FAA Releases UAS Integration Roadmap

From the press release:

WASHINGTON –The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today released its first annual Roadmap outlining efforts needed to safely integrate unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into the nation’s airspace. The Roadmap addresses current and future policies, regulations, technologies and procedures that will be required as demand moves the country from today’s limited accommodation of UAS operations to the extensive integration of UAS into the NextGen aviation system in the future.

By way of AUVSI. The Roadmap and Comprehensive Plan are both available to download from the FAA site.

LockMart SR-72

NASA SP-2001-4525

AvWeek has a nice marketing piece for Lockheed-Martin's Mach 6 ISR/strike concept based on Blackswift that they're calling SR-72. They have a nice set of graphics that compares the the new Mach 6-capable combined cycle engine to the old Mach 3 SR-71 cycle.

YF-12 Inlet Schematic

The SR-71 provides a nice historical example of design for high-temperature metallic structures. There is also a great deal of detail on the research NASA did on the YF-12 which includes quite a bit of declassified material on how the YF-12 family managed the inlet boundary layer and shock train across the wide range of Mach numbers at which it operated. One of the aircraft involved in that research program is at the museum so folks can go see it, and there is a virtual tour of the SR-71 cockpit available for those who can't make it to Dayton.

Free (not Libre) TopOpt App

This little app from the TopOpt research group at the Technical University of Denmark is lots of fun to play with. Versions available:

• iOS AppStore
  
• Android Google Play
  
• On the web
  
• pre-compiled binaries for Linux
  

You can move around boundary conditions and forces to see what 2-D arrangement of material is the stiffest. There is also an option to export the geometry to an stl file for 3-D printing.

I couldn't find links to any source for this implementation, but it is based on the methods in the 99- and 88-line codes I've written about previously.