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Ben Iannotta

Editor, reporter and strategic leader known for producing compelling journalism through engaging storytelling, deep research, investigation and visualization. Former editor of Aerospace America and Gannett-owned C4ISR Journal. Works published by the Associated Press, New Scientist, The New York Times, Popular Mechanics, Reuters, Smithsonian Air & Space, Space News and The Washington Post.   

Latest editing and writing

Aerospace America •

NASA wants to keep an unbroken American presence in low-Earth orbit

AIAA SCITECH FORUM, ORLANDO, Fla. — NASA today elaborated on its newly embraced determination to keep Americans in low-Earth orbit continuously beyond 2030, when the final crew members are scheduled to come home from the International Space Station before it’s deorbited in early 2031.

Last year, when NASA invited the industry and public to comment on its draft long-term strategy for research in LEO, the agency received a very specific complaint: The document did not explicitly call for maintain...
Aerospace America •

Can Kwaj Survive?

The waves knocked down doors, upended furniture and tipped over bookshelves, leaving flooding in its wake and an unspoken question: Is this the future?

The scene was January 2024 on the island of Roi-Namur, the second largest among the 100 slivers of land that form Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, an oblong ring of islands 1,100 kilometers north of the equator. About 120 U.S. military personnel and contractors live and work on Roi-Namur to run its rocket launch pad, radars and telescopes.
Aerospace America •

AI at work: mastering the airspace

NATS, the quasi-private company that controls much of the United Kingdom’s airspace, expects jet travel to continue increasing annually by 2% for the foreseeable future. While that’s happening, the U.K. has pledged to meet net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 through its Jet Zero initiative, and that means aircraft must fly the most efficient routes possible. Meanwhile, in urban areas, a host of eVTOLs — electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft — should be ready for trials as air taxis in a c...
Aerospace America •

4 reasons to root for quantum computing

The United States will pour at least $968 million in fiscal 2024 into research on quantum computing and its applications, more than double the $449 million spent in 2019. The allure is easy to see, as large-scale, error-free quantum computers could in theory perform tasks impossible for existing computers.

If or when they’re ready, these computers won’t be like the “classical” computer on your desktop or in your hand. Those contain circuits etched into silicon chips, and within those circuits a...
Aerospace America •

Understanding the misunderstood Kessler Syndrome

Irony isn’t just limited to life in 1-g. Last year, a discarded payload adapter from a European Space Agency Vega rocket was orbiting Earth as it had for the past 10 years, when radars showed it had company — a small number of new objects traveling with it. ESA concluded that a “hypervelocity impact” with a piece of debris had broken fragments from the adapter.

Here’s the irony: ESA was preparing to dispatch a spacecraft to the adapter to demonstrate a technique for removing such debris, the go...

Aviation

Popular Mechanics •

Retired DC-10s Battle Western Blazes

During this summer's brutal wildfires in the American West, you might have seen a couple of ghosts from the past. Two converted DC-10s, which have been out of airliner service for years, are performing much of the aerial firefighting. And it's thanks to a startup company that almost went belly-up.
After its founding in 2002, 10 Tanker Air Carrier of Casper, Wyo., invested tens of millions of dollars to turn two former passenger planes—one that was once flown by American Airlines, the other by Co...
Aerospace America •

Ending runway incursions

Two planes carrying a combined 308 people were on the same runway in Queens, New York, as one of them started to take off. In Austin, Texas, a cargo plane came within 30 meters of landing on an airliner taking off from the same runway. In Boston, a business jet taking off nearly collided with a passenger jet landing on an intersecting runway. In Burbank, California, a regional jet aborted its landing to avoid another passenger plane taking off from the same runway. At Reagan National in Virginia...
Aerospace America •

Smarter Collision avoidance

On the morning of June 30, 1956, two airliners embarked on flights that would shape the next 60 years of air traffic safety measures. The planes departed from Los Angeles International Airport within three minutes of each other, one headed for Chicago and the other for Kansas City, Missouri. Their paths converged 90 minutes later, at 21,000 feet over the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The left wing of the Chicago-bound United Airlines Douglas DC-7 smashed into the tail of the Trans World Airlines Lock...
Aerospace America •

What aviation’s small environmental footprint should and shouldn’t tell us

A well-done feature story organizes lots of information in a logical manner but doesn’t tell you, the readers, what to think. Naturally, different readers will find different insights.

I want to draw your attention to one potential takeaway from our cover story, “The dark side of green.” If you read the article, you know that it refers to a study showing that aviation comprises an incredibly small percentage of the demand for the metals in lithium-ion batteries. The tempting takeaway would be t...
Aerospace America •

Why do we fear flying more than driving? Here’s a hunch

In the United Kingdom, an unwritten rule says that two heirs to the British throne should not travel together by air, according to Business Insider and others. The intent, I suppose, is to avoid the royal equivalent of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives becoming the leader of the free world.

The heir rule sounds a bit like “amygdala hijacking,” the psychology term for when this almond-shaped cluster of neurons in our brains unnecessarily triggers our fight, flight or freeze respon...
Aerospace America •

The elusive fully autonomous airliner

It was a bright July morning in 2013, and Asiana Airlines Flight 214 with 307 souls aboard was cleared to descend to San Francisco International Airport. The pilot flying the plane and the captain next to him had flown into SFO dozens of times, but this day was different: The Instrument Landing System at runway 28L was not functioning.

Normally, the duo would tune their Boeing 777’s ILS receiver to radio frequencies emitted by an antenna at the far end of the runway and another at its head. The...
Popular Mechanics •

The Good and Bad News About the Latest 787 Fire

U.K. investigators say Friday's fire on an Ethiopian Airlines 787 at London's Heathrow Airport was a "serious incident" that produced "smoke throughout the fuselage and extensive heat damage in the upper portion of the rear fuselage," the UK investigators said. But they don't think the problem came from one of the plane's two lithium-ion batteries. That might—or might not—be good news for Boeing, which was only just recovering from the battery fires that grounded its new Dreamliner for four mont...

Space

Aerospace America •

Two possible space strategies for the Trump administration

What will our Year-in-Review issues look like for the next four years with President-elect Donald Trump at the helm in the United States?
I predict that the research themes won’t vary much from what we saw in the Biden years and the first Trump administration. These themes — artificial intelligence, electric flight, biofuels, hypersonic weapons, extending society into space — do not depend solely on the United States, and they are governed by market forces and security needs that are beyond the...
Aerospace America •

SpaceX shouldn’t be afraid to slow down

We’re about to find out whether SpaceX can find a better balance between its present derring-do and the paralyzing caution it has bucked since its founding.

Last month’s Starship test flight blew concrete and bonding agents from the launch pad into neighborhoods and likely wetlands near the company’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas. Elon Musk, who doubles as CEO and chief engineer, tweeted that “we wrongly thought” based on test data that the pad would erode, not explode. Construction had begun o...
Aerospace America •

NASA stands by its X-planes

NASA has not flown an experimental aircraft in the seven years since it pledged to build and fly five of them to deliver “revolutionary levels of aircraft performance improvements.” The goal was to give the U.S. an edge in the “international competition” to build aircraft capable of satisfying an anticipated doubling in passenger trips by the 2030s, according to a 2016 NASA brochure announcing what was then known as the New Aviation Horizons Initiative. That demand portended an “economic potenti...
Aerospace America •

Fuel-free space travel

Is it a breakthrough, or baloney? Not long after the turn of the millennium, the EmDrive — catchy shorthand for “electromagnetic drive” — was a mere glimmer at the fringes of space-propulsion research.

The idea was to generate thrust by harnessing a strange effect that seems to happen when electromagnetic energy is circulated in an enclosure. That’s where things stood until November, when the concept began commanding mainstream attention after a team of NASA researchers reported in AIAA’s Journ...
Aerospace America •

Planet Spotting

Astronomers have cataloged about 30 planets beyond our solar system that might optimistically harbor life, although none of these worlds is thought to be Earthlike. Researchers are confident that within decades, they’ll find what they believe to be a bona fide Earth 2.0.

If such a discovery were made today, it might generate as much frustration as exhilaration. The vast majority of the worlds discovered since 1995 were detected by measuring the gravitational tug on their host stars, or more lat...
Air & Space Smithsonian •

The Mirror Makers

In 1968, a stark cement building slowly took shape on the grounds of an optical manufacturing company called Perkin-Elmer, which sits on a hill in Danbury, Connecticut. The cavernous building was made especially for secret military programs, including the construction of cameras for KH-series spy satellites. Such work capitalized on the company’s expertise—grinding and polishing disks of glass or metal into optical mirrors.
Veteran optical physicist Terence Facey leans back in his chair and decl...

Defense and intelligence

Aerospace America •

What the age of nuclear testing can teach us

We live in promising and sometimes frightening times, but the history pointed to in our cover story reminds me that we’ve been here before and survived.
The late 1940s through the early ’60s were a time of scary nuclear experimentation, as you can see in our cover story. The device set off at the Trinity Site in New Mexico in 1945 had not set the entire atmosphere ablaze, as nuclear physicist Edward Teller warned colleagues it might. So, with the Cold War raging, U.S. and Soviet scientists bega...
C4ISR Journal •

A tale of four towers

When Ralph Haller returned to the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in 2007 after stints at the CIA and in private industry, something was obviously different at the spy-satellite agency's Chantilly, Va., property. Four new office buildings had opened since he left in 1993, and with these "towers," as NRO employees call them, came a divided management structure that has contributed to the agency's slow adoption of Internet-like intelligence tools for tapping the agency's spy trove.
Smithsonian Magazine •

Spy Blimps and Heavy Lifters

DURING THE PREPARATIONS for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, local entrepreneur Mike Lawson rounded up a group of investors, pooled $1 million, and bought a one-person, helium-filled airship. His plan: Persuade Olympics officials to rent the craft for security surveillance. “That little sucker would fly about 50 miles per hour,” Lawson recalls.
On a gloomy day in October 1995, the great nemesis of all airships rose up and dashed his spirit. The remnants of Hurricane Opal blew through Atlanta...
C4ISR Journal •

Who Should Fly UAVs?

The U.S. Army plans to retire the traditional sticks and rudders its UAV operators are relying on to steer early versions of the Predator-derived Sky Warrior aircraft over Irag and Afghanistan.
Trackballs and clickable screen displays are set to replace those sticks and rudders as the Army seeks to capitalize on what it sees as an ample supply of young, computer-savvy enlisted people willing to learn how to fly UAVs and drop bombs. Those operators are to form the core of the Sky Warrior UAV fleet the Army is building to rival the Air Force's Predators and Reapers.
Air & Space Smithsonian •

Will the Air Force finally get a spaceplane?

COUNTRY MUSIC SUDDENLY BLARES FROM UNSEEN LOUDSPEAKERS AS VETERAN Boeing manager Dennis Rainwater opens the door to a large, gymnasium-like room. Inside, a blue curtain blocks the view of the far side of the chamber.
Rainwater has to shout to be heard. “Behind the blue curtain is something you’re not supposed to see,” he yells.
Or hear, for that matter. The country crooning drowns out the conversations of people working on whatever is behind the curtain and disguises the sounds of tools that mig...

Climate

Aerospace America •

It’s time to replace those hurricane cone graphics

Each hurricane season, terabytes of temperature, humidity and pressure collections from satellites and hurricane hunter aircraft are fed into forecasting models and ultimately boiled down into the famous hurricane forecasting cones published online by the National Hurricane Center and adapted by local television forecasters.

The collective experience with those cones this hurricane season should prove once and for all that the cones are a dangerous failure as a communications tool. When Hurrica...
Aerospace America •

Aviation’s Overdue Embrace of Bold Innovation

Walking the exhibit halls of the Paris Air Show back in 2015, I had a hankering to write a story about what it would take to build a totally climate-friendly airliner, one with roughly the passenger capacity and ranges of conventional hydrocarbon versions. Not thinking of hydrogen, I assumed that meant one powered by battery-supplied electricity, like Airbus Group’s tiny, piloted E-Fan plane, then grabbing headlines. In front of me were booths filled with executives and researchers from all the...
Aerospace America •

Taking the temperature on temperature

With an alarming frequency, the public keeps hearing that this or that year was “the hottest on record.” Almost true to form, NOAA and NASA in January announced that 2019 was the second-warmest year ever measured. In fact, nine out of the 10 hottest years in the era of instrument-recorded global temperatures dating back to the late 1800s occurred in the past decade. The drumbeat continues, with 2020 on its way to dethroning 2016 as the warmest yet on average across our planet’s surface.

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