The Future of Aviation Technology is accelerating like never before and is no cleared for take-off into a whole new paradigm of innovation, performance and electronic capability. Very soon most military aircraft will be flying themselves autonomously and interact with human piloted aircraft and air-traffic control or battlespace command and control systems.

Indeed all this technology is also slowly making its way into the non-military government agencies and quasi government agencies with UAVs Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. We are seeing UAVs used for weather, pollution monitoring, surveillance, forestry, FEMA, policing, search and rescue and even real estate photography. In the private sector with commercial use we will soon see self-flying airliners, shuttle services and air taxis. The first Airliner Flight was already conducted in fact.

The FAA along with NASA is developing super realistic Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Simulators for air traffic controllers, which hook up with airliner simulators all playing in real time in the virtual world. Of course with the advent of zero-zero visibility airline pilots and corporate jets are now about to land without ever seeing the actual runway or looking at an infrared version of it.

If all this sounds exciting that’s great, but in reality this is only the tip of the iceberg. In fact some of the greatest achievement in aviation are nearly upon us with such technologies as lighter materials with carbon nano-tubes, blended wing-bodied aircraft, flying cars, hypersonic flight, levitation, super computer aerodynamic flow modeling and new propulsion technologies. We truly are at the dawn of a new era in aviation innovation.

I appreciate your interest in this subject, as I have a passion for flying that started as a boy. Please be thinking here and consider the implications of the future of aviation technologies and innovations. Perhaps this article is of interest to propel thought in 2007?