The South Korean air force showcased its new aircraft testing and evaluation center on opening day, September 8, by coating this F-4 Phantom fighter jet with ice. In the facility, engineers simulate conditions that a plane might encounter at 40,000 feet to determine if the craft’s composite structure—particularly in its wings—can endure the freezing temperatures without cracking. The test center is the second-largest of its kind in the world. (The largest is McKinley Climatic Laboratory at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.)

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Today US Airways flight 1549 made an unexpected stop: the Hudson River. After a troubled take off around 3:30PM, the Airbus A320 descended into the river on the west side of Manhattan. Local ferry operators immediately began to throw life vests into the water and pick up passengers, with the Coast Guard Cutter Ridley and NYPD arriving shortly there after. All 148 passengers, as well as the 5 crew members, are all alive and accounted for. An FAA report said that a flock of geese likely caused the crash.

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Story from Lifehacker Australia

Conventional wisdom holds that in times of economic distress, it should be easier than ever to get discounted airfares. However, while there are some good deals to be had, the fundamental strategies for getting cheap flights remain the same as ever.

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The Transition is not a flying car. The vehicle, set to go on sale next year, will cruise smoothly on the road and through the sky. It will have four wheels, Formula One–style suspension, and a pair of 10-foot-wide wings that fold up when it switches from air to asphalt. And when the engineers at Terrafugia in Woburn, Massachusetts, let me sit inside their just-finished proof-of-concept vehicle and grab the steering wheel, it’s easy to imagine piloting this thing up and out of traffic, into the open skies.

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Imagine a '57 Chevy cruising through the air, and you get an idea of what single-engine, propeller-driven airplanes do to the environment. The average private plane, such as the popular two-seat Cessna 172, is 30 years old. It carries a four-cylinder piston engine designed in the 1940s that burns leaded gasoline, has no catalytic converter, and gets as little as 12 miles per gallon. “It’s fair to say that small aircraft are gross polluters,” says Mark Moore, an engineer who has led personal-aircraft projects for NASA.

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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.

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The future of secure travel hinges on seamless, instant communication-and 24/7 autonomous surveillance. For a look at the technologies that will soon safeguard your travel plans, launch the photo gallery.

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For years, the U.S. military has wanted a plane that could loiter just outside enemy territory for more than a dozen hours and, on command, hurtle toward a target faster than the speed of sound. And then level it. But aircraft that excel at subsonic flight are inefficient at Mach speeds, and vice versa. The answer is Switchblade, an unmanned, shape-changing plane concept under development by Northrop Grumman.

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