In this age of eternal flight delays, traveling from New York to Miami in the scheduled three hours sounds like a fantasy. Yet within a decade, aircraft designer Abe Karem plans to fix that by bypassing congested runways in his tilt-rotor, vertical-takeoff commercial plane, the AeroTrain. Sitting on a helipad with its twin rotors tilted straight up, the craft can take off vertically and fly like a helicopter. Once the plane has reached a safe altitude of 50 feet, the pilot will tilt the rotors forward and fly the craft like an airplane.

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.

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I don't know about you, but when airline pilots organize themselves enough to protest their employer's overall poor performance—not, I'd like to point out, merely their crappy pay—that gets my attention. That's precisely what hundreds of American Airlines pilots intend to do tomorrow in nine cities around the country. They'll be demonstrating at major airports to "encourage passengers to help AA employees get management's attention" to fix problems relating to performance and customer service. Specifically, American has the worst on-time performance among network carriers. The pilots are also, naturally, not particularly amused about the nose-gear-wiring fiasco that grounded hundreds of aircraft and caused countless traveler delays last week.

Yesterday Boeing announced that one of its pilots recently took to the air in an airplane powered by hydrogen fuel cells. This marks the first time a manned aircraft running on fuel cells has ever successfully completed a flight, though robotic drones have done so in the past.

The highest-endurance aircraft currently flying is Northrop Grummans Global Hawk UAV, which can stay aloft for up to 40 hours. Now Darpa—which, to its credit, is never short on outlandish ideas—wants to beat that endurance record more than 1,000 times. The goal of Darpa's recently launched Vulture Program is to build a kind of atmospheric satellite that can stay aloft for five years at a time with little or no maintenance.