While researching STOL airfoils, the Cuanda effect, as well as the Dyson bladeless fan (which uses a blown ring geometry airfoil) , as one does, I came upon an interesting article.   This I am sure will interest those of us who are into aerodynamics. I suppose that is most of us. This article elucidates a surprising understanding of low Reynolds Number flow by the ancient and medieval technologists, and also an insight into pre-industrial revolution industrialisation.

As published in Low-tech Magazine by Kris De Decker this is a truly amazing read follow the link below :

Wind powered factories: history (and future) of industrial windmills

Please follow the link and leave a comment.

Reaper UAV

Between January 2006 and April 2009, he estimated, 60 drone attacks were carried out in Pakistan.

While 14 al-Qaeda were killed, some 687 civilian deaths also occurred.

This is an extrordinary amount of “collateral damage” and one wonders who has decided that this is acceptable and would it be acceptable if the casualties were for instance American or British?

Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield said that a push toward more robotic technology used in warfare would put civilian life at grave risk. Technology capable of distinguishing friend from foe reliably was at least 50 years away, he added. However, he said that for the first time, US forces mentioned resolving such ethical concerns in their plans.
“Robots that can decide where to kill, who to kill and when to kill is high on all the military agendas,” Professor Sharkey said at a meeting in London.
“The problem is that this is all based on artificial intelligence, and the military have a strange view of artificial intelligence based on science fiction.”
Professor Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics, has long drawn attention to the psychological distance from the horrors of war that is maintained by operators who pilot unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs), often from thousands of miles away.

“These guys who are driving them sit there all day…they go home and eat dinner with their families at night,” he said. “It’s kind of a very odd way of fighting a war – it’s changing the character of war dramatically.”

The rise in technology has not helped in terms of limiting collateral damage, Professor Sharkey said, because the military intelligence behind attacks was not keeping pace.

That physical distance from the actual theatre of war, he said, led naturally to a far greater concern: the push toward unmanned planes and ground robots that make their decisions without the help of human operators at all.

The problem, he said, was that robots could not fulfil two of the basic tenets of warfare: discriminating friend from foe, and “proportionality”, determining a reasonable amount of force to gain a given military advantage. “Robots do not have the necessary discriminatory ability,” he explained.

“They’re not bright enough to be called stupid – they can’t discriminate between civilians and non-civilians; it’s hard enough for soldiers to do that. “And forget about proportionality, there’s no software that can make a robot proportional,” he added.

“There’s no objective calculus of proportionality – it’s just a decision that people make.”

Current rules of engagement to which the UK subscribes prohibit the use of lethal force without human intervention. Nigel Mills is aerial technology director at defence contractor QinetiQ, who make a number of UAVs and ground robots for the armed forces. He told BBC News that building in autonomy to the systems required assurances of the importance of human input. UAV deployment “The more autonomous a system is, the more effort you have to put into the human/machine interface because of the rules of engagement.

“Complete autonomy – where you send a UAV off on a mission and you don’t interact with it – is not compatible with our current rules of engagement, so we’re not working on such systems.” The US air force published its “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047″ in July, predicting the deployment of fully autonomous attack planes.

The document suggests that humans will play more of a role “monitoring the execution of decisions” than actually making the decisions. “Advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input,” says the report. However, it concedes that “authorising a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions. “Ethical discussions and policy decisions must take place in the near term in order to guide the development of future UAS capabilities, rather than allowing the development to take its own path apart from this critical guidance,” it continues. While the US’s plans are vague, Professor Sharkey said the mere mention of ethical issues was significant. “I’m glad they’ve picked up on that, because if you look at any previous plan, they hadn’t done so,” he told BBC News. However, he warned that work toward ever more autonomous killing machines is carrying on, noting the deployment of Israel’s Harpy – a fully autonomous UAV that dive-bombs radar systems with no human intervention. He cautioned that an international debate was necessary before further developments in decision-making robots could unfold.

A comment one could make is – Robots do not feel emotions and do not surrender. Send robots to war and the consequences could be devastating

Otherwise, flight attendants continued to serve snacks. Passengers read magazines and watched movies. And the flight kept on its schedule.

But in the cockpit, the 60-year-old captain had died of a suspected heart attack and two co-pilots took over the controls. The 247 passengers aboard did not learn what had happened until the flight from Brussels landed safely Thursday and was met by fire trucks, emergency vehicles and dozens of reporters.

“I was shocked,” said Dora Dekeyser of Houston. “Nobody knew anything.”

“We weren’t panicking. I never thought it was something as serious as this. We were relaxed,” said Dekeyser’s granddaughter, Stephanie Mallis, 18, of Lansdale, Pa.

After the crew of the Boeing 777 asked if there were any doctors aboard, several passengers approached the cockpit, including a doctor who said the pilot appeared to have suffered a heart attack.

Dr. Julien Struyven, 72, a cardiologist and radiologist from Brussels, examined the pilot in the cockpit and tried to revive him using a defibrillator. But it was too late.

“He was not alive,” Struyven said. There was “no chance at all” of saving him.

The dead pilot was based in Newark and had worked for Continental for 32 years, the airline said. His name was not immediately released.

Tom Donaldson, a former leader of the Continental pilots’ union who currently flies Boeing 767 jets for the airline, said pilots must pass an extensive physical every six months to remain qualified to fly. The exam includes an electrocardiogram, blood pressure check and a vision test.

For long routes such as trans-Atlantic flights, a third pilot is aboard to permit the captain or first officer to take rest breaks.

Donaldson said there is no specific training on how to react if a crew member becomes incapacitated, but any one of the three pilots is fully qualified to operate the jet.

“Clearly you want another set of eyes watching when you’re going down a checklist, but you’re capable of flying the airplane yourself,” he said. “You can put the gears down, put the flaps down and carry out your other duties by yourself in an emergency.”

Air France pilot Hugues Duval, 29, said his co-pilot training included an exercise in which he had to take off and land without a captain.

“It’s not a drama. If the captain is ill or incapacitated, you make sure he isn’t blocking any controls or the wheel,” Duval said in Le Bourget, France, where he was attending the Paris Air Show.

“After you ask for priority to land, you can also ask in the cabin if there is another pilot on board. In case you need help reading the checklist or taking the radio. I did it in a simulator,” said Duval, who flies the Boeing 777 but was at the air show to do stunt flying.

On Thursday’s flight, Martha Love of Greenwich, N.J., was sitting in the first row of the plane. She said passengers were not told what was going on.

“No one knew,” she said. She only became concerned after the plane landed, when she saw emergency vehicles lined up along the runway.

Simon Shapiro, a passenger from the Brooklyn region of New York City, was also unaware. “I didn’t hear anything or see anything,” Shapiro said. “I was wondering why there were so many cops.”

Passenger Kathleen Ledger, 45, of Bethlehem, Pa., said she learned about what happened when her cell phone rang after landing.

“My husband called me and told me,” she said.

She was impressed with the way the flight crew handled themselves and did not think passengers needed to be informed of the death during the flight.

“They did an incredible job,” she said. “I would have done the exact same thing.”

In 2007, another Continental pilot died at the controls after becoming ill during a flight from Houston to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. It landed safely with a co-pilot at the controls after being diverted to McAllen, Texas.
From Associated Press see: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iovN3SY651-awcKmIjXAkyb8z5RwD98TBRPO4

QUT Unmanned Aircraft

In April, researchers from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) completed a successful flight of a small pilotless plane over Kingaroy in Queensland’s South Burnett region.

Professor Rod Walker says the test was one of the first in the world to use mobile phone technology to send data to a computer in the US controlling the plane.

As more businesses use wireless technology, it has created a shortage of radio spectrum.
Professor Walker says that prompted his team to examine the possibility of using mobile phones to send information.

“Technically it’s possible to use one of these more advanced phones to control an aircraft pretty much anywhere in the world,” he said.

He says they are now gearing up for another test with a manned aircraft in Brisbane next month.

“With the connectivity to the internet you can now control machines and in this case an aircraft,” he said.

“There’s really many other devices that you could control remotely pretty much from anywhere in the world.

I guess that’s kind of exciting in some ways and possibly also scary in others”.

From http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/17/2600455.htm?section=justin

IL18 Hotel

It was always going to happen. An Airliner becomes a Hotel. For a Euro 450,000 investment entrepreneur Ben Thijssen has installed a Bar, Jakuzi and Sauna in a Illushin type 18 Airline which saw service on routes to Havana during the time of the East German Federal Republic. He plans to be acccepting Guests this Northern Summer. This amazing project has been set up near the Airport of Teuge bei Apeldoorn in Holland.
The cockpit is in original condition says Thijssen.  DDR-Chief Erich Honecker often flew in this machine. The cokpit has a seat for the members of the Ustashi who always were required to fly with him.
Thijssen is sure the Honiger Hotel will get good bookings.
From the German World Online www.welt.de/reise

AdelaideNow reports that the modified aircraft was rigged with a camera, attached with a rubber band, which had been set to capture images every 1.5 seconds.

The images returned more than was expected when it captured graffiti vandals at work.

The plane operator sent the pictures to South Coast police who used them to identify the offenders.

Read more on this story at AdelaideNow heralsun.com.au