Items tagged with boeing
It is almost always nice when your flight lands a little early, but one recent flight landed quite a bit earlier than usual. A Virgin Atlantic Boeing 787-9 reached 801 mph thanks to the help from a jet stream. This flight broke the Boeing 787-9’s previous record of 776 mph. The Virgin Atlantic flight from Los Angeles to London reached 801 mph on Monday night while flying over central Pennsylvania. At one point in the air, the plane was traveling faster than the speed of sound. The flight landed 48 minutes earlier than expected and many other flights in the United States were shortened by at least half an hour. Virgin Atlantic Boeing 787-9 Why was the plane able to topple previous speed...
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Nearly a week after the U.S. Presidential election, many in the United States (and around the globe) are anxious about how President-elect Donald Trump will govern once he takes office on January 20th. Will then President Trump adhere to promises that he made during the campaign or will he take a more measured approach to appease a larger slice of the American populace? But it’s not just those within the United States that are a little on edge; some nations around the world are concerned about the power that President Trump will wield. One of Trump’s frequent targets on the campaign trail was China. He relentlessly assailed the country and its trade practices, often in very unflattering terms....
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Boeing has just unveiled a new weapon that's sure to strike fear in drone owners everywhere. It's small, able to fit in a box the size of four briefcases, and it shoots frickin' lasers. Plus, it looks cool, too. What more do we need? Over the past few years, it's become clear that many people don't understand proper etiquette when it comes to flying their drones. We've even seen folks fly their drones over wildfires, throwing all common sense out the window (or perhaps it was burnt up with those wildfires). While there's no reported incidents of a person dying by the hand of a [commercial] drone, there are some major concerns that the first case is on its way. Even more concerning is the annoyance...
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For regular consumers, wearable tech can prove to be a boon for a multitude of reasons - it could improve our fitness and in some cases, increase our productivity. That being the case, it's no secret that the same could really prove useful when put into action in military situations. This is something the Pentagon has been mulling for some time. As Reuters reports, wearable tech is progressing so rapidly, that it just doesn't make sense for the government to go on its own and develop its own tech. Says Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, "I've been pushing the Pentagon to think outside our five-sided box and invest in innovation here in Silicon Valley and in tech communities across the country....
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Space travel is back, baby! Not that it ever truly stopped, but with the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011, NASA has been transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) by way of Russia's Soyuz spacecraft. That's set to change with NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which will see Boeing and SpaceX offering commercial spaceflights from U.S. soil. NASA has selected four astronauts to train and prepare for commercial spaceflights from the private sector. They include Robert Behnken, Eric Does, Douglas Hurley, and Sunita Williams, all of which will work closely with Boeing and SpaceX to develop their crew transportation systems and provide crew transportation services...
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SpaceX was hoping that it’s third attempt at a controlled Falcon 9 landing on a floating barge would be a charm, but those hopes went up in smoke this morning. In fact, SpaceX didn’t even get a chance to get close to landing on the barge, as the Falcon 9 launch vehicle exploded during ascent. The SpaceX Falcon 9, which lifted off from Cape Canaveral promptly at 10:21am EST for its seventh Commercial Resupply Services flight (CRS-7), broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean just minutes after liftoff. Onboard were over two and a half tons of supplies for the crew members aboard the International Space Station (ISS), a much ballyhooed Boeing-built docking adapter that would “give Boeing’s CST-100 and...
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This past February, YouTube launched a new feature that allows uploaders to include multiple views, and it takes little imagination to realize the cool content that can come from that. Today, we have a brand-new example, and with Boeing involved, you know it's got to be good. At the Paris Air Show earlier this week, Boeing decided to show us what its 787-9 Dreamliner can do. Most notably, that includes a near vertical takeoff. So, the company decked the plane out in cameras, and even filmed from outside, to give users all possible perspectives. The finished result is extremely cool. As you watch the video, you may want to step it back a bit and change the angle, to see how things looked at that...
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Facebook’s efforts to spread Internet connectivity to nearly every person on the globe will get off the ground this summer. A new report from The Wall Street Journal indicates that Facebook’s prototype drone, dubbed Aquila, will be much larger than the one-tenth-scale drone that the company tested in early March. The full-size model will have the wingspan of a Boeing 737 (117 feet), but will only weigh as much as a small car (we’re assuming something that weighs less than 3,000 pounds). “Depending on how this test flight goes, we’ll see what happens,” says Jay Parikh, Facebook’s VP of Engineering. “This is a big plane, this is a big project and it’s never been done before.” The drones are capable...
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After Edward Snowden exposed the NSA's spying behavior last summer, it took little time for companies the world over to capitalize on it, offering either software or hardware with the promise of enhancing our security and privacy. Admittedly, I'm always more drawn towards the hardware side, and it was Geeksphone's Blackphone that first caught my eye. With a promise of keeping your communications as locked-down as possible, the company was definitely catering to the privacy nut - a term that seems a lot more sane today than it did prior to Snowden's leaks. Mere days after we talked about the Blackphone, we learned that Boeing was working on its own ultra-secure mobile phone, but with this one,...
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The National Transportation Safety Board has released its findings regarding the investigation it conducted following the events that led to the grounding of 50 long-range Boeing 787s. According to its report, a series of failures have been attributed to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Boeing Co., and its supplier of lithium-ion batteries. Back in January 2013, ground workers at Boston Logan International Airport noticed that smoke and flames were coming from an auxiliary power unit lithium-ion battery that was in a Japan Airlines 787 Dreamliner that was parked at a gate. A second incident involving the battery, manufactured by GS Yuasa Corp, occurred days later on another 787 Dreamliner...
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The Department of Justice's U.S. Marshals Service division has reportedly been employing fake cellphone towers on planes in an effort to stay one step ahead of criminals such as drug dealers and terrorist organizations operating in the United States. Unfortunately for law abiding citizens and privacy advocates at large, the fake cell signals don't just zero in on the criminal that's being sought by law enforcement officials, at least not at first, and instead gathers data from up to tens of thousands of people during each flight. These spy planes are equipped with so-called "dirtboxes," which are named after the initials of the Boeing Co. subsidiary that produces them (Digital Recovery Technology...
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Cue those "hand quotes", because Boeing's got the freakin' lasers. Called the 'Thin Disk Laser', Boeing's managed to deliver a product that's 30% more effective than what the US' Department of Defense required, and if used in combat, I'm not sure we'd want to know what kind of damage it could do. Let's just say, when less than 1 watt could easily blind you, it seems likely that 30,000 watts could do some ridiculous damage. Boeing's laser, also referred to as an 'Active Mirror Laser', is a solid-state type that implements a lasing material to act as an amplifier and a mirror to direct the beam. More than one laser is implemented here to form one fused beam, with each individual one having a layer...
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Boeing thinks you need even more ways to stay connected while on a plane. Agree? Not that it matters much, because the friendly skies are gradually becoming a place where you can no longer escape your work e-mail, and maybe, your work calls. The airplane maker has this week revealed that systems will soon be installed during production on the 747-8 and 777, enabling these aircraft to provide in-flight use of cellphones and Wi-Fi by the end of 2013. It's all a bid to bring more wireless waves and more robust in-flight entertainment options to passengers, and in an increasingly competitive airline marketplace, it sure sounds like a good plan. Additional connectivity systems are being evaluated...
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