"We finally flew our first thermal camera flight yesterday afternoon. About 10 seconds after launch my co pilot looked at the screen and said something like, 'We now have our very own predator drone'" A rice farmer in Louisiana had a real problem, feral pigs were coming out of the woods at night, into the rice fields, tearing up his crops and causing
thousands of dollars worth of damage. The only solution is to bring in hunters to shoot the pigs.
Hunting feral pigs in waist high rice plants, in the dead of night, is very difficult. You have to be within 10 feet of them to shoot them and it can take hours to stalk them down. So the farmer calls his brother, an Electronic Warfare engineer who flies
RC airplanes as a hobby.
$5000 worth of electronics, including a
$4500 infrared camera, are installed on a $80 model airplane, and the
Dehogaflier is born!
posted by smoothvirus
on Oct 18, 2011 -
52 comments
"Flight into Danger" invented the cliches of the disaster film genre, invigorated the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and changed the life of its author, tractor-trailer company advertising executive Arthur Hailey.
posted by sevenyearlurk
on Aug 15, 2011 -
16 comments
Austrian research company IAT21 has presented a new type of aircraft at the Paris Air Show which has the potential to become aviation's first disruptive technology since the jet engine. ... The key to the D-Dalus' extreme maneuverability is the facility to alter the angle of the blades (using servos) to vector the forces, meaning that the thrust can be delivered in your choice of 360 degrees around any of the three axes. Hence D-Dalus can launch vertically, hover perfectly still and move in any direction, and that's just the start of the story.
posted by Trurl
on Jun 23, 2011 -
38 comments
Photographer Nate Bolt, on a overnight San Francisco to Paris flight, set up a time lapse camera to record the journey (with permission), and found midflight that he was shooting
an aurora borealis.
[more inside]
posted by ZeusHumms
on Apr 11, 2011 -
16 comments
The biggest mistake people make when talking about the outsourcing of U.S. jobs by U.S. companies is to treat it as a moral issue. Sure, it's immoral to abandon your loyal American workers in search of cheap labor overseas. But the real problem with outsourcing, if you don't think it through, is that it can wreck your business and cost you a bundle.
Case in point:
Boeing Co. and its 787 Dreamliner.
Boeing can't say it wasn't warned. As early as 2001, L.J. Hart-Smith, a Boeing senior technical fellow, produced a
prescient analysis projecting that
excessive outsourcing would raise Boeing's costs and steer profits to its subcontractors.
[previously]
posted by ennui.bz
on Feb 18, 2011 -
58 comments
The largest model railway layout in the world, Hamburg's
Miniatur Wunderland has been featured here
before. Featuring areas modelled on real life attractions, it also is home to the fictional town of
Knuffingen where the 200,000 mini-inhabitants are very much looking forward to the opening of their new
airport.
[more inside]
posted by jontyjago
on Feb 12, 2011 -
15 comments
Authorities believe a 16 year old boy found dead last month on a Milton, MA street fell out of the wheel well of an aircraft. Last month, the suburb of Milton, MA, was horrified when the mutilated body of a teenager was found in the road. The body lacked identification, but was eventually found to be that of Delvonte Tisdale, age 16, from Charlotte, NC. The mystery of how he got there when he had been seen the night before in his bedroom seems to have been solved: authorities now believe he stowed away in the wheel well of an aircraft from Charlotte to Boston, and fell out as the airplane approached Logan airport.
[more inside]
posted by kpht
on Dec 10, 2010 -
59 comments
“There is one line in ‘Zero Hour!’ where a stewardess says, completely seriously, ‘The life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing: finding someone back there who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner,’ ” Mr. Abrahams said. “That was the essence of the movie. We just repeated the line. We didn’t have to change a thing.”
Airplane! (known in Australia as
Flying High!)
turns 30 [more inside]
posted by crossoverman
on Jun 28, 2010 -
186 comments
Solar takes to the skies. The
Solar Impulse took flight today, reaching an altitude of 5500 feet over 87 minutes.With
a wingspan of over 60 meters, close to that of a Boeing 747, it weighs about as much as a small car. Its 12,000 solar cells generate power for the 40hp engine, with an average speed of 70 kph (44 mph). The team will continue testing the prototype, including a 36 hour overnight flight, before constructing
an even lighter,
more powerful,
more stable plane, with the goal of flying around the world in 2012, traveling both during both the day and at night, without fuel.
posted by markkraft
on Apr 7, 2010 -
20 comments
"Joey, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?" Veteran actor
Peter Graves--who was the star of the original
Mission Impossible TV series, most famously (for some of us) played Capt. Oveur in
Airplane!, and was the Emmy-winning host of
Biography--has died of natural causes. He was 83.
posted by zardoz
on Mar 14, 2010 -
93 comments
Early in the days of
exploration of Antarctica, Australian geologist
Douglas Mawson turned down an invitation to join Robert Falcon Scott's
Terra Nova Expedition in 1910 (
Cool Antarctica previously). Instead, Mawson lead his own expedition, the
Australasian Antarctic Expedition (December 1911 to December 1913), an expedition to chart the 2000-mile coastline directly south of Australia, one of the least-visited parts of the continent throughout the early years of Antarctic exploration.
The group's efforts and activities are well documented, and many remnants of the expedition remain on Antarctica.
The conservation of Mawson's Huts is now an ongoing effort from
Association of Australasian Palaeontologists (AAP)
Mawson's Huts Foundation. While most efforts were focused on the recovery and treatment of artifacts inside the main hut, the group also searched for the
Vickers (
Aviation)
monoplane that was modified to become an "air tractor", or motorized sledge. The remains of the plane were last seen in 1975.
Now the plane has been found, thanks to an exceptionally low tide and a bit of luck.
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Jan 5, 2010 -
11 comments
21st Century Jet: The Building of the 777 (part 1 of 5) In the early 90's, Boeing decided to build a new airplane, the 777. They also decided to allow KCTS Television and Channel Four London to film the design, construction, and testing of the new airliner. This 5-hour documentary, first aired in 1996, is no longer shown on TV, and out of print on VHS, but you can now watch it on Google Videos.
[more inside]
posted by FishBike
on Dec 18, 2009 -
20 comments
