A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
It used data on bird strikes to get a sense of what would happen if a small drone collided with a plane. Only 3% of collisions between aircraft and birds similar in weight to domestic drones result in damage, found the George Mason University researchers. An even smaller number caused injuries to humans, it found, and many of these were caused by flocks of birds.The research project was prompted by the recent introduction of rules in the US that make owners of drones weighing more than 250g register their craft with the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). "Contrary to sensational media headlines, the skies are crowded not by drones, but by fowl," wrote Eli Dourado and Samuel Hammond in an article summarising their research. US airspace is home to about 10 billion birds, said the researchers, but collisions between fowl and aircraft have remained rare. The pair analysed 25 years of data gathered by the FAA on bird strikes to determine what damage ...