The remains of Capt. Lorenza Conner, an Air Force pilot missing for 41 years since the crash of his F-4D fighter in North Vietnam, have been identified, the Department of Defense announced Oct. 8. Conner’s F-4D was shot down by anti-aircraft fire on Oct. 27, 1967, over Tuyen Quang Province. While his co-pilot ejected safely and was captured, Conner was unable to eject before the airplane crashed. Between 1992 and 2003, and then in 2007, joint US-Vietnamese teams investigated the incident and surveyed the crash site, recovering aircraft wreckage and human remains that were identified as those of Conner.
The Defense Innovation Unit is gearing up for the first flight of its commercially developed hypersonic testbed as soon as the end of February—part of a larger project to quickly increase the cadence of the Pentagon’s hypersonic flight testing and field advanced, high-speed systems and components at scale.
