Fox News correspondent Stephanie Bennett has the latest on the aftermath of the Kazakhstan plane crash on'Special Report.' Crew members and survivors of the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan on Christmas Day say they heard at least one loud bang before the aircraft crashed in a ball of fire, heightening speculation that a Russian anti-aircraft missile may have been responsible for the tragedy. The Embraer 190 passenger jet flying from Azerbaijan to Russia crashed near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after diverting from an area of southern Russia where Moscow has repeatedly used air defense systems against Ukrainian attack drones. At least 38 people were killed while 29 survived. Subhonkul Rakhimov, one of the passengers aboard Flight J2-8243, told Reuters from the hospital that he had begun to recite prayers and prepare for the end after hearing a bang.

Ukrainian forces have killed or wounded more than 1,000 North Korean troops Russia has sent to fight them, according to Kyiv and officials in South Korea. "According to preliminary data, the number of killed and wounded North Korean soldiers in the Kursk region already exceeds 3,000 people," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his evening address on December 23. South Korean intelligence put the North Korean dead and wounded at 1,100, and said the North was preparing to send more troops. North Korea sent 11,000 troops to fight in the Russian region of Kursk, which Ukraine counter-invaded in August. North Korean troops were evidently untrained in dealing with Ukrainian drones, which took a high toll.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has suspended certain operations by a Texas-based drone company after a Florida boy was injured during a holiday airshow last week and had to undergo heart surgery. The FAA confirmed to Fox News Digital that it suspended the Part 107 Waiver for Sky Elements Drones. The waiver allows drone operators to fly at night, fly over people, and operate drones outside the line of sight. Thus, with this waiver suspended, Sky Elements Drones legally cannot perform its shows. It's not clear how long the pause will remain in place.

This paper presents a novel approach to improve global localization and mapping in indoor drone navigation by integrating 5G Time of Arrival (ToA) measurements into ORB-SLAM3, a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system. By incorporating ToA data from 5G base stations, we align the SLAM's local reference frame with a global coordinate system, enabling accurate and consistent global localization. We extend ORB-SLAM3's optimization pipeline to integrate ToA measurements alongside bias estimation, transforming the inherently local estimation into a globally consistent one. This integration effectively resolves scale ambiguity in monocular SLAM systems and enhances robustness, particularly in challenging scenarios where standard SLAM may fail. Our method is evaluated using five real-world indoor datasets collected with RGB-D cameras and inertial measurement units (IMUs), augmented with simulated 5G ToA measurements at 28 GHz and 78 GHz frequencies using MATLAB and QuaDRiGa. We tested four SLAM configurations: RGB-D, RGB-D-Inertial, Monocular, and Monocular-Inertial. The results demonstrate that while local estimation accuracy remains comparable due to the high precision of RGB-D-based ORB-SLAM3 compared to ToA measurements, the inclusion of ToA measurements facilitates robust global positioning. In scenarios where standard mono-inertial ORB-SLAM3 loses tracking, our approach maintains accurate localization throughout the trajectory.

Kyiv, Ukraine – Russian air defence officials could very possibly have struck an Azerbaijani passenger jet over Chechnya after panicking during a Ukrainian drone attack, analysts and experts from Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan have told Al Jazeera. Moscow might have also compounded what one expert described as a "crime" by not letting the damaged plane land nearby and instead forcing it to fly to Kazakhstan. The analysis by these experts comes amid mounting reports quoting unnamed Azerbaijani officials and other analysts pointing fingers at Russia for the crash, in which at least 38 people were killed. The Kremlin claimed that the AZAL 8432 flight with 67 passengers on board hit a flock of birds early Wednesday after it entered Russian airspace to land in Grozny, Chechnya's administrative capital. But within hours, photos and videos of the plane surfaced, apparently showing deep holes and multiple pockmarks on its tail.

Russian air defenses downed an Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people, four sources with knowledge of the preliminary findings of Azerbaijan's investigation into the disaster said on Thursday. Flight J2-8243 crashed on Wednesday in a ball of fire near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan after diverting from an area of southern Russia, where Moscow has repeatedly used air defense systems against Ukrainian drone strikes. The Embraer passenger jet had flown from Azerbaijan's capital Baku to Grozny, in Russia's southern Chechnya region, before veering off hundreds of miles across the Caspian Sea. It crashed on the opposite shore of the Caspian after what Russia's aviation watchdog said was an emergency that may have been caused by a bird strike. Officials did not explain why it had crossed the sea.

This work demonstrates universal dynamic perching capabilities for quadrotors of various sizes and on surfaces with different orientations. By employing a non-dimensionalization framework and deep reinforcement learning, we systematically assessed how robot size and surface orientation affect landing capabilities. We hypothesized that maintaining geometric proportions across different robot scales ensures consistent perching behavior, which was validated in both simulation and experimental tests. Additionally, we investigated the effects of joint stiffness and damping in the landing gear on perching behaviors and performance. While joint stiffness had minimal impact, joint damping ratios influenced landing success under vertical approaching conditions. The study also identified a critical velocity threshold necessary for successful perching, determined by the robot's maneuverability and leg geometry. Overall, this research advances robotic perching capabilities, offering insights into the role of mechanical design and scaling effects, and lays the groundwork for future drone autonomy and operational efficiency in unstructured environments.

Russia's Foreign Ministry accused NATO of trying to turn Moldova into a logistical centre to supply the Ukrainian army and of seeking to bring the Western alliance's military infrastructure closer to Russia. Arto Pahkin, the head of operations of the Finnish electricity grid, told the country's public broadcaster Yle that "the possibility of sabotage cannot be ruled out" after an undersea power cable linking Finland and Estonia broke down. It is the latest in a series of incidents involving telecom cables and energy pipelines in the Baltic Sea. A "terrorist act" sank the Russian cargo ship that went down in international waters in the Mediterranean this week, the Russian state-owned company that owns the vessel said. The Oboronlogistika company said it "thinks a targeted terrorist attack was committed on December 23, 2024, against the Ursa Major", without indicating who may have been behind the act or why. The Azerbaijan Airlines passenger jet that crashed near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan, killing 38 people, was earlier diverting from an area of Russia that Moscow has recently defended against Ukrainian drone attacks.

An Embraer passenger jet crashed near the city of Aktau in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, killing 38 people, after diverting from an area of Russia that Moscow has recently defended against Ukrainian drone attacks. Twenty-nine survivors received hospital treatment. Azerbaijan Airlines flight J2-8243 had flown hundreds of miles off its scheduled route from Azerbaijan to Russia to crash on the opposite shore of the Caspian Sea, after what Russia's aviation watchdog said was an emergency that may have been caused by a bird strike. But an aviation expert suggested that cause seemed unlikely.

In the last decade, data-driven approaches have become popular choices for quadrotor control, thanks to their ability to facilitate the adaptation to unknown or uncertain flight conditions. Among the different data-driven paradigms, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is currently one of the most explored. However, the design of DRL agents for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) remains an open challenge. While some works have studied the output configuration of these agents (i.e., what kind of control to compute), there is no general consensus on the type of input data these approaches should employ. Multiple works simply provide the DRL agent with full state information, without questioning if this might be redundant and unnecessarily complicate the learning process, or pose superfluous constraints on the availability of such information in real platforms. In this work, we provide an in-depth benchmark analysis of different configurations of the observation space. We optimize multiple DRL agents in simulated environments with different input choices and study their robustness and their sim-to-real transfer capabilities with zero-shot adaptation. We believe that the outcomes and discussions presented in this work supported by extensive experimental results could be an important milestone in guiding future research on the development of DRL agents for aerial robot tasks.