The HAV304 took the crown of “world’s longest aircraft” with its inaugural flight today. The gargantuan spans a football field and towers just over two stories in height, owing its construction to pure metal. It sacrifices little in being the world’s longest, as it still reaches 100 mph, which is triple that of the dwarfish Goodyear blimp. Further, it can stay airborne for just over three weeks (and hypothetically, if it could maintain its maximum speed for all that time, it would travel over 50,000 miles.)
If your everyday social networks prove too uneventful for your business flights, Virgin America aims to offer the solution. Today the company unveiled flight-centric social networking for business travelers who … Continue reading
The UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom has announced that it has cleared the way for faster in-flight broadband on commercial aircraft. Ofcom has cleared the plan for airlines and other transportation … Continue reading
According to Pentagon officials, China’s military has begun testing of a new ultra-high speed missile vehicle, which is designed to deliver warheads through US missile defenses.
A few days ago, Virgin Galactic successfully completed another test flight. The test flight happened last Friday and saw the craft reach its highest altitude yet.
You might think the pilot behind the controls would have looked out the window for a bit and enjoyed the view at 71,000 feet. Pilot David Mackay said he didn’t get to look out the window because he was too busy checking the thruster system that will be used to control the craft in space.
SpaceShip Two will eventually fly to an altitude of 62 miles above the surface of the Earth, which is the official start of outer space. Passengers aboard the spacecraft will pay $250,000 each to make the trip into space.
Unless you are a billionaire playboy or a business magnet of some sort, odds are you fly Coach like the rest of us when you travel by air. For the well-heeled, it’s First Class all the way, but for the really rich it’s private jets. A company called Spike Aerospace has a new private jet in the design phase it claims will be the fastest private aircraft in the skies – assuming it launches in 2018 as planned.
The 18-passenger aircraft is called the Spike S-512 and it will have a cruising speed of Mach 1.6. That makes it about twice as fast as a commercial aircraft. The company says a trip to London from New York would take three to four hours in its jet.
One of the biggest challenges to building the aircraft is dealing with the sonic boom when flying over populated areas. The FAA has regulations for sonic booms and those regulations are what greatly limited the usefulness of the Concorde jet when it was in service.
The 131-foot-long aircraft is expected to have a maximum flying range of 4,000 nautical miles, and will between $60 million to $80 million when it launches.
An aerospace company based in Boston called Spike Aerospace is working on a new aircraft that it believes will be the fastest business jet on the planet. The aircraft is … Continue reading
Despite our best efforts, accurately predicting the weather remains about as easy as accurately predicting the next winning Powerball numbers. But with the installation of a new type of humidity sensor, the fleets of commercial passenger jets that inhabit our skies could soon provide meteorologists an unprecedented look at the sky—in real-time.
Sikorsky as announced that it has been granted a contract by DARPA to develop phase 1 of the X-Plane program. The X-Plane to be designed under the contract is a vertical take off and landing experimental aircraft. The contract is worth $15 million to Sikorsky and will see the company begin development of a high […]
A dragon flew from Auckland to Los Angeles last night. As we gear up for the release of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Air New Zealand is once again embracing its national ties to the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit franchise by emblazoning one of its commercial aircraft with a likeness of Smaug […]
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