Quantcast

General Aviation News

GA pilots help monitor Lake Erie algal blooms

by 2 Comments

It’s only a matter of time before the harmful algal bloom that has plagued Lake Erie begins to grow along the western basin and elsewhere this summer. This year, however, there will be a new tool employed to monitor the problem and spread the word to residents about toxic cyanobacteria.

Dr. Rafat Ansari, senior scientist at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, has spearheaded a citizen science campaign along with general aviation pilot Terry Schubert, to involve public volunteers to monitor water quality along Lake Erie’s coastline and interior waterways. In this case, they are engaging private pilots to collaborate with researchers to collect scientific data. [Read more…]

NASA launches competition for airspace redesign

by Leave a Comment

NASA has launched a new competition for the redesign of our national airspace.

Sky for All: Air Mobility for 2035 and Beyond is a $15,000 challenge to develop ideas for technologies that could be part of a clean-slate design and concept of operations for the airspace of the future. The challenge is open now. Deadline for submissions is Feb. 26, 2016.

The design challenge, administered by HeroX and sponsored by NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD), asks potential solvers to think outside the current air traffic management system box, and consider how to manage crowded skies, autonomous operations and cyber security of the system. [Read more…]

Retired NASA pilot inducted into Virginia Aviation Hall of Fame

by Leave a Comment

RICHMOND, Va. — A retired NASA pilot who has the distinction of being the only person in the world to have flown and tested both the Concorde and Russian TU-144 supersonic transports has been inducted into the Virginia Aviation Hall of Fame.

Robert A. Rivers spent 14 years, from 1990 to 2004, as a research pilot at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, as well as a number of years at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. [Read more…]

NASA picks six ‘wild ideas’ to study

by

It never hurts to ask. In that spirit, six teams of NASA’s aeronautical innovators are about to take the plunge and ask if the novel ideas they have come up with have the potential to transform aviation as we know it, extending the frontier of what’s possible with flight.

Imagine an electrically-propelled airliner whose fuselage is the battery. How about an remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) equipped with artificial intelligence programmed to respond to unforeseen situations the same way a human pilot would?

Those are among the six concepts recently selected for study during the next two years or so as part of an imaginative venture under NASA’s new Convergent Aeronautics Solutions (CAS) project. [Read more…]