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New Smyrna Beat •

Special election said to miss point of Florida's Sunshine Law

That election came and went on Tuesday, with voters resoundingly defeating five of the seven proposed amendments. The perception of a lack of transparency in the process that led to the commission’s Aug. 26 resurrection of the special election likely helped defeat most of the amendments.One section reads: “Even though the Sunshine Law does not prohibit a board from adding topics to the agenda of a regularly noticed meeting, the Attorney General’s Office has advised boards to postpone formal acti...
New Smyrna Beat •

The disaster after the disaster

Cheryl Booth heard about meetings the city was holding about a program intended to help residents fix their properties. It was FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) created in 1988 to break the cycle of homeowners repairing their properties after natural disasters only to have them be ruined again by the next disaster. After the president signs a disaster declaration, reimbursement grants are made available to local municipalities who hire contractors to harden homes against future disas...
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 •

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 •

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 •

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...
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.
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...