Lifeboat Foundation

The FAA bill that goes to the House floor Wednesday also establishes a Syria Study Group to provide the first comprehensive review of U.S. strategy in Syria.

Electric drones booked through smartphones pick people up from office rooftops, shortening travel time by hours, reducing the need for parking and clearing smog from the air.

This vision of the future is driving the Japanese government’s “flying car” project. Major carrier All Nippon Airways, electronics company NEC Corp. and more than a dozen other companies and academic experts hope to have a road map for the plan ready by the year’s end.

“This is such a totally new sector Japan has a good chance for not falling behind,” said Fumiaki Ebihara, the government official in charge of the project.

Continue reading “Japan eager to be on board vertical-takeoff ‘flying cars’” »

The Navy will launch formal flight testing in 2021 for a new, first-of-its kind carrier-launched drone engineered to double the attack range of F-18 fighters, F-35Cs and other carrier aircraft.

Russian company GET (Global Energy Transmission) has pioneered a mid-air inductive recharging system that can charge up several drones at once without requiring them to land. Build enough of these stations, and you can have an army of drones in the air that never need to land.

You can now control and communicate drone swarms using your mind!

DARPA’s new research in brain-computer interfaces is allowing a pilot to control multiple simulated aircraft at once.

ICYMI overnight: A little more than an hour after its launch window opened—the delay was due to remnant thunderstorms in the area—#SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched from Florida early on Monday morning. The rocket’s first stage made a flawless flight, and then descended to a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean and safely landed.

The company has now flown 16 missions this year.

Continue reading “SpaceX launches heavy telecom satellite, sticks high-seas landing” »

The rules around where and when you can fly a drone out in the wide, wide world can seem a little daunting, but there are a few great tools out there to help you figure it out.

The US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has created a brain-computer interface that enables a person to control everything from a swarm of drones to an advanced fighter jet using nothing but their thoughts and a special brain chip.

Life imitates art, in defense tech no less than in society. In the 1982 techno-thriller film “Firefox,” Clint Eastwood steals a fictional Soviet fighter jet called the “MiG-31 Firefox,” a Mach 6-capable stealth fighter he piloted with his thoughts. But now in 2018, the US military has gone even further: you can control a whole group of drones or fighter jets with your thoughts.

Continue reading “DARPA’s New Brain Chip Enables Telepathic Control of Drone Swarms” »

The U.S. Army is eyeing a system that traps military drones while they’re on the move, which could help the devices avoid detection by enemies.