airplanes

In 2006, a bunch of terrorists went ahead and ruined air travel for the rest of us. After the terrorists failed to bring liquid explosives onto a British flight, the airlines banned liquid carry-on items larger than 3.4 ounces. This forced us to leave shampoo at home and buy outrageously overpriced drinks by the gate, to say nothing of the flask of whiskey I liked to travel with.

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Last September, five days before Hurricane Ike pulverized the Texas coast, the National Hurricane Center pegged a point near Corpus Christi as the storm’s most likely landfall. Residents of the low-lying region around Galveston, some 250 miles north, breathed a sigh of relief.

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The Antares DLR-H2 has just completed its first test flight, making it the world's first zero-emissions aircraft to successfully fly on hydrogen fuel cell power alone.

And because hydrogen fuel cells only react with oxygen in ambient air, the lone byproduct is water, which has no ill effect on the environment.

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While we seem to be closer than ever to seeing a flying car in our lifetimes, The Economist seems to believe the flying car will die before it was ever really born, but not necessarily for reasons in the air. They think flying cars will have trouble getting road certified.

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Nine days: That's the longest any airplane has stayed in the air. Burt and Dick Rutan's Voyager set the record in 1986 by flying 24,986 miles around the world without refueling. But nine days of uninterrupted flight won't cut it for Darpa, the Pentagon's advanced-research organization. It's challenged the aviation industry to come up with an unmanned surveillance and communications plane that can circle targets for half a decade — and do so on nothing but solar power.

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This fall, Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard and his team will begin test flights of a prototype of Solar Impulse, a sun-powered plane designed to circumnavigate the globe without burning a drop of oil. Piccard wants the project to demonstrate the potential of green technology, and he’s feeling the pressure. "We still have to prove that this plane will fly," he says.

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Commercial Flight: 2020

The long, skinny tube has to go. Tasked with improving the nation's air transportation, NASA wants airplanes to burn 40 percent less fuel than a 777 by 2020 and 70 percent less by 2030. Not only that, it wants those same planes to be whisper-quiet. The best -- and perhaps the only -- way to reach these ambitious benchmarks is to design commercial planes more like stealth bombers and less like pencils.

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After frightening revelations that hackers have already managed to break into the computer systems that control huge swaths of the United States' power grid and other pieces of national infrastructure, the Wall Street Journal reports that cyber-spies have broken into the Pentagon's Joint Strike Fighter program -- its costliest initiative -- and made off with several terabytes of sensitive data.

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Unfortunately, there’s pretty much no way to protect jet engines from geese or other large birds. In fact, fastening some sort of shield over a jet engine could actually make things worse.

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Learn more about the plane, after the jump. [ Read Full Story ]