u.s. air force

The U.S. Air Force said today that an experimental test in August of its hypersonic X-51A Waverider failed due to a fin inadvertently unlocking and sending the aircraft into a corkscrew that ended in a crash into the Pacific Ocean.

At the time, the Air Force said only that the August flight had ended with the crash, but didn't reveal what had been at fault. But in a conference call today, X-51A program manager Charlie Brink explained what he and his colleagues have learned over a couple of months of investigation.

The August flight was the third of … Read more

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif.--He might be the most famous airman in the history of the U.S. Air Force, and he's a graduate of the Test Pilot School.

In 1947, Capt. Chuck Yeager became the first person to break the sound barrier, hitting Mach 1.0 in a Bell X-1 rocket plane 42,000 feet above this Mojave Desert outpost. And today, to commemorate the import of the event that ushered in the supersonic era, the aircraft hangs from the ceiling in the entryway of the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Yeager … Read more

Last month, the European Space Agency abruptly declared its Earth observation satellite, Envisat, dead. After more than 10 years of successfully monitoring the planet's natural behaviors from space, the once valuable tool is now considered junk that could endanger active space assets for as much as 150 years.

Situations like this are what has led the U.S. Air Force and partners around the globe to move forward with the construction of a system designed to closely track as many as 200,000 piece of space debris. And now, the Air Force is considering which of two contractors' proposals … Read more

The U.S. Air Force yesterday gave the go ahead to begin "introductory" flight tests of its version of the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter, a major step forward for the trillion-dollar program that, Wired reports, is expected to succeed nearly all of the Pentagon's tactical jets over the next three decades.

If you think maybe you read that number wrong, let me repeat: a trillion dollars. According to Reuters, the F-35 program is seen as a fleet of 2,443 jets over the next 50 years, a flying armada that is expected to cost $1 trillion over … Read more

The decade-long war is over: EADS North America has conceded defeat to Boeing in the campaign to capture a multibillion-dollar deal to build a new aerial tanker for the U.S. Air Force.

Last week, the Pentagon announced that it had selected Boeing to build the next-generation KC-46A tanker in a long-term arrangement that could eventually be worth $30 billion. For starters, the Chicago-based aerospace titan is getting $3.5 billion to build the first four of a projected 179 of the new tankers. It has to deliver 18 by 2017.

"Boeing was a clear winner," Deputy Defense … Read more

PlayStations have seen plenty of army action with games like Call of Duty: Black Ops. Now they're doing real-life military duty as part of the Condor Cluster, a U.S. Air Force supercomputer whose off-the-shelf components include more than 1,700 Sony PS3 processors.

The computer--which will undertake a range of tasks including synthetic aperture radar enhancement, image enhancement, and pattern recognition research--also incorporates 168 separate graphical processing units. It's capable of computing about 500 trillion calculations per second, which makes it some 50,000 times faster than the average laptop.

As such, the Condor can read a whopping 20 pages of information per second. Even when 20 percent to 30 percent of the characters on a page are removed, the computer can recover all of the sentences and words with about 99.9 percent accuracy, according to the official Web site of the U.S. Air Force.

Affordability was a key motivator in the decision to use PS3 processors.

"The total cost of the Condor system was approximately $2 million, which is a cost savings of between 10 and 20 times for the equivalent capability," said Mark Barnell, director of the Air Force Research Laboratory's high-power computing division.

He said the Condor isn't made to compete with the world's largest general-purpose supercomputers, but is meant for highly specific military tasks. "The biggest thing for us was [that] the particular applications and the hardware we chose to build this computer with purposely match those applications well," he said.

Initial projects scheduled for the Department of Defense mega-machine, housed in Rome, N.Y., will include neuromorphic artificial intelligence research, in which programmers will "teach" the computer to read symbols, letters, words, and sentences so it can fill in human gaps and correct human errors. … Read more

The X-51A Waverider flew today, and it flew fast.

The scramjet engine in the experimental aircraft burned for a little over three minutes at around 10 a.m. PDT Wednesday in a test range over the Pacific Ocean, pushing the X-51A to the hypersonic speed of Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. That was the top speed reached by the aircraft in its brief flight, according to Boeing and press reports citing U.S. Air Force officials. (Editors' note: A separate Air Force News Service report had initially cited a higher speed, but was amended to give … Read more

If you're the kind of person who worries about the security of computer networks, you should know that the National Security Agency is worrying about it too.

Since Tuesday, the NSA has been conducting its 10th annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a competition that pits students from a series of military academies against each other--and against the competition's leaders at NSA--in a bid to see who has the best cyberdefense skills. The idea? To "build and defend computer networks against simulated intrusions by the National Security Agency/Central Security Services Red Team."

The competition will last until … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--The American trucking industry could save as much as $10 billion, or 3.4 billion gallons of diesel fuel, a year if devices being tested in a joint public-private initiative at the world's-largest wind tunnel here are rolled out nationally.

Over the last few weeks, a partnership between the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, the U.S. Air Force, the NASA Ames Research Center, and the conglomerate, Navistar, has been conducting tests on the aerodynamics of tractor-trailer trucks. The findings indicate that new devices could be added onto the nation's thousands of trucks that could increase … Read more