here’s what the planes look like.]

Food, medicine, and ammunition aren’t the flashiest of payloads, but they’re essential for anyone operating on the ground, far from regular supply routes. The ability to deliver cargo silently and in small, expendable packages can keep special forces operational for longer as they pursue the tasks of irregular warfare.

The cargo glider can also aid combat troops in static but difficult-to-reach positions, making a continued presence possible. And because cargo can be delivered at distance, it can more safely be used in situations where hostile anti-aircraft weapons would make closer delivery by crewed aircraft untenable.

The Air Force will test the 15 gilders under contract at the Pendleton test range in northeastern Oregon to make sure they perform as expected. 

Watch the existing Silent Arrow cargo glider fly below:

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This story originally featured on Task & Purpose.

Pilots of fixed-wing Air Force aircraft have been wearing the same helmet for nearly 40 years, but that could soon change with a new brain bucket that’s lighter, more comfortable, more adaptable and better ventilated than its predecessor, the HGU-55/P.

“It’s been 40 years since we’ve had the 55/P, so there’s been a lot of room for improvement,” said Maj. Justin “Hasard” Lee in a video about the Next Generation Fixed Wing Helmet on his YouTube channel last month.

“Everything about this helmet has been designed from the pilot’s perspective, so finally we have a modern helmet to go with these modern fighters,” Lee said.

An F-35 pilot with years of experience flying the F-16 fighter jet, Lee had a few gripes about the old-school 55/P, which is worn by many fighter, bomber, transport and tanker pilots across the service. Lee’s first grievance? The weight, which, according to manufacturer Gentex, is 2.2 pounds. Though that sounds light, any number of pounds sitting on your head can really add up when you’re pulling nine times that weight in a high-G maneuver. The average weight of a human head is about 10 or 11 pounds, so that, plus the helmet, equals about 120 pounds or more of weight sitting on your neck at nine Gs.

“Not only is that uncomfortable to be under nine Gs when you’re flying, but the biggest issue is later in your career when pilots start having neck and back issues,” Lee said. “I know unfortunately a lot of pilots that have had to be medically retired because of that.”

It’s no joke: according to a 2012 study, 72 percent of surveyed Royal Norwegian Air Force pilots experienced neck pain in relation to flying, while 35 percent experienced back pain. Neck rotation was a major cause of grief for the pilots, particularly “checking six,” meaning to look behind them, the study found. To help keep its dwindling number of fighter pilots in the service, the U.S. Air Force actually contracts athletic trainers, strength coaches and massage therapists to help pilots better prepare their bodies for the strain of G-force.

“The idea behind the program is the preventive maintenance,” said F-15C pilot Maj. Clayton “Red Beard” Cruichshank about a physical training program at Nellis Air Force Base in April. “Rather than waiting until someone has a back or neck problem, we’re already training to be stronger before problems occur, so we’re better able to handle the stresses.”

Any little loss of weight in the helmet also helps, Lee said. While the website of the helmet manufacturer, LIFT Airborne Technologies, did not state the exact weight of the Next-Generation Fixed Wing helmet, Guido Rietdyk, the company’s president, said the goal “is to have the helmet not exceed 2.2 lbs in any size or configuration.”

That can make a big difference, because pilots have a lot of gear they need to put on their helmets in order to do their jobs. For example, fighter pilots use the Helmet Mounted Cueing System, which shows flying and targeting data on a heads-up display on the pilot’s visor. For night flying, they also wear night vision goggles, but switching between the two with the old helmet was a real headache.

“I’ve flown a lot of night combat missions,” Lee said. “The thing was, you’d fly with the HMCS, until it got dark, you’d have to take off the helmet, take off the HMCS system, put on a bracket, put on your night vision goggles, and so that was a whole process.”

That’s a problem when you’re flying a close air support mission for ground troops under fire who don’t have time for you to adjust your head gear.

“That’s time you’re taking away from the troops on the ground,” Lee said. “So being able to streamline that process is important.”

The Next Generation Fixed Wing Helmet makes it easy to attach the NVGs, with no extra bracket required, Lee said. That modularity is important because the new helmet is meant to stick with pilots throughout their career, from pilot training to whichever aircraft they are assigned to. Most pilots wear the current 55/P throughout their career too, but not all of them are happy about it.

“The current 55/Ps are terrible!” one C-17 cargo jet pilot told Task & Purpose. The pilot spoke on the condition of anonymity since he was not authorized to speak with the press. 

“Mine has never fit right since pilot training,” he added. On top of that, the old helmets are swampy pits after a long flight.

“They don’t breathe at all,” he said. “It’s a huge relief when we get to take off the helmet after a flight or during pilot swap out.”

Unlike fighter pilots, who wear their helmets every time they get in the cockpit, C-17 drivers don’t have to wear their headgear all the time. The pilot explained that he usually wears his “to mount NVGs for night flying,” though occasionally “we will wear them during daytime in a combat zone to protect against debris should the cockpit take a direct hit.” The 55/P can’t stop bullets, but it might stop penetration from debris, the pilot said. 

A navigator aboard a WC-130J weather reconnaissance plane shared his opinion of the old helmets.

“For me it doesn’t fit great around the ears so it doesn’t do a great job with isolating noise,” said Lt. Col. Mark Withee, a navigator with the 53rd Reconnaissance Squadron. “After a while it’s also pretty uncomfortable with the way it’s squishing my head.”

Like the C-17 pilot, Withee and his fellow WC-130J aviators don’t have to wear helmets very often, but when they do, it’s not the most pleasant experience.

“The old ones aren’t built with any ventilation, so in hot environments your head gets sweaty pretty quickly,” Withee said. While some people wear cloth skull caps to keep the helmet pads from getting gross with sweat, Withee reasoned that they’re just another layer of fabric insulating your head on a hot day. Of course, that insulation can be a godsend in cold environments. Withee recalled standing near the back of a WC-130J over the North Pacific in January at 5,000 feet up, where the temperature was negative 15 degrees with high winds whipping by.

“The only part of me that wasn’t cold was my head. But that was sort of a special circumstance,” the navigator said.

Between the tight fit and the lack of ventilation, the 55/P has its flaws, but the Next Generation Fixed Wing Helmet seems to put several of those to rest. Unlike its predecessor, the NGFWH actually has vents in the back to get that sticky air out of your hair.

“Out here in Phoenix, temperatures get up to about 120 degrees on the ramp,” Lee said. “And we’re not dressed for the heat. We have on a G suit, which is like snowpants.”

Lee said in an earlier interview with Task & Purpose that pilots lose a lot of water before they even get in the cockpit, like when they’re walking across the desert flight lines of the Middle East or the humid ramps of Florida or South Carolina. But the cockpit is not much better.

“The air conditioner doesn’t work that well until you’re flying because it’s using all the A/C to cool the mission systems like the radar,” Lee said. “Unfortunately the pilot gets left out of the loop on that.”

The heat is more than just an inconvenience: it’s a safety hazard. According to one study from 1979, just 3 percent dehydration can reduce a pilot’s G tolerance by 40 percent. If your tolerance to G-forces goes down, you can’t take the high-speed turns of aerial maneuvering and you’ll be more likely to black out from G-induced loss of consciousness. With that in mind, “anything you could do to save the heat,” like a helmet that actually vents out hot air, “is great,” Lee said.

Temperature aside, just wearing a poorly-fitting helmet can be a nuisance, as the C-17 and WC-130J aviators mentioned earlier. But the NGFWH might fix that, too. Lee pointed out that the new bucket has a few knobs for adjusting various parts of the headwear so it fits just right. The pilot also custom-fitted the helmet on his own using an in-depth app that comes with it, he said.

However, the fit of the helmet is about more than just creature comfort. Having a helmet jostle around in the middle of a mission could be an unwelcome and potentially dangerous distraction. There are also certain heads-up display tools such as the Helmet Mounted Cueing System, where the pilot’s eyes have to be centered properly for him or her to see the signals within.

“They actually did a great job,” Lee said of the NGFWH. “The helmet has this dynamic fit system which means it’s a lot more comfortable than the old helmet.”

Convenience, comfort and mission preparedness go hand-in-hand and all the way down in the NGFWH. Lee said his favorite feature of the new helmet is a pair of lights mounted to its sides. Those lights help with reading maps or other documents inside the cockpit, but that’s not the cool part. The cool part is how you turn it on. In the past, pilots brought flashlights to read flight documents, but that meant they had to take a hand off their flight controls to hold the flashlight. Some pilots tried strapping lights to their fingers, or wearing tongue-activated lights on their oxygen masks, but Lee found those solutions clunky or unappealing.

Unlike those past ideas, the next-gen helmet is activated by a button which gets pressed by the pilot’s jaw muscles when he or she clenches their jaw. There are different activation settings pilots can choose, but Lee demonstrated using a short clench, followed by a long clench, to activate the pair of lights on his helmet.

“I was skeptical about this at first, but it actually works surprisingly well,” Lee said. “It’s probably the best solution that I’ve found to lighting up the cockpit.”

There’s one last thing that Lee and other aviators said they appreciated about the Next Generation Fixed-Wing Helmet. It’s a feature many civilians have become accustomed to when they put on their AirPods: noise cancellation. Except instead of blocking out loud street noises, pilots want to block out the engine roaring around them in the cockpit.

Noise cancellation is “huge,” Lee said. “We’re flying six, eight hour missions in combat, so anything you can do to reduce the stress is important.”

Withee echoed that sentiment.

“What would be really nice is noise canceling,” the C-130 “Hercules” engine noise, the navigator said. “At least in the Herk the David Clark or Bose noise cancelling headsets make a big difference. It sucks going on helmet and not having that.”

With so much high praise, you might expect the Air Force to have bought a bunch of the Next Generation Fixed-Wing Helmets in bulk by now, but that hasn’t happened yet. 

Guido Rietdyk, the president of LIFT Airborne Technologies, which created the NGFWH, said testing is scheduled to complete in late 2023, with a production contract to commence sometime in 2024. The process to find a new helmet has been going on for some time now. The Air Force started taking crowd-sourced user suggestions back in 2018, and private companies ran with the ideas from there. 

Originally, more than 100 concepts were in the running, Rietdyk said, but now just two remain: LIFT and GenTex, the maker of the 55/P, which has a next-generation helmet in the race. Should the NGFWH be accepted, it will be the standard helmet for all fixed-wing Air Force aviators except for F-35 pilots, who already have their own cutting-edge helmet.

The NGFWH is currently being tested by F-22 fighter pilots, Lee said, with B-1 bomber pilots next on the list.

“It’s big,” Lee said. “Every little piece of equipment you have, you want to make sure it’s updated so you can be as lethal and capable as possible. They’ve gone through this helmet and made everything seamless for the pilot.”

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The Air Force wants its next jet to be fast, cheap, and eminently flexible. It is arriving in the form of a drone, designed in such a way that it can be modified over and over again as a platform. To build this drone jet, the Air Force Research Lab awarded a contract worth almost $18 million to Kratos, maker of aerial target drones as well as the Valkyrie and Mako combat drones.

Formally called the “Off-Boarding Sensing Station” (OBSS), the program is a specific request for “the design, development, and flight demonstration in an open architecture aircraft concept to achieve the goals of rapid time-to-market and low acquisition cost,” with an expected delivery of Oct. 31, 2022.

Kratos hinted at development of the program before the contract was awarded on October 26, 2021, but even with some of that development occurring previously, creating a new and usable jet in the space of a few years is a remarkable shift. This can be read, in part, as a response to the long and somewhat tortured history of the F-35 series jet, the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps’ primary fighter, which was decades in development. 

If the OBSS can be delivered as promised, it will offer a complement to the existing Air Force fighter wings. This drone is not a rival to the F-35, but instead billed as a force multiplier, allowing the robotic escort to carry additional weapons and sensors and, importantly, to take on some of the risk from the fight itself. One way to think of the OBSS is as a tool connected with a fighter, which receives orders from the pilot and can share what its sensors see.

[Related: This cutting-edge drone is headed out to pasture at an Air Force museum]

OBSS will take off and land on runways like a conventional jet. Once in the sky, the promise is that it will “provide significant performance for sensor extension missions for manned jet aircraft,” according to Kratos. It also “will accommodate significant offensive weapons volume to also act as a weapons bay extension for manned aircraft.”

The term for this kind of collaboration, as used by the Air Force, is “manned-unmanned teaming,” and it lets the autonomy of robot systems serve as an extension of human-directed power. Another Air Force Research Lab program working towards this goal is Skyborg, which has previously flown in Kratos-built drones. Skyborg is envisioned as a modular AI that can plug into a variety of drones, turning those planes into more-autonomous uncrewed wingmates for fighters.  

Shifting the scouting functions to a cheaper drone protects the pilot’s life in the more-expensive plane, and means only some ability is lost if the drone gets shot down. In the past the Air Force has used the word “attritable” for drone programs like this, emphasizing that a lower cost means commanders can make plans with the expectation that some drones will be lost in the mission. For the OBSS announcement, both the Air Force Research Laboratory and Kratos used “low-cost” and “affordable,” which are subtler ways of highlighting the benefit of a cheaper vehicle relative to an expensive crewed plane.

[Related: The future of the Air Force is fighter pilots leading drone swarms into battle]

As Kratos president Steve Fendley told The War Zone: “Attritable means it’s going to have some limited life or limited number of missions, whether that’s one or 10 or a hundred, I don’t know. I would say that the programs we’ve been on and the requirements we’ve seen, there typically is a desire, at least, that says we would like this to be good for x number of hours or x number of missions.”

One way to take advantage of that reusability is outfitting the drones for the riskier parts of crewed missions. For an attack on an anti-air missile emplacement, having a human pilot in an F-35A or a C-130, for example, and directing the drone from a distance, lets the OBSS fly an attack route with some danger, with the goal of clearing a path through deadly defenses. This is a task that is sometimes done by cruise missiles or loitering munitions, which are destroyed in the hit. If the cost of OBSS is comparable to that of a cruise missile, or even a few cruise missiles, using one in battle with the expectation that most of the time it will return to fight another day makes sense from a balance-sheet perspective.

All of this future promise hinges on whether or not the prototype version in development by Kratos can deliver as promised. Fortunately for observers, the time to delivery is short, with an expected flight next year. Should that prove successful, the contract awarded has the option of an extension to 2024, with nearly $32 million more for the company should they deliver.

With a total possible contract award just shy of $50 million, OBSS is offering to develop a wingmate for stealth fighters at just 64 percent the purchase price of a single F-35A.

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This story originally featured on Task & Purpose.

If you’ve ever struggled with a government computer still running on Windows 2000, know that you’re not alone. In fact, the military’s cybersecurity infrastructure and software development enterprise is in such a bad state that the Air Force’s first-ever Chief Software Officer will soon resign because it isn’t worth fighting the entire bureaucracy of the Department of Defense just to get some basic information technology issues fixed.

“We are running in circles trying to fix transport/connectivity, cloud, endpoints, and various basic IT capabilities that are seen as trivial for any organization outside of the U.S. Government,” wrote Nicolas Chaillan in a LinkedIn post announcing his resignation on Thursday. “At this point, I am just tired of continuously chasing support and money to do my job. My office still has no billet and no funding, this year and the next.”

For those who might be thinking “what do I care about software? Let the nerds figure that one out,” hear this: Many experts believe that future conflicts will be won and lost based on our ability to develop new software.

“Success in tomorrow’s conflicts will largely depend on how warfighters are able to harness and adapt everything from mission systems on aircraft to sensor packages, networks, and decision aides,” retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula and Heather Penney who are respectively the dean and senior resident fellow for The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, in a July policy paper on network and software development.

“To prevail in a dynamic and contested battlespace, warfighters must be able to reprogram and reconfigure their weapon systems, sensors and networks,” they wrote. “Yet the Air Force continues to develop, update, and manage software and architectures in a highly centralized and stove-piped fashion.”

Apparently the old Air Force recruiting slogan, “It’s not science fiction, it’s what we do every day,” does not apply to the branch’s bureaucracy, which Deptula and Penney argued is stuck in a bygone era.

“The bureaucracy of Department of Defense funding categories also prevents software tools from being fielded and employed,” they wrote, which means warfighters are always a step behind their changing battlespace. “This is a recipe for failure given tomorrow’s challenges. To put it bluntly, software and networks shouldn’t be governed by industrial age processes.”

It was that kind of bureaucracy that also made Chaillan’s three years on the job a Sysphean task just to get simple projects done, at least according to his LinkedIn post.

“I’m tired of hearing the right words without action, and I called on leadership to ‘walk the walk,’” Chaillan wrote. “That includes funding, staffing and prioritizing IT basic issues for the Department. A lack of response and alignment is certainly a contributor to my accelerated exit.”

There are several specific experiences that impressed on Chaillan how little military leadership actually cares about cybersecurity and software development. One of those is DevSecOps, which is short for development, security, and operations. DevSecOps is a process by which software developers keep security central to every step of software development, rather than tacking it on at the end of the development cycle, according to IBM. 

Chaillan wrote that he was very proud of his team creating the DoD Enterprise DevSecOps Initiative, which began spreading the holy word of DevSecOps to the backwards cyber-heathens dwelling in the Pentagon. But even that process is often like pulling teeth, Chaillan wrote.

“[Our leaders] have repeatedly refused to mandate DevSecOps, not even for new starts in custom software development!” he said. “There is absolutely no valid reason not to use and mandate DevSecOps in 2021 for custom software. It is borderline criminal not to do so. It is effectively guaranteeing a tremendous waste of taxpayer money and creates massive cybersecurity threats but also prevents us from delivering capabilities at the pace of relevance, putting lives at risk[.]”

The same problem applies to implementing Zero Trust systems. Those are software security steps like when Gmail or Facebook texts you a verification code just to make sure you’re not a hacker. You’d think national security secrets would have a better layer of security than my company’s Mailchimp account, but apparently not, according to Chaillan.

“[W]e hear the leadership talk about Zero Trust implementations without our teams receiving a dime of funding to make it happen,” he wrote. Nowadays, DoD is willing to put more money where its mouth is in terms of Zero Trust, but it’s not using any of the early work Chaillan and his team did on the subject last year, he said.

“Why waste more taxpayer money playing catch up?” the software officer wrote. “The ‘not invented here’ syndrome is powerful in DoD and our leadership is not willing to stop it.”

The ‘not invented here’ problem refers to a widespread habit of different military agencies, or even different tribes within an agency, doing their own version of the same project without sharing information or best practices. This is even a problem between different fighter jet programs in the Air Force, wrote Deptula and Penney in their analysis.

“Although the F-22 and F-35 are the only two 5th generation fighters in the Air Force inventory, they cannot share information with each other machine-to-machine,” because they use incompatible datalinks that were developed 10 years apart, they wrote. “Today, the F-22 and F-35 fleet still cannot exchange information without the aid of an externally hosted gateway, one which is still in the experimentation and demonstration phase.”

Read more about the Air Force’s IT meltdown over at Task & Purpose.

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A pilot has two general ways to train at the controls of a plane: in a real aircraft up in the sky, or down below in a simulator. A station on the ground can allow aviators to practice a tricky maneuver like refueling their bomber behind a tanker, and it’s less expensive than getting a real bird in the air. But of course, the reality of actually being in the sky, and experiencing punishing G-forces in a nimble fighter jet, is different from ground-based practice. 

A company called Red 6 has developed their own system that fuses those two training scenarios, by using augmented reality to visually simulate other aircraft on a fighter pilot’s visor while they are actually flying. The approach aims to fill a lacuna that the company’s CEO and co-founder, Daniel Robinson, says exists when carrying out training sorties in the sky.

“A lot of the work we do as combat pilots takes place beyond visual range—i.e., a range at which the sensors on the airplanes can see the threats, but the pilot is not capable of physically seeing them with their eyeballs,” Robinson, a former F-22 Raptor pilot, says. At around 10 nautical miles, a pilot could see an actual aircraft outside of their plane. But if those adversaries are virtual, and simulated only on radar, of course there’s nothing for the pilot to actually glimpse. “When they transition from the radar to look up, there’s nothing there.”

That’s the issue that Robinson wanted to tackle. “I wanted to figure out a way to put synthetic entities into the field of view of the pilots,” he says, “and have them look, feel, and behave, as if they were real airplanes.”

[Related: The US’s flagship fighter jet simulator is now multiplayer]

The solution involves using AR in the pilot’s field of vision, meaning they can see the real world outside the airplane—an important detail, to be sure—and also see images of synthetic aircraft that aren’t actually there. Those computer-generated images, he says, would be flown by either AI or a real pilot on the ground. 

The goal is to make it seem like a pilot flying a real aircraft in the sky is actually flying with, or against, simulated aircraft—because there’s no substitute for actually being up there, as opposed to in a simulator. “Strapping yourself to something that’s capable of pulling 9 Gs, you can run out of fuel, you can crash into the ground, [and] people are shooting at you,” Robinson says. “The cognitive load on the pilot’s brain is massively increased once you start doing this for real.” 

[Related: Refueling B-52s in the sky is hard, so the Air Force is trying VR simulators]

“If we accept that we must fly real airplanes to train,” he adds, “and expose ourselves to that environment, the question is, how do we do it efficiently?” His answer to that is getting pilots up in the sky, but using AR, AI, and computing power to create synthetic but visible aircraft to interact with them. 

Robinson outlines the ways in which the tech works. “I can fly an intercept on an augmented reality KC-46 tanker,” he says. “I can go join up on the wing, fly alongside it, drop in behind it, [and] I see the refueling boom.” In that respect, it’s a similar training scenario to a project the Air Force kicked off earlier this year to explore more accurate ways, using tech like AR, for B-52 bomber pilots on the ground to practice refueling their birds behind tankers. 

In the scenario Robinson describes, he could continue flying his real aircraft after joining up with the mock tanker, and then join a simulated wingman who’s flying a fighter like an F-22, and then the real aircraft and the artificial F-22 could then fight against an simulated enemy. If you were on the ground looking up at that complex scenario through binoculars, all you would see was one real aircraft, while the pilot in it would see two artificial ones outside the canopy. 

The company just recently signed a contract of some $70 million to install their system into a T-38, which is a two-seat training jet used by the likes of the US Air Force and NASA. They call it ATARS, for Airborne Tactical Augmented Reality System. Next up could be using ATARS on an aircraft like an F-16. 

Robinson says he expects to get ATARS up and running and off the ground in the T-38 in the next 12 to 18 months. “The first plan is to integrate into T-38, [and] validate that it’s safe,” he says; then comes bringing it to additional aircraft. “Can we create a network in which multiple military airplanes can connect and train together,” he wonders, “because if we do that, we’ve ushered in a fundamentally new paradigm in training.” 

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The best armor, if it could be devised, would weigh absolutely nothing. It would surround its wearer in an impenetrable aura of pure protection, holding all threats at bay. This idealized defensive system could come in the form of a force field, and it would be useful for stopping everything from nuclear missiles to small drones. With directed energy weapons, the Air Force believes such a force field is someday possible—but that day is in 2060 at best.

References to force fields appear three times in “Directed Energy Futures 2060,” a report from the Air Force Research Laboratory published July 16. The potential for military force fields is captivating—a concept that seems more suited to science fiction; the report actually contains an appendix of three science fiction vignettes. 

The real-world term to know here is “directed energy,” and force fields are one of the more distant applications of that idea.

As defined by the report, “directed energy” is any focused beam of electro-magnetic energy used for a military purpose. This can be the burning destruction of a drone from a high powered laser, jamming radio frequencies, or it can even be as simple as using a low-powered laser to illuminate a target for a laser-guidance system.

Directed energy weapons and tools are in use across a range of nations today. The report declares that at least 31 nations have directed energy weapons, and that non-state actors like militias and insurgent groups have also used them. Some of this technology, from counter-drone microwaves to pilot- or sensor-blinding laser pointers, is available and in use today.

Directed energy against missiles?

The most fantastical, and least attainable, vision for directed energy set out by the Air Force is using it to thwart ballistic missiles.

“Although a concept often associated with science fiction, in fact ground and ship-based DE [directed energy] defense systems effectively act like point-localized force fields against small and relatively soft targets today,” the report says, before suggesting that sufficiently advanced directed energy could solve the exceptionally hard problem of missile defense, or at least its technical aspect. It continues: “However, these concepts require significant technical advancement by 2060 to achieve the full range of power contemplated.”

The desire for force fields is not particularly new. In 2015, Boeing patented a force field concept that would use lasers to heat the air in between a humvee and an explosion, creating a counter-blast that dulls the effect of the bomb. It is a novel idea, a fascinating concept, and just a patent. The work of using energy to stop weapons is hard, iterative, and frequently ends in failure.

As our colleagues at The War Zone write, “we’re still a ways away from being able to fully realize these types of directed energy capabilities,” even as military studies envision new concepts to get from the present to that future. 

Putting directed energy weapons on airplanes, or even in space, would be required to create this theorized missile-stopping forcefield. The Air Force attempted an airborne anti-missile laser before, mounting it inside a massive 747. The program, despite massive hype in the 1990s and early 2000s, was canceled in 2011. Successfully combining power supply, accurate sensors, dedicated tracking, and the reliability to intercept an incoming attack was a huge challenge a decade ago. It would take significant technological lift to get it ready by the 2060s.

Directed energy to destroy drones

While using massive lasers to stop airborne nuclear missiles in flight remains well beyond the scope of modern technology, there are some more modest successes with directed energy devices.

“Although not necessarily as imagined by science fiction,” the report states, some Directed Energy Weapons in development today effectively act like counter-drone force fields.

[Related: The US military is testing a microwave anti-drone weapon called THOR]

In this anti-drone application, the directed energy creates a real but unseen barrier to flight, where high-powered microwaves or consistently targeted lasers disable the electronic systems guiding drones. The craft may not be immediately repelled, but with the energy blast damaging essential systems they will not stay airborne and active for long.

For example, THOR, a high-powered microwave weapon tested by the Air Force to blast multiple drones out of the sky, is a kind of directed energy weapon.

Directed energy to halt humans 

After the theorized anti-missile force field of the 2060s and the drone-disruption force field of the present, the report identifies a third type of invisible barrier of directed energy. This force field is the “Active Denial System,” a weapon used by military and police forces as a less-lethal crowd control tool. Blasting nearby humans with 95 Ghz of directed energy, it heats the outer layer of skin.

“People have described the physical effect of this [Directed Energy] as like facing a roaring fire,” declares the report. “This spectrally precise effect can be thought of as creating a force field that repels crowds around an embassy, base, port, or other high value location.”

[Related: The US military’s heat weapon is real and painful. Here’s what it does.]

Unlike the imagined force fields of fiction, which are portrayed as creating a purely passive shield against harm, these counter-drone and counter-human weapons are the far more immediate form of energy direction. The technology to invisibly prevent people from standing in an area may be a distant goal. The technology to harm people standing in an area or drones flying nearby is ready, deployed, and in the arsenals of multiple militaries.

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Somewhere high above New Jersey, I yanked the oxygen mask off my face, worried I was about to throw up.

Maj. Jason Markzon, the pilot of our F-16 fighter jet, had just steered the plane through two tight, hard turns, part of an aviation procedure called the G-exercise. A moment later, Markzon—whose Air Force call sign is Flack—abruptly rolled the aircraft on its side, a maneuver known as a knife-edge pass that put the plane’s stubby wings perpendicular to the ground. He brought us back to horizontal, then pulled the plane hard to the right. I groaned.

The crushing turns and fast choppy maneuvers were physically punishing—a roller coaster ride I wanted to end. “Do you mind leveling out?” I asked.

“Rob, how’s it going, man?” Flack asked, his voice coming in through the speakers in my red, white, and blue helmet.

“I do not feel well,” I replied.

We had taken off some 20 minutes earlier, all eight stages of the jet’s afterburners lit and rocketing us down a runway at MacArthur Airport on Long Island. We screamed off the ground and into a partly cloudy blue sky on a windy morning in late May. Moments after becoming airborne, Flack pulled back on the control stick in his right hand, sending us into a 60-degree climb at something north of 400 mph.

The seats on an F-16 are reclined at an angle of 30 degrees, so a 60-degree climb feels like you’re going straight up. We flew to about 10,000 feet. That took all of about 30 seconds and hit us with 5.4 Gs, or more than five times the force of gravity. I weigh around 155 pounds, but at that acceleration, it felt like I weighed more than 800. Flack ended the climb by leveling us out with a slow roll. For just a moment, we were upside down.

We cruised to the Garden State, and Flack made a 90-degree turn, then a brutal 180-degree turn—a hard long pull and a steep bank angle. I experienced 6.2 Gs during the maneuver. (Astronauts typically endure three or four during liftoff, and an F-16 and its pilot can handle nine.) The sudden moves were part of our G-exercise, a standard practice before any flight that might hit the crew with high Gs to ensure that the plane, and anyone aboard, can take the stress. I did not pass.

It’s hard to describe the frightening sensation of pulling heavy Gs. A crushing feeling pushes you back into your seat. You experience difficulty breathing. The force pushes blood away from your eyes and brain, potentially giving you tunnel vision. It’s not unusual for rookies to feel pummeled by the Gs—some even lose consciousness—and shaken to the point of puking from air sickness.

I didn’t vomit. Not then, anyway.

The plane wrote checks my body couldn’t cash

The Air Force sometimes offers journalists the chance to ride in an F-16 when the Thunderbirds are in town. The team, which is to the Air Force what the Blue Angels, with their F/A-18 jets, are to the Navy, performed in New York in May.

Pilots often refer to the F-16 as “the viper,” a reference to spacecraft that appeared in the original Battlestar Galactica and to the fact that the plane is so maneuverable, it can seem to snap around like the head of a snake. (The official name is “The Fighting Falcon,” but come on: “viper” sounds so much cooler.)

Flack took me up in an F-16D Block 52, a two-seater built in the early 1990s. It features a Pratt & Whitney F100 turbofan engine that produces more than 29,000 pounds of thrust with the afterburner. Hold the throttle wide open and, if you’ve burned off enough fuel to lighten the load, the plane will fly straight up. I was sitting on an Aces 2 ejection seat, which I’d armed before takeoff by moving a small lever.

The Air Force added the F-16 to its fleet in 1979 and the plane remains in service today; the sleek, single-engine aircraft is lighter than Navy fighters and can hit twice the speed of sound. It’s renowned for its agility and ability to accelerate quickly from low speed. “The F-16 was the quintessential dogfighting airplane of the late 20th century,” says retired colonel Mike Torrealday (call sign, T-Day), who flew the aircraft for about 25 years and even ejected out of one over Utah after an engine failure. “It’s probably one of the most physically demanding airplanes to fly.”

Movies like Top Gun can’t convey the brutal physics of piloting a fighter jet that can, as T-Day says, “snap 9 Gs in less than a second.” Pilots are athletes in top physical condition and endure years of training to handle the accelerative forces. This is critically important to avoid a phenomenon called G-LOC (pronounced gee-lock), or G-induced loss of consciousness.

Before strapping into our viper, Flack and I donned G-suits—a high-waisted garment worn over the flight suit that features a hose connected to an air system in the jet. As pilots experience increasing acceleration, the suit fills with air like a blood pressure cuff, squeezing the legs and abdomen. That prevents blood from pooling in the extremities, keeping it in the chest and head and reducing the risk of losing consciousness.

Even more important than the gear is an exercise called the anti-G-straining maneuver that requires tensing the calves, hamstrings, quads, and glutes while clenching your abs. Imagine sitting in an office chair, pulling your feet backward as you roll and drag yourself forward. That helps blood remain in your core and brain, keeping your lights on and preventing you, as pilots say, from taking a nap. Aviators do this as they quickly inhale and exhale every three seconds or so by making a breathy “keh” sound.

Fighter pilots learn these techniques early on in trainer aircraft and hone them in a centrifuge, learning what it’s like to get it right—and wrong. “You can see somebody almost melt in front of you if they don’t do a correct anti-G-straining maneuver,” says Cheryl Lowry, a retired Air Force colonel and physician who teaches at the University of Texas Medical Branch.

You can’t safely pull a lot of Gs without wearing the suit and doing the exercise. Your heart rate would skyrocket as it fights to keep blood flowing upstairs rather than pooling everywhere else. You’d lose peripheral vision and then the ability to see color before going temporarily blind. “Pretty much immediately after that, you’re in grave danger of having a G-LOC,” Lowry says. When you regain consciousness—if the jet hasn’t crashed—you’ll feel woozy.

Pilots rarely lose consciousness; the Air Force says that statistically, it takes around 200,000 hours of flight time or more to get one G-LOC event. It recorded at least nine incidents in each of the past three years, including a fatality during a Thunderbirds training exercise over Nevada in April, 2018. Maj. Stephen Del Bagno crashed after feeling a max of negative 2 Gs (a situation that can occur if the plane is inverted, sending blood rushing to the head), while flying upside down before going into an 8.5-g dive. The Air Force determined that the “push-pull” effect of those two extremes impaired Del Bagno’s tolerance to the forces and reduced the effectiveness of his anti-G-straining maneuver, leading to G-LOC.

Computer code can help. The F-16 and some F-35 fighters use software called Auto-GCAS to avert a crash if a pilot loses consciousness. The Air Force says the system has saved eight lives. But the Thunderbirds eschew the technology because its pilots routinely fly at low altitude and in tight formation, and do not want to risk having the software take control of the planes.

Highway to the vomit zone

Military pilots spend years mastering the skills needed to handle the rigors of high-speed flight. I had about four hours of training that included basics like what to do during an ejection. (One tip: “think skinny and pass through” if headed toward power lines.)

Nailing the G-strain is “a little bit like getting the right swing in golf,” says Jan Stepanek, a physician and chair of the Aerospace Medicine Program at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. Seasoned aviators like Flack rely on muscle memory to pull it off, know how many Gs they can tolerate before it becomes necessary, and can do it almost subconsciously. I’m not sure I did mine correctly.

Flack had another advantage over me: Since he was in control of the plane, he knew what was coming. Motion sickness in a fighter jet, as in virtual reality and even a car’s rear seat, is caused by the disconnect between what your eyes see, your inner ear feels and how your brain handles that dissonance. Even though I enjoyed a clear view of the sky and terrain below (but not in front of me, as Flack’s seat and other equipment obstructed the view) through the canopy, the stimuli I felt on my inner ear was just too much.

I found being in the plane exhilarating—for a person who loves aviation, it was one of my life’s most intense and overwhelming moments. But the violence of it all added up. Commercial airliners generally bank into a turn at a gentle 25 or 30 degrees, and less when up high. Fighter jets can take a turn at 60 or even 90 degrees. A commercial plane is a bus; a fighter jet is a Formula 1 race car. You feel everything. It’s not subtle.

Flack eased up a bit after I removed my oxygen mask. Eventually he steered the aircraft through a slow barrel roll. “Oh my god, we are upside-down,” I announced, unnecessarily. By that point, I’d had enough.

“If it’s alright, I think I want to head home pretty soon,” I told him.

But Flack had already announced over the radio that we were “RTB,” letting air traffic control know we were returning to the base. A gusting crosswind and shorter runway than he was used to forced Flack to abort our first landing attempt. He retracted the landing gear and brought us around again before nailing the landing in a touchdown he called “pretty challenging.”

I didn’t throw up during the abrupt turns or the knife-edge maneuver or during my dramatic rip-off-the-mask moment. I kept it together during the barrel roll. But I lost it into a Zip-loc bag a few minutes before Flack’s first pass at the runway. I vomited again on the tarmac, while still sitting in the viper trying to get myself together before climbing down the ladder. And, for good measure, I ralphed again in the hangar after chugging a bottle of water too quickly. A doctor handed me two Zofran tablets and I fell asleep on the floor, still wearing my flame-retardant flight suit.

I felt a little better when I woke up, not sure how long I’d been out. But it took a week for me to feel like myself again. Flack has the right stuff. I do not.

Raw footage from my is flight below.

This story was originally published on August 6, 2019.

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On June 24, a digital pilot flew a 44-foot-long drone over California. This Air Force program, called Skyborg, could one day use its AI system to operate uncrewed robotic wingmen that would accompany traditional fighter jets into battle.

This test lasted two and a half hours, and involved a large drone called the MQ-20 Avenger, which is made by General Atomics and boasts a sprawling, 76-foot wingspan. It was just the second time that the Air Force has flown a drone using the Skyborg software; the first occasion was in late April, in Florida, using a smaller craft made by a company called Kratos. 

The Air Force’s goal, as described in a recent press release, is for the artificial intelligence software to be able to modularly pop into different types of uncrewed aircraft and “autonomously aviate, navigate, and communicate, and eventually integrate other advanced capabilities.” Those additional capabilities could include the software flying the drone alongside a human pilot in a fifth-generation fighter like an F-35, and perhaps even charging ahead into a battlefield. 

[Related: An Air Force artificial intelligence program flew a drone fighter for hours]

The Air Force refers to the software that does the actual flying for Skyborg as the “autonomy core system,” or ACS. Once the ACS was given control of the aircraft in the June test, according to the Air Force, it “accomplished basic aviation behaviors and responded to navigational commands, while reacting to geo-fences, adhering to aircraft flight envelopes, and demonstrating coordinated maneuvering.” 

Eventually, a Skyborg drone may work with a human-flown aircraft in a partnership that the military refers to as manned-unmanned teaming. But Heather Penney, a senior fellow with the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, former F-16 pilot, and combat veteran, stresses just how much work is left to do on this challenging task.

[Related: An AI just copiloted a U-2 spyplane for the very first time]

A second successful test of Skyborg in a controlled environment is a small but notable step, she says, but real-world deployments of Skyborg-powered drones will face serious additional challenges. “This is a very difficult thing to do, especially when you look at what the combat battlespace is going to be—it’s going to be very dynamic,” she says. “You have to enable it to sense and respond and react appropriately to the battlespace environment, as well as to the teammates.” 

Nonetheless, she sees the software as playing a key role in military aviation going forward. “This is the future of combat operations for a number of reasons,” Penney says. Uncrewed drones flown by software like this could “take on unique and different missions.” 

So what would those missions, or tasks, look like? One use, she says, could be “forward sensing,” meaning that the drones would fly ahead of crewed aircraft and analyze the area. They could also “provide additional weapons capacity,” she says—deploying missiles or bombs on command. Or, they could carry out “collaborative electronic warfare” by jamming enemy signals. In short, they’d enhance what a typical crewed fighter jet can accomplish. And they have one more advantage: since they’ll be less expensive than a traditional fighter jet, and won’t have humans on board, they’ll be more disposable in dangerous situations. 

[Related: The stealth helicopters used in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden are still cloaked in mystery]

Three companies have contracts to build drones that Skyborg could pilot. They are General Dynamics, which makes the Avenger drone flown in the most recent test; Kratos, which manufactures a drone used in the first test; and Boeing, whose Loyal Wingman drone has a removable, modular nose to allow for different payloads and missions.

But Penney, who used to fly the fighter jet known as the viper and now pilots aircraft like a Cessna 170, emphasizes that the system has its work cut out for it in the future. “People don’t understand how truly complex this problem set is,” she says. “What they’re trying to do is create a core capability that can be ported into any drone.” And that’s hard, because just as a human pilot has to learn how different aircraft handle when they switch plane types, so too will the Skyborg system. That, she says, is a very “audacious objective.” 

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This story originally featured on Task & Purpose.

Whether they’re in Star Wars, Halo, or Warhammer 40,000, I’m a big fan of sci-fi planetary invasions, so my ears perked up when I heard the U.S. Air Force wants to invest $48 million into researching reusable rocket technology that could help shoot cargo or special operations troops into space and then bring them down to an austere base or combat zone anywhere on the planet in under an hour.

At least, that could be a capability in the next few decades if all goes well, and that’s a lot of ifs. The Air Force put the $48 million request in its fiscal year 2022 budget proposal. In the request, titled “Rocket cargo,” the Air Force says it seeks to “leverage a commercial rocket to deliver [Air Force] cargo anywhere on the Earth in less than one hour, with a 100-ton capacity.”

The branch hopes the capability would provide U.S. Transportation Command with a cheap and fast alternative to sealift or airlift, and it could also allow Air Force Special Operations Command “to perform current rapid-response missions at lower cost, and meet a one-hour response requirement,” which is wicked fast compared to a 10-plus hour flight across an ocean in a C-17 Globemaster III transport jet.

While the Air Force did not specify which commercial rocket it hopes to strap its cargo to, Ars Technica pointed out that only one matches its description: the Starship rocket being developed by the private space exploration company SpaceX. A fully reusable heavy launch rocket, Starship is designed to carry crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the moon, Mars, and beyond, according to SpaceX’s website. Once completed it will be the world’s “most powerful launch vehicle ever developed,” the company boasts.

But don’t pull on your Halo Orbital Drop Shock Trooper cosplay just yet. The Air Force was clear in its budget justification that the service does not intend to invest in developing Starship. Instead the funding is meant to help the Air Force understand if and how it can use the rocket for military applications. For example, the funding would help researchers come up with ways for Air Force loadmasters to load or unload a rocket, rapidly launch one from “unusual sites,” figure out where it might be able to land and detect enemies, and even investigate whether the rocket could airdrop its payload after reentry. 

The Air Force has already spent $9.7 million this fiscal year gathering performance and design data on Starship, and the service plans to continue doing so as SpaceX keeps testing the rocket. In fiscal year 2022, the Air Force hopes to test the rocket in greater detail, including a wind tunnel test to figure out if air-drops from the rocket are possible.

If Congress approves the funding, and if Starship works out, and if the Air Force can figure out how to use it for military applications, it could open up some really cool sci-fi scenarios.

“When you can launch an austere airbase in a space capsule, that’s frickin’ awesome!” Will Roper, the former assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, told reporters in November during a briefing on the service’s new Advanced Battle Management System.

“Just to be able to just have it come down, halfway around the world, with everything you need to be able to maintain and operate a small fleet of airplanes—refuel it, rearm it and get it back in the fight,” Roper added.

The chief of U.S. Transportation Command, Army Gen. Stephen Lyons, said a drop platform like this could redefine military logistics.

“Think about moving 80 short tons, the equivalent of a C-17 payload, anywhere on the globe in less than an hour,” he said in October. “We should challenge ourselves to think differently about how we will project the force in the future, and how rocket cargo could be part of that.”

Lyons’ comments came just weeks after he revealed during a National Defense Transportation Association event that the Pentagon had signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with aerospace pioneer SpaceX to develop potential shipping routes that pass through outer space.

U.S. Transportation Command “has identified that commercial, point-to-point space transportation may provide a unique capability, enabling the command to better support moving equipment and eventually people quickly around the globe to meet our national objectives, global emergencies, and natural disasters,” U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Nirav Lad, principal investigator for space transportation CRADAs at the command, said in a statement.

Whether the under-an-hour capability promised by rocket delivery is worth the added cost is an open question, The War Zone reported. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hopes the cost of future Starship launches will be as low as $2 million a pop, which is about four times the cost of sending a C-17 to do the job, according to The War Zone.

There’s also the question of survivability, as The War Zone asked. How smart would it be to send a big noisy target like a rocket into enemy territory, and then launch it back?

Hopefully the Air Force will answer these questions in the coming fiscal year. And if we ever hear Gen. Lyons start chanting “express elevator to hell!” we want to be the first to tell you.

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A plane is limited by what it can carry, and how far it can carry it. This is especially true of small aircraft. DARPA’s Gremlins program is one answer to this challenge: by launching small drones from airborne carriers, swarms can piggyback on the range of their flying transports. In an upcoming series of tests, announced by an Air Force general last week and set to take place around October or November, the drones will be launched and then re-armed in flight. Or at least that’s the goal.

Right now, traditional aircraft take off from runways and, after some time traveling to their destination, have a set amount of time they can fly over an area before they have to return and land. But if any part of the target can move, be it people, tanks, or anything that can fit on a truck, it’s better to have aircraft that can adapt and pursue it from the sky.

Long-endurance drones and high-end fighters can do this reasonably well—drones like the Reaper for many hours, fighters like an F-15 at greater speed and with more bombs. Yet those aircraft are expensive to fly and operate. Reapers require human pilots at remote consoles for the entire time they are in operation. Over battlefields where there is little risk of anti-air weapons, these flights can operate with impunity, but the United States does not expect all future wars to resemble the same uncontested skies as seen over Afghanistan and Iraq.

DARPA’s Gremlins program, in the works for years, is an attempt to meet all of these challenges by building a kind of plane that flies for less time, at less distance, and at a much lower cost. To still work in combat, for everything from scouting to dropping bombs on targets, the Gremlins will be carried into battle in other aircraft, launched in the sky, and then fight as a swarm.

[Related: DARPA wants friendly gremlin drones]

Swarming allows the drones to disperse their functions across several smaller bodies. Not every Gremlin needs to have the same sensor if the drones can share the important information in near-instantaneous time. By dispersing the functions of an aircraft across many small bodies, it makes the work of anti-aircraft weapons harder. Shoot down a Reaper, and that knocks out a camera system, a communications relay, and several weapons all at once. Shoot down a fighter like the F-35, and that’s a human life as well as tens of millions of dollars of equipment. Destroy a Gremlin, and the rest of its swarm mates can still carry on their mission as designed.

[Related: DARPA’s new combat drones could catch a ride from other aircraft]

The company leading the Gremlins program is Dynetics, with dronemaker Kratos working on the actual airframe. Steve Fendley, president of Kratos Unmanned Systems Division, told Military.com that “they now want to rearm the Gremlins in air and redeploy [them], so they won’t just do one mission now.”

At sea, aircraft carriers are as much about rearming and refueling aircraft as they are about launching them. What makes a carrier so effective as an entity is that it can not just launch planes at an enemy, but do so repeatedly, sustaining that fight over time.

With Gremlins able to land on airborne carriers, like C-130 transport planes, the ability to take on new weapons could keep those same drones fighting for longer. If it works, it lets the drones shift all the heavy lifting to the transport, while the Gremlins swarm flies for every mission equipped with only what it needs immediately.

Making Gremlins work will require automating a tremendous amount of flying, from launch to attack to keeping formation with other drones. The planned returns for aerial landing include the drone latching on to a boom trailing beyond its mothership, much like for in-air refueling, only this will entail not just refueling but possibly being lifted inside the craft and rearmed.

In the last round of trials for Gremlins, flown in October 2020, the Gremlins came within 50 feet of successfully docking mid-air. For any of the program to deliver on the promised results, it will need to cut that 50-foot error to zero. 

If that can be done, the military will have an answer to expensive anti-air weapons, finally bending the cost curve away from pricey planes to cheaper missiles. The Air Force prefers “attritable” to “expendable,” but what makes a swarm work is that parts of it can be lost and the mission will still be completed. It’s a powerful answer to new attacks, and one that adds lots of reach and punch to aircraft that would otherwise be too low or unprotected to get near the fight.

Watch a concept video of the Gremlins below:

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The U.S. Air Force is quietly ramping up spending on a future bomber, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service published earlier this month. The Air Force also sent requirements for the program to the industry earlier this week. The goal is a new group of bombers to serve two functions: replace the aging bomber fleet, and safely attack despite future defensive weapons.

Work on Air Force’s next bomber began years ago. Here’s what Popular Science said about it in 2012:

Such a bomber would greatly expand the ability of the Air Force to hit protected places in enemy countries, places beyond the safe reach of America’s still-flying Cold War-era B-52 bombers. The Air Force expects to field between 80 and 100 of the new Long Range Strike Bomber, and they plan to have them ready for action by the mid 2020s.

Lockheed Long Range Strategic Bomber Concept Art

In March, people reported and photographed what appeared to be a new, v-shaped aircraft flying over Texas. This theory meshes well with the Congressional Research Service report, which saw a rapid budget increase and notes that:

Despite corporate maneuvering about the contract, both the Air Force and potential industry partners are keeping quiet about the development. In a triumph of blandness, Air Force secretary Deborah Lee James told the U.S. Naval Institute in a statement that “The [Long range Strike Bomber] is a top modernization priority for the Air Force. It will be an adaptable and highly capable system based upon mature technology.”

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The future of the United States Air Force is a human-piloted, $100 million stealth jet guiding flocks of $3 million drones that glide effortlessly into position powered by turbo fans. Thanks to the Air Force Research Lab and drone-maker Kratos, that future of combined human/robot formation is already being tested.

There are many good reasons to want a human in the cockpit of a plane, including their judgement, fast-thinking skills, and the capability to respond to unexpected threats.

But there are hard physical obstacles that suggest maybe not every plane needs to have a pilot. Humans need systems to stay alive, and those systems sometimes break. Earlier this month, Air Force F-35As were grounded because the system supplying oxygen to pilots failed, and the F-22 struggled with oxygen problems for years as well. Another challenge is the gravitational force on a pilot from sudden and sharp maneuvers; there is an upper limit on how much force a human body can withstand before they black out and possibly die. Finally, there’s the simple calculation of the value of a human pilot—they’re expensive, and their deaths, compared to that of a robot, matter, so the incentives are all in place to make a plane that can keep pilots safe.

Not so when it comes to robots. The term d’art is “attritable,” which is Pentagon-speak for “cheap enough that it’s okay to replace it if it’s lost.” And Kratos has a lot of experience making drones ultimately built to be replaced.

“Our heritage from the beginning of time was to develop inexpensive airplane systems that are rugged enough to withstand the ground impact,” says Steve Fendley, president of the unmanned systems division of Kratos. “Targets are designed to be shot at, possibly even hit. Our target systems can take a missile strike to the wing that destroys the wing, deploy a parachute, land, and all we need to do is replace that wing. So you replace the components that are designed to be replaceable, and very inexpensive, and then fly again.”

The primary target drone Fendley is talking about is the BQM-167 aerial target, which can cost between $750,000 and $900,000, depending on the options selected and the size of the order. That body is the basis for the Mako, one of two combat drones designed and built by Kratos. The Mako can fly at altitudes anywhere from 20 feet to 50,000 feet, at up to 690 mph, and with a maximum range of 1400 nautical miles (or 700 miles each way on a round trip). Depending on the size of the order, it will cost between $1.5 and $2 million, according to Fendley.

Like the target drone it’s based on, the Mako uses rocket-assisted takeoffs to get airborne, instead of traveling down a runway. That requires a launch space in the 10s of square feet, so several Mako drones could presumably be launched from a small area. And the drones are geared for combat. The Mako can carry payloads internally, on wing stations and on wing tips. Payloads could be anything from fuel tanks to extend its range, bombs intended for targets on the ground, and even air-to-air missiles. And it can do aerial maneuvers at up to 12 Gs, beyond what a human pilot can endure without losing consciousness.

Concept art for Mako combat drone

“Valkyrie” is the larger of Kratos’ combat drones, and depending on the options selected and the size of the order, it could be produced for a unit cost of between $2 and $3 million each. The Valkyrie isn’t as fast as the Mako, though by no means slow: it has a top speed of 650 mph. It can cover a range of over 3,000 nautical miles while carrying a standard payload, or more than enough to fly from Los Angeles to Boston. Powering the Valkyrie is a turbofan engine, like those typically found in business jets, which makes it more fuel-efficient than the turbo-jet in the Mako. It can fly at altitudes between 50 feet and 45,000 feet. It has a wingspan of 22 feet and a length of 29 feet, making it about 20 feet shorter and 10 feet narrower than the F-16 Fighting Falcon. Both Mako and Valkyrie can deploy parachutes at the end of their mission, gently falling to the ground for recovery and repair, ready to perform another mission.

Oh, and it might just drop a swarm of small drones from the internal bay that runs most of the plane’s length.

That bay can carry “anything from weapon systems to UAVs,” says Fendley. “It can carry, let’s call it a volley of small UAVs, and it can deploy those UAVs to either be its wingmen or to go conduct a mission of their own.”

“Drone” is a big category, and it includes everything from plane-sized vehicles like the Valkyrie to much smaller quadcopters. The biggest advantage of small drones is that costs allow for great numbers. The biggest weakness is limited flight times and ranges, so a big drone that can carry many small drones in its belly and unleash them when needed is a best-of-both-worlds scenario. The Air Force, aware that it needs a cheaper way to deal with threats, is looking seriously at small drones as a way to stop missiles or launch aerial attacks.

In 2015, DARPA released a concept video showing drones, stealth fighters, and cargo planes working together to attack enemy defenses. Expendable drones scout ahead, and relay information back to the stealth fighter. That stealth fighter, in turn, relays information to a decidedly conspicuous cargo plane, which releases drones and missiles to hit targets. While none of the planes in the concept are explicitly named, it’s easy to see a Kratos Valkyrie fulfilling the role of the drone, an F-35 as the stealth fighter, and a C-130 as the cargo plan. If the Valkyrie itself could release an additional swarm of smaller drones, an air defense system built to tackle large planes could be overwhelmed.

The Air Force is already working on drone swarms, which fly together as a loud, buzzing, autonomous unit, like especially large, mechanical bees. The swarm is a future potential, one the Air Force is exploring but not yet in a useful, military form.

Individual combat drones like the Mako and Valkyrie are much closer to realization. In 2015, the Air Force sent out a request for “Low Cost Attritable Strike UAS Demonstration,” which is the cheaper combat drone program that ultimately led to the Kratos Valkyrie. Besides a small price tag, the Air Force wanted “long range, high speed strike capability in remote regions where forward basing is difficult or prohibited,” perhaps thinking of a future where runways won’t always be available but air support is still required. In 2016, Kratos won the $40.8 million dollar contract to develop the vehicle, which lead to the Valkyrie. Notably, the contract required a vehicle that could do “defensive counter air manoeuvres, offensive counter air manoeuvres, the suppression of enemy air defences and the destruction of enemy air defences,” or tasks in the past performed by versatile fighter-bombers (in modern military parlance, a “strike aircraft”).

Valkyrie model in a wind tunnel

Fighting other aircraft is well beyond the abilities of drones used by the Air Force today, though DARPA’s been looking for input on drones that could win air-to-air combat since at least 2015. Which leads to the fundamental question of any autonomous or semi-autonomous system: how, exactly, does it know where to fly, and more importantly, when to kill?

Fendley compared lethal decisions in a combat drone to the military chain of command in a large weapon system, like the guns of a ship or a missile battery.

“Typically there is a chain of command,” says Fendley. “In our autonomy system, you have gates of decision-making. There are certain functions, like deploying weapons is one of them, where a system has everything it needs to be prepared up through that point and when it gets through that point, it holds for for human approval for that last command.”

For example, the drone can fly into position, aim at a target, and then stay on target without firing until a human approves the command to fire. And this gated control system isn’t limited to lethal decisions. If the drone has to fly over sensitive airspace, for example, it could send a request for human approval to pass through that boundary, and wait until it gets the okay to do so, or receives a different order.

There are options when it comes to the human that’s in control. It can be a fighter-pilot communicating through a special tablet over a tactical military network, or a passenger sitting in the back of a military cargo plane, overseeing the drones escorting the flight and giving them specific orders when needed. Most of the time, the drones will automatically track and match the actions of the human-piloted plane. The drones fly the exact same path of the plane, offset by some distance in three-dimensional space for safety.

“A year and a half ago, we actually flew in formation with a Harrier [fighter],” says Fendley. “Hands-off, no data-link on the ground, our tactical aircraft system was operating solely on the tactical network system which the Harrier had, positioning and flying that airplane 100 percent autonomously.”

This is a straightforward example of a “manned/unmanned teaming,” where human-piloted aircraft and autonomous machines work seamlessly together. It could be one-to-one, with each fight matched to a drone, or it could be several drones flying in formation with the piloted aircraft, several cheaper drones amplifying the fighting power of the initial aircraft while only minimally increasing the costs involved. At $3 million each, a Valkyrie drone isn’t cheap by most standards, but it’s a lot easier to send into a messy situation than the F-35A fighter jet, which costs the Air Force 30 times as much.

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When we look up at the stars at night, we are staring into an infinitely deep ocean, a void filled with endless layers of deeper, farther lights. Most telescopes seek the outer limits of our universe, or document celestial phenomena on the edges of human comprehension. DARPA’s Space Surveillance Telescope, which the agency handed over to Air Force Space Command yesterday, is all about mapping the objects close to Earth. Its job is to plot the closest layer of space by discerning which bright objects are moving in geosynchronous orbit, and filtering out everything else.

The Space Surveillance Telescope, or SST as everyone referred to it yesterday, is one of DARPA’s longest-running projects. Typically, DARPA likes projects that finish in three years, from concept to prototype to something that can be refined into a useful tool for national security or the military.

SST started in 2001, and yesterday marked the telescope’s transition from a DARPA experiment into an Air Force asset. (Besides air, the Air Force claims both cyber and space as domains, ensuring the service has a hand in protecting both the internet and satellite television.) The telescope first opened its eye to stare at the night sky in February 2011. Sitting at 8,000 above sea level on top of North Oscura peak in New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, it is the 10th largest telescope in the continental United States and the 38th largest in the world.

Space Surveillance Telescope Control Room

Key to the SST is a sensor that MIT’s Lincoln Labs started working on in 1998, though the idea was theorized earlier. Using an array of curved Charged Coupled Devices, the telescope can record images from curved mirrors without distortion. Ultimately, this could feed more compact optic systems, and differently shaped ones: instead of the flat planes of modern cameras, curved CCDs could lead to spherical cameras, where the distortion is less. James Gregory, a materials scientist working with Lincoln Labs, says that the tech could redesign optics to get rid of astigmatic aberrations. Not all DARPA projects lead to technology that goes beyond military use, but the imaging devices put to use in the Space Surveillance Telescope might reshape cameras.

The telescope captures a vast picture: 100 million pixels, according to deputy DARPA director Steven Walker. It takes just one person to operate, and that person can operate it remotely, or set the telescope to scan the sky autonomously. And it captures a lot of information, with the camera gathering and saving half a terabyte of data on a typical night scan (the amount of data collected varies depending on the mission and other variables). The whole apparatus is immense, weighing 225,000 pounds.

The project’s stated goal is to track objects in geosynchronous orbit, the part of space that’s most immediately valuable to people on Earth. A satellite in geosynchronous orbit moves in time with the planet’s rotation below, so that it is always located over the same spot. Geosynchronous satellites broadcast television, give us GPS coordinates, relay communications, and film the earth, giving us everything from weather information to detailed surveillance for governments with satellites. And as a business, the satellite industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue a year.

America was not the first nation to put satellites into space; deputy DARPA director Steven Walker reminded the audience at Tuesday’s proceedings that DARPA was created after Sputnik shook America out of complacency. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been the biggest benefactor of satellites in orbit, with 576 satellites in orbit presently, and a military that’s operated for decades with the security that the tools they had in space would continue to provide valuable information to people on the ground.

Front Of The Space Surveillance Telescope

Now, the United States Air Force is less sure. Major General Nina Armagno, director of strategic plans, programs, requirements and analysis for Air Force Space Command, told the assembled crowd at the hand-off ceremony that by 2025, “Russia and China can hold any of our space assets at risk.” In 2007, China shot down one of its own satellites with a missile, and the same basic ballistic technology that can put an object into space can carry an explosive to destroy an object that’s already there.

The Space Surveillance Telescope isn’t a complete answer to the threat of nations blowing up each other’s satellites. It is, according to both DARPA and the Air Force, the first step to an answer. By providing Space Situational Awareness (acronymed as SSA, but almost always said as the full name when described out loud), the Air Force wants to track what objects are moving in the night sky, which objects are new, and what danger those objects might pose to satellites in orbit. When asked if the Air Force was working on space weapons to defend satellites, Armagno clarified that the Air Force is working on space defenses, and declined to explain further.

Attribution is one possible space defense that the SST brings to the military. With a working picture of objects in geosynchronous orbit, if something new shows up and, say, collides with a communications satellite, then SST could show how that object moved across the sky, and other tools could link it to the actor that launched it. “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace,” said Armagno, quoting George Washington’s first State of the Union address.

Back Of The Space Surveillance Telescope

At a total program cost of $150 million, the SST is roughly half again as expensive as a single F-35A, the Air Force’s newest stealth fighter. To cover all of geostationary orbit would take four such telescopes. Budget constraints, widely derided in casual conversation at the transition ceremony, mean that the first SST is now the only one, and the most immediate stage of its life is disassembly. The SST is going to Australia, where it will be Space Command’s eye on the southern skies. The need is the most urgent there; the Air Force has many tools that look at space, and only one of those is below the equator.

The SST’s next stage of life will begin on the beach at Australia’s Harold E. Holt naval base. Air Commodore Sally Pearson, with the Royal Australian Air Force, remarked at the transition ceremony that they’ll have to prepare the telescope for “cyclonic conditions,” a consideration it didn’t need when perched on top of an inland desert mountain.

Both Australian and United States Air Forces hope to have the telescope up and running in Australia by 2020. Once in place, it will stare into space, mapping and plotting objects, looking for danger. It will share some of this information with NASA and the larger scientific community, especially when those dangerous objects are asteroids, but it will remain a military tool, scanning for objects made by humans that threaten other objects made by humans placed in orbit around the planet that contains all humans.

The Space Surveillance Telescope won’t, by itself, be able to stop any of those threats. Instead, it will remain vigilant, making it hard for any country that puts a malicious object in orbit to deny that it is there. “No one wants a war in space,” Armagno told the assembled audience. On the off-chance that’s not true, the SST will be there to find out who, exactly, decided to start a war in the heavens.

The Space Surveillance Telescope As The Sun Starts To Set

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For more than two hours on April 29, an advanced robot brain flew a Kratos-built Mako drone fighter exactly as it was supposed to. The flight test was a key milestone in the Air Force’s effort to develop a new, useful autonomy system for a growing fleet of plane-sized robot fighters.

Dubbed the “autonomy core system,” or ACS, the new robot control system is crucial to the Air Force’s ominously named Skyborg program—an AI that can pilot an airplane to fight and fly alongside human pilots, and learn in the process. 

This initial test was flown over the same Tyndall Air Force Base that previously experimented with the four-legged Ghost robots for base security. Before Skyborg flies alongside human-inhabited planes, the Air Force wants it to master the basics, which was the point of the April test. The Mako is a relatively cheap test platform for exercises like this, adapted from an aerial target drone.

These basics include the routine parts of flight, like taking off, staying airborne, and landing without incident, as well as more complex activities, like receiving navigational commands from humans. Part of the test included seeing if Skyborg could navigate the drone around a geofence, or an internally programmed barrier in the sky defined by GPS points. The Air Force watched the plane from the ground and from the sky, and tracked its progress on those tasks and others. 

[Related: The future of air combat is drones launching more drones]

“We’re extremely excited for the successful flight of an early version of the ’brain‘ of the Skyborg system. It is the first step in a marathon of progressive growth for Skyborg technology,” Brigadier General Dale White, the Air Force’s program executive officer for fighters and advanced aircraft, said in a release. “These initial flights kick off the experimentation campaign that will continue to mature the ACS and build trust in the system.”

The publicly stated aim of the Skyborg program is to create robot airplanes that can fly missions fully autonomously, while being much cheaper than expensive crewed fighters (like the stealthy, pricey F-35). They are also far more expendable, though the word the Air Force uses is “attritable.” This is less about actively making a cheap, almost disposable drone, and more about having an airplane cheap enough that its loss in combat is not a significant cost or, perhaps as important, a loss of capability.

Skyborg is not a single drone design, but is focused on creating and flying various drone bodies for a similar purpose. The term specifically refers to the kind of AI that will direct autonomous drone planes as they fly alongside inhabited fighters. The Air Force is contracting with three companies to actually build prototype fighter-jet drones to do the flying.

[Related: Boeing’s new autonomous fighter jet has a pop-off, swappable nose]

When Skyborg was first announced back in 2019, Will Roper, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, specifically likened it to R2-D2, the robotic copilot of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.

“I expect the first things that we’ll do will not appear as sexy as what you might imagine in a movie, but will be completely game-changing,” Roper said.

By figuring out the software for the Skyborg first, the Air Force can work on adapting that code to airframes later, allowing bodies to multiply and adapt as threats and needs change.

Crucial to that process will be how the AI onboard the drones takes in, stores, and adapts to new sensor information. Machine learning offers the potential for an entire fleet of drones to learn from the actions and data of each individual craft. Training algorithms often requires tremendous amounts of data, especially novel data. Some of that will be generated in training flights, which should make the aircraft decent enough at all the scenarios it is explicitly trained for.

What will pose a challenge to Skyborg in the future, and what will likely vex any military project built around autonomous machines trained on available data, will be unusual situations. If the drone is used to flying along an F-35, and then departing on an attack run, what happens if its data link is severed, or if it is fed false information, or if hostile drones interfere with the flight path? Battle is the accumulation of expected risks creating wholly new scenarios. Trusting robots to navigate it smoothly means placing a tremendous amount of faith in a kind of data processing specifically designed to unearth unexpected results.

Over the next few months, the Air Force Research Laboratory plans to experiment more with the early Skyborg planes. Navigation with and around autonomous craft in the sky is an essential part of the Air Force’s vision for future fighter combat. Robot-assisted combat could finally mitigate the trend towards increasingly expensive fighters, and force countries to drastically rethink air force planning in the most significant way since the widespread adoption of jets and missiles.

Before all of this happens, Skyborg needs to prove it can play nice with other planes, and if not, needs to demonstrate that its autonomous core system can adapt so that it does so the next time it flies.

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You may not think too much about swarms of aggressive drones, but military planners do. That’s because a swarm of drones could confound defenses, as the formation could keep flying even after individual drones inside of it fail. For military experts tasked with securing bases against assault, preventing damage from a swarm of explosive-laden drones means stopping the entire swarm, not just removing a few moving pieces. That is why the Air Force is testing a new weapon, one that targets the electronics that makes the swarm work, all at once.

To defeat swarms like this, the US military is developing THOR, or the Tactical High Power Operational Responder. Built for the Air Force Research Laboratory, THOR is one way that bases or other military installations might defend themselves against aerial robots traveling in groups.

Officially, THOR is a “counter-swarm electromagnetic weapon” that “provides non-kinetic defeat of multiple targets.”

Stripped of jargon, this means that instead of using bullets or explosions to disable robots, THOR turns to messing up their electronics, specifically by hitting the gaggle with a high-powered microwave. The effect of such an approach against an electronic system can vary, from temporarily impairing the ability of the drones to communicate with one another all the way up to frying the electronics and rendering entire machines in the swarm broken.

[Related: The US military’s heat weapon is real and painful. Here’s what it does.]

This disruption, a cone-shaped blast against electronics, happens in a nanosecond and with immediate results, the Air Force boasts. And silently, too. The success projected is one of technological triumph against a new enemy. The imagined outcome is a sky full of robots approaching the THOR weapon, and then without any external indicator of change, the robots all fail in a host of ways, some crashing to the ground on fried computers, others staggering in place or veering of course.

THOR acts, and then the robotic smog clears.

On the outside, THOR looks like nothing so much as a radar hatching from a shipping crate. Its body is small by military standards. The entire system can fit inside a 20-foot-long shipping container, which itself can fit inside a C-130, the Air Force’s durable transport plane. That’s important, because it can reach places most likely to want a THOR. These are bases remote enough to risk a swarm attack, yet not so remote that they would be too small to be targeted.

Once offloaded from a plane, THOR could be driven into position on the back of a flatbed truck, so it’s not entirely at the mercy of runways. Still, it’s a big piece of equipment, and developing it wasn’t cheap. While the Air Force doesn’t list a unit price, it says the development cost was $15 million. 

[Related: The Coyote swarming drone can deploy for aerial warfare—or hurricanes]

In February 2021, the Air Force tested THOR in an exercise south of Albuquerque, at Kirtland Air Force Base. Army observers were in attendance, suggesting that the Army itself may look to THOR as part of a comprehensive approach to protect against drones.

Previously, the Air Force demonstrated THOR for a crowd including reporters in 2019. At that demonstration, the THOR system knocked out a single hovering drone. And in December 2020, Richard Joseph, the Air Force’s chief scientist, said that THOR had been deployed and tested in Africa for base defense. 

Part of the particular danger of drone swarms is the relatively low cost of components. Useful quadcopters can be found for a few hundred dollars or less, and it takes only a little modification to fit a small explosive payload to one. In 2016, an abandoned ISIS drone factory contained lots of cheap, off-the-shelf components for individual drones, which had been used to deadly effect in its earlier war effort in Iraq. While none of these drones were set up to swarm together, non-state actors have launched massed attacks featuring multiple drones working together, which have proven effective against more traditional anti-air defenses.

[Related: Russia Is Working On An Anti-Drone Microwave Gun]

This is to say nothing of the potential for cheap, acrobatic swarms. A company in China set a drone swarm world record in September 2020, with 3,051 drones, and then surpassed that with a 3,281-drone swarm in March 2021. The same technologies that make drones aesthetically pleasing in the sky, or allows them to ominously assemble into a flying QR code, can also coordinate many drones to fly in formation against a fixed position and, if so equipped, cause harm.

Shooting down a single small flying machine is hard, if doable. Shooting down an entire teaming sky of robots—a murmuration of drones, some potentially carrying explosives—is a danger that seems to demand special weaponry. Thus, THOR. 

Figuring out a way to stop a swarm is increasingly a military preoccupation. It’s an abrupt shift from decades of working on fighting expensive, high-end aircraft with increasingly sophisticated missiles, and it will take different tools to work. 

If THOR continues to be successful in trials, it is possible that the Army and Air Force could field THOR units as early as 2024 for more battlefield testing, with a possible formal entry into service slotted for 2026. Microwave weapons may not stop the development of swarm drones entirely, but they may at least stop a given swarm at a crucial moment. 

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Imagine the US aerial intelligence-gathering apparatus, and drones and satellites probably come to mind. But for decades, and still today, the military has also been using a spy plane called the U-2 to collect information about what’s below using instruments like radar, antennas, and even a film camera. Challenging to fly and especially hard to land, the aircraft cruises comfortably in the neighborhood of 70,000 feet off the ground.

We recently heard from two U-2 spy plane pilots about what it’s like to operate this aircraft and how the Air Force uses it today. Here’s what we learned.

The landing literally involves a speeding car

The U-2 loves heights—it has nearly twice the cruising altitude of a commercial jet. That’s thanks to its long, glider-like wings, which span 105 feet across. “This jet does not want to be on the ground, and that’s a real problem when it comes to landing,” says Matt Nauman, a U-2 pilot.

One complicating factor when landing is the dearth of wheels on the plane: to save weight, its designer gave it just two sets of wheels, lined up like bicycle tires, front to back, under the fuselage. Compare that with the landing gear on commercial planes like the 737, which has a stable triangle pattern: two sets of wheels next to each other under the wings, and one up front.

In other words, when a U-2 lands, there’s nothing to keep the wings from tipping and hitting the ground except the pilot’s skill. Because of the big wings, which provide oodles of lift, and the scant landing gear, the pilots need help when plopping it on the ground. “We’ll actually slow down, and the nose will continue to come up until the plane essentially falls out of the sky at two feet [off the ground], so we slow it down enough where it can no longer fly itself,” Nauman says.

To get an outside viewpoint, another U-2 pilot literally drives behind the aircraft at high speeds while it’s landing, radioing information to the pilot in the plane to help them land. Vehicles like Mustangs, Camaros, Pontiac G8s, and Chargers have done that job, says Travis Patterson, another U-2 pilot. “He’s actually talking the pilot down a little bit,” Patterson says, “just to help him out.”

The pilot wears a spacesuit and eats out of a tube

The cockpit of a U-2 is pressurized to around 15,000 feet of altitude, but the plane itself operates much higher off the ground. In case they need to eject or they face another problem, the pilots wear a spacesuit for the entire flight, like the one that Felix Baumgartner wore when jumping out of a balloon from 128,000 feet off the ground. That gear makes landing the plane more complex, too. “You’re effectively wearing a fishbowl on your head,” says Patterson, “and you’re trying to land one of the most difficult aircraft in the world.”

As for what they eat? “It’s actually a toothpaste tube full of food, like an MRE in a tube, that you eat through a port in your helmet,” Nauman says, although he says they’re working on improving that cuisine.

The point is to gather intelligence

The aircraft doesn’t carry kinetic weapons like guns. But Patterson says that it’s not helpless, as it does have a “self-defence system.”

So instead of kinetic weapons, it carries sensors like antennas, radar, and imaging equipment to gather intelligence and send it back down to the surface in real time. The plane is Mr.-Potato-Head-like, in that it’s modular: the Air Force can swap out what payloads and sensors they want it to carry.

“The missions are reconnaissance-based,” Patterson says. “If you think about the hot spots on the globe—right now we’re focusing on big players like China, and Russia, Iran, North Korea—there’s probably a U-2 flying somewhere in those areas right now, taking a look at what’s going on.”

The plane flies in international airspace, as opposed to directly over a country that’s a surveillance target. The idea is that the sensors can see so far—for example, a large radar unit in the nose is capable of peering some 300 miles in one direction from an altitude of 70,000, Patterson says—meaning that being “parked off someone’s coast” still enables a nice view inland.

The plane also can carry a digital-camera-like imager with a “lens about the size of a pizza platter,” says Patterson, that can image in different parts of the light spectrum that aren’t visible to the human eye or consumer-grade cameras.

And yes, it still shoots on film sometimes. It features a “giant wet film camera,” Patterson says, that carries about 10,500 feet of film. That film produces high-fidelity pictures of what’s below. Plus, Nauman says that shooting on film allows them to share imagery more easily with allies without running into issues pertaining to alterability or whether or not something is classified. “That film camera actually just lets us develop that film and distribute it as need be,” Nauman says.

Finally, it’s easy to imagine that the pilots would land the plane and then hand over a couple hard drives to intelligence analysts. But instead, the craft shares its data (just not what comes out of the film camera) with the surface while the plane is still in the air.

They take the information they gather, “and we pipe it over a data link to a satellite, and then down to the ground somewhere else in the world where we have a team of almost 300 intel analysts sitting there, operating as our crew,” Patterson says. They can also send the data straight to the ground, skipping that satellite link.

It’s been flying a long time

The first U-2 flew in 1955, although most of the planes with the U-2 name in service today were built in the mid-1980s, Patterson says. The fleet numbers around 30 planes, plus four craft that have two seats in them used to train pilots. The airframes may still be flying through 2040 or even 2050, Patterson says, because once the plane gets up high, the stress on the craft is low.

“We’re not a fighter, where we’re pulling a lot of g-force,” Patterson says. “Once it gets to altitude, it’s smooth, and quiet—and it’s very, very nice on the airplane. The only tough part is the landing.”

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Last week, an Air Force C-17 lifted off from Afghanistan and flew to Germany. On board the large cargo aircraft was an intricate bio-containment system populated by three government contractors who were also coronavirus patients.

The April 10 flight was the first time that the contraption, first developed during the Ebola crisis in 2014 and unveiled five years ago, was used for real. The Air Force calls it the Transport Isolation System, or TIS, and it can move people who are infected with a contagious bug of some kind without giving the contagion to anyone else on the plane, or contaminating the aircraft itself. It’s also designed so that medical caregivers can go in and out, and offers them a place to take off their dirty personal protective equipment before reentering the rest of the aircraft.

Here’s how onboard healthcare workers tend to patients in the system, and how it works.

One TIS is actually made up of three modules: two isolation modules, and an antechamber. The modules are on pallets, like cargo. The antechamber is something akin to the mud room in a house—the proper place to remove any soiled stuff—while the isolation modules it connects to are where the patients reside. On the C-17 flight from Afghanistan to Germany, the Air Force actually flew two complete TIS units, for a total of four isolation modules and two antechambers. Plus, a whole bunch of crew was on hand to help. The patients were dispatched to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center after the flight arrived in Germany.

“It is a negative-pressure system,” says Maj. Donna Eaton, a nurse working at Joint Base Charleston in South Carolina and a trainer for people who work on the TIS. That way, she explains, “all the pathogens stay in the device and do not escape into the air.” In other words, it’s designed so that air flows inwards, not outwards.

When caregivers need to enter the modules to see patients, they can put on their personal protective gear, or PPE, in the plane, outside of the TIS system. To exit, after moving from the isolation modules back into the antechamber, the steps are regulated. “There’s timers in there that you have to hit,” Eaton says. “We have meticulous procedures for people to take off their PPE.”

The modules themselves, she says, can mimic the different levels of care you’d find in a hospital, from something basic—like you’d see on a standard hospital medical floor—to ICU-level. Patients who are ambulatory and can walk themselves will naturally need a different level of attention than someone who is in critical care. Those critical care patients, she says, would show up already “packaged” with the medical equipment they need already connected to them.

And not surprisingly, they stash other emergency medical gear inside the TIS, Eaton says—stuff such as oxygen tubing or simple kit such as a thermometer. They can bring other equipment as needed inside, too, but won’t take it into the contaminated area unless they need to. “We have everything available on the aircraft to take care of any kind of patient and any kind of emergency situation,” she points out.

The entire TIS draws power from one of the C-17s two electrical networks. Any oxygen the patients need also stems from the cargo plane’s O2 system. The antechamber on its own weighs some 1,285 pounds, while an isolation module clocks in at 1,455 pounds, according to an Air Force fact sheet.

While the Transport Isolation System dates to 2014, the Air Force is also working on a new solution dubbed the Portable Bio-Containment Module, notes Air Force Magazine.

These American medical modules are similar in concept to a French flying hospital called the Morphée, which has also been used to transport coronavirus patients. That French system is slightly different in purpose, though—it’s not a bio-containment transport facility so much as an open-plan ICU in an aircraft that can treat a dozen or more patients.

Meanwhile, down at sea level, the US Navy has hospital ships.

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If President Donald Trump’s Space Force idea actually comes to fruition, it won’t be the first military force aiming for space. Not by a long shot. In fact, the idea of installing a military presence in space is as old as the space age, and the United States came close to establishing its own space force in the 1960s.

But there are a few differences. For instance, no one knows quite yet if the Space Force will involve eventually putting military personnel in space or if it will simply involve boots on Earth, and lots of robotic technology in the sky.

“I think Space Force is as much about career path for Department of Defense satellite operators,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist with Harvard and spaceflight historian, says in an email. “It’s not really about human spaceflight at all.”

Let’s get this out of the way: there are Department of Defense satellites in space. The Boeing X-37B, an uncrewed space shuttle, has flown a series of classified missions in the last decade-plus, all with a lot of secrecy as to what it’s doing. Strategic Command keeps track of what’s in space, and the Air Force has a brand new satellite and space junk tracking “space fence” expected to go online next year. Lots of astronauts began their career in the military. So in some ways, there’s a sizeable military presence in space.

But there are also no dedicated military astronauts or space craft right now. It’s unclear how soon any Space Force plans would call for that. But that wasn’t always the case.

In the 1960s, the USAF was working in earnest to carve out its own place in space. They technically launched a prototype space station into space, but never quite got boots on the ground…or into microgravity, more accurately.

There were also many attempts to establish space-ready military vehicles in the 1950s and 1960s. The Air Force worked with Bell Labs in the 1940s to create the X-1 experimental plane, which utilized rocket engines. Chuck Yeager’s famous 1947 flight on an X-1 became the first to break the sound barrier. But Yeager was only eight miles up, about 42 miles short of the 50 mile mark the Air Force has long considered the boundary of space. (NASA sets it at 62 miles, or 100 kilometers.)

The Bell X-1 flight catalyzed an interest in hypersonic flight. In 1948, Yeager would reach a height of 13 miles, the highest and fastest flight to date, reaching speeds of 957 miles per hour.

The X-1 was also the first aircraft in the X-Plane program, a loose grouping of experimental aircraft tested and operated by some variance of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), its successor NASA, and the Air Force. Subsequent X-planes all worked on technologies that could be applied towards space exploration or other related high-altitude flight. Notably, the X-13 tried to create vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) technology that sounds a little like our re-landed rockets in the private space industry today, and the X-8, X-11 and X-12, which were literally missile rockets.

Then came the X-15.

Way up high

Most early X-planes had high altitude ambitions, but the X-15 was meant to specifically be a military space plane. It was designed by North American Aviation in cooperation with NASA and the US Air Force. Its first flight was in 1959, but in 1962, the flights began to aim higher than ever before.

Much of the personnel who flew X-15 missions came out of the X-20 Dyna-Soar program, which was a plane strapped atop a more conventional launch vehicle rocket.

Flight 62 of the X-15, taking place in 1962, hit a benchmark of 59.6 miles, just short of the edge of space by NASA’s definition (but not the Air Force’s.) Two more flights reached above 50 miles as well, flights 77 and 87. But flights 90 and 91 reached altitudes of 65.8 and 67 miles in 1963. Joseph A. Walker, the pilot on both flights, had reached into space during his 12 minute suborbital flights, hitting speeds of 3,710 MPH. He was also technically the first American to go to space twice, with Gus Grissom becoming the first NASA astronaut to do so in 1965.

In 2005, Walker and two other X-15 pilots—Bill Dana and Jack McKay—received their astronaut wings from NASA.

But while the X-15 was under development, the Air Force was surreptitiously eyeing space for another purpose: intelligence gathering.

Spies in space

In 1960, the Air Force launched—or attempted to launch—the SAMOS E-5 satellite into orbit. It never went terribly well. The first flight lost control; the second flight made it to space in 1961, while two others suffered additional failures. Famously, the SAMOS-3 mission exploded on the launch pad. You can see that here. Missions 5 through 11 were all successes to a limited extent in the sense that they got to space, but didn’t quite fulfill their mission goals.

“The first possible US military astronaut program was the 1961 SAMOS E-5 spy satellite, which had a pressurized cabin and would have (if it had ever flown a successful mission) returned to Earth with a camera,” McDowell says. “Stupid design for a spy sat, so many of us think it was a back door way to get a USAF equivalent of Mercury up and running. Never got that far as the spy sat flights were all failures.”

But the Air Force was also ramping up for another project at this time. Known as the Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), it would have been the first space station.

The program was forming parallel to NASA’s own Gemini program, and would have used a modified Gemini capsule to ferry astronauts to and from the MOL. The MOL itself resembled a hollowed-out rocket body with a Gemini attached at the front. The public perception was that it was a military space station, without much detail added. But in reality, it was a spy station, intended to keep watch over Iron Curtain states in the Cold War era from afar.

The Air Force had selected crew for each of the three proposed MOL phases, with crews of two spending up to 40 days each in orbit, taking recon photos and otherwise monitoring near-Earth space. This included Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. who, had he flown, would be the first black astronaut. Lawrence was killed in a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter accident in 1967. (Despite its name, the Starfighter was a standard fighter jet and not a space plane.)

The MOL was “dominated” by the Air Force, Michael Neufeld of the National Air and Space Museum says, but it actually involved members of other branches of the military, including the Army and Navy. In 1966, a test flight was sent up, uncrewed. For a few years, there was a space station technically up there…just without a crew. It spent two months in orbit before decaying into the atmosphere.

Just a few years later, the program was cancelled entirely.

“MOL was a Department of Defense reconnaissance satellite program that the Nixon Administration cancelled because of rising budgets, multiple launch delays and the argument that robotic recon sats could do the job nearly as well,” Neufeld says.

Seven MOL astronauts transferred to NASA at the end of the mission, several of whom flew multiple shuttle missions. Richard Truly, one of the first MOL recruits, flew the second prototype Enterprise shuttle mission, which didn’t reach space but tested out the landing capabilities of the craft prior to its first real space launch. He later flew aboard STS-2 and STS-8 in the Columbia space shuttle and eventually served as NASA administrator under President George H.W. Bush. Robert Crippin, part of the second group of MOL astronauts, flew the first shuttle mission in 1981. Other MOL-turned-Shuttle astronauts were Karol J. Bobko, Charles Gordon Fullerton, Henry Hartsfield, Robert Overmyer, and Donald Peterson. Albert Crews and James Abrahamson joined NASA in other capacities.

McDowell says that the last real effort of the military involved a group of “Manned Spaceflight Engineers,” military trained personnel meant to handle highly classified payloads aboard space shuttle flights. “They trained 32 of them, but only two flew,” McDowell says. Gary E. Payton flew on STS-51-C, and William A. Pailes flew on STS-51-J, both in 1985. STS-51-J was, incidentally, piloted by Karol Bobko, one of the MOL astronauts who transferred to NASA.

The Space Shuttle program did ferry up a few other Department of Defense personnel, but none came out of an official program. There was some chatter in the 1980s of increasing an Air Force presence in space. The Air Force went as far as setting up a mission control in Sunnyvale, California. “It would also have been mission control for military astronauts when that was talked about in the Shuttle era,” McDowell says. “It’s located not far from the Lockheed factory which built the spy sats.”

Future Missions

But Trump’s Space Force seems to be an altogether different proposition from any of these programs and other previous military involvement in space, potentially also testing the bounds of the 1967 Space Treaty, which outlines and restricts certain military involvement in space. It also would take away a lot of services performed by the Air Force and give them over to this entirely new branch. That isn’t just spy satellites or other classified activities. That includes things like tracking space junk. It also may not put quite as many boots above the ground as the mental images might confer. (There aren’t, yet, a ton of outlined plans or details for what the Space Force actually entails.)

“Equating the Space Force idea with military astronauts is quite misleading,” Neufeld says. “Almost all of it would be transferring the USAF space assets, including ground control, satellites in orbit, satellite operations, launch operations (like the 45th Space Wing at the Cape) to a separate service.”

“It will be very disruptive on the Air Force to do this,” he says. “It might also involve transferring some Navy and Army elements. Where the [National Reconnaissance Office] NRO falls in all this, a military space agency jointly staff by DoD and CIA, would be one of the conundrums.”

So even if there aren’t Space Force astronauts up there, there still could be a whole lot of confusion in the course of establishing a Space Force, and a lot of unanswered questions. At some point, perhaps, there will be a more concrete plan as to what it actually looks like—but there’s a history as old as NASA’s spaceflight program to look back to when it comes to a military presence in space. And if Space Force comes to pass, it’s going to upend a lot of historical precedent.

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This story originally featured on Flying Magazine.

In a display of bipartisanship on June 9, 2020, the US Senate confirmed Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. to be 22nd Air Force chief of staff with a vote of 98-0. The unanimous vote cleared the way for the decorated pilot and experienced commander to become the first Black individual in history to lead a branch of the U.S. military as its highest-ranking officer.

Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett congratulated Brown on his confirmation and highlighted the important role he will play leading the Air Force into the future and carrying on the strategic vision of the current Air Force chief of staff, Gen. David L. Goldfein. “I join leaders, Airmen, and Space Professionals from across the forces in congratulating Gen. Brown and his wife Sharene,” Barrett said. “Leaders of their caliber will perpetuate the legacy of excellence that Gen. Goldfein and Dawn Goldfein have epitomized over the last four years. Gen. Brown’s unrivaled leadership, operational experience, and global perspective will prove crucial as we continue modernizing the Air Force to meet tomorrow’s national security challenges and protect our nation.”

In advance of the vote on his confirmation, Brown testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee during a hearing May 7 where he pledged to ensure Air Force readiness to support the National Defense Strategy if confirmed. “I am committed to the Air Force achieving irreversible momentum towards implementation of the National Defense Strategy and an integrated and more lethal joint force,” Brown said.

Brown was commissioned in 1984 as a distinguished graduate of the ROTC program at Texas Tech University. A command pilot with more than 2,900 flying hours (130 in combat) primarily in the F-16A/B/C/D and 15 additional fixed and rotary-wing aircraft, he currently serves as the US Pacific Air Forces commander of US Indo-Pacific Command at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii. U.S. Pacific Air Forces support more than 46,000 air personnel serving principally in Japan, South Korea, Hawaii, Alaska, and Guam.

Chief of Space Operations and fellow service chief, Gen. Jay Raymond also congratulated Brown on his confirmation. “Gen. Brown is an innovative leader who clearly understands the complex and evolving strategic environment we face today as a Department,” Raymond said. “He clearly understands the importance of leading across all domains to compete, deter, and win—especially in war-fighting domains like space. I am thrilled with Gen. Brown’s confirmation. I couldn’t ask for a better teammate.”

Brown will replace Goldfein August 6 at a swearing-in ceremony.

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Pilots sometimes train in simulators—machines on the ground that do their best to mimic the experience of operating an aircraft in the sky. This month, the simulators that give F-35 pilots the chance to practice down on terra firma at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada received an update that allows them to link with a number of other Air Force simulators in real time. Thanks to the new uplink, a pilot in a sim at Nellis can fly their F-35 alongside a virtual F-16 operated by another aviator in a simulator in, say, Asia.

That may sound like basic video game stuff—the equivalent of playing Call of Duty or Fortnite against a friend in another location—but before this month, that capability didn’t exist for F-35 simulators. Previously, the four rigs at Nellis could mimic a four-ship exercise in a virtual flight with each other—like playing Mario Kart with a person sitting next to you—but now they’re capable of flying, in real time, with other simulators for other aircraft in far-flung places.

These F-35 sims can now connect with a variety of other aircraft simulators, most of them for other fighter jets: F-22s, F-16s, and F-15s. So, a pilot in an F-16 simulator in Europe, or an F-22 in the U.S., could digitally fly with one of the F-35 sims in Nevada. The system also works with the Boeing E-3, which is an AWAC, or airborne warning and control system plane.

Getting the F-35s onto the bigger Matrix-like web required building a “complex translator that allows for us to take the way the F-35 communicates and to put it out on a distributed network that can then flow to the other platforms,” says Chauncey McIntosh, vice president for F-35 training and logistics at Lockheed Martin, which makes the stealth jet, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter, or Lightning II. In this case, the simulated jets had to join a pre-existing Air Force system called the Distributed Mission Operations Network, or DMON.

McIntosh also notes that they had to bridge systems that simulate aircraft made by different manufacturers—for example, F-15s and E-3s are Boeing aircraft, while F-35s, F-16s, and F-22s are Lockheed. And the overall DMON system at the Air Force is run by Northrop Grumman, which makes the B-2 Spirit and forthcoming B-21 bombers.

The platform also needed to simulate a “fair fight,” McIntosh says. In other words, the aviators in different simulators “need to feel like it’s going to be that way in the real world.” Lockheed also had to think about how they depicted virtual weather, like rain, in the digital environments that bring various aircraft types together. Ultimately, the goal is for the training to be as similar as possible to real multi-aircraft missions in the actual world. These Nellis simulators, which run on the same code that the F-35 planes do, aren’t the type that physically move to mimic an aircraft’s motion: Instead, a pilot sits in a domed environment that displays high-def images around them.

Lockheed Martin says that uplink of the four simulators at Nellis will be followed by simulator updates at two bases in California: Naval Air Station Lemoore, this fall, and at Marine Corps Naval Air Station Miramar, in the spring of 2021.

The Air Force, the Marines, and the Navy and all fly F-35s, and three different variants exist. It’s a tremendously expensive jet that will cost some $79 million apiece in 2021 for the Air Force model—the least expensive. And, it’s a high-tech flying machine that’s had a troublesome history. “It turns out when you combine the requirements of the three services, what you end up with is the F-35, which is an aircraft that is in many ways suboptimal for what each of the services really want,” Todd Harrison, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The New York Times Magazine in a 2019 feature covering the jet’s turbulent past.

It’s a one-seat fighter jet, but airplane-makers like Boeing and Kratos have even been working on totally uncrewed fighter jets that could complement airplanes flown by people, like the way a wingman does. Because these planes would have no one board and would cost less to make, they’d be the type of craft that an air force would feel more comfortable losing in combat than a traditional crewed one.

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It’s hard for a military to win hearts and minds if none of its members speak the local language. Humans who grew up speaking a language and joined the military are the best solution, followed closely by interpreters recruited locally. But that’s not always possible, as there’s sometimes a rarity of language speakers or a lack of safety guarantees for the interpreters. For this reason, the military wants a technology that can work as an interpreter in real time–a universal translator, if you will. Or perhaps a less-squirmy version of Douglas Adam’s Babelfish. Last week, the Air Force Research Laboratory put out a solicitation for such a device. They’re calling it, simply “Human Language Technologies.”

Their solicitation says they want to conduct research and development in automatic speech recognition, machine translation, natural language processing, information extraction, information retrieval, text-to-speech synthesis, as well as other speech and language processing technologies.

Specifically, the Air Force says that these technologies are necessary as, “much of the information needed to effectively understand, anticipate, manage, and operate in the global environment is found in foreign language speech, text, videos, and images,” especially for “lesser spoken languages that have high military interest but lack sufficient linguists and automated language processing capabilities.”

So why is it the Air Force, and not, say, the dirt-kicking Army or first-in Marines that are looking at this technology? The Air Force collects “signals intelligence,” which is information from observable relayed communication. The Air Force has done this for decades, using, among other means, satellites that spied on Soviet radio, radar, and microwave transmissions.

Today, signals intelligence can also include information sent online or over mobile networks. Because messages are often encrypted, decoding is as much a part of the task as capturing the signal, and if the people that the Air Force wants to watch are communicating not just in code but in a language they don’t know, a universal translator might help decipher the message.

The announcement posted last week is just within the first stage of an acquisition program. The Air Force Research Lab says they’ll release more details of the project in January 2016. They expect the contract to award $10 million over 5 years, or about 8 percent the cost of an F-35.

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Sometimes, unmanned is a horrible name for drones. Large military remotely piloted vehicles, like the Global Hawk, are piloted by and attended by rotating shifts of crew. That adds up to a rather large labor force, especially given that Global Hawks can fly for up to 30 hours, and crew shifts are only 8 hours long. So to ease the burden on the pilots, the Air Force is making a big change: They’re letting enlisted pilots fly Global Hawks, and not just commissioned officers.

For years the Air Force has struggled to keep enough drone pilots. The work, often seen within the military as a career dead-end or at least a pause, requires long hours and is not without its psychological toll. Yet demand on drones for intelligence gathering and surveillance, from both the Commander in Chief and commanders in theater, remains high, so the Air Force has struggled to fly as many drone patrols as possible without exhausting its airmen. Earlier this week, the Air Force announced it would offer $125,000 to drone pilots that agreed to stay in service for five more years.

That will help keep existing pilots in. Opening up piloting positions to enlisted members will expand the total available pool of pilots for the Air Force to draw from. In their announcement, the Air Force said:

That’s a lot of Pentagonese. In essence, it means that Global Hawk surveillance is a big part of current missions (like the fight against ISIS), and that Air Force officials expect they’ll need to keep flying as many or more missions in the future.

In World War II, a small number of enlisted members of the United States Army Air Forces served as pilots, however that hasn’t been the case since the Air Force was spun off into its own branch in 1947. Starting in the 1960s, the Air Force only commissioned officers with college degrees to be pilots, usually ones who came up through training programs like the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps and Officer Training School. This helped the flow of pilots into the Air Force, which would find its manpower sorely taxed in the contested skies above Vietnam.

There was another innovation that in one move almost doubled the available fighter pilots. The Air Force’s main fighter in Vietnam was the F-4 Phantom, which featured a pilot in front and a navigator in the seat behind them. Initially, the Air Force required pilots in both seats (the Navy, which also flew the F-4, never had this requirement). In his history of the fighters of the era, C. R. Aderegg writes:

Just as in Vietnam, meeting the demands of a long war with existing manpower means changing the way things are done. With its decision to let enlisted airmen pilot unmanned vehicles, it looks like the Air Force is learning this lesson for at least the second time.

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On a dusty tarmac, about 20 miles from downtown Phoenix, Capt. Joseph Stenger stands in 109-degree heat, barely sweating. A 32-year-old fighter pilot with the slicked-back hair, steady eyes, and ropey forearms you see on movie posters, he is admiring an equally impressive piece of flying machinery: the F-35 Lightning II fighter. In his green flight suit, and standing a little over 6 feet tall, Stenger is nearly face to snout with this menacing jet.

It’s his job to figure out what it can do in combat, and to teach that to hundreds of other fighter pilots.The F-35 started arriving here at Luke Air Force Base this past winter. It is the most sophisticated fighter ever built. It is stealthy, so it can appear the size of a golf ball to enemy radar, if it’s detected at all. It can also jam enemy radar—or make it seem there are 100 golf-ball-size targets in the sky. It can travel at Mach 1.6. It carries a 25 mm cannon, air-to-air missiles, two 2,000-pound guided bombs, and four external laser-guided bombs. But what truly sets it apart is its brain, 8 million lines of software code—more than any fighter in history—fusing navigation, communication, and targeting systems.

Stenger explains it like this: In older jets, he has to manually operate things like radar (pointing it at the ground to search for missiles shot at him, or at the sky, to look for enemy planes). He has to monitor a high-speed data link for plane-to-plane communications and texts from ground troops. He or his back-seat weapons guy must pick through data before locking on a target and firing. “You can imagine that’s pretty time consuming and requires a lot of cognitive processing,” Stenger says.

The single-seat F-35 does much of this for him, by fusing and automating dozens of sensors. So, for instance, if his heat sensor picks up an enemy missile headed his way, a chime will sound, “like a doorbell” he says, and a computer voice will say, “Missile left, nine o’clock.” When Stenger looks there, a green circle pops up on his helmet’s face shield, pinpointing the missile’s site, along with its speed and time to impact. Just by looking at the circle Stenger can aim his weapon and fire at the enemy, then outrun the missile. Six external cameras also capture a 360-degree view outside the jet and feed it to his face shield. If Stenger looks down he can see through the cockpit floor to the ground.

Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor that makes the F-35, will deliver thousands of these jets over the next few decades to the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Air Force. The USAF will take 1,763, and Stenger will help train the aspiring F-35 pilots set to come through Luke’s sand-colored gates. With more than 200 flight hours in the F-35 so far, he knows it as well as any Air Force pilot here. When he’s not on the flight line, he spends days in classified briefing rooms, reading tactical manuals on the F-35’s capabilities. He can tick off the jet’s attributes like a new crush.

Stenger and most others in the military see the plane as the key to America’s continued air superiority, and yet it could also spell the beginning of the end for an iconic American profession. The F-35 is so high-tech, so automated, so smart, so connected, that in May, the secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, declared: The F-35 “should be, and almost certainly will be, the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly.”

To Mabus and others, the job of a fighter pilot has changed over the years. No longer do pilots sneak up on each other’s tails, train their crosshairs, and fire. They glean information from screens that look like iPads or from helmet displays. Electronic sensors, networked warfare, and air-to-air radar-guided missiles can take down enemy fighters from 100 miles away. Most of the time, pilots in a conflict never see one another at all. If that’s the case, many argue, why not have pilots on the ground—scanning the same screens and pushing the same buttons—out of harm’s way?

Stenger has considered this question before. As a pilot in Afghanistan, he flew more than 330 combat hours, doing things like blowing up Taliban fighters and safe houses, taking out missiles launchers, and providing cover for coalition forces. And yet, in his nine years in the Air Force, he’s never been in a dogfight or even encountered an enemy fighter—or any sort of enemy aircraft. When faced with the argument for unmanned fighter jets, he takes a philosophical line. “I wouldn’t offer up a conjecture because I’m a captain, and my job is to fly the F-35,” he says. “And that’s what I’m going to do. If another manned fighter comes up, great. If not, well that kind of stinks for the next generation because they’ll never get to know what being a fighter pilot is like.”

***

Luke is typically a busy Air Force base. Every 15 minutes, the desert air rumbles with the sound of jets taking off and landing. For the past 32 years, it has served as a major training base for the F-16 Fighting Falcons that sit in endless rows beneath sun canopies on the flight line. Those planes will be phased out as the F-35s arrive and squeeze them for space.

During flight training, Stenger’s students learn many skills, and dogfighting is still among them. With 1.7 million acres of Sonoran Desert and 57,000 cubic miles of airspace at his disposal, Stenger can orchestrate the kind of tactical dogfight scenarios seen in Top Gun. “We can set up 100 miles apart for air-to-air combat training,” says Stenger, seated in a bare second-floor office, which he moved into in July. In training, Stenger would pit two of his F-35 students against four F-16s fighter pilots. (This is the same class of fighter jet that Russia and China possess, and the type that could face off against the F-35.) “You employ the tactics you were taught, and you will kill them before they ever see you,” Stenger says, “well beyond visual range.”

That phrase is crucial to the argument for unmanned fighter jets. Nearly every air-to-air engagement on the planet has been well beyond visual range since the early 1990s. That’s around the time modern militaries began relying on networked warfare: A system that combines GPS satellite locators, infrared radar, secure data links for ground and air-to-air communication, surveillance aircraft like Boeing’s E-3 Sentry, and, of course, radar-guided air-to-air missiles.

As networked warfare has risen, incidents of aerial combat have decreased. Since 1990, only 54 fighter jets have been shot down globally, says John Stillion, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and a former Air Force officer, who put together a database on all confirmed aerial victories between 1965 to 2013.

Of course, geopolitics can partially explain that trend. Few nation states with fighter jets have been warring with each other in that period. But Stillion argues that technology is driving change as well. The increase in sensor-driven flying and beyond-visual-range shooting, he says, has rendered a jet’s traditional strengths—things like high speeds, acceleration, and maneuverability—less important than they once were. What matters most now, he argues in a recent paper, “Trends in Air-to-Air Combat: Implications for Future Air Superiority,” are sensors, powerful and long-range weapons, aircraft flight range, and network connectivity.

“Those are things normally associated with long-range bombers,” Stillion says. “So maybe our future fighter jets resemble unmanned long-range strike platforms.”

It’s an interesting position, and one that makes both technical and fiscal sense. Drones can pretty much do—and in some ways do better—everything a manned fighter jet can. They can stay aloft 24 hours at a time, while manned fighters are limited to the amount of time a pilot can stay in a cramped cockpit seat, several hours at best. In addition, drones don’t need to be trained and retrained, as pilots do. And ending that practice could save a lot of money.

The cost of training can be staggering: The Air Force spends $14,183 an hour to fly a single F-35A, according to the 2015 Department of Defense Budget. That’s just in peacetime training. Budgeting 13 hours of crew time per month, that equals $2.2 million a year, for one crew’s training. When its F-35 training program is fully running in a few years, Luke will have 144 of those planes. Each squad on the base will be made up of 24 aircraft with several hundred support personnel. When you do the math, people are expensive and impractical.

***

Though many agree that the role of fighter jets, and therein fighter pilots, will change in the future, how that will play out is up for debate. Stillion argues that the next-generation fighter jet should more closely resemble long-range strike bombers. Those planes are bigger than fighters, by far. They could carry a crew—one even big enough to swap out shifts—but they wouldn’t have fighter pilots, per se. Instead, the bomber would be equipped with long-range missiles and a complement of four drones, each of which would have its own advanced radar and medium-range missiles.

In a future dogfight against nations like China or Russia, Stillion envisions those drones flying in a picket line deep into enemy territory, and acting as lookouts. The bomber would follow about 100 miles behind them. The crew would control the drones and use them to double the bomber’s sensor-detection range. As Stillion depicts it, in a duel against eight fighter aircraft. At that point, the bomber team would fire long range missiles (good for about 250 miles), taking out up to six enemy jets at once.

Drones can pretty much do—and in some ways do better—everything a manned fighter jet can.

Stillion is not alone in reimagining aerial combat. Lockheed Martin’s experimental Skunk Works site in California has dozens of technicians combining unmanned systems with artificial intelligence. Its secret Minion project is developing a reconnaissance drone, like Stillion’s advance drones, that would also jam enemy radar, drop GPS-guided bombs, and shoot a high-powered microwave to disable electronics. “You could project forward to where there is a time when you can replace human cognitive capability with artificial intelligence,” says Bob Ruszkowski, director of advanced air dominance and unmanned systems at Skunk Works. But he also believes that there will always be a need for “a mixture of manned and unmanned working together.”

Northrup Grumman’s engineers are focused on the problem too. Its experimental X-47B unmanned combat jet has already made successful takeoffs and landings from an aircraft carrier (as well as made midair refuelings). The company believes a dogfighting drone is just years away.

What might slow progress are the ethical questions that arise when speaking about drone fighter jets. “Sometimes war is about breaking things, and sometimes it really is about killing people,” says Heather Penney, an Air National Guard F-16 fighter pilot who deployed twice to Iraq. “Even with remotely piloted aircraft, there are still humans in the loop. Regardless of how good Siri might become on your phone, I don’t think we as a society will ever get to the point where we trust weapons platforms to make autonomous decisions about life and death.”

Penney knows that work well. On the morning of September 11, 2001, as a rookie in the D.C. Air National Guard, and its first female fighter pilot, she found herself at Andrews Air Force Base taking off in an F-16. Her orders that day: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93, packed with passengers—and hijackers—headed for the nation’s capital. She had no ammunition. Rather, she was tasked with a suicide mission: Ram the plane if need be. The passengers ended up taking down the flight themselves.

Penney, who works as director of USAF Air Superiority Systems at Lockheed, personally believes Stillion’s concept makes a lot of sense. “But there are a lot of technological what-ifs that go along with it,” she says. Among the biggest is the development of directed-energy weapons—lasers that will travel at the speed of light to take out aircraft and destroy network data links and communications. Every major nation—the U.S., China, Russia, most of the European countries—are pursuing them.

So if most of your air force is made of drones, and they rely on data links, and if the enemy can fry those links with an electric pulse, then your drone says, “‘I’m not talking to my pilot anymore; I’m going to fly home because that’s what I’m programmed to do,’” Penney says. “Then the bad guy doesn’t even need to shoot it down. The effect is the same. They’ve won the air space.”

Actual pilots, on the other hand, will work toward a mission objective even as the battle space degrades, Penney says. “They can sit gracefully operating, with manner and intent, and to the best of their ability.” Penney also believes that only humans, not drones, can best figure out how to get in the enemy’s head and mess with it in a way that cripples him. “Your job is to create confusion in the enemy,” Penney says, “get in his line so you are making better decisions faster than he is, causing him to make mistake after mistake.” For that, she says, nothing can touch human cognition. So far.

***

Following my tour with Stenger, just as the Arizona sun is starting to bake Luke’s miles of tarmac, I head over to a freshly paved stretch of road in a far corner of the base. Things are quiet. There’s a rare three-day break in the flight schedule and the crews are taking advantage of the downtime. Despite the midday heat, teams of airmen play volleyball in a sand pit. Others sit on picnic tables, in the shade of pine trees, drinking Cokes and watching the games. The scene is so straight out of Top Gun that it conjures a Kenny Loggins backing track (though the heavyset airmen have none of the moves of Maverick and Iceman).

Nearby stands a two-story stucco building with a soaring atrium and a pitched roof that resemble jet wings. Recently constructed, it looks like a Southwestern high school, but it is a $47 million training center. Inside it smells like new carpet and holds some 18 classrooms, a 240-seat auditorium, a vast expanse of as-yet-to-be-used cubicles, and, tucked behind heavily guarded double security doors, space for 12 brand-new, state-of-the-art, F-35 flight simulators that cost $23 million apiece.

Lt. Colonel Rhett Hierlmeier heads up the center’s operations. The 38-year-old pilot used to fly F-15C Eagles out of Okinawa, mostly around the Pacific and Guam and Japan, and later F-22s. Both planes are air-to-air fighters. “So over the past 10 years, there’s really not been much for us to do,” he says, sitting in a sparse second-floor office, overlooking dozens of empty cubicles. “The deployments were really about presence, show of force.” He notes that the last time a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot shot down an enemy plane was in the late ’90s, during the Balkan Wars. “With Iraq, those guys ended up burying their jets because of our superior presence,” he says.

A former Air Force Academy instructor, Hierlmeier flew the F-35 for the first time three weeks earlier. His job here is to train up an instructor cadre who can then train hundreds of U.S. pilots, as well as pilots from eight coalition countries that have signed on to the buy the F-35. They include Australia, Norway, Canada, Turkey, the Netherlands, and Denmark. The current class is small, including four Americans, three Norwegians, and one Italian, but it will grow to as many as 300 pilots each year.

Hierlmeier leads me through two locked doors and into a vertiginous hall that looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book: Every 15 feet or so, asymmetrical arches painted in disorienting reds and gray, recede down the hall, flanked by blue police strobes. Hierlmeier is not sure why, but they seem meant to confuse intruders. From hidden speakers, a Thin Lizzy song overpowers our discussion: The drinks will flow and the blood will spill/and if the boys want to fight, you better let them. When I ask if it’s to amp up student pilots, Hierlmeier, who is serious, says: “No. There are a lot of classified conversations taking place behind these walls. It’s meant to cover them up.”

We stop at a double door the size of a loading dock. Hierlmeier opens it onto what looks like an amusement-park ride. A white dome, 11 feet in diameter, sits in the middle of the room, surrounded by a massive steel frame and 25 high-definition projectors. A replica F-35 cockpit sits on tracks that disappear into the dome. I ask if I can take a picture. No, says Hierlmeier. But he does invite me to sit in the cockpit, which I do. It’s like sitting in a low-riding Italian sports car. Before they ever get to fly an actual F-35, the student pilots must first spend a month in class practicing on computer monitors with joysticks. Then they do 30 hours inside these simulators, helmets on. Those helmets, made by defense contractor Rockwell Collins, are custom-built for each pilot and cost upwards of $400,000 apiece. “It’s like wearing a laptop on your head,” Hierlmeier says of their computing power.

Inside the F-35 Helmet

The sims are the most advanced virtual-reality experience on the planet. A pilot hops into the cockpit and rolls into the dome on the track. Clack. Clack. Clack. Once inside, the projectors shoot Google Earth-quality images of clouds and shadow, mountain ranges rushing past, dusty neighborhoods 30,000 feet below. There are rural landing strips, enemy jets ahead, and missiles whizzing your way. It’s an immersive 360-degree view—with sound effects. Like the F-35s themselves, the simulators are connected to a secure ground server and linked to each other. That way pilots can train together, in separate rooms, on tactical missions. These sims will one day be linked to other fighter-jet simulators at Air Force training bases around the U.S.

And that’s where it gets interesting. Hierlmeier is a student of technology, and grew up reading science fiction and watching Stars Wars. Standing outside the cockpit, he peers into the darkened dome, and says he believes we will one day fight our enemies from inside one of these things. When I ask what that will take, he says flatly, “Bandwidth.”

Bandwidth is a big challenge to networked warfare. And flying a fighter drone from the ground requires sending and receiving massive amounts of data in real time. So engineers are focused on things like improving artificial intelligence so planes can act with more autonomy, thus cutting down on communication bandwidth. If we get machines to think for themselves, we can equip them with a mission objective, rules for engagement, battle scenarios, and then send them on their way. Only by solving the problems of AI and operations autonomy, and onboard processing, says Ruszkowski, can we “reduce communications congestion and usage bandwidth.” Skunk Works has demonstrated that with automated ground-collision avoidance and airborne-collision avoidance systems. If Ruszkowski and his team can extend those capabilities to next-gen stealth fighters, he says, it would go a long way to solving the problem: “We believe that’s the foundation for future military systems.”

Hierlmeier, flanked by a pair of Lockheed Martin contractors and an Air Force PR person tapping her smartphone, leans on the cockpit and considers that future. “I don’t want to be the horse cavalry guy at the start of World War I,” he says. “I’m hoping we’ll see a day when man is not in the machine, in the jet, but man is in the loop. We’ve got to embrace that. I see a day when you’re driving into this dome, and you’re fighting the fight from right here.”

This article was originally published in the January/February 2016 issue of Popular Science.

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More than half of Americans living today weren’t born yet when the last B-52 Stratofortress bomber was delivered to the United States Air Force in 1962. The venerable bomber, in service for 53 years and counting, has fought in every major American war from Vietnam to the War on Terror. Now, a new cruise missile from defense giant Lockheed Martin means the ancient warbird has a new tool for the next stage of its life.

The missile in question is Lockheed Martin’s Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Weapon, whose acronym (JASSM), sounds like a schoolyard term for a topic covered in health class. JASSM is made to work with all American bombers and several fighters, including the B-1, B-2, B-52, as well as the F-16 and F-15, and in the future, Lockheed plans to have a version that works with their F-35. In October, Lockheed announced that they’d received a $305 million contract to supply an extended-range version of the missile to the Air Force. Today, Flight Global confirmed with Lockheed that “the B-52 will be updated to carry the turbofan engine-powered cruise missile internally on a new digitised rotary launcher and externally on its pylons”.

The 2,000-pound JASSM uses infrared and a jam-resistant GPS receiver to find its way to targets. Half of the missile is a 1,000-pound payload, designed to penetrate fortified targets, and the JASSM cruises to its targets with its own jet engine. The original missile could travel about 200 miles, but the extended-range version (JASSM-ER) can hit targets at least 500 miles away. That range is what makes them so attractive for the B-52; while the plane still flies fine, it’s not in the least bit stealthy and anti-air defenses have improved dramatically since the Stratofortress was designed in the 1950s. Hitting targets an extra 300 miles further away than previously available keeps the B-52 in the fight, making the aging fleet a valuable Pentagon tool for years to come.

How long could that last? The Department of Defense thinks that the airframes themselves can last until at least 2040, meaning the Stratofortress may fly for another 25 years yet.

Watch a B-52 release a regular JASSM missile in testing below:

[Via FlightGlobal]

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Eventually, America’s beloved rugged close-air support warbird A-10 “Thunderbolt” will have to retire. But not today: in fact, the A-10 likely got a life extension when the commander in charge of the Air Force’s combat deployments suggested retirement might be pushed back a few years.

This is welcome news for troops on the ground, who associate the distinctive “brrrrrrrrrt” of the A-10’s vulcan cannon with battlefield salvation, and bad news for those who find themselves on the receiving end of the A-10’s attacks. For a few more years, the Thunderbolt will stay in the skies, hunting America’s foes. But it has to retire someday.

Beloved as it is, the A-10 is an old plane. Designed to hunt Soviet tanks in a potential European war, it entered service in 1975 and it’s remained active ever since.

Numbering the A-10’s days is the F-35, America’s brand-new stealthy multi-purpose jet. Designed as a versatile, multi-role plane, the F-35 is built to serve in many roles, and it serves none of them worse than close air support. Instead of the A-10’s large 30 mm cannon with 1,350 rounds, the F-35 fires a 25mm gun with either 181 or 240 rounds, depending on the model. (Both planes can carry roughly the same payload of bombs or missiles).

The F-35 only just started entering service this year, and they haven’t seen combat yet, so we don’t know for sure how it will actually perform as an A-10 replacements. There’s no other plane quite like the A-10, but here are three possible (and one definite) replacements.

Super Tucano

Textron Airland Scorpion In Flight

AHRLAC In Flight

F-35 With A Lot Of Weapons

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After years of intense speculation, the Air Force finally revealed a first image of its long-awaited new bomber, and gave it an official name. Formerly known as the Long Range Strike Bomber, or LRS-B, the new, Northrop Grumman designed plane is now the B-21. If that sounds at all familiar, it’s because America’s last brand-new shiny Northrop Grumman designed bomber was the B-2 Spirit. With the shroud lifted off the new bomber, we can see that the B-21 looks…almost exactly like its predecessor.

B-21 Concept Art Screenshot

The B-2 Spirit was a victim of its time: a highly advanced bomber that entered service right as the Cold War ended. As American security concerns switched from fears of Russian attack to worries about the side effects of Russian economic implosion, a top-of-the-line stealth bomber became the easiest fat to cut off the Pentagon’s budget. After just 21 planes were delivered, the program ended, leaving America with a super-fancy flying machine to show off at parades.

In October, the Air Force announced the award of the contract to Northrop Grumman. The B-21 will pick up where the B-2 left off, making it the iPhone 5S of bombers (if Apple only came out with a new iPhone every 25 years). According to the USAF press desk, “designation B-21 recognizes the LRS-B as the first bomber of the 21st century,” and is not a reference to the just 21 B-2s that were made. It will supplement the tiny B-2 fleet, and replace the ancient B-52s still used by the Air Force today, as well as the older B-1 bombers. We’ve speculated a lot on the kind of tech the bomber will have.

The biggest question is whether or not the B-21 will be unmanned. Strategic bombers are, after all, built so they can carry nuclear weapons if need be, as well as other, less-apocalyptic payloads. In late 2014, Popular Science spoke with a senior defense official at the Pentagon involved in the program, who insisted that, when carrying a nuclear weapon, the bomber will have a human crew on board. The B-21’s Ace Combat 2-style concept art seems to confirm that, with windows visible on the plane. This matches the ad Northrop Grumman aired during the Super Bowl this year, which put cockpits for human pilots on their future fighters.

That same ad teased the B-21 too, with a crowd awaiting its unveiling at the end, and a Northrop Grumman factory building a previously unseen bomber at the very start, which it transitioned into a normal B-2 takeoff. Watch that glimpse below.

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Just before 9 a.m. on a blue-sky Louisiana morning, a giant gray B-52 bomber gradually lifts off the tarmac with some 190,000 pounds of fuel on board, a trail of dark exhaust behind it.

A few seconds later, there’s a small glitch: One of the aircraft’s landing gear legs—the rear one on the left—decides to stay down. The rest fold up, as they should. The pilots determine that the problem isn’t big enough to scrub the day’s flight, so the bomber pushes on with its training mission, two big wheels hanging down for five hours like an incomplete thought, limiting the plane’s speed and reducing its fuel efficiency. At some point, as planned, the crew refuels from behind an airborne tanker, taking on thousands of more pounds of gas.

That’s the B-52—a beefy old bomber that dates back to the post-World War II years. Though the US military has incorporated sleeker flying machines in recent decades, it’s not retiring what’s known as the “BUFF,” or Big Ugly Fat Fucker, anytime soon. The aircraft that lifted off that March morning from Barksdale Air Force Base in northwestern Louisiana was built by Boeing in Wichita, Kansas, and delivered to the Air Force in early March of 1962. The Cold War-era ship is far older than its two pilots that day: Carlos Espino (call sign “Loko”), 27, and Clint Scott (call sign “Silver”), 34.

Operating the B-52 is like “flying a museum,” Espino says from the left-hand seat in the cockpit just before the mission. “It’s a brick—I would say it’s like wrestling.” He’s a friendly, burly guy, and his squadron, the 20th, are known as the Buccaneers. The patch on his right shoulder shows a pirate throwing a bomb.

“It has a lot of redundant systems,” Espino adds. “So if one system fails, there’s plenty of other systems to back it up.” The most challenging maneuver, he says, is precisely lining the aircraft up with a tanker in the sky to accept more fuel. “At the end of air refueling, you’re literally sweating.”

The plane may be large—its 185-foot wingspan and 159-foot length make it bigger than a 737, and smaller than a 747—but the space for the crew is cozy. Behind and below the cockpit is a small submarine-like compartment, sometimes illuminated in red, where two others sit: radar navigator Rebecca “Ripper” Ronkainen, and aircraft navigator Jacob Tejada, both 28. If anything happens that requires an airborne evacuation from the jet, Ronkainen and Tejada’s ejection seats blast downwards rather than upwards, which is only safe if the plane is more than 250 feet off the deck. Also on board that day is an instructor and weapons systems officer, call sign “Pibber.”

Right behind where Tejada and Ripper work is a urinal. Ideally, no one poops on a B-52, even if the mission drags on for hours. Imodium can help.

Officially called the Stratofortress, or less officially, the Stratosaurus, the B-52 sports a wealth of engines hanging from its big wings. While most airliners rely on two or four engines, the BUFF has eight TF-33 turbofan thrusters. The Air Force is set to replace those engines with new ones, an improvement that could boost the jet’s efficiency by at least 20 percent.

Upgrades like that should help the B-52 fit in a little better with the Air Force’s more modern lineup. Many of the bombers have also been outfitted with a new digital system, though the craft’s cockpit is still very much awash in traditional analog dials. Plus, each BUFF goes through an exhaustive maintenance process every four years that involves some 40,000 hours of labor and around 3,000 swapped parts. The Air Force says it would like to keep the BUFF flying until 2050; it’s a plane they keep investing in because they have it, and because it can do, and has done, a lot.

B is for bomber

The Air Force’s fleet of bombers is an alphabet soup of “Bs” and numbers. There’s the B-1 Lancer, which now only carries conventional bombs, due to a treaty called New START. There’s the B-2 Spirit, a stealthy wing that can deliver either conventional or nuclear weapons. There’s the B-52. And finally, there’s the B-21 Raider, the Air Force’s forthcoming stealth bomber, which is still in the works.

Currently, the military owns 20 B-2s, 62 B-1s (that number may decrease to 45 next year), and 76 B-52s. That makes the BUFF, with its long, swept-back wings and narrow body, the most abundant.

“The B-52 has been a workhorse of the Air Force for decades,” says Todd Harrison, who directs the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “It’s a remarkable aircraft, and I think it has really proven out the concept that your major platforms can stay relevant, long after their design life, by upgrading the components and the technologies that go on them.”

What makes the BUFF so enduring is the way it was first designed, says General Timothy Ray, the head of Air Force Global Strike Command. When they built the B-52 in the early 1960s, “you could do some precision engineering and precision manufacturing, but back then the efficiency wasn’t the driver,” he explains. “Today, you have the technical means to plan and manufacture to the finest of requirements.” In other words, they don’t build bombers like they used to.

Ray also notes that there’s more than one way to measure a plane’s age. “When you look at the life remaining in the air frame, the B-52 is the youngest,” he says.

Over the next decades, the Air Force might slim its bomber fleet down to just the futuristic B-21s and the old-school B-52s. Ray describes a fleet on the order of 75 BUFFs and 100 Raiders, or ideally even more: 220 bombers in total.

The costs involved with aircraft like these are astronomical. Giving each B-52 eight new engines and other upgrades requires a budget of about $130 million per plane, Ray says. The new B-21 Raider will be even pricier to buy, which is why the fleet of tomorrow would be a mix of vintage and new. What’s more, the B-52 is a metal bird that’s already in the hand, which is another reason to keep it running. “This is real,” Ray says, “whereas the B-21 is in parts getting put together right now.”

On a per-plane basis, the B-52 is less expensive for the Air Force to own and fly than the other bombers. The BUFF fleet costs the Air Force $1.4 billion per year, according to Harrison, which translates to around $18 million for a single aircraft annually. The B-1, meanwhile, clocks in at $23 million per plane each year, and the B-2 a whopping $43 million. Part of the reason for the difference is that because the Air Force has so many B-52s compared to the others, the operational costs per aircraft are much lower. But no matter how you slice it, bombers don’t come cheap.

Sending a message

The US has three different ways of deploying nuclear weapons: intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), nuclear missile-outfitted submarines, and those B-52 and B-2 bombers. The Air Force calls this apocalyptic arsenal the “nuclear triad.”

During a nuclear attack, Harrison says that America’s ICBMs would need to be taken out first: They’re a “missile sink.” Submarines, designed to survive, then would respond to that initial attack from their underwater hideouts. Non-stealth bombers are different, however, because they’re the most visible and dynamic. “They’re the one leg of the triad that is both unpredictable and can be used for signaling [to an adversary] in a crisis,” Harrison says.

Meanwhile, ICBMs, Ray says, are difficult to “message” with because the missile silos themselves are static. “Bombers, though, are flexible. And you can recall a bomber,” he says. “When I launch an ICBM—that’s it. Thirty minutes later, things are going down.”

Having BUFFs and other aircraft on hand also allows the military to conduct what it calls bomber task forces. Ray notes that they’ve sent bombers into the Black Sea, “which drives the Russians crazy, and it makes our day.” The same goes for flights into the Baltic Sea.

Russia performs similar operations with their fleet. Just this month, NORAD reported that that country flew bombers within 37 miles of Alaska.

Wheels down

As useful as the BUFF has been, though, CSIS’s Harrison wonders about the aircraft’s ongoing effectiveness against any country with modern safeguards. “If we have a conventional fight against Russia or China, the B-52 is a sitting duck to air defense systems and to Chinese and Russian fighter jets,” he says. In that case, the plane would have to operate at a safe distance from those countries, where its only effective weapons would be pricey cruise missiles. In a scenario like that, a stealthy B-2 or the forthcoming B-21 bomber might be more useful.

“At some point, you have to let important aircraft go,” Harrison says. “Is it really worth it to keep these planes in the air, or for the same amount of money, could we buy something else that’s more useful to us?” On that note, Harrison brings up a Navy aircraft called the P-8 Poseidon, which is like a 737 but can carry weapons such as cruise missiles. When asked if the military was thinking about a B-52 alternative like the Poseidon, an Air Force spokesperson said by email: “The Pentagon is carefully considering options and planning experiments toward the prospect of fielding such a plane.” A related idea is something called an arsenal aircraft, which could deploy what’s known as “standoff” weapons from afar.

Ultimately, the BUFF has its quirks—one of which was on full display during that March training mission out of Louisiana. The issue with the stubborn stay-down wheels stemmed from a fascinating design feature on the aircraft that allows the plane to pivot its main landing gear, so that if it’s landing in a cross wind, the nose of the beast can face into the wind while its wheels line up with the runway. Those landing gear legs can’t fold up into the belly, though, unless the switches say they’re centered. And sometimes the switches that control the wheels just “get out of rig,” an Air Force spokesperson wrote via email.

In fact, after that five-hour flight, another team quickly hopped into the same B-52 and took off again with the landing gear issue still unresolved, its crew said. That’s the BUFF. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good, and it gets a lot done. That should be enough to keep it cruising onward, punching through the sky for maybe the next three decades, perhaps with the occasional part out of place.

For more photos from inside and around the aircraft, click here.

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If a sodden rice paddy feels soft and forgiving underfoot, it is not a merciful place to set down an airplane at 200 mph. And that’s only one of Mike Selby’s reasons to look nervous as he watches his A-10 Warthog—a 10-foot-wide, 65-pound, hand-built model—begin its maiden takeoff roll down a rough asphalt runway near Bangkok, Thailand. Selby, who spent over $12,000 and the better part of a year fabricating and building this radio-controlled jet, stands runwayside with his thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans, trying to look relaxed as he draws on a Cuban cigar. But he can’t stop tapping his foot. Next to him, pilot Ray Johns, a U.S. Air Force general and test pilot who has flown everything from Air Force One to the U2 surveillance plane, chews a wad of gum with anxious rapid-fire chomps and leans back against the weight of the control console hanging from his neck.

It’s been nearly a year since Johns last flew one of Selby’s finished models, at the Top Gun competition in Lakeland, Florida, and the memory haunts them both. Top Gun, held each April, is the de facto world championship of radio-controlled scale-model aeronautics, an invitation-only event that hosts some 130 entries, jets and prop-planes alike, from around the world. Selby had spent the two years before the event building and tweaking his Embraer Tucano 312 (a Brazilian turboprop fighter trainer), and the plane had a grip on first place going into its final competition flight. But suddenly, as it went into a tight turn, the plane stopped responding to Johns’s control inputs. “We saw it jink to one side, and then it just keeled over and dove into the forest,” Selby says. “We had to rent a helicopter to recover the pieces.”

Now, half a world away, Selby’s chance at redemption is taxiing into place on the runway: a sophisticated new plane that’s already creating a buzz among the top echelon of the model-aeronautics community. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he blows the event away with the A-10 this year,” Top Gun organizer Frank Tiano told me earlier by phone. He’s seen pictures and specs. “It’s big, it’s a jet, it’s twin-engined, it has an extremely high level of detail and function. As far as I can tell, there’s rarely been an airplane this ambitious, with as much character and as much charisma.”

But it’s not an airplane—model or full-size—until it flies. Johns, from his position halfway down the runway at Bang Nam Prio, commands bystanders to silence and seems to grow taller as he pushes the remote-control throttle forward. The A-10’s twin engines scream to life, turning the head of a straw-hatted woman herding a group of water buffalo on the other side of the runway.

Hit up the gallery for a closer look at Selby’s Warthog along as well as a few of its rival models. And be sure to check popsci.com/rcjet the week of April 20 to find out how the A-10 fares at this year’s Top Gun competition.

As the turbines spool past 100,000 rpm, Johns releases the brakes, and the A-10 begins to roll. With its twin rudders buffeted by a gusty crosswind, the fighter jet zigzags awkwardly at first, before Johns gets it straightened out. It shrieks past us at full throttle, tracking down the runway’s centerline. Then, with a subtle tug of his index finger, Johns lifts the plane’s nose, and it bounds into the air with an almost startling decisiveness. Selby squints and watches his creation climb and bank to the left, its silhouette tapering into the sun.

Fighter Command

Best of the Best

Scale-model jets are the apogee of radio-controlled model aeronautics: The technical challenge of building jet power in miniature is far beyond the abilities of the average hobbyist. Handcrafted by an elite cadre of backyard aviators, these models can fly at speeds of up to 300 mph, and at Selby’s level of competition, they’re built to look and perform exactly like their real-life counterparts.

“We’re at the obsessive end of the spectrum,” Selby says. At the age of 53, he’s thin and fit, with a calm, quick smile. He flew model airplanes as a kid in Rochester, New York, and brought his hobby with him when he began working in Asian finance in his 20s. Selby made prescient investments in everything from airfreight to fish packing, and after a stint as chief of staff for the sultan of Brunei, he now manages the assets of the Thai monarchy. He collects fast cars, big boats and Khmer art, and keeps his collection of rare guitars (including instruments signed and given to him by Keith Richards and Pete Townshend) in a dedicated room of the apartment he shares with his Thai wife, Lek.

But Selby’s greatest passion is building hyper-realistic scale-model planes. “Building and tinkering is so far from what I do work-wise, it takes my mind off it,” he says. “Also, it’s part of my attempting not to grow up.” It is a pursuit that has become increasingly sophisticated over the past five years. For those like Selby, with plenty of resources, ambition and technical savvy, high-tech composite materials and miniaturized controls have enabled higher strength-to-weight ratios, and telemetry and digital engine-management systems have given RC pilots more power and control. Model kits are more realistic and reliable than ever before, and super-modelers like Selby, who build their own from scratch, are taking on larger, more ambitious projects.

“Around the world,” Tiano says, “there’s a niche group of maybe 2,000 people who have as much dedication as these guys. There are about 200 who have the skills to execute what they dream up. And of these 200, there are maybe two dozen guys like Mike who can create something truly remarkable.” Those people would be Selby’s competition at Top Gun in April.

Among them is Walt Fletcher, who retired from the U.S. Army Special Forces to run the Hobby Hut in St. George, Utah. He is readying a one-third-scale Fokker DR-1 triplane, flown by World War I flying ace Baron Manfred von Richthofen, a.k.a. the Red Baron. The pilot’s head will turn left or right, and he’ll be able to wave to the judges as the plane goes by, Fletcher tells me. “And it’s got speakers that blast out sound bites of the Le Rhone rotary engine and the machine guns.”

David Wigley of Smithtown, New York, pilots Boeing 767s for American Airlines in what he calls his “full-size life.” His entry in the Top Gun Masters class this year will be a Westland Wyvern, a British Royal Navy strike fighter from the early 1950s. Wigley designed and built the obscure plane from scratch over four years. Among its details are counter-rotating propellers, a droppable torpedo, and a functioning pneumatic tail hook for landing on model aircraft carriers.

But Selby and Johns, also 53, have built a Top Gun dream team over the years, and the roster inspires confidence. Their crew includes Bangkok scale-jet-engine builder Pornchai “Hard Porn” Saechour and pit crew/logistician Bill Davidson. By virtue of his position as administrative assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force, Davidson is the top career civilian in the U.S. Air Force, and he may know more about military aircraft than anyone alive. (According to his wife, Peg, he can sit inside their house and identify just about any overflying plane by sound alone.) Practice time for the flight crew is limited to a week each January, when Selby, Johns and Davidson rendezvous in Bangkok to shake out their latest flying machine, party, and prepare for Top Gun.

Death From Above

Even though Selby’s team has never won the overall Team class at Top Gun, Selby has won more Critics’ Choice awards—bestowed each year by the judges and a panel of “guest artists” for exceptional craftsmanship —than anyone else. In 2001 (the first year Johns and Selby flew together), they won it with an F7 Grumman Tigercat, a late-1940s fighter. In 2004, a Brewster Buffalo (which now hangs at the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida) brought them another, and in 2005 and 2006 it was a Vought Vindicator SBU-2 (a carrier-based dive bomber developed for the U.S. Navy in the 1930s). Last year, their Tucano was so impressive that even after crashing, it was still named a runner-up.

This year’s plane is an ambitious choice. The real-life A-10 Thunderbolt II, a.k.a. the Warthog, was the first Air Force jet specifically designed for close air support of ground forces. Its distinguishing characteristics make it an especially difficult plane to model. The A-10 weighs in at 30,000 pounds, and its engines produce 18,000 pounds of thrust. True to its nickname, the fighter, all bumps and protrusions, isn’t sleek. Rather, it’s built to take—and inflict—a beating. From a cockpit protected by a titanium “bathtub,” a pilot can drop up to eight tons of bombs or fire a 30-millimeter Gatling gun at 4,000 rounds a minute. “On a battlefield,” Davidson says, “there’s probably nothing more intimidating than an A-10 coming at you on a strafing run.”

But the flight characteristics of the A-10 make it a tremendous engineering challenge. At Top Gun, a model must not only be built to scale, it must fly to scale as well. “They’re judging realism in flight,” Selby explains. “If the real airplane makes bombing runs at 300 knots, a smaller plane has to do its bombing runs at a much slower speed, or else it won’t look realistic. You’ve got to duplicate whether it climbs steeply or gradually, whether it turns quickly like a fighter jet or sluggishly like a heavy bomber. The A-10 is a tough one, because it’s known to have excellent maneuverability at low air speeds and altitudes, so we’ve got to make that happen.”

Although Selby’s A-10 Warthog is strictly a hobbyist project (albeit an expensive one), it has the tacit support of the Pentagon, where his work has high-placed admirers. “A couple of years ago,” Johns recalls, “[Air Force chief of staff] General Buzz Moseley was challenging us to fly an Air Force plane, instead of the Navy planes we had been flying for the past few years. It wasn’t exactly an order, but he said he was getting impatient. He wanted to know when we were going to get around to putting one of our birds into the air.”

In the Team class at Top Gun, competitors replicate a particular aircraft, rather than just a type. Selby’s team settled on an A-10 flown by Captain P.J. Johnson, who is now a colonel based in a Pentagon office just down the hall from both Johns and Davidson. The plane, built in the early 1980s and painted in the Air Combat Command’s Flying Tigers color scheme, is based out of Moody Air Force Base in Georgia. In the first Iraq war, in 1991, Johnson’s A-10 wing was partially blown off in combat. Remarkably, he managed to land safely.

In early May, Davidson traveled to Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina and took walk-around photos of another full-size A-10 for reference, and Selby dug up a book of photos of Johnson’s A-10. He also unearthed schematics and official guides to markings and heraldry. In the “static” part of the Top Gun competition, a team of judges meticulously checks the model’s lines, markings and weathering against photos of the actual plane, right down to the scratches and dings. It must be an exact copy of that moment in the A-10’s career. “If there’s a defect on the real plane,” Tiano says, “you’d better have the same defect on your model, or you’re going to lose points.”

Small but Powerful

Selby’s model will be the first A-10 to fly in competition, and probably the largest jet ever to fly at Top Gun. About 85 percent of Top Gun competitors build from kits, but Selby designed and built nearly everything on Johnson’s A-10 from scratch in his 1,500-square-foot workshop, just off the parking deck of his 30-story apartment building. The shop is a tech geek’s dream, outfitted with a laser-cutting machine, computer numerical control mill and lathe, 3-D laser scanner, and plastic vacuum former.

A scale modeler’s biggest challenge is building a functional model that will look like the real plane, while using different materials and construction techniques, and keeping thrust-to-weight and lift-to-weight ratios within practical limits. “A plane with an overloaded wing will fly like a powered brick,” Selby says. “In low-speed situations, you can run into stalls and control problems, and the sink rate on the plane is quite high.”

Master Blaster

Starting with Davidson’s photos and the original Fairchild Republic drawings of the A-10’s wing, Selby scaled the wing down and modified the control surfaces, using design and airfoil-analysis software. The A-10’s fuselage, wing and control surfaces are made of lightweight fiberglass, carbon fiber and Kevlar. To make the skin look authentically weathered, Selby bound pastels into the paint and then rubbed it with steel wool—a particularly impressive feat considering that he’s partially color-blind.

Real A-10s are equipped with turbofan engines, which drive a fan that feeds extra air into the burner, but to stay aloft, model jets typically use lighter and simpler single-stage axial turbines. Unfortunately, most single-stage turbines take several seconds to accelerate from idle to full throttle. This lag time can sometimes make the difference between being able to abort a landing, and crashing.

Selby and Saechour’s Bangkok-based scale-jet company, PST Engines, boosts its miniature jet engines’ acceleration by adding extra vaporizers in the combustion chamber and sophisticated digital fuel controls. Built out of heat-resistant superalloys and kitted out with full ceramic bearings, the A-10’s engines rev up to 120,000 rpm and develop up to 29 pounds of thrust—more thrust for their weight, Saechour claims, than anything else on the market. With both wings attached, Selby’s 5.5:1-scale A-10 stretches 10 feet across and weighs 65 pounds at takeoff. Inside the fuselage, carbon fiber snakes like spaghetti around five Kevlar fuel tanks, which hold 8.5 liters of jet fuel, enough for about 15 minutes of flight.

Selby designed the plane’s electrical system with enough redundancy to make NASA proud. A power box distributes signals from the two radio receivers to 24 servo motors, which operate the control surfaces. The redundant radio system calculates which receiver has a stronger signal and constantly switches back and forth. Two separate electrical systems run the microswitches and small microcomputers that handle sequencing, and backup lithium-polymer batteries guard against catastrophic loss of power.

Selby also built a high-pressure pneumatic system to handle the landing gear, gear doors and braking system. He designed and machined his own hydraulic shock absorbers out of aircraft-grade aluminum and even molded his own rubber tires. Up front, there’s an onboard replica of the A-10’s Gatling gun.

When the A-10’s canopy opens, it reveals an action figure wearing a jumpsuit meticulously sewn by a Bangkok dressmaker to match P.J. Johnson’s. On the tiny plastic control panel, each instrument is laser-engraved; the panel even pulses and appears to acquire a target. “There are no extra points awarded for cockpit detail,” Selby says, “but if you’re going to go to this much trouble, you might as well take it all the way.”

Inside the Warthog

Small Plane, Big Risk

Considering the time, craftsmanship, dedication and money that has gone into this airplane, it’s a wonder that Selby can summon the guts to send it into the air. But that’s the nature of the Top Gun competition: Build a complex, delicate machine, and then risk destroying it.

Selby and Johns suspect that radio interference might have caused their Tucano’s crash at Top Gun last year. If that’s the case, the “radio hit” must have come from somewhere off-field, since all other competitors’ radios are impounded and disabled during competition. But according to Top Gun organizer Tiano, radios have become so sophisticated that they are rarely the cause of crashes anymore. “When we do have equipment failures,” he says, “it’s usually a problem with fuel or with batteries. But even those are getting more rare.”

Tiano, who was standing next to Johns when the Tucano went down, thinks the plane probably didn’t have enough airspeed as it entered a turn, causing it to stall and plunge to the ground. “It looked a little slow to me,” Tiano says. “But we’ll never know for sure.”

Selby has learned his limits the hard way, losing several planes over the years. Although he was once a commercially rated multiengine pilot, Selby claims he doesn’t have the right stuff to fly the model planes he builds for competition. “I’d probably consider it,” he says, “if my best friend didn’t happen to be one of the world’s best pilots.”

Ray Johns made his first solo flight at 16 and studied the certification of commercial aircraft for military applications while getting his master’s degree. As a flight instructor, he’s flown most of the Air Force’s fighter and air-to-ground jets and was the chief test pilot for an Air Force One project in 1990 in which the military radically modified a Boeing 747-200 for presidential use.

Johns got into model airplanes as a kid, and he continued the hobby as an adult in the Air Force, wherever his duties took him. On a visit to Singapore in 2000, the deputy American ambassador introduced him to Selby. As a three-star general and deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and programs, Johns rarely has the chance to fly in a single-seater plane like the A-10. So he gets his fix in miniature. To hear him describe it, it’s in many ways more difficult and more satisfying.

Model Control

“Flying a model is actually much harder than real flying,” Johns says. “For starters, when you have a new plane, you don’t have any idea about what speed it will take off, land, or stall. When you get it in the air, you don’t have the direct feedback that pilots rely on to stay oriented. You only have control when the plane’s in your line of sight, and your perspective is usually all wrong. For instance, when you’re landing and you’re looking at the plane coming toward you, the controls are reversed. You need to remember to push the stick left to go right, and right to go left.”

Fire Up the Engines

“The trick when testing airplanes,” Johns says as our caravan of three vehicles pulls up to the airstrip for the second day of flight time, “is to expand the envelope a little at a time.” Only one part of the process should be unknown at any given time, he explains, “so if you screw up, you have room to recover. That’s the same whether you’re testing Air Force One or one of Mike’s models.”

The airstrip is deserted on this hot Saturday morning. This is flat, green, fertile country, in the heart of the rice belt just outside Bangkok’s sprawling eastern suburbs. We unload to the sounds of chirping birds and lowing buffalo, and Selby and Saechour carefully spread their tools and parts out on bird-marked tables in the shade of a wooden pavilion. As their teammates assemble the plane, Johns and Davidson go out to walk the runway.

Selby and Johns are constantly on the move, chewing gum or, in Selby’s case, smoking a cigar. Bill Davidson, a larger man, provides an anchoring presence, moving as required, his large glasses hiding soft eyes that offer few hints of the intrigue that he has known in his career at the Pentagon and, earlier, in two decades as an agent of the Air Force’s secretive Office of Special Investigations.

“You know how people say, ‘If I told you that, I’d have to kill you’?” Johns had commented to me earlier. “There are guys who are just playing around—and then there are guys like Bill.”

When Johns and Davidson return from their runway inspection, the A-10 is assembled and fueled. Saechour clears everyone from the area behind the plane—the turbines exhale gases at a toasty 1,1000F—and starts the engines with a butane/propane mix. Once the engines reach a stable rpm and temperature, the fuel supply switches over to the pure Jet A formula in the internal tanks. After Johns and Selby double-check the pneumatic pressure, control surfaces and radio, Johns takes the controls, taxiing the plane out to the runway for the day’s first takeoff.

If yesterday’s first takeoff was a little wobbly, today’s is rail-straight—but the landing is downright harrowing. Just before touchdown, a gust catches the A-10’s double rudders and yaws it sideways. The plane veers to the left, then back to the right. As the tires catch the pavement, the plane darts toward the edge of the runway, where Davidson is videotaping the flight. Davidson keeps his cool as Johns works the stick frantically and gets it redirected, and the A-10 skids sideways to a bootlegger’s stop a few feet from Davidson. There’s a long silence. “You had me holding my breath,” Selby says finally, letting out a sigh. “And I think you had Bill wetting his pants.”

Heavy Lifting

Smoothing it Out

After the day’s first flight at Bang Nam Prio, Selby and Johns decide to wait out the crosswind gusts and do some troubleshooting. On his control console, Johns modifies the A-10’s stick movement to “soften up the middle” and make the controls less touchy. Selby and Saechour try to figure out why the nose wheel keeps fouling on its hatch when retracting, and eventually trace the problem to the fake hydraulic cap on the side of the nose structure. “You get so involved in putting these little tchotchkies on to make it look real,” says Selby, as he lies down on the cement floor under the landing gear, “that you can forget that it needs to reliably function and fly.”

The A-10 takes off again and, as it climbs, the landing gear functions flawlessly. Johns sends the A-10 into a steep climb and then pulls it into a half-loop and rolls it 180 degrees—a rapid-reverse maneuver known as an Immelmann turn. Johns brings the plane around for a low-level pass over the runway. As it roars past us at palm-treetop level, it couldn’t look or sound any more realistic. Standing in his jeans and topsiders, Selby smiles and whistles, starting to relax.

On the next flight, the A-10 carries four fiberglass “bombs,” but during the bombing run, they fail to release. For Selby and Johns, the situation brings back memories of the 2006 Top Gun competition. “We were sitting in first place with our Vindicator when Ray brought it in for the run. He called out, ‘Bomb drop.’ But nothing happened. We would have won overall Team, but we came in second—only two tenths of a point behind the winner.”

Between flights, Selby and Saechour shorten the release pins, while Davidson and Johns review the video. Johns is critical of his own flying. “The high-speed pass was too high,” he says. “The Immelmann was sloppy, and that was a wussy split S—but at least the landing flare was better.”

Final Pass

There’s time for one more flight today, and then the men and their wives will head off to the islands for some beachside R&R. In the few weeks before Selby airfreights the plane to Florida, he will do some cosmetic work on the aerial-refueling hatch and add a GPS-based telemetry system. The system will include a voice synthesizer that will call out various data points, such as altitude, airspeed, and engine rpm and temperature. “That way,” he says, “Ray can plot his turns and we can figure out the stall speed, which will allow us to land slower, which will look more realistic and more to scale.”

Johns taxis the A-10 back out to the runway. “Let’s make sure that we don’t go home with more pieces than we came to the field with,” he says. He pushes the throttle forward, looking confident as the A-10 screams down the runway and into a steep, arcing climb. He brings it around for the bombing run. This time, the bombs release and come down in a perfect trajectory, sinking deep into the mud at the opposite side of the runway.

He takes the plane through a military roll and a split S, then an attack approach and a half-reverse Cuban eight—maneuvers he will attempt at Top Gun to wow the judges. Selby is beaming. “Next, General Ray’s going to show you the Jimi Hendrix maneuver!” he says. “First he’ll fly it behind his back, then with his teeth.”

Johns brings the plane in for a perfect landing and taxis it over to the tarmac. As it coasts to a stop, the canopy opens, as if the pilot-in-miniature were seeking some breezy relief from the tropical sun. The turbines shut down, and Davidson pulls the video camera’s viewfinder from his eye. He walks over to Johns and Selby, his normally impassive face stretched into a grin. Looking around at his partners and then at the plane, he quietly delivers his verdict.
“Flies like an A-10,” he says.

Hit up the gallery for a closer look at Selby’s Warthog along as well as a few of its rival models. And be sure to check popsci.com/rcjet the week of April 20 to find out how the A-10 fares at this year’s Top Gun competition.

Contributing editor Tom Clynes profiled Arctic climatologist Konrad Steffen in the August 2007 issue.

Skimming the Palms

(Mini) Rudder and Stick

Note For Note

Armed to the Teeth

Preparing For Takeoff

Pre-Flight Inspection

Best of the Best

In Good Hands

At the Controls

Hall of Fame

Sophisticated on the Inside

Taking the Title?

The Competition: MiG-15

The Competition: F/A-18 Super Hornet

The Competition: F-4 Phantom

The Competition: Camera Mounted Sport Jet

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XP-59A Airacomet

October 1, 1942 is an unusual start date for a history of aviation. Many begin in 1903 with the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, or at the human-carrying balloons of the 18th century. The classically inclined may even start with Icarus, the hubristic and tragic character from Greek Mythology. In The Big Book of X-Bombers and X-Fighters, out today, Steve Pace starts instead with the Bell Aircraft Corporation’s P-59 Airacomet, the first jet airplane built and flown in the United States.

The Airacomet exemplifies the narrow focus of Pace’s work: only experimental planes (x-planes), only those designed for the United States Air Force, and only those with jet engines. As such, his work serves as a technological history of the cutting edge of high-end war machines, from the dawn of the jet age to the stealth testbed Tacit Blue and beyond. The stealthy flying wing B-2 Spirit bomber graces the book’s cover, while the book’s final chapter is devoted to the upcoming Long Range Strike Bomber (since renamed the B-21). Pace gives that narrow focus enough heft to fill 360 gorgeous pages, rich with detail and filled with pictures and illustrations of unusual airplanes.

Northrop (and later Northrop Grumman’s) flying wings are present throughout. Early on, we meet Northrop’s unpowered MX-334 flying wing glider, the program that lead to the jet-powered flying wing. Rare for aircraft, the test pilot lay prone inside the vehicle. Harry Crosby flew this plane for Northrop, as well as the company’s twin-tailed XP-79B flying wing. Crosby died during the XP-79B test flight, and he’s hardly the only tragic figure in Pace’s tome. Experimental aviation is a graveyard of premature ideas and sometimes human pilots.

Prone Northrop Glider

Awkward Airplane Puberty

World War II spurred the initial development of turbojet aircraft, but it wasn’t until the Korean War that any American jets would see combat. Pace captures the struggle of the Air Force (established as an independent branch of the military in 1947) to go from a gigantic fleet of rapidly obsolete propeller planes to a sleek, fast, jet-powered existence. The early phase of jet bombers gave us the underpowered and bug-eyed XB-43, as well as America’s first nuclear-capable jet bomber the XB-45 (called the B-45 in service), and others.

A tremendous amount of aviation evolution took place in these early years. While the B-45 is largely the domain of airplane buffs, just five years after the B-45’s first test flight, the prototype of most iconic jet bomber of all time, the XB-52, took its own test flight. The B-52 entered service in 1955 and is expected to serve with the Air Force until 2044. As Pace notes, “if this holds true, the B-52H will be eighty-two years old at its retirement, at which point it will be the longest-lived combat aircraft in history.”

B-52A

Most of the airplanes in the book aren’t nearly as successful as the B-52. One of the more iconic failures is the Parasite Fighter program, which aimed to put an escort fighter inside the bomb bay of an intercontinental bomber, since no existing fighters could match a bomber’s range in the late 1940s. Thus was born the XF-85 Goblin, a compact, angry engine with wings, guns, and a cockpit. Never terribly effective, it was made obsolete by an invention beyond any single airplane: aerial refueling, which extended the range of normal fighters to match that of bombers.

Goblin Fighter

Engines

Engines are the beating heart of Pace’s work, and he devotes the middle chapter of his book to propulsive systems. Airframes, the shiny metal exteriors of aircraft, get all the credit, but it’s the engine evolution that transformed jets from the underwhelming P-59 Airacomet to the powerhouse F-35. The relevant unit is “pounds force”, and the P-59’s engine only generated 1,250 lbf. Today’s F-35 is powered by an engine that generates 43,000 lbf. That’s a huge increase, and Pace makes sure to highlight the role of engines in making the jets possible. Pace’s chapter on propulsion is slim, but it’s important to understanding his whole approach to x-planes: new engines require new bodies, which spur the development of new engines–a virtuous cycle with supersonic outputs.

X Marks The Future

If there is a limitation in Pace’s book, it is deeply tied to the work’s strength: most x-plane jets date from the early and middle years of the Cold War. This is when jets were new, when the danger of being completely outmatched by another superpower was present, and when there were more easy improvements to make. The x-planes thin out the closer we get to the present-day, and while undoubtedly there are some programs that just aren’t known to the public yet, it seems that the general trend in cutting-edge military innovation is moving beyond expensive Air Force jets.

One of the more successful x-aircraft to transition into a military aircraft since the end of the Cold War is arguably the V-22 Osprey, a turboprop vertical takeoff and landing aircraft used by the Marine Corp and Air Force. It’s no jet, and yet it has caused arguably the biggest change in how Marines fight since the World War II Higgins landing craft. Yet as a turboprop, it’s beyond the scope of Pace’s book, so that’s a part of the future we’re missing here.

Drones make a minor appearance in The Big Book of X-bombers and X-Fighters, with a single page shared by General Atomic’s Reaper, Predator C, and Boeing’s Phantom Ray all grouped under “Occupied vs Unoccupied Bombers and Fighters.” The Reaper slides in under a technicality as a “turbopropjet,” but it’s the prop-driven drones, more than any stealth jet or super fast bomber, that have defined aerial warfare in the 21st century.

These are minor critiques. Pace’s focus on the history of experimental jets is a strong, informative history of the peak years of big budget planes built for big wars. It may be a finite history: the $1.5 trillion F-35 program gets the last part of the penultimate chapter, and its decades of development, towering costs, and likely middling combat experience are souring the American public, Congress, and the Pentagon on giant expensive super-planes.

X-plane programs may no longer be the future of war, but The Big Book of X-Bombers and X-Fighters is an excellent travel through the Planes of Future Past.

Cover for The Big Book Of X-Bombers and X-Fighters

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Few American airplanes are as beloved as the A-10 Thunderbolt II. Affectionately known as the “Warthog,” the iconic ground attack fighter is loud, ugly, deadly, and almost ancient. First flown in 1975, the plane is clearly showing signs of age, which is partly why the Air Force has spent decades developing a replacement. The plane they chose, the expensive, problem-riddled F-35, is at the best of times a poor candidate for the A-10’s old job. So today, as a joke, U.S. Air Forces Central Command tweeted out their suggested Warthog replacement: the X-Wing, from Star Wars.

It’s an April Fool’s joke, sure. But it hits at a very real frustration within the military: the A-10 is an aging plane, and the F-35 simply can’t do the A-10’s job as well as the A-10. Yet the age of the Warthog means that, at some point soon, troops on the ground will have to do without the familiar brrrrt of the A-10’s Avenger cannon blasting away hostile tanks, technicals, and other targets.

The A-10 was designed with a service life of 8,000 flight hours, which would have brought the fleet to retirement age in 2005. The War on Terror decided differently, so the retirement was pushed back to 16,000 hours (around 2016), and that’s been extended now to 24,000 flight hours, which will keep the planes in the air until 2028. There’s an inevitable obsolescence just from age itself. Add to that advances in anti-aircraft missiles and weapons over the past 40 years, and it becomes hard to ignore that the A-10’s days are numbered, even with a congressional caucus trying to save it.

So why all the clamoring for a new replacement? The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, designed and built over decades, is finally starting to enter service. It’s the most expensive airplane program in history, faced with a gargantuan task: replace six different retiring American fighters, using roughly one similar body. The F-35 has three different versions: the F-35A for the Air Force, the vertical-takeoff-and-landing F-35B for the Marine Corps, and the carrier-based F-35C for the Navy. All three boast sophisticated sensors and stealth for modern battlefields, but none features a gun even remotely on par with the A-10, and while they can carry a similar amount of missiles and bombs, they lose some of their stealth protection when doing so.

Given this frustrating reality, it’s no wonder Star Wars fans, including the Air Force, apparently, long instead for the reliable, powerful X-Wing fighters flown by Luke Skywalker in the original trilogy, and seen again under Poe Dameron’s command in The Force Awakens. In the movies, the X-Wing switches perfectly between fighting Imperial aircraft and attacking targets on the ground. It’s a beautiful, fictional plane, but it’s not a dedicated anti-tank machine like the A-10. If the Air Force really wanted to sell their joke, they’d have gone with the aging, rugged Y-Wing instead.

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After frightening revelations that hackers have already managed to break into the computer systems that control huge swaths of the United States’ power grid and other pieces of national infrastructure, the Wall Street Journal reports that cyber-spies have broken into the Pentagon’s Joint Strike Fighter program — its costliest initiative — and made off with several terabytes of sensitive data. Hackers have also managed to get into the Air Force’s air-traffic-control system, the Journal reports.

The identity and national origin of the hackers can’t be reliably determined, but the Journal cites former U.S. officials as saying that the attacks seem to have come from computers in China. Because it’s such an easy matter to mask one’s IP address online, however, the source of the attacks is nearly impossible to determine definitively.

China’s state-run Global Times newspaper responded that Chinese citizens couldn’t have been responsible, because “from a technical point of view, on the global scale hackers in the U.S., Russia, and Israel are at a higher level than those in China.” But our recent reporting on the culture of hacking in China suggests that the Global Times‘s low opinion of its country’s hackers isn’t justified — or at least it won’t be for long. A Pentagon report released when our article was published last month says that China has made “steady progress” in refining new cyberwarfare strategies and techniques. And as our writer Mara Hvistendahl discovered in China, there’s an ever-more-vague distinction between the civilian and military roles of hackers there. Nationalistic young people, responding to a surge of popular esteem for hackers, compete among each other for bragging rights. The Chinese military, meanwhile, sponsors hacker competitions and hand-picks particularly skilled operatives for vaguely defined state-sponsored contracts. Nationalistic civilian hackers, it seems, are just as dangerous to the United States as a centralized military “hacker command”.

And as Hvistendahl’s article points out, the threat from hackers — Chinese hackers in particular — has been thoroughly overlooked. The United States has no centralized force for defending against such attacks (although the Obama administration is rumored to be planning a military command for cybersecurity). And in the meantime, offices across the U.S. are under siege. The Associated Press quotes New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly as saying that the New York Police Department is attacked at least 70,000 times each day, although no attack has yet been successful. As the Wall Street Journal so frighteningly puts it: “Attacks like these — or U.S. awareness of them — appear to have escalated in the past six months, said one former official briefed on the matter.”

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Military airplanes that can accelerate through the sound barrier are relatively common. An F-16 and other fighter jets can do it. So can a type of U.S. bomber, the B-1B. But those planes are designed for fighting and bombing, not shuttling executives around. And the aircraft that carries the president, Air Force One, is a 747, an iconic but decidedly subsonic plane.

Recently, the Air Force took a small step towards exploring what a supersonic aircraft for government leaders could look like. In August, the military branch awarded three private companies contracts that total about $4.8 million—a small amount considering the eye-watering sums that accompany military aircraft (upgrading just one B-52 bomber, for example, will cost around $130 million). The contracts are for the companies to deliver information to the Air Force about supersonic executive transport concepts.

The three companies are Boom, Exosonic, and Hermeus, and they’re all working on different types of supersonic aircraft. Denver-based Boom, for example, envisions a Concorde-like airliner called Overture that could zoom people from Tokyo to Seattle in just 4.5 hours. Last year, Popular Science took an in-depth look at Boom and other companies that want to bring supersonic flight back for commercial or business-jet passengers—an idea that comes with serious economic, technical, and environmental challenges.

The relatively small Air Force contracts aren’t for the actual delivery of a finished supersonic aircraft. Instead, they’re for configuration concepts: these companies will deliver specs such as what the dimensions or weight of such an aircraft would be, its communications set-up, and how the cabin would be laid-out (the Air Force says it will receive a VR model of the interior space).

As for who a hypothetical jet like this might carry, a spokesperson for the Air Force’s Presidential and Executive Airlift Directorate notes via email that these concepts are for “executive transportation” and thus “potentially for our nation’s senior leaders.” The spokesperson also says that this project doesn’t affect the plans the Air Force already has in place for the next-gen Air Force One, which the military refers to as the VC-25B, and will once again be a Boeing 747.

One major issue with supersonic flight is the sonic boom an aircraft creates as it flies overhead, which can perturb people below. For that reason, civilian aircraft can’t break the sound barrier over the US; the aerospace industry is thus interested in creating a craft that can go faster than the speed of sound without making that boom. A notable project comes from both NASA and Lockheed Martin, which is working on an aircraft called the X-59 QueSST. That plane—still a work in progress in California—is intended to be a demonstrator craft that NASA will fly over the US to gauge public feedback in response to what the agency refers to as the plane’s “thump,” or quiet sonic boom. Interestingly, the X-59 won’t have a traditional windshield for the test pilot at the controls—they’ll look at a 4K monitor in front of them instead to see the scene in front of the plane. If successful, the X-59 project could help pave the way for relatively quiet supersonic flight over US soil.

Indeed, making supersonic travel less noisy is the stated goal of one of the three companies that the Air Force contracted for executive transport—Exosonic advertises an aircraft concept that would have a sonic boom that is “muted.”

Of the three companies, Boom is the one closest to unveiling any kind of hardware publicly. Next month, the company will unveil a demonstration aircraft called the XB-1, a new supersonic-capable plane that is one-third the size of what they hope their commercial airliner will be.

But projects like these take years, so members of the public—and government leaders—should expect to fly at traditional, subsonic speeds for the foreseeable future.

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An Air Force unit celebrated the start of hurricane season early this year, with a flight over the Yucatán Peninsula at the end of May to penetrate the heart of subtropical storm Alberto.

“There aren’t many people that fly into hurricanes,” says Major Chris Dyke, an Air Force meteorologist. But he’s one of them.

Leading up to the peak of hurricane season, scientists predict the number and intensity of storms to wallop the coast, using information from satellites, buoys, ships, and weather balloons throughout the world, says Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist who heads the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University. But when an individual storm begins to brew over the open ocean, another breed of weather trackers steps in to foretell its future.

Based out of Biloxi, Mississippi, the U.S. Air Force’s 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron Hurricane Hunters collect information for the National Hurricane Center to predict a storm’s intensity and direction—data that can only be gathered from within a storm itself.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has its own hurricane hunters, but their flights are primarily for research purposes—the Air Force is the lead agency for operational missions, Dyke says. He flies in the back of the plane to oversee each mission’s data collection. In addition to the typical probes measuring temperature, pressure, and altitude, the hurricane hunter aircrafts have all sorts of special instruments.

One device determines surface-level wind speeds based on the choppiness of the ocean’s waves, calculated using radiation emitting from the water’s surface. Another measures the atmosphere’s moisture content, which can help predict whether a storm will continue to build or fizzle out. That’s what happened last month when Dyke was flying through Alberto and noticed the storm pulling in dry air. This often causes a system to cease building, he says, which ultimately helped dissolve Alberto.

A flight will last anywhere from 10 to 12 hours, the majority of which is spent inside a swirling storm. At more than a dozen points throughout the journey, zig-zagging in and out of the storm’s eye, meteorologists will drop small devices from the back of the plane called dropsondes. Attached to a parachute, these instruments collect temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and direction as they plummet through the sky, according to Kevin Petty, an atmospheric scientist at Vaisala, a company that manufactures meteorological instruments.

The information from the dropsondes and the plane itself paints a picture of what’s happening inside the storm. The National Hurricane Center receives this data and feeds it into computer models to predict where a storm will move and what its wind speed and storm surge might be once it hits land.

Air Force crews have been flying into storms to gather information for the public since the 1940s, but they didn’t have much to go on without satellite data. “They used to fly to the Virgin Islands and just head east, looking for waves,” says Klotzbach, from Colorado State.

Now, hurricane hunters fly into every major weather system expected to make landfall. This year, that likely means they’ll head into a handful of hurricanes and over a dozen named storms, according to Klotzbach. As of last week, his group is predicting a hurricane season of average intensity in the Atlantic, similar to NOAA’s latest forecast.

Dyke watches each year’s hurricane season predictions, even if they say nothing of the individual storms themselves. “I do keep up with it,” he says, “just to know if I’m going to have some time off in a summer.”

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Early on the morning of January 25, 1944, eight young American airmen strode across the gravel of an airfield in Kunming, China, toward a B-24J bomber. Their mission was to fly the 67-foot-long aircraft, its nose bedecked with a picture of a pinup girl and the slogan “Hot as Hell,” over the Himalayas to pick up supplies from British-held India. It was a routine run but still plenty dangerous. The weather over the mountain route, known as the Hump, was fearsomely unpredictable and severe. Some 600 American planes would crash in the area by the war’s end. The men settled into their positions: two pilots, a navigator, a bombardier, a radio operator, a flight engineer, and two gunners. At 7:40 a.m., the plane roared up into the sky. Smooth sailing as they climbed to 15,000 feet. But three hours into the trip, thick clouds rolled in. The pilots could barely see a mile in front of them. Somewhere in that vast mountain range, out of sight and out of touch with their base, the Hot as Hell went down. In 1947, with the fighting over, the United States mounted a campaign to find the bodies of the more than 300 Americans who had gone missing in plane crashes on the Hump. The searchers traveled by truck, mule, and foot, fording rain-swollen rivers and fending off malarial mosquitoes, but never found the spot where the Hot as Hell fell to Earth. The area in which it presumably lay, the search party’s official report declared, “encompasses many thousands of square miles of mountainous jungle terrain, some of it inaccessible, unexplored, and uninhabited.” Their conclusion: “Any further attempt for the recovery of their remains would prove unsuccessful.” Sixty-eight years later, on a sunny October morning, Meghan-Tómasita ­Cosgriff-​­Hernández came clambering along a rocky trail 9,400 feet up in the Indian Himalayas. The anthropologist and her 12 teammates had hiked uphill under a glaring sun for more than two days to reach the spot where they now stood. Before them was a steep gully, thick with trees, brush, and boulders—and littered with a weather-beaten propeller, wing, engine, and the other ragged pieces of what had been the Hot as Hell. The group’s mission was as straightforward as it was daunting: search through acres of that jungly growth and unstable scree for the remains of the airplane’s crew. Well, thought Cosgriff-Hernández, looking over the expanse, let’s get to it.

Cosgriff-Hernández’s team was one of many the United States military regularly dispatches all over the world—but these are squads of scientists as well as soldiers. Their task is not killing enemies but rather finding dead Americans. Some 83,000 American military personnel have gone missing in conflicts since World War II—presumed to have died in plane crashes, ship sinkings, and chaotic battles. Dozens of times a year, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (which goes by the initialism DPAA) sends teams of forensic archaeologists, anthropologists, ­aircraft experts, and others to scour Vietnamese jungles, European forests, Pacific islands, and other former battle zones for those service members’ remains. Finding the bodies is just the first hurdle; next comes the challenge of using forensic dentistry, DNA analysis, and other techniques to identify to whom those bone fragments and broken teeth belonged. The agency boasts a $112 million annual ­budget and a staff of about 700, working out of a center in Hawaii and a network of far-flung labs and field bases. At any given time, investigators are working on about 1,200 cases.

The project began after the Vietnam War, when families of missing soldiers pressured the government to figure out what had become of their loved ones. Hundreds of remains from that conflict have since been found and returned to relatives. “Because of that success, later on Congress added the Korean War,” says Kelly McKeague, a former Air Force major general who is director of the DPAA. “Then other families started asking, ‘What about us?'”

The agency is now officially tasked with providing “the fullest ­possible accounting” of the fates of missing personnel from the ­Second World War through today’s conflicts. As many as 39,000 of the total were lost at sea, and the agency does not expect to ever ­recover their remains. But that still leaves a staggering caseload.

Many searches begin in musty archives and digital databases. DPAA historians and archivists pore over battle reports, flight and ship logs, and other documents to figure out where those soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen are likely to have actually died. The Hot as Hell crash site, though, was handed to the agency: Clayton Kuhles, an Arizona mountaineer and self-appointed MIA hunter, found some of the plane’s wreckage with the help of a local guide in 2006.

Kuhles reported his discovery to the Department of Defense, but the site lies in Arunachal Pradesh, a politically sensitive state in northeastern India; China claims part of the region, which borders Tibet. Getting permission for a gaggle of U.S. military personnel to poke around up there proved tricky. Indian authorities finally allowed a recovery crew access early in 2009, but a snowstorm forced them to quit after only a few days. A second try later that year found no human remains. They weren’t allowed another shot until 2015.

Cosgriff-Hernández was the scientific lead on the 2015 mission, and one of just two women. (In other searches, she is often the only one.) Fast talking and athletic, she’s always thrived on physical challenges. In college, she competed at track and field. Growing up in San Diego, she was also intrigued by the dead sea creatures she’d run across on the beach—all those strangely shaped skulls and teeth. “It sounds morbid,” she says, “but I’ve always been fascinated by death.” She wound up getting a doctorate in biological anthropology, and was hired by the DPAA’s predecessor agency in 2012. She quickly developed a reputation for volunteering for the hairiest missions. Besides the Himalayas, she has spent months in the jungles and mountains of Vietnam, Laos, Papua New Guinea, and many other places. “I’m trying to get in all the crazy, intense missions while my body is still up for it,” she says with a half-smirk.

When the request went out in mid-2015 ­seeking volunteers for the Hot as Hell mission, her hand shot up. It would be tough by anyone’s standards—more than a month spent high up a steep mountain, far from any human habitation. Cosgriff-Hernández—who often goes by Mitch, an abbreviation of her unwieldy multihyphenated name—trained for three months, hauling heavy packs on 10-mile “ruck marches.” In late September, the group flew to ­northeastern India and drove SUVs to the ­remote town of Damroh. Then they continued on foot. They hiked about nine hours the first day, and more than six the next. The views were unutterably beautiful, but the ­high-altitude trek was often tortuous. Even team medic Sgt. 1st Class Saule Plott, a U.S. Special Forces veteran of three Iraq tours, found it tough. “It was very, very steep, and extremely hot,” he says. “I would say the majority of us were not ready for it.” The searchers set up a base camp about an hour’s hike from the wreckage; that was the closest spot with enough flat ground. Cosgriff-Hernández, Plott, and a few others made the first foray to the site the next day. Plott was astonished. “It’s a sight to see, especially in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “An entire plane, busted into parts. Fuselage, engines here, tires there.” All scattered over a square mile and a half. He knew there wouldn’t be anything as obvious as a skeleton in a flight suit in there; after more than 70 years of exposure to the elements, all that was likely to remain of the crewmembers were fragments of “osseous material”—bones or teeth. How, Plott wondered, were they supposed to find something as small as a single tooth in all that debris-strewn wilderness?

Before the search began, an explosive-ordnance technician swept the area with a metal detector for unexploded shells. The slope was so steep that team members would have to do their digging while tied to lines anchored around trees. There wasn’t even enough level ground on which to set their sifting screens, forcing them to build an ­improvised ledge out of branches and rope.

Cosgriff-Hernández set a fixed starting point and laid out a grid of 4-square-meter digging areas. Using hand rakes and trowels, a rotating group dug through a carpet of moss and roots, and manhandled the exposed dirt and loose stones into buckets. Those were passed along to another group at the sorting screens. They sifted everything through quarter-inch wire mesh, filtering out the dirt and examining whatever was left, picking through the rocks, sticks, and leaves for anything that might have once belonged to one of the missing air crew.

Cosgriff-Hernández took turns on the trowels and screens, swapping jabs and jokes with the crew. In the evenings they’d play gin rummy or watch movies on someone’s solar-battery-charged laptop. One night Cosgriff-Hernández made s’mores, and on Halloween she doled out king-size candy bars. “Instead of being like, ‘Oh, thank you,’ they were like, ‘You’ve had this in your tent the whole time?!’” she says, laughing.

On the eleventh day, one of the soldiers looked up from his screen. “Hey, Mitch, I found something,” he called. He handed Cosgriff-­Hernández a small, curved dark shard. She knew immediately what it was. “We found cranium!” she called out. A mighty whooping and cheering rose up. “I’m sure the village down below heard us celebrating,” she says.

No more remains turned up that day. Nor the one after that, nor the one after that. It started raining. The temperature dropped. Plott found himself miserably sifting through a bucket of mud one day, thinking: This is a lost cause. This is absolutely pointless. Then he spotted something on his screen: two discolored teeth, clinging to a shard of jawbone. The sight hit him harder than he’d expected. “I had to fight back tears,” he says. “I suddenly thought I had made the right decision in volunteering to come.”

But soon the weather worsened into hail and snow, and the close calls were piling up. One searcher was briefly trapped under a runaway boulder, and another hurt her knee. Cosgriff-Hernández had to dive out of the way of a landslide at one point. The team decided it was too dangerous to continue. After 35 days in the Himalayas, they packed up their precious finds and headed back to Hawaii.

The DPAA operates out of an imposing three-story building on a joint U.S. Air Force and Navy base on the outskirts of Honolulu. The federal government built the facility as the agency emerged out of a major restructuring of the MIA recovery effort in 2015. For years, several different Pentagon offices had been involved in hunting for missing military personnel. Their collective pace was leisurely: Between 2002 and 2012, they accounted for an average of just 72 service members each year. The program was hammered by the press, veterans’ families, and politicians for being wasteful, inefficient, and lagging behind the scientific curve. As a result, in 2015 most of the mission was consolidated under the rubric of the DPAA. The tempo has quickened substantially since then. Last year, the agency identified 201 missing service members, the most in its history. (Still, at that rate, it will take over a century to clear the list.) Director McKeague credits the higher number to better organization and technology—including one of the world’s largest forensic anthropology labs.

Dozens of sets of human bones lie neatly arrayed on metal tables in an expansive examining room on the DPAA building’s second floor. Some consist of just a few vertebrae and a tibia or two, some nearly complete skeletons. The pieces are often cracked or broken, and discolored by fire, chemicals, or years in the ground. The grisly scene is surreally counterpointed by floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the island of Oahu’s lushly forested mountains.

Many of the remains come from sites such as the National Memorial Cemetery of the ­Pacific, aka the Punchbowl, in the hills above Honolulu. It is the resting place for more than 33,000 service members, more than 2,000 of whom are still unidentified. Disinterring and identifying those remains is part of the DPAA’s mission.

While finding those bones is easy, identifying who they belong to is not. Many caskets turn out to hold the parts of more than one person, all jumbled together. The agency’s anthropologists spend painstaking hours sorting out which go with which, piecing them together one by one. Bones themselves can offer important clues about who they came from. The degree to which cartilage has ossified is an indicator of age. The shapes of chins, eyebrow ridges, and pelvic girdles tend to differ between men and women. Features of skulls can point toward ancestry: Asians, Africans, and Europeans tend to have characteristically shaped eye sockets, cheekbones, and nasal apertures. Several years ago, John Byrd, the DPAA’s lab director, stumbled across a forgotten trove of chest X-rays the Armed Forces had taken of ­inductees to screen for tuberculosis. By comparing the shapes of unidentified bones to those in the ­X-rays, DPAA analysts have helped ­identify well over 100 service members.

Cosgriff-Hernández’s involvement with the remains from the Hot as Hell site ended with their arrival at the lab. She handed them off to another anthropologist, who worked “in the blind,” knowing nothing about who the fragments might have come from, a standard precaution to prevent her biases or ­expectations from ­influencing her analysis.

She couldn’t tell much, though, from the little pieces of skull and jaw. So she sent them to one of the DPAA’s partner agencies, the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System’s DNA lab, which specializes in gleaning ­information from the tiniest of ­biological samples.

Kimberly Root, an ­analyst at the AFMES facility in ­Dover, Delaware, got the case. The lab has developed several techniques to deal with often badly decomposed remains, including procedures that have enabled its staff to extract genetic material from a mere 0.2 grams of bone material, and from remains treated with DNA-​­damaging formaldehyde.

Root broke off a fragment of the cranium piece, and extracted a sample of dentin—the dense tissue beneath the surface enamel—from one of the teeth. Both procedures are tailored to do as little damage as possible to the remains, since they will ultimately be ­returned to family members. From those samples, Root and her fellow analysts extracted profiles of both mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mothers to their children, and ­Y-chromosome DNA, which is passed only from ­fathers to sons. They first determined that the skull and tooth were from the same person. Comparing those profiles to DNA samples given by surviving family members, Root found that the mtDNA matched up with one particular crewmember’s maternal niece and nephew, and the Y-chromosome DNA matched the same ­crewmember’s paternal nephew.

That’s not quite proof positive, but as Root wrote in her report, that combination indicated it was 623,000 times more likely that the skull sample came from that missing flyer than “from an unrelated ­individual in the general Caucasian population.” With the airman’s identity all but confirmed, the case went back to Honolulu and forensic odontologist Calvin Shiroma. There were no X-rays of the Hot as Hell crew’s teeth, which would have enabled Shiroma to compare the shapes of crowns and roots; all he had were paper dental records. The molars Plott found in the Himalayas had fillings; the records showed that the airman the DNA lab had identified had fillings in the same teeth. Taken together, the DNA, odontology, and other evidence pointed conclusively to one person. His name was Robert Eugene Oxford, of Concord, Georgia. The youngest of six children, he was a slim, dark-haired young man who played gospel and hillbilly guitar, worked on his family’s farm and at the local post office, and planned on marrying his sweetheart. One month after the Japanese attack on Pearl ­Harbor, in January 1942, Oxford volunteered for the Army Air Corps. By the end of that year, he was sent overseas as a second lieutenant. He was 24 when he died in the Hot as Hell crash. Merrill Roan was on her way to lunch with her husband in Thomaston, Georgia, in spring 2017 when she got the call that Oxford’s remains had been found. He was her husband’s uncle, and something of a family legend. “It was unbelievable,” she says. “We were ecstatic. We started calling all the kids and grandkids.” Roan had been involved for years in a campaign to pressure the DPAA to find the Hot as Hell crew’s remains. She still resents what she sees as the agency’s foot-dragging: “Some of his loved ones who knew him could have been here” for his funeral if he’d been found sooner. Many relatives of missing Americans complain about the DPAA’s bureaucracy, and some charge that it privileges Vietnam operations at the expense of World War II cases. But perhaps the most obvious question about the agency’s work is simply: Is it worth it? Does it really make sense to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to recover a few shards of bone?

“Objectively, it makes no sense,” acknowledges McKeague. That said, “it’s worth it from the standpoint that these individuals made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of this nation,” he says. “It’s an obligation, a sacred one, that we’ve committed to. It also sends a strong signal to those currently in uniform that this country will do everything humanly possible to ensure that they’re brought home. That they will not be forgotten and that their sacrifice will not be in vain.” Cosgriff-Hernández was delighted when she heard the news about the Oxford identification. She has been in touch with a few of the families whose loved ones she’s located, but those are the exceptions; usually, as in this case, she just moves on to the next job. When we last spoke, she was gearing up for her next mission, in the mountains of the Philippines.

All of Oxford’s siblings, friends, and his ­fiancée were dead by the time his family held a service for him in a high school auditorium near Concord. Nonetheless, hundreds of people turned out—dozens of relatives, as well as scores of neighbors, veterans, local politicians, and other well-wishers. At a cere­mony before the burial, a framed photo of the airman stood next to his casket. Beside it, his family placed pictures of the other seven Hot as Hell crewmembers.

Vince Beiser is the author of the forthcoming book The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization.

This article was originally published in the Summer 2018 Life/Death issue of Popular Science.

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X-37B After Landing

The Air Force’s X-37B–its secret robotic space plane that’s been orbiting the Earth on a mission shrouded in mystery for more than a year–landed safely in the wee hours Saturday morning at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Orbital Test Vehicle 2 (OTV-2) is the second X-37B test vehicle to successfully complete an orbital mission and autonomously return to Earth, following sister spacecraft OTV-1’s 225-day mission in 2010.

That original mission lasted 224 days, a figure that at the time was mind-blowing for a top secret robotic spaceplane. It led to wide speculation about what the X-37B’s are really capable of–the Air Force maintains that it is simply learning how to quickly recover and launch robotic spaceplanes, nothing more–as well as what their pickup-truck-sized cargo bays might be holding (the Air Force is silent on the latter point).

Regardless, OTV-2 just blew OTV-1 and even its own design parameters clean out of the water. The most recent OTV mission lasted for 469 days on orbit, more than twice the length of OTV-1’s inaugural mission and surpassing its own 270-day mission profile by 199 days. So the 29-foot mini-shuttles are showing some serious promise, we’re just not sure what for.

If anything, this most recent mission is proof that the Air Force is getting somewhere with its stated goal for the orbiters. With OTV-2 on the ground, OTV-1 is already being prepped for another mission slated to launch later this year. The Air Force likely won’t be any more forthcoming about the payload or objectives of that mission either, but rumor has it that Boeing Phantom Works–maker of the X-37B–is exploring the possibility of building a larger version tentatively titled the X-37C that would be nearly twice as large and could carry up to six astronauts.

NewsDaily

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Starscream

If you’re seeing Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen tonight, prepare yourself for a parade of hardcore military hardware unlike any you’ve ever seen. As was the case with the first Transformers film, the U.S. Air Force Entertainment Liaison Office played a significant role in assisting with and supervising the placement of military gear.

But what happens when the F-22 Raptor–a weapons system in jeopardy of being canceled entirely–plays a central role in the film, while unmanned drones are flying nearly constant missions over Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? We talked to the USAF Entertainment Liaison Office to find out.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’s list of featured Air Force hardware includes the F-16 fighter jet, E-3 AWACS command and control aircraft, the A-10 tank-killer, B-1 bombers, and the T-38 supersonic jet trainer. And of course there’s the $200 million-dollar F-22 Raptor, an air superiority fighter with stealth capability.

“It’s the first feature opportunity for showing an F-22 dropping a JDAM [guided bomb],” said Bryon McGarry, a USAF Captain who serves as deputy director for the Air Force Entertainment Liaison Office in Los Angeles.

The franchise is also, undoubtedly, the first time a modern military aircraft has played a featured speaking role. An F-22, filmed flying over Transformers sets at Holloman Air Force Base and the Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, plays the alternate form of Starscream, a Decepticon Transformer and one of the movie’s robot baddies. The irony of which is almost too perfect to believe–the Obama administration has expressed strong interest in sharply downsizing or canceling the F-22 program altogether, although the House Armed Services committee just last week approved (by a 31 to 30 vote) plans to build 12 more F-22s–eight more than recommended by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his 2010 budget. Opponents of the expensive F-22 program feel the money would be better served fulfilling the increased demand, for more Predators, Reapers and other aerial drones.

F-22 Raptor

Drones did, in fact, have their first big screen debut in the 2008 movie Eagle Eye which stars Transformers lead Shia LeBeouf as yet another geek fighting a dangerous artificial intelligence construct run amok. MQ-9 Reapers from Creech Air Force Base in Nevada were on hand for that movie, McGarry noted.

The Reapers acted as the long arm of the renegade AI chasing down LeBeouf’s character. Yet the Air Force approved this depiction of its unmanned aerial system (UAS)–because besides, Eagle Eye also included Rosario Dawson playing an Air Force agent from the Office of Special Investigations.

“Since the renegade AI’s ability to commandeer varied technology was integral to the story, it was deemed an acceptable portrayal of the UAS in that specific story line,” McGarry explained.

This does not mean that moviegoers will necessarily see many drones in near-future films. Filmmakers still crave access to the pilots and planes which have given the Air Force its gallant image, whether it’s flying against Transformers or killer robots in another recent summer movie, Terminator: Salvation.

And in the end, it simply comes down to age-old Hollywood aesthetics.

“When you see a wide-angle shot of F-22s or hear the real sound of them flying by or rolling in on a target, there’s no substitute,” McGarry said. He helped coordinate Air Force resources with the wish lists of Transformers filmmakers, such as timing F-16 training flights with the movie’s shooting schedule. For arrangements outside the usual military training, filmmakers paid the hourly operating cost of the Air Force equipment.

Beyond the hardware, filmmakers also value the face-time with real Air Force pilots and personnel in order to get the human stories and interactions right. McGarry had been on the set of an earlier movie for three days when director Michael Bay turned to him and asked what an Air Force character representing top brass might say in a certain scene. Capturing the realism of a UAV remote-piloting facility in the middle of the U.S. desert is, not surprisingly, lower on most summer blockbuster directors’ wishlists.

Essentially, if directors want to use the Air Force’s toys for a movie, they have to play by the Entertainment Liaison Office’s rules. And since the Michael Bays of the world clearly favor the more traditional, personal Air Force in their films, this has been a win-win situation both for the directors and an Air Force interested in maintaining some aspects of this perception. Even as F-16 Fighting Falcons flash across the screen in Transformers, back in the real world, squadrons of Air Force National Guard F-16 pilots are being actively retrained to fly Reaper drones instead.

Echoes of this transition from manned to unmanned are also found in the 2008 movie Iron Man where the fictional Colonel James “Rhodey” Rhodes opines on the future of air combat by suggesting that “no unmanned aerial vehicle will ever trump a pilot’s instinct.” That movie features F-22 Raptors (again!) dueling with the flight-capable Iron Man.

McGarry, however, is in fact quite open to cooperating with a film prominently featuring UAVs (see: Eagle Eye)–he just hasn’t seen many scripts asking for it. He said that he has not seen any similar “Rhodey”-like sentiments in his script read-through of the upcoming Iron Man sequel. He recently helped coordinate Iron Man 2 scenes shot at Edwards Air Force Base in California, described as a “veritable grocery store” of the latest Air Force hardware undergoing final testing before deployment.

“It’s a new Air Force,” McGarry acknowledged. “We’re always looking at the forefront of technological applications.”

As for how Iron Man 2 will choose to depict that new Air Force, “you’ll have to wait and see,” McGarry said.

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X-wings these are not. Someday, laser-toting airplanes may be sleek, small fighters, but first the U.S. Air Force wants to put laser guns on big, bulky, and decidedly unsexy aircraft. USAF’s first laser weapons will go on C-17s and C-130, planes better known for carrying cargo than packing a punch.

Scout Warrior explains:

The Air Force wants to test out this system by 2022, as Popular Science noted last year. Navy ships have already deployed with lasers, as there’s more room for a laser on a ship than an airplane. And Army trucks with lasers can park extra power supplies on the ground.

Airplanes don’t have the same luxury of extra space, so expect cargo carriers converted to laser gunships. The AC-130 is already a popular, gun-toting variant of the classic C-130 body, which swaps out carrying capacity for lots of (non-laser) guns. A version with a laser could protect troops on the ground (or friendly planes in the sky) from rockets, drones, and, if the laser is powerful enough, even some missiles.

As long as there isn’t smoke in the way, at least.

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The F-22 Raptor stealth fighter was designed to defeat any threat it might face on the modern battlefield. However, earlier today an even tougher fighter based out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue shot down seven of the planes before they even got off the assembly line.

In a 58-40 vote today, the Senate agreed to remove an order for an additional 7 planes, capping the run at the 187 already requested by the government. The vote comes after weeks of fighting between the White House, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of the Air Force, all of whom opposed the additional planes, and members of Congress who supported the expanded order.

The seven planes would have cost $1.75 billion. President Obama so strongly opposed the addition of the planes that he vowed to veto the entire $679.8 billion defense bill if the Senate didn’t remove the additional request.

The argument saw bipartisanship on both sides of the debate, with President Obama uniting with his former rival John McCain in denouncing the order, and with 14 Democratic Senators voting to keep the seven additional planes, whose construction would benefit their home States.

The central front of the legislative showdown revolved around determining the priority’s of the military. Obama, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and most of the military’s upper echelon argued that the F-22, which was designed to dogfight advanced Soviet fighter jets, had little application in America’s current wars against insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan. Additionally, Secretary Gates added that in the zero sum game of defense spending, every dollar spent on the F-22 was a dollar not being spent on the wars America is currently engaged in.

“The grim reality is that with regard to the budget we have entered a zero-sum game,” said Secretary Gates. “Every defense dollar diverted to fund excess or unneeded capacity is a dollar that will be unavailable to take care of our people,”

The opposition, conversely, sees the F-22 as a key component in maintaining America’s long term military supremacy in the face of a rising China and a resurgent Russia. Also worth noting, the F-22 program employs thousands of people, and those employees form a power constituency a year before a midterm election in which unemployment numbers will play a large role.

This, however, is not the end of stealth fighters in general. One of the objections to the F-22 voiced by Secretary Gates was that the plane was too limited. Conversely, the F-35, another stealth fighter, can perform many of the same jobs as the F-22, fits in better with the counterinsurgency wars the US faces and costs far less than the F-22. So far, the government plans to build 2,400 F-35s, compared with 187 F-22s.

Said President Obama of the vote, “”As Commander-in-Chief, I will do whatever it takes to defend the American people. But I reject the notion that we have to waste billions of taxpayer dollars on outdated and unnecessary defense projects to keep this nation secure. And that’s why I’m grateful that the Senate just voted against an additional $1.75 billion to buy F-22 fighter jets that military experts and members of both parties say we do not need.”

NY Times]

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Though we’re likely a decade from seeing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in action, much less in the Air Force’s elite Thunderbirds squad, that hasn’t stopped Lockheed Martin from releasing these images of the military’s new fighter jet in full Thunderbirds dress.

The multimedia team at Lockheed’s aeronautics division released the photos in a somewhat odd effort to virally market a $100 million fighter jet. The F-35, developed by Lockheed along with Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems, is still under development, though the Pentagon has ordered 2,400 of the all-purpose aircraft for delivery over the next two decades.

As for the Thunderbirds stripes, it looks like the F-35 may be the next fighter jet to don the colors, replacing the F-16C/D Block 52s currently in service. While the military has 187 formerly-next-gen F-22 Raptors built or on order, it looks like the F-35 is going to leapfrog its Cold War-era counterpart completely. The Senate voted today to drop funding for seven additional F-22s, and when a military program dies, it’s generally not easy to resurrect.

See the rest of the shots here

[via Flightglobal]

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Takes Flight In Thunderbirds Colors

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Takes Flight In Thunderbirds Colors

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Takes Flight In Thunderbirds Colors

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Takes Flight In Thunderbirds Colors

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Takes Flight In Thunderbirds Colors

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Takes Flight In Thunderbirds Colors

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Takes Flight In Thunderbirds Colors

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Takes Flight In Thunderbirds Colors

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Takes Flight In Thunderbirds Colors

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After the explosion of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday, the hunt is on to find out what went wrong. Although the company says it still isn’t sure what the hell happened, the Air Force has just announced that its safety officers sent the command for the rocket to destroy itself–but that was long after it was already breaking apart from a malfunction, USA Today reports.

Before the rocket’s first stage could separate from the rest of the rocket and attempt to land on a drone ship, the rocket suffered a catastrophic failure and started breaking up. Some 70 seconds later, safety officers sent the self-destruct command. The command may have prevented the rocket from going out of control, as well as helping it burn off its toxic fuel before falling into the ocean.

Although SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the failure came from too much pressure building up in the liquid oxygen tank of an upper stage, it’s not clear what caused the high pressure.

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Any pilot will tell you that flying is the easy part, it’s landing that’s hard. That adage is especially true for robotic planes like the Predator and Reaper drones. While the UAVs can follow a pre-programmed flight path, they still need a human to bring them safely down to the tarmac. And that means a lot of UAVs crashing due to human error.

Well, according to Danger Room (friends of the show), that’s about to change. Image analysis company 2d3 is developing new software that will finally allow the UAVs to land themselves.

The program, called The Visually Assisted Landing System (VALS), lets the drones use their cameras to identify landmarks, adjust speed and direction accordingly, and navigate to a smooth landing. And since runways are clearly defined, flat, obvious pieces of topography, identifying them should be easier than, say, distinguishing between some Taliban in a Toyota pick up and a bus full of deaf nuns.

Navigating three dimensional space is a specialty of 2d3, as their flagship product boujou creates computerized 3-D environments based on footage shot by movie cameras. A short animated video of how the system works can be seen at the 2d3 website.

The best part about VALS is the weight. Unlike some other automated landing systems, VALS is only a software upgrade, not a bulky physical addition to the aircraft. By utilizing the drones existing cameras, the system can be used for both the larger UAVs like the Predator, and smaller drones like the Scan Eagle.

With take off and landing becoming fully automated, that’s one less thing for human pilots to do. But as long as no one designs a robot that plays beach vollyball, there will still be something only a flesh and blood fly boy can do.

[via Danger Room]

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Militaries change slowly, and technology moves fast. The “Air Superiority 2030 Flight Plan,” which the Air Force released today, is an attempt to identify the battlefields of the future, and see what the Air Force needs to put in motion today to do its job right in the future. Unspoken, but alluded to throughout the document, is a move away from expensive, long-in-development aircraft.

The Air Force can “no longer afford to develop weapon systems on the linear acquisition and development timelines using traditional approaches,” reads the report. It continues later: “the Air Force must reject thinking focused on “next generation” platforms. Such focus often creates a desire to push technology limits within the confines of a formal program.” Rather than have a few planes that they upgrade over time, the Air Force is trying to make the most future-y plane all at once, and it’s often a disaster.

While not once mentioned by name in the study, these lines could both apply to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a decades-long in development program shared with the Navy, the Marine Corps, and several allied nations. The F-35 is still in testing, with a fresh batch of software problems as recently as last week. The Air Force version of the F-35, the F-35A, is the cheapest of the three at just $108 million each. The Air Force still plans to buy over 1700 of the planes, and they’re expected to serve the Air Force as long as 50 years. If there is anything that defines the Air Force in 2030, it should be the ubiquity and inadequacy of the F-35. Instead of acknowledging that in the Air Superiority 2030 Flight Plan, the document dances around it.

Instead of an assessment of the F-35, and how the Air Force plans to build its force around it, we get allusions to other programs. The Air Force wants better aerial refueling in 2030, which is hard to see working in 2016 as their latest tanker hit delays because it can’t refuel planes. (Tankers are complex, sure, but the Air Force asks for lots of complex planes all the time. This one shouldn’t be hard to get right). The only airplane mentioned by name is the B-21, a new stealth bomber in development that appears to be as successful as it is secret, and we can’t really have a fair assessment of a program if all we’ve seen is a low-grade computer rendering of the design.

Nestled right at the bottom of this long list of desired abilities is “Low cost systems.” The section mentions 3D printing and autonomy, but it misses possible the most exciting part of the Air Force’s proposed cheap systems: attack drones that cost less to make than the missiles that are used to shoot them down. It’s a promising concept, and one that marks a solid break from long-in-development, expensive, next-generation aircraft.

If I had to guess what war in the sky will look like in 2030, I’d place my money on the small cheap deadly drones.

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In this video, exclusive to PopSci.com, Captain Adam Brockshus narrates a Hellfire missile strike on a group of insurgents in Afghanistan. As a Predator instructor pilot, Brockshus was called into the Ground Control Station to oversee a former student who was taking his first shot in combat.

Click on for an inside look at how the hundreds of attack missions using unmanned aircraft are executed.

The insurgents under fire here gave themselves away when, apparently, they accidentally detonated an IED they were trying to set up. The pilot’s instructions were to target the second man in the group.

For more on how unmanned drones have changed the way war is waged in the air, and the U.S. Air Force’s frantic unmanned reinvention, see our September issue cover feature here and its accompanying gallery for more on the anatomy of a typical unmanned strike.

The post Video: An Annotated Predator Drone Strike in Afghanistan appeared first on Popular Science.

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Military technology is developed over years and guarded carefully. Modern planes are elaborate machines, full of specific parts and components that all have to work or else a multi-million dollar craft fails when it’s most needed. If you don’t have the blueprint for a specific plane, there are two ways to figure out how to match its abilities. One is the painstaking process of building a similar plane independently by trial and error. The other option: just steal it. Steal it all.

Last night, the Justice Department announced Wenxia Man of San Diego was convicted by a federal jury in Florida for conspiring to export jet engines and a drone to China.

From the release:

The F-35 is America’s newest jet fighter, versions of which will serve with the Air Force, Navy, and Marines. In total, American plans to purchase more than 2,400 F-35s, and they’ll serve for at least 30 years, likely longer. The F-22 is America’s premier and exclusive air-to-air superiority fighter, built to outfight any other plane in the sky. While there are only about 187 F-22s in service, the Air Force has recently talked about restarting their production line. F-16s serve with many Air Forces across the globe, and the United States still employs over 1,200 of these versatile fighters.

While all of these planes are far more than just their engines, they would be nothing without the jets that make them go, and it’s much easier to build a plane to rival them around the same engine, or a similar engine.

Besides the jet engines, Man attempted to export a MQ-9 Reaper drone. Reapers–the larger, deadlier successors to Predator drones–are surveillance platforms armed with hellfire missiles, regularly used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to attack insurgents or suspected terrorist hideouts. Curiously, Reapers aren’t terribly useful against militaries that can put aircraft into the sky. Basically any fighter can shoot one down, and the ground-focused drones lack the situational awareness to even see aerial attacks coming. What could China gain from a Reaper? They could use it to improve their own military drones, or possibly develop new weapons for shooting them down.

This is hardly the first attempt by China to steal American military technology, and it likely it won’t be the last. Man was convicted of “conspiring to export and cause the export of defense articles without the required license,” and she faces at least 20 years in prison for this attempt.

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