The Lockheed Martin Skunk Works revealed on 19 July that it has secretly built and flown a large, high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that has been designed to test a range of new technologies critical to what the company foresees as a ‘third-generation’ of unmanned platforms that will emerge in the US in the next decade. Nicknamed Polecat, the high-altitude flying wing demonstrator was launched in March 2003 with USD27 million of internal Lockheed Martin funding and was completed 18 months later. It did not fly, however, until last year. Its key feature is an advanced laminar flow wing that...