Model Airplanes

Delta CEO Ed Bastian said the Boeing 737 Max 8 scandal was “unthinkable” for the aviation industry — but he’s still standing by Boeing.

Delta’s fleet never included the Boeing 737 Max 8 planes that were involved in two deadly crashes, but the Atlanta-based company has plenty of other Boeing planes. Bastian is willing to vouch for their safety.

“Sixty percent of our airplanes that we fly are Boeing,” Bastian told Recode’s Kara Swisher and Jason Del Rey at the 2019 Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Tuesday. “Boeing has been the most successful aviation company in the world.”

On March 10, Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Nairobi, Kenya, faltered and crashed soon after taking off, killing all 157 people on board. The incident came just months after a Lion Air flight of the same model took off from Jakarta, Indonesia, and crashed, killing all 189 passengers. After reports that the anti-stall system in Boeing 737 Max planes made it difficult for pilots to control aircraft without being overridden by the system, the models have been grounded all over the world as regulators probe what happened.

Bastian said Delta did look into buying the Boeing 737 Max planes for about a year but ultimately decided against it. He said the aircraft’s anti-stall system didn’t come up when the company was considering the 737 Max, but if Delta planned to buy it, the company “would have had some questions, but we

Article source: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/6/11/18657008/ed-bastian-delta-boeing-737-max-scandal

The 39th annual Capitol Fourth celebration is on the horizon, and a slew of stars (including TV’s coolest uncle, John Stamos) will be there. But arguably the biggest names aren’t even human — Sesame Street will appear on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol building as well.

Stamos will kick off the extravaganza July 4 at 8 p.m. Carole King, Sesame Street, Lindsey Stirling, Vanessa Williams, the cast of Broadway’s “Beautiful,” including Vanessa Carlton, the National Symphony Orchestra and more will take the stage.

“You can’t get more patriotic than this,” Stamos said on the event’s page. “I’m excited to carry on this July 4th TV tradition for the American people and especially proud to honor our veterans. You don’t want to miss it!“

Check out the full list of performers on the PBS website.

And, of course, there will be fireworks. Find out the best places to watch.

The gates open at 3 p.m. And, if you plan to attend, the U.S. Capitol Police have a big list of what you cannot bring:

• Alcoholic beverages
• Glass bottles
• Animals (other than service animals)
• Bicycles
• Firearms and ammunitions (either real or simulated)
• Explosives of any kind (including fireworks)
• Knives, blades or sharp objects (of any length)
• Laser pointers, signs, posters
• Mace, pepper spray, sticks, poles
• Electric stun guns
• Martial arts weapons or devices
• Umbrellas larger 36 inches in diameter (those smaller than 36 inches will be allowed)
• Pocket or hand tools, such as a “Leatherman”
• Sealed packages, large boxes, duffel bags, suitcases
• Drones, model rockets, remote or manually controlled

  Article source: https://wtop.com/fourth-of-july/2019/06/capitol-fourth-2019-lineup-sesame-street-john-stamos-carole-king-more/

Get ready to fly with the South Carroll AeroModelers Club in Sykesville.

The South Carroll AeroModelers Club is currently looking for new members who are passionate about airplanes and who would like to become members of the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA). Their next meeting will be on July 6.

Casey Sterbenz, president of the South Carroll AeroModelers, said in an email interview that everyone is welcome to join the club.

Sterbenz said they will offer introductory flying lessons using club trainer model aircraft to people of all ages and backgrounds — including those who have no experience.

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Those interested in being part of the club must become members of the AMA and must have a registration number from the FAA.

One of the many benefits of being a member of the AMA is that they offer insurance coverage.

Please note that the AMA offers a free three-month membership. Regular adult membership is currently $75 per year and youth membership is free for kids.

To become a member of the South Carroll AeroModelers Club, the annual membership fee for adult members is $80. The registration fee for new members is $20, and youth members are assessed a $10 annual membership fee, though no registration fee is required for new youth members.

To become a member of the AMA, you may visit their website at www.modelaircraft.org/joinrenew.aspx. You may register to the FAA by visiting its website, https://www.carrollcountytimes.com/news/neighborhoods/cc-nh-south-carroll-061219-story.html

Sebastien Roblin

Security,

Here is what we know. 

Meet the Su-47: This Strange Looking Russian Jet Never Saw Combat (But Made History)

Moreover, while it demonstrated amazing instant turning performance, it was poor at sustained turns as it bled off speed quickly. Though claimed to be Mach 2-capable, the fastest speed Berkut flight speed reported was Mach 1.65.

In 1996, the March/April issue of Russian military periodical Air Fleet Bulletin published an innocuous-seeming photo of a meeting between Russian military chiefs and aviation industry counterparts. Sitting on the table before them were two model airplanes. One was an advanced variant of the by-then well-known Flanker multi-role fighter.

(This first appeared several months ago.) 

The other was a strange black jet with forward swept wings—that is, the wings seemed to be swept the “wrong way.”

Whether the image amounted to an accidental leak or an intentional plant, it set off a firestorm of excited speculation in Western and Russian press forecasting a new cutting-edge jet that could outperform the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter, the production model of which made its first flight the same year.

In fact, the model represented an advanced tech demonstrator—the Sukhoi Su-47 Berkut (“Golden Eagle”).

Drones capable of autonomous avoidance aren’t novel — DJI has featured them in its lineup for years. But what about quadcopters that can dodge fast-moving projectiles? That’s what scientists from the University of Maryland and ETH Zurich describe in a newly published paper (“EVDodge: Embodied AI For High-Speed Dodging On A Quadrotor Using Event Cameras“) on the preprint server Arxiv.org. They claim that their philosophical “reimagining” of navigation stacks, dubbed Embodied AI, enables virtually any drone to avoid moving obstacles with no more than cameras and an onboard computer.

They intend to release the accompanying code and training data set after the paper is accepted for publication.

“We develop a purposive artificial intelligence-based formulation for the problem of general navigation,” wrote the paper’s coauthors. “Embodied AI … [is] AI design based on the knowledge of agent’s hardware limitations and timing/computation constraints … To our knowledge, this is the first deep learning-based solution to the problem of dynamic obstacle avoidance using event cameras on a quadrotor.”

So how does it work? The team’s setup comprises a front-facing event-based camera — i.e., an image sensor with superior latency and high dynamic range — and a lower-resolution down-facing camera, plus sonar and an inertial measurement unit. Drawing on the collected data, a network of “shallow” AI models — EVDeBlurNet, EVHomographyNet, and EVSegFlowNet — each performs “modest” tasks like deblurring and denoising image sequences, approximating background motion from the down-facing camera, and segmenting

Article source: https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/10/ai-helps-drones-dodge-fast-moving-objects/