Rapid Fire July 16, 2012: Droning On

* The American FAA has released thousands of pages of certification documents for UAV flights in civil airspace. They establish which organizations have sought permission, their specific drone models, where they fly, how often, and for how long. Hat tip: reader Jason Attas. * Kurt Albaugh from the US Naval Academy marvels at the 9 million lines of code helping fly the F-35 and wonders whether this could lead to unmanned JSFs. This is a rather fast shortcut. Modern cars that cost less than the seat in a fighter jet often run as much or more code, but this has led to reliability issues. Quantity in code has an adverse quality of its own, that is, more code makes things more complicated to troubleshoot. There’s probably a lot that aircraft makers, car manufacturers, and software companies like Google (working on driverless cars) can learn from one another – Even the more so with increased civilian UAV use. * Colombia’s air force releases an official statement that says their downed Super Tucano was not hit by FARC anti-aircraft fire. Brazil also had a crash recently, and Colombian crash pictures didn’t show bullet holes in the wing. The front section, where a […]