This is Boeing's "Phantom Eye," a hydrogen-powered, unmanned spy plane that flies 65,000 feet above the ground and can fly for four days straight. Boeing hails it as the "first of its kind" — its looks alone set it apart for that honor.

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Pogo in storage at the Garber Restoration circa 1990's

The Convair XFY Pogo tailsitter was an experiment in vertical takeoff and landing. The Pogo had delta wings and three-bladed contra-rotating propellers powered by a 5,500 hp Allison YT40-A-16 turboprop engine. It was intended to be a high-performance fighter aircraft capable of operating from small warships. Landing the XFY-1 was difficult as the pilot had to look over his shoulder while carefully working the throttle to land.

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June 2, 1954: A Convair XFY-1 Pogo aircraft makes a vertical takeoff and landing. It’s a milestone in the checkered history of VTOL aircraft.

Using designs captured from the Germans, the Navy and the newly formed Air Force crafted two design studies in 1947 for creating a fixed-wing vertical-takeoff-and-landing, or VTOL, aircraft. The goal of the project was to build a fighter that could protect convoys but not require a large landing area.

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The scramjet engine in the experimental aircraft burned for a little over three minutes at around 10 a.m. PDT Wednesday in a test range over the Pacific Ocean, pushing the X-51A to the hypersonic speed of Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. That was the top speed reached by the aircraft in its brief flight, according to Boeing and press reports citing U.S. Air Force officials. 

The 200 seconds of autonomous flight by the U.S. Air Force's X-51A set a duration record for an aircraft powered by a scramjet (short for "supersonic combustion ramjet") engine, though in part that can be chalked up to the rarity of any flights at all at this extreme level. The previous record was set by NASA's X-43A, whose scramjet engine burned for only about 10 to 12 seconds in November 2004; that aircraft zoomed to Mach 9.8.

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The North American F-107 was North American Aviation's (NAA) entry in a United States Air Force tactical fighter-bomber design competition of the 1950s. The F-107 incorporated many innovations and radical design features, and was based on the F-100 Super Sabre. The competition was eventually won by the F-105 Thunderchief, and the F-107 prototypes ended their lives as test aircraft.

The July 2010 issue of Air & Space Magazine has a nice feature on the F-107A but contains a factual error: 

With one F-107A safely ensconced in the Air Force museum, the other two served in the late 1950s with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (later NASA). Today only one remains, at the Pima Air and Space Museum, in Tucson, Arizona.

The National Museum of the USAF still has the F-107A in its collection as does the Pima Air Museum.

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A top secret space plane developed by the US military has blasted off from Cape Canaveral on its maiden voyage.

Billed as a small shuttle, the unmanned X-37B heralds the next generation of space exploration. It will be the first craft to carry out an autonomous re-entry in the history of the US programme.

But its mission - and its cost - remain shrouded in secrecy. The Air Force said the launch was a success but would give no further details.

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A team from NASA and Boeing completed the first phase of flight testing of its blended wing body design that could represent the airliner of the future. The airplane is based on a design where the fuselage provides a significant part of the lift.

Such designs, as shown above, could carry hundreds of airline passengers in the large center section while burning much less fuel than today’s airliners of similar capacity. Well, except that the airplane pictured above is only about one foot tall.

The test aircraft is only a 8.5 percent scale model with a 21 foot wingspan, but engineers at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center were able to demonstrate the tailless aircraft can be safely flown, and more importantly safely landed in a variety of conditions.

A great talk. I love the part where he discusses how after the great achievements of the SR-71 and moon landing we retreated technologically.

The Northrop/McDonnell Douglas YF-23 was an American prototype fighter aircraft designed for the United States Air Force. The YF-23 was a finalist in the U.S. Air Force's Advanced Tactical Fighter competition. Two YF-23s were built and were nicknamed "Black Widow II" and "Gray Ghost", respectively. The YF-23 lost the contest to the Lockheed YF-22, which entered production as the F-22 Raptor.

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Awaiting restoration at the National Museum of the USAF- 2004.

During restoration at the National Museum of the USAF- 2008.

Post restoration at the National Museum of the USAF- 2009.

Western Museum of Flight- 2002.