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NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter acquired this image on May 22, 2021 using its black and white navigation camera. This camera is mounted in the helicopter’s fuselage and pointed directly downward to track the ground during flight. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.The next flight of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter will take place no earlier than this Sunday, June 6. Regardless of flight date, data will be returned to Earth over the subsequent three days.The flight profile will send Ingenuity to a location about 350 feet (106 meters) south of its current location, where it will touch down at its new base of operations. This...

It was attempting to refill its water bucket at a lake Four were killed Monday May 10 after a helicopter crashed in Erhai Lake in Dali, Southwest China’s Yunnan Province. The Z-8X helicopter operated by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force had been assisting firefighters on the ground by dropping water with an external bucket. It crashed while attempting to refill at the lake. Initially it was reported that the two pilots were killed and there were two missing crewmembers. After a search that involved 16 ships and more than 490 rescuers the crewmembers were found deceased about 16 hours...

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is preparing to explore a new region of the Red Planet today on its fifth scheduled flight (3:26 p.m. EDT, or 12:26 p.m. PDT), with flight data coming in around 7:31 p.m. EDT (4:31 p.m. PDT).  Off to new places! The #MarsHelicopter is slated for its fifth flight on May 7, with data coming down at 4:31pm PT (7:31pm ET). The rotorcraft will take off at Wright Brothers Field and will land elsewhere this time, which is another first for Ingenuity. https://t.co/JxLNz7UADw pic.twitter.com/zOGo1j7srt — NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) May 6, 2021 If all goes well, the...

Perseverance's Left Navcam Views Ingenuity During its Third Flight: NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter can be seen hovering during its third flight on April 25, 2021, as seen by the left Navigation Camera aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Full image and caption ›The craft’s April 25 flight was conducted at speeds and distances beyond what had ever been previously demonstrated, even in testing on Earth.NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter continues to set records, flying faster and farther on Sunday, April 25, 2021 than in any tests it went through on Earth. The helicopter took off at 1:31 a.m. EDT (4:31...

*Click on the link to watch the video* "The drone, called Ingenuity, was airborne for less than a minute, but it is the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another world. Ingenuity was carried to Mars in the belly of Nasa's Perseverance Rover, which touched down on the Red Planet in February. This successful attempt means that a further four flights will be attempted over the coming days, each one taking the helicopter further afield.

NASA's Ingenuity today hovered in the skies of Mars making the equipment the first human-made helicopter to take flight on another planet.Amid cheers in the control room, engineers confirmed the diminutive helicopter had spun up its rotors, taken off, landed, and spun everything down, leaving the stage set for further tests. An image from the helicopter's onboard navigation camera showing its shadow on the surface of Mars was swiftly followed by another sequence from the Perseverance rover showing the helicopter hovering.Ingenuity's shadow on Mars. Source: Screengrab from NASA/ESA live feed (click to enlarge)As one of the newest bits of kit...

:15 a.m. — Coverage of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter’s first flight 7:40 a.m. – ISS Expedition 65 In-Flight Event for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency with JAXA Flight Engineer Soichi Noguchi (on the NASA TV Public-Education channel with English interpretation; on the NASA TV Media Channel in native language) 1 p.m. - Media telecon on the science of NASA's SpaceX Crew-2 mission. NASA Image Library album on Crew-2 science. 2 p.m. — Briefing following flight of Ingenuity Mars helicopter

Based on data from the Ingenuity Mars helicopter that arrived late Friday night, NASA has chosen to reschedule the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s first experimental flight to no earlier than April 14. During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a “watchdog” timer expiration. This occurred as it was trying to transition the flight computer from ‘Pre-Flight’ to ‘Flight’ mode. The helicopter is safe and healthy and communicated its full telemetry set to Earth. The watchdog timer oversees the command sequence and alerts the system to any potential issues....

NASA's Mars helicopter is slowly unfolding beneath the Perseverance rover By Elizabeth Howell 30 March 2021 NASA's Perseverance rover is slowly getting ready to deploy the first helicopter on Mars even as it takes a look back at the litter it's dropping on the Red Planet.The rover, which was carefully sterilized on Earth to avoid contaminating Mars with microbes, dropped a protective debris shield onto the planet's surface on March 21. The shield is no longer needed as it was designed to protect Ingenuity during the "seven minutes of terror" landing in February.An image from the WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic...

Incredible, any rotary-wing aviators here?Homemade Helicopter by 102 year old Boeing Engineer

PARIS (Reuters) - French billionaire Olivier Dassault was killed on Sunday in a helicopter crash, a police source said, with President Emmanuel Macron paying tribute to the 69-year old conservative politician. Dassault was the eldest son of late French billionaire industrialist Serge Dassault, whose namesake Dassault Aviation, builds the Rafale war planes and owns Le Figaro newspaper. “Olivier Dassault loved France. Captain of industry, lawmaker, local elected official, reserve commander in the air force: during his life, he never ceased to serve our country, to value its assets. His sudden death is a great loss. Thoughts on his family and...

Portland’s descent into blue-haired, gender-confused madness is something new in America. The city’s criminal justice system tolerates vandalism and assaults by communist thugs, while punishing normal Americans who dare to protect themselves. Street commie antics in Washington, D.C. last weekend suggest this political rot is spreading. If we give anti-American Portlandesque district attorneys a bit more time, the scoundrels may turn a blind eye to more violent crimes as well. The arsonists are practicing. Chile provides an example of how this could go. In the early 1970s, under the Marxist president Salvador Allende, Chile’s criminal justice system began ignoring crimes...

FBI special agents arrested Andrew Rene Hernandez, 22, on a complaint charging him with one count of unsafe operation of an unmanned aircraft... [P]olice officers responding to a burglary call at a Hollywood pharmacy on Sept. 18 requested air support. The police helicopter was approaching the pharmacy when the pilot saw the drone and unsuccessfully attempted to evade it. The helicopter’s nose, antenna and bottom cowlings were damaged. The complaint states that if the drone had struck the main rotor it could have brought down the helicopter. The drone’s camera and memory card led to identification of Hernandez as the...

-- The incident reportedly took place at Wattisham Flying Station in Suffolk on Nov. 6, 2020. The AH-64D in question had returned to this base the day before after experiencing a malfunction with the gun during live-fire training. As such, it had been loaded with practice rounds, which have solid projectiles, rather than high-explosive or high-explosive-incendiary shells. -- The exact circumstances of the incident, including how the M230 went off, are still unclear. It's also not known if British Army personnel were actually working on the gun at the time of the discharge. There are unconfirmed reports that ground crew...

Two Marin County, California, firefighters were rescued Friday after becoming trapped while battling the Woodward Fire in northern California, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office said Saturday. The California wildfires have burned more than 1 million acres, CNN reports.

An Air Force helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing at a Virginia airport Monday after someone shot at it, injuring a member of the crew, local and military officials told McClatchy. The UH-1N Huey helicopter is assigned to the 1st Helicopter Squadron at Joint Base Andrews and had been on a routine training flight, the base said in a statement. The injured crew member, who was not identified, was treated at a hospital and released. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the incident.

The FBI is investigating the incident, involving a helicopter assigned to President Donald Trump’s support detail. The UH-1N Huey helicopter, assigned to Joint Base Andrews just outside of Washington, D.C., was conducting a routine training flight roughly 1,000 feet above the ground before it was forced to make an emergency landing at an airport in nearby Manassas, Virginia, after being struck by a bullet, an Air Force spokesperson tells U.S. News. The helicopter is assigned to the 1st Helicopter Squadron, which supports the movement of the president and other senior government officials to and from Andrews, where Air Force One...

FRESNO, Calif. — U.S. District Judge Dale A. Drozd sentenced a Turlock man today to two years and three months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release for purposefully striking a Stanislaus County Sheriff’s helicopter with the beam of a powerful laser, U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott announced.In March 2018, Roger Shane John, 34, pleaded guilty. According to court documents, on the evening of Oct. 22, 2017, John struck a Stanislaus County Sheriff’s helicopter, Air 101, five to six times with a powerful green laser, causing visual interference of both the pilot and tactical flight...

After the crash of a helicopter carrying Kobe Bryant and several other people last year, a bit of a scandal erupted when it was determined that one of the sheriffs responding to the scene had taken photographs of the wreckage and the bodies of the victims. Those photos leaked out into the public over social media, causing distress to the families of some of the victims. But while certainly a tasteless thing to do, it wasn’t technically illegal so there wasn’t much to be done about it. That will change in the near future if a new bill introduced in...

The HMCS Fredericton, participating in NATO’s Operation Reassurance meant to bolster security in Central and Eastern Europe, lost contact with a CH-148 Cyclone helicopter during a training exercise. “The cause of this accident is unknown at this time,” Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan said. The aircraft’s data and voice recorders have been recovered, he said. General Jonathan Vance, Chief of the Defence Staff, said there was a “very sizable debris field” in an area of the Ionian Sea where the aircraft crashed. The crew of a C-148 Cyclone helicopter, attached to Royal Canadian Navy frigate HMCS Fredricton, which crashed in the...