The engines on a French Concorde are to be examined as the first move in a £15m project aiming to get the supersonic passenger jet back in the air.

The Rolls Royce engines of the former Air France Concorde will undergo an initial examination to see what work needs to be done to start the engines.

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Today a team of researchers at MIT unveiled their latest feat of engineering — an airplane that uses 70% less fuel than conventional aircraft. The MIT team was one of six groups — and the only university led team — across the US chosen by NASA to help redesign current aircraft to increase fuel efficiency, lower emissions and allow planes to take off on shorter runways. The team accomplished all of NASA’s set goals with their innovative D-series plane, lovingly referred to as the “double bubble”.

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The open source flight simulator project has just released Flightgear 2.0.

...FlightGear is a free flight simulator project. It is being developed through the gracious contributions of source code and spare time by many talented people from around the globe. Among the many goals of this project are the quest to minimize short cuts and "do things right", the quest to learn and advance knowledge, and the quest to have better toys to play with.

The idea for Flight Gear was born out of a dissatisfaction with current commercial PC flight simulators. A big problem with these simulators is their proprietariness and lack of extensibility. There are so many people across the world with great ideas for enhancing the currently available simulators who have the ability to write code, and who have a desire to learn and contribute. Many people involved in education and research could use a spiffy flight simulator frame work on which to build their own projects; however, commercial simulators do not lend themselves to modification and enhancement. The Flight Gear project is striving to fill these gaps.

It looks great and the price is right so check it out!

FlightGear Web Siite

An amazing achievement that shows the innovation of private industry.  I can't wait to see these aircraft fly!

Virgin Founder, Sir Richard Branson and SpaceshipOne (SS1) designer, Burt Rutan, today reveal SS2 to the public for the first time since construction of the world’s first manned commercial spaceship began in 2007. SS2 has been designed to take many thousands of private astronauts into space after test programming and all required U.S. government licensing has been completed.

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As with most things I do these days, it starts with an idle bit of chat when there’s nothing better going on and ends up turning into a Vice blog post. One afternoon in Seoul, while bored and looking for anything to occupy my time, a guy I’d met a few days earlier told me he’d heard a rumour that a giant Boeing 747 had been dumped inexplicably on the doorstep of a housing complex out in the suburbs, and was now slowly wasting away. That was literally all the information he had, but the possibility of jumping up and down on a jumbo jet wing without getting shouted at or accused of terrorism by lingering air traffic control staff seemed like a lot more fun than another morning hanging out with the art kids of Insadong, so I got on a train to check it out.

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Computers definitely have an advantage in responding to situations when given the proper inputs.  But I'd be far more comfortable in an aircraft the allows the pilot to override the flight systems in an emergency.

But while most reports are focusing on why the sensors gave incorrect information (icing, an electrical fire. etc.), the more substantive issue is that the pilots of Flight 447 never had a fighting chance because their airplane's controls were never in their hands -- they were in the hands of the on-board computers made by the likes of Northrup Grumman, Litton and Honeywell.

Flight 447 was an Airbus, which uses so-called "fly-by-wire" technology that relies entirely on electronic rather than hydraulic and manual systems. Boeing jets also use fly-by-wire, but allow pilots to override computers in an emergency -- whereas Airbus systems don't.

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Wired.com got its mitts on the first official cockpit video and other footage from the recent test of Virgin Mothership Eve at the Scaled Composites skunkworks operation in sunny SoCal. Scaled Composites and Virgin tend to keep the test results hush-hush but say “several recent published articles have been sufficiently inaccurate and negative” to make them “set the record straight.”

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Russian_Antonov_Jet_225.pps (2.27 mb)

Lufthansa_D-AIQP_A320_crosswind_Hamburg.wmv (3.42 mb)