Photo: Courtesy of AeroVironment

The Pentagon spent millions developing a humongous hydrogen-fueled drone that, it hoped, could fly at soaring altitudes for a week at a time. Now the drone is all on its lonesome, because no one wants to buy it.

Built by drone manufacturer AeroVironment, the Global Observer is a 70-foot-long jumbo drone with a wingspan nearly as long as one of the Air Force’s B-52 bombers. Powered by liquid-hydrogen fuel cells, it was billed as a persistent eye-in-the-sky capable of loitering at 65,000 feet for a week a time without spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The Pentagon also envisioned many missions. The drone’s 380-pound payload of spy cameras and sensors could stare at a diameter of 600 miles of earth at once, while doubling as a communications relay. It could patrol the oceans and possibly track hurricanes — the Department of Homeland Security was interested in it too.

But now no one wants the giant drone.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

The ongoing trials of China’s first aircraft carrier and her ship-based jet fighters represents a major leap-ahead in capability for the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). But the hype surrounding Lioaning‘s debut test cruise last summer and the inaugural landing of her J-15 fighters in late November masks an important truth, one the world’s other carrier powers have long known.

Developing a flattop and its planes is hard, requiring years of trial and error and no small amount of risk. And while China’s ascent as a naval power might seem unstoppable, the saga of China’s first seagoing fighter pilots proves otherwise. A lot of things can, have and will go wrong, casting into doubt whether Beijing will possess a truly useful carrier capability any time soon.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

The F-35′s rearward visibility is limited. Photo: Lockheed Martin

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the military’s expensive main warplane of the future, has a huge blind spot directly behind it. Pilots say that could get them shot down in close-quarters combat, where the flier with the better visibility has the killing advantage.

“Aft visibility could turn out to be a significant problem for all F-35 pilots in the future,” the Pentagon acknowledged in a report (.pdf) obtained by the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington, D.C. watchdog group.

That admission should not come as a surprise to observers of the Joint Strike Fighter program. Critics of the delayed, over-budget F-35 — which is built in three versions for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps — have been trying for years to draw attention to the plane’s blind spot, only to be dismissed by the government and Lockheed Martin, the Joint Strike Fighter’s primary builder.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

F-35s are back in the air following a six-day grounding. Photo: Lockheed Martin

The Pentagon’s fleet of next-generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighters has been cleared to resume flying, six days after the discovery of a half-inch crack in an engine blade led to the grounding all 50 or so training and test jets.

Engine-maker Pratt and Whitney said it is confident it has isolated the source of the crack in the F135 engine and can fix it. But the stealthy F-35′s propulsion problems are anything but fixed. Finicky motors are an inevitable side effect of the plane’s design.

Pratt and Whitney put the best possible spin on the turbine blade’s potentially catastrophic flaw, which if undetected could have caused a crash. “Prolonged exposure to high levels of heat and other operational stressors on this specific engine were determined to be the cause of the crack,” the company announced late Thursday. “No additional cracks or signs of similar engine stress were found during inspections of the remaining F135 inventory. No engine redesign is required as a result of this event.”

Read the rest at Danger Room.

The targets were buildings packed with humming computers. A missile streaked overhead and, at preset coordinates, it fired concentrated beams of energy. Computers short-circuited, the lights flickered out and even cameras monitoring the rooms shut off. The missile had turned off all the power in the targeted buildings.

This first successful test of the three-year, $40-million Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP) at a Utah test range on Oct. 16 marked a big step forward for technology that has been in development for more than four decades.

The potential of CHAMP and other so-called Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons is enormous, in theory. They could allow an army to bloodlessly disable select portions of an enemy’s military capabilities, potentially winning a fight without a lethal shot being fired.

But CHAMP itself, a collaboration between the Air Force Research Laboratory, defense giants Boeing and Raytheon plus Ktech, a small company Raytheon acquired last year, does not necessarily herald “a new era in modern-day warfare,” as Keith Coleman, the CHAMP program manager at Boeing Phantom Works, claimed in a press release. Boeing declined to comment for this story.

Experts disagree on the Boeing-Raytheon technology’s capabilities and readiness, and the vulnerability of military targets to its effects. “It’s an interesting program,” Norman Friedman, a respected military author and analyst, tells AOL Defense. But CHAMP “could be PR over reality,” he adds. A truly revolutionary EMP weapon might require more work.

Read the rest at AOL Defense.

Boeing art.

The missile launched from the wing pylon of a B-52 heavy bomber and streaked over the desert of western Utah. At pre-set coordinates, a microwave emitter installed in the winged, jet-propelled cruise missile blasted a target building. But there was no big bang, no billowing clouds of dust and debris. Instead, the building was struck with disruptive, high-frequency microwaves.

The goal of the test on the morning of Oct. 16 was “to render … electronic and data systems useless,” according to Boeing, the lead contractor for the three-year, $40-million Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP, initiated in 2009.

Read the rest at AOL Defense.

The 3-D printer craze has taken off with everyone from hobbyists and amateur gunsmiths to giant corporations. Less known is how the U.S. military has caught the desktop manufacturing bug too, and is designing printable components for bomb detectors and prototype limbs. Even more radical: The Army has even gone so far to deploy a helicopter-borne 3-D printing laboratory to Afghanistan.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

An F-35 over Eglin Air Force base in 2009. Photo: Air Force

The latest high-level Pentagon review of the trillion-dollar F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program did not go well for the Lockheed Martin-built JSF. But don’t tell the Air Force that. The flying branch is racing ahead with its own JSF training and evaluation, regardless of the Defense Department’s hang-ups.

Last week’s Defense Acquisition Board review by senior Pentagon officials was meant to approve a comprehensive plan for completing the stealthy jet’s more than decade-long test effort, but in a “very painful” four hours, the officials could not agree on the plan, Reuters reported.

The impasse is bad news for the ambitious effort to replace essentially all of the tactical jets flown by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps with a family of broadly similar F-35 models costing no less than $400 billion to develop and purchase and hundreds of billions more to operate and repair. Since its inception in the late 1990s, the single-engine JSF has grown steadily heavier and more complex, has suffered frequent program delays and technical problems and isn’t slated to be fully combat ready until 2018, at the earliest. At least one aviation expert expects the military to slash its total buy of JSFs.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

F-22 Raptors. Photo: Air Force

Mitt Romney says he wants to re-open production of America’s topline stealth fighter program. One problem: the Air Force still isn’t sure why the planes were intermittently choking their pilots for more than a decade.

Thanks to a big assist from teams of Navy divers and NASA scientists, the Air Force believes it has figured out how to keep the F-22 Raptor’s fighter jocks safe, after 12 years of disturbing incidents. That’s the good news from today’s Congressional hearing on the Raptor’s long history of causing mysterious, and potentially fatal, breathing difficulties.

The bad news: The Air Force doesn’t know what’s really going on in the F-22 pilots’ bodies that cause them to experience dizziness, confusion, memory loss, blackouts and, over the longer term, chronic coughing and fatigue. Nor do they understand why the stealth jet is causing these symptoms. Through trial and error the flying branch and its Navy and NASA pals have figured out what the experts say is the best remedy to these dangerous symptoms.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

A soldier checks his radio headset in Iraq in 2009. Photo: Army

In key moments during the U.S. Army’s latest war game for advanced communications gear, the troops’ high-tech new radios failed them.

The setting was the semi-annual Network Integration Exercise in New Mexico in May and June. The radio in question: the General Dynamics Manpack, a backpack-portable version of the Pentagon’s ambitious Joint Tactical Radio System. Voice traffic from the Manpacks was “garbled” and “unintelligible,” according to Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester. In a memo dated July 20, Gilmore declared the Manpack “not operationally effective.” In other words, it didn’t work in mock combat — and it probably won’t work in real combat, either.

But the scathing review hasn’t stopped the Army from doubling down on the meager remnants of the once-mighty JTRS initiative, which aimed to equip the entire U.S. military with hundreds of thousands of cheap, high-tech radios whose smart processors would switch waveforms in an instant, making them the radio equivalent of Star Trek‘s universal translator. Just over a week ago the Army dropped $54 million on 13,000 copies of General Dynamics’ similar Rifleman radio, banking on engineers to work out any bugs like those identified in the Manpack in New Mexico.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence airship concept. Art: Northrop Grumman

The Army’s football-field-size robot spy blimp finally took to the air for the first time Tuesday at a military base in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The 90-minute first flight of the Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, manufactured by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman, is only the beginning of a months-long test program, but it’s still good news. For years the Pentagon had tried and failed to get next-generation airships off the ground.

“The first flight primary objective was to perform a safe launch and recovery with a secondary objective to verify the flight control system operation,” Army spokesman John Cummings said in a statement. “Additional first flight objectives included airworthiness testing and demonstration, and system level performance verification.”

“All objectives were met during the first flight,” Cummings added.

Read the rest at Danger Room.

A reminder, relayed by reader Mike Pearson, that MIT tested a “flipping” vertical-takeoff drone five years before the Navy’s and Aerovel’s Flexrotor.