Air

A daredevil retired pilot has been captured on camera performing loops, rolls and a dramatic dive while flying the'world's smallest' twin-jet aircraft. Bob Grimstead, 70, flew at an altitude of 5,000ft (1,524m) in the diminutive plane which has been described as a'bubble car with wings'. At just 13ft (4m) long, 4ft (1.2m) wide and weighing a mere 180lbs, Mr Grimstead, from West Sussex, was able to reach speeds of 140mph (225kmh). The former British Airways airline pilot used to fly 400 tonne jumbo jets and said he had no fear taking to the skies in the micro plane and said it was'superb fun'. Bob Grimstead, 70, (pictured) flew the diminutive jet at 5,000ft (1,524m).

Drone delivery service Wing is launching its own air-traffic control app to keep its craft safe in the skies. The company, owned by Google-parent Alphabet, recently started making deliveries in parts of Australia and Finland. Wing's new iOS and Android app aims to'help users comply with rules and plan flights more safely and effectively,' providing a rundown of airspace restrictions and hazards as well as events nearby that could interfere. The new app, Open Sky, is being released to drone flyers in Australia this month according to Wing. 'The design of our software has required a detailed understanding of flight rules -- along with buildings, roads, trees, and other terrain -- that allow aircraft to navigate safely at low altitudes, and we've used it to complete tens of thousands of flights on three continents,' Wing said in a blog post.

The tests, set to take place at Edwards Air Force Base in Kern County, California, are expected to be conducted on a "small, but representative high-speed surrogate aircraft," Cara Bousie, the service's spokesperson, told Aviation Week. Although Bousie steered clear of offering any additional details regarding the looming tests, she did indicate that the move is part of a two-year campaign for the department to determine just how the technology will perform in a controlled setting. Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, previously revealed in a March interview that aircraft candidates that may be used during the summer trials include the Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie, Composite Engineering BQM-167 Skeeter and Boeing QF-16. Disclosed to the public just in March, the Skyborg program's objective is to deliver a combat-ready, autonomous, unmanned aerial vehicle prototype by the end of 2023. The aircraft is expected to act as a robotic wingman for service members, using its AI tech to manage combat mission tasks on its own when the need arises.

These days, you can't attend a conference or have a conversation with leaders of the aerospace and defense community without touching on the modernization of the sector. This includes the integration of new technologies and processes to address aging equipment and fleets. The scale of the challenges in this space is too large, the costs are too high, and the impact of failure is too great to disregard the upside that's possible from a complete rethinking of how technology enhances these applications. Although the industry has experienced the effects of modernization in small ways for some time, we're starting to see how the adoption of digital technology is driving innovation on a much broader scale. New technologies like artificial intelligence, ubiquitous connectivity, advanced data analytics, blockchain, and robotics/autonomous systems are taking center stage and empowering cutting-edge applications.

Technology has revolutionized our world and lives. It has made our lives better, faster, easier and fun. It has given us multi functional devices that have put everything at the touch of a button. From the way we communicate to the way we travel, its changing and evolving rapidly every day. Social media isn't the only big statement technology has made by making the way we connect and interact with the world.

Advances in AI are reshaping the future for airlines. Application areas include crew management, flight maintenance, ticketing, and passenger identification, and they all center on one objective: improving the customer experience. Business and technology grow hand in hand. Companies that don't leverage technology for the good of their customers or employees don't often last. A lot of businesses have failed because they didn't innovate and embrace the new technology and practices their competitors embraced.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. In the world of artificial intelligence & machine learning (AI & ML), black- and white-box categorization of models and algorithms refers to their interpretability. That is, given a model trained to map data inputs to outputs (e.g. And just as the software testing dichotomy is high-level behavior vs low-level logic, only white-box AI methods can be readily interpreted to see the logic behind models' predictions. In recent years with machine learning taking over new industries and applications, where the number of users far outnumber experts that grok the models and algorithms, the conversation around interpretability has become an important one.

The human brain is an amazing work of art, it has very complex neural circuits and the way it registers, stores, processes and analyzes information and takes decisions has always been a matter of fascination. To even attempt to replicate the human brain or to "teach" a machine to do that is an extremely ambitious endeavor fraught with controversy. Many a scientist in the field of ai research has been fascinated with this concept and thus was born "artificial intelligence" and "deep machine learning". "Artificial intelligence" is a familiar buzzword for many in the tech sector today. It has been used in the airline industry for years now, to assist pilots to make decisions under difficult, high-pressure, complex situations which can be too difficult for an individual to handle or when the experience of a pilot, or the lack of it, gets in the way of safety of hundreds of passengers.

There's a certain oversized quality to a Las Vegas conference center that makes you feel like a child monarch: simultaneously powerful and helpless. Presumably, the rooms and corridors are cavernous because space is cheap in the desert, but the overall effect somehow manages to be stifling. It feels suspiciously big, as if you're never meant to leave. The trappings of a conference do nothing to dispel this feeling: everything is arranged -- your room, your food, your schedule -- and hey, look! They even have robots handing out snacks!

On the AI journey, automation is often the default, depopulated destination. We must consciously choose to empower humans via augmentation. "Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed. Donald Trump's tweet, a hasty response to the fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10, offers a typically visceral response to computerization when it is perceived to cause a catastrophe. Unfortunately, it ignores the subtle issues surrounding the adoption of technology to both support and replace human involvement in decision making. Early investigations into the cause of this and an earlier crash point to complex, computerized flight-control software -- the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) -- introduced on the Boeing 737 MAX 8 to correct the angle of attack of the aircraft if it becomes too steep under certain flying conditions. A single source -- faulty sensor data -- has been blamed for the crashes. However, the algorithm also considers ...