The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently hosted a forum to discuss the advance of micro air vehicles—extremely small unmanned aerial vehicles. Current MAV technology runs to vehicles about six inches long, but researchers are looking toward the not too distant day when they may have “insect-size” UAVs. The end game, they say, is to fill “a variety of critical new military needs, chiefly in urban areas.” The forum gathered some 70 attendees from universities around the world, as well as government and industry researchers.
The B-21 Raider stealth bomber was recently flown, for the first time, by an operational pilot as part of its flight test process, the Air Force said June 11. And a top Pentagon official said the move to bring operational testing into the B-21 process earlier than normal shows the…