Free Republic

The cruise missiles so often used to destroy ISIS installations and other enemy targets descend like a flash out of the sky, traveling up to 600mph as they approach unsuspecting terrorist compounds, hideouts, and ammo storage facilities. But the impressive speed at which a cruise missile is propelled will seem like a proverbial stroll in the park when an awesome new generation of hypersonic “birds” take flight as an operating Air Force weapon system. The website military.com reveals updated details of the progress the Air Force is making in the development of the X-51, the hypersonic air vehicle that’s...

ALKMAAR, Netherlands, - A Netherlands public broadcaster shared a clip of its video drone being smacked out of the sky by an aggressive goose. RTV Noord-Holland, which shared the clip on YouTube, said the Egyptian goose apparently saw the drone as a rival when it was flying over the Oudorperpolder area of Alkmaar. The bird came in low to knock the device out of the sky. The drone did not appear to be seriously damaged and was able to make a relatively smooth landing.

A US operation has killed the senior al-Qaida figure who issued the claim of responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, according to US sources familiar with the matter and a reported video posted by the group. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) said that its ideologue Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi was killed with his eldest son and other fighters in Yemen in a US air strike, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which cited the online video. Reuters could not independently verify the video. Ansi's death would suggest the covert US drone program against the Yemen branch of...

Credit: NASA Langley/David C. Bowman A team at NASA's Langley Research Center is developing a concept of a battery-powered plane that has 10 engines and can take off like a helicopter and fly efficiently like an aircraft. The prototype, called Greased Lightning or GL-10, is currently in the design and testing phase. The initial thought was to develop a 20-foot wingspan (6.1 meters) aircraft powered by hybrid diesel/electric engines, but the team started with smaller versions for testing, built by rapid prototyping. Imagine a battery-powered plane that has 10 engines and can take off like a helicopter and fly...

The skies above the U.S. military's counterterrorism hub on the Horn of Africa have become chronically dangerous, with pilots forced to rely on local air-traffic controllers who fall asleep on the job, commit errors at astronomical rates and are hostile to Americans, documents show. Conditions at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the base for U.S. pilots flying sensitive missions over Yemen and Somalia, have become so dire that American warplanes and civilian airliners alike are routinely placed in jeopardy, according to federal aviation experts and documents obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. Unlike other major U.S....

Drone footage recorded over the Nepalese capital Kathmandu shows the scale of destruction following a major earthquake.

Jane’s Defence Weekly reports that Hezbollah has built a runway in the morthern Bekaa Valley to be used for drones, likely Iranian-made UAVs. New satellite images shows the runway in an area 10 kilometers south of the Lebanese village of Hermel.
Jane’s states: The short length of the runway suggests the facility is not intended to smuggle in weapons shipments from Syria or Iran as it is too short for nearly all the transport aircraft used by the air forces of those countries. An alternative explanation is that the runway was built for Iranian-made UAVs, including the Ababil-3, which has been...

  An American drone strike in January killed four people in Afghanistan: An American and an Italian held hostage by al-Qaida, as well as two Americans working with the terror group, were inadvertently killed in U.S. counterterrorism operations earlier this year, the White House said Thursday. The White House said that Warren Weinstein, an American held by al-Qaida since 2011, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian held since 2012, were killed in a January operation in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The operation targeted an al-Qaida-associated compound and there was no reason to believe either hostage was present,...

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WPVI) -- Need a new way to keep tabs on your child? A father in Tennessee may have the answer. Chris Early uses an eye in the sky to watch his eight-year-old daughter. Early, from Knoxville, is a techie and he loves to play with his new drone. He owns a production company and loves to see what new things he can do with it. A few weeks ago he used it to when his daughter Katie asked to walk to school on her own. As she was walking out of the door, the father got out his...

A Mansfield man says a drone was hovering outside his first floor window. He called police and was told there was little they could do about it.

Flying a kamikaze drone armed with explosives from the back of an MV-22 Osprey aircraft, and directing it right into the insurgent’s fighting hole. The Marines tested a small unmanned aircraft known as the Switchblade recently at Twentynine Palms, Calif., flying it directly at targets from both the ground and the back of the Osprey, a long-range aircraft that has rotors like a helicopter, but can fly like a plane once they rotate forward. They were “inert,” with no explosives on board, but the mission went off without a hitch, said Col. James Adams, commanding officer of Marine Aviation Weapons...

The Harris County Precinct 1 Constable's Office is doing something that no other agency in Harris County is believed to have done yet: Use drones to help fight crime. It's an eye in the sky for law enforcement, without giving up the element of surprise. "It could absolutely save lives," says Constable Alan Rosen. Rosen says the agency's two new $1,200 drones, which have been in use for three weeks, are game changers in getting intel before serving search warrants, on SWAT situations and even looking for escaped inmates. "You're not gonna detect that the drone is there because it's...

Pro tip: Don’t fly your camera drone too close to chimpanzees. They might knock it out of the air using a stick. That’s what happened to one camera drone user over in the Netherlands while flying a drone in a zoo’s chimpanzee habitat. One of the chimps decided that “enough is enough”

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s mixture of personal and work email once resulted in a reply to a crashed drone story with inquiries about home decorations. Files obtained by The Associated Press show that Mrs. Clinton accidentally sent adviser Huma Abedin questions about the attractiveness of shelving units in response to a drone crash in Pakistan. “I like the idea of these. How high are they? What would the bench be made of? And I’d prefer two shelves or attractive boxes/baskets/ conmtainers (sic) on one. What do you think?” Mrs. Clinton wrote, AP reported Tuesday. When Mrs. Abedin then asked if she...

VANCOUVER – Spurned by U.S. regulators, Amazon.com has turned to the one country where flying delivery robots are still welcome: Canada. On Monday, the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper revealed that the online retail giant is testing its latest prototypes for package-carrying drones at a top-secret site in British Columbia. “We are rapidly experimenting and iterating on Amazon Prime Air … including outdoors at a rural test site in Canada,” wrote Amazon spokesperson Kristen Kish in an email to the National Post. --- Located a mere 600 metres from the U.S. border, the Canadian testing grounds fulfill a lingering threat by Amazon...

Aden (AFP) - The United States said it had evacuated all its staff from Yemen, whose embattled president has appealed for "urgent intervention" by the UN Security Council as attacks by Iran-backed rebels bring his country nearer to civil war. Due to the deteriorating security situation in Yemen, the US government has temporarily relocated its remaining personnel out of Yemen," State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke said in a statement. The evacuation comes after several suicide bombings claimed by the Islamic State group killed 142 people in Sanaa on Friday, with the jihadists seeking to exploit the chaos gripping the country....

<p>Syria's state news agency says the country's air defense forces have shot down a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft.</p> <p>SANA says the aircraft was downed Tuesday north of the coastal city of Latakia. It provided no further details.</p> <p>State television broadcast footage of what it said was the wreckage, including a wheel and electronic parts. Soldiers in camouflage could be seen loading some of the debris into the back of a truck.</p>

SOME PROFANITY The woman who was captured in a viral video last year attacking a drone photographer and calling him a “pervert” may have her charges dropped and record cleared.

Privacy seems like such a quaint 20th Century concept, doesn’t it? Unbox Therapy has posted a video of the CX-10 Mini Drone, which is described as the world’s smallest drone and is a definite harbinger of things to come. In other words, it looks like privacy is finally toast. The good news with this particular drone is that Unbox Therapy says you’ll have to fly it indoors since it’s so small and light that a good gust of wind could blow it down. This means that you can’t use it to secretly peep on into your neighbor’s window, for instance,...

Explorer Sam Cossman recently employed the help of multiple drones to capture photos and footage of the Marum Crater in an active volcano on the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. He ended up losing multiple drones in the process, but he left the island with spectacular images that will help provide a better understanding of the volcano and the life that exists around it.