Last weekend, PopSci traveled to Lakeland, Florida, to watch Mike Selby's 5.5-to-1 scale model A-10 Warthog—star of our recent feature story— compete in Top Gun, an invitation-only event that is effectively the world championship of experimental radio-controlled aircraft.

Selby's team includes pilot Raymond Johns, an Air Force test pilot and three-star general; pit crew/logistician Bill Davidson, who is the Administrative Assistant to the Secretary of the US Air Force; and Bangkok jet-engine builder Pornchai "Hard Porn" Saechour.

Everyone can guess the worst way to load passengers on to a plane is to do it front to back. People would have to wait at every row or squeeze awkwardly past. It would stand to reason, then, that the way airlines usually do it—back to front—would be the best way. But according to Fermilab physicist Jason Steffen, that's not the case. As it turns out, it's far from the best: it's the second worst.

Last summer, more than 1,000 environmentalists in the U.K. staged a weeklong protest in a "Climate Camp" at Heathrow Airport, where about 70 people were arrested. Their immediate purpose was to block a planned expansion of Heathrow, but the protests highlighted a growing complaint in Europe—that the ride to global-warming catastrophe is being fueled not only by coal-fired power plants and SUVs, but also by the ever-rising number of commercial jets. Now governments are starting to listen.

For a closer look at the exotic aircraft the Air Force might be cooking up at Area 51, launch the photo gallery.