plane

Airplane iPod use is cool, but it's no black box

There are dozen of companies, cars, boats, gadgets and science projects that now use iPods as data acquisitions systems in place of bulky laptops when all that's needed is basically to write info to a hard drive.

Here's a more interesting one, noticed by Luxist.

The LoPresti Fury is known for a design that combines an old military plane silhouette with a modern sleekness. It is the last plane that renowned aviator and engineer Roy LoPresti designed himself. (He worked on the NASA Lunar Module, among other things.)

Now the Fury will be the first production aircraft, according … Read more

No need to lock this cockpit

Three aircraft in the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) pipeline promise to change some assumptions we have about air travel--the assumption that there's a pilot in the cockpit, for instance.

In the works is an unmanned cargo plane with a 30-ton payload capacity. IAI could have gone for an unmanned passenger jet--the technology does exists--but "the world is not yet ready to be flown without a pilot at the stick," Shlomo Tsach, IAI director of flight sciences, told the Jerusalem Post. "A psychological obstacle needs to be overcome before people are willing to fly in unmanned planes.&… Read more

Furnish your private jet in Versace

What? What's this you say? You don't have a private jet? Well, then. If you did, you'd probably be interested in knowing that TAG Aircraft Interiors ("Your Palazzo in the Sky") has teamed up with Italian design house Versace to create custom interiors for the private plans of the uber-rich. This way, you don't have to worry about whether or not the colors of the seat cushions go well with the paint job on the interior of your in-flight hot tub. You'll have Versace's experts to do all that dirty work for … Read more

A jet for flybys

Forget the Navy bar. This is what I call a "target rich environment"...for puns.

The Trend Hunter blog has dubbed Maverick Jets' new SoloJet the Top Gun of executive aircraft. (What an original pop culture reference.) Considering the glaring irony that Tom "Maverick" Cruise has traded in his F-14 Tomcat to become TomKat, one can't blame the Top Gun references from jumping into the blogosphere.

The single engine jet holds a 3,190-pound Pratt & Whitney JT-15-5 engine, enabling the jet to climb 8,000 feet per minute. It flies at 472 knots--that is … Read more

'Silent jet' could save your hearing

If you're about to go deaf from living near an airport, there's hope. Researchers at Cambridge and MIT are unveiling a "silent jet" that uses military stealth technologies to muffle noisy planes.

Rather than the standard tube-and-wing design of commercial airliners today, the jet is a "flying wing" like the stealth bombers developed in secret a couple of decades ago. If it works, researchers say the plane will make about as much noise as a washing machine. But don't start buying up cheap property along flight paths anytime soon--the earliest these jets are … Read more