Flight

You may have noticed that on some drink cup lids, there are small domes that can be "popped down" to indicate what sort of beverage is in the cup. Scientists now believe that similar domes could help drones monitor the air pressure on their wings.

Ordinarily, quadcopter drones have to tilt their front end downward when flying forward, increasing their frontal area and thus increasing drag. An experimental new drone gets around this problem, by only tilting its rotors.

A stretch of airspace spanning 165 miles (265 km) across England is set to become the world's longest dedicated drone corridor, with the UK government approving plans for the initiative as part of a wider push into next-generation aviation.

The new ultra-long-range Gulfstream G800 completed its first flight on Wednesday in the skies over the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport in Georgia, on a two-hour test flight that used sustainable aviation fuel.

The world's largest flying aircraft has reached record heights, with Stratolaunch today completing the seventh test flight of its gigantic Roc carrier plane and logging a record altitude for the huge aircraft in the process.

On June 15, Airbus' first A321XLR (Xtra Long Range) airliner completed its maiden flight over Hamburg-Finkenwerder Airport with test pilots Thierry Diez and GabrielDiaz de Villegas Giron at the controls for a four-hour shakedown systems test.

While eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft certainly are fascinating, it's hard to say how many will ever be anything more than concepts. Volocopter's VoloConnect may be the real deal, however, as it flew for the first time in May.

Stuttgart-based German aerospace company H2FLY has claimed a new world record for its four-seater HY4, which became the first hydrogen-powered passenger aircraft to reach an altitude above 7,000 ft (2,134 m) on April 13.

The US Air Force's AFWERX technology accelerator program has announced that in December 2021 it successfully completed the first flight of an electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft with an Air Force pilot at the remote controls.

The shift to sustainable fuels in the aerospace sector passed another milestone last week when a United Airlines 737 MAX 8 airliner took to the skies with one of its two LEAP-1B engines running on 100-percent Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF).

One way scientists hope to prevent hypersonic aircraft from overheating is by having the propellant do double duty as a coolant, and newly developed 3D-printed catalysts could be the missing piece to this puzzle.

If you were a bird, chances are that you'd want to minimize the number of times you had to land on the treacherous ocean. A new study now suggests that multiple seabird species have thus evolved dark-colored wings, in order to stay aloft longer.