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Photo: Solar Impulse

A Swiss-built solar-powered airplane made its first short “flea hop” flight yesterday, in anticipation of initial test flights next year. The Solar Impulse HB-S1A, a project of Swiss aeronautical adventurer Bertrand Piccard, flew 1,150 feet, skimming along a military runway in Zurich just a meter above the ground.

See pictures and videos here.

Concept courtesy of Lockheed Martin.

Size matters. (Well, at least in the surveillance world.)

And three projects under way take dimensions to whole new lengths. The LEMV (it stands for Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle) is a mammoth hybrid airship championed by the U.S. Army as part of a future fleet of reconnaissance vehicles. As required in the U.S. Army’s LEMV proposal request, the non-rigid autonomous airship must be able to operate at 20,000 feet above sea level, have a 2,000-mile radius, and remain deployed for 21 days.

The 250-foot-long airship will be able to house a 5,000-pound payload of radar and motion-imagery sensors, in addition to other spyware. While the LEMV has yet to be built—Lockheed Martin is one possible airframe supplier—the buoyant behemoth is expected to deploy to Afghanistan within 18 months.

Photograph courtesy AeroVironment, Inc.

On the other end of the spectrum is AeroVironment’s NAV (Nano Air Vehicle) “Mercury,” which weighs less than an ounce. Mercury mimics a bird in flight with its ability to climb and descend vertically—as well as fly sideways and backwards—and is part of a new class of small remote-controlled gadgets able to fly indoors and gather intelligence in urban settings.

Lockheed Martin’s NAV, based on a maple seed, is in the second stage of testing. As we reported in 2006, Lockheed Martin hopes that soldiers will be able to carry the NAV in their pockets, and use the technology to photograph cave interiors, or to see what’s lurking down a blind alley.

Photograph courtesy Lockheed Martin.

According to Jill Krugman, a public affairs officer with Lockheed Martin, DARPA stopped funding the project at the conclusion of phase one. But the company felt development should continue, and the corporation has been funding the project through Independent Research and Design (IRAD). “Through IRAD,” says Krugman, “the team developed the approximately 30″ SAMARAI as a technology demonstrator.” (View a YouTube video of the 30″ prototype here.) As the project progresses, the team will build increasingly smaller versions, based upon what they learn during testing.

The 11-17 August issue of Flight International, a global aerospace weekly published in the United Kingdom, noted the results of a poll that asked if the Boeing 787, Airbus 400M, or another slowly evolving work in progress would be the first to make a maiden flight:

Total Votes: 4534

So who gets the contract to retrofit the pigs?

There’s little that scares George Muellner, who has bragging rights to 690 combat missions in Vietnam. During three decades in the U.S. Air Force, he accumulated 5,300 hours in the F-4, A-7, F-15, and F-16 as a fighter pilot, fighter weapons instructor, and test pilot. He even flew 50 combat sorties in Operation Desert Storm, and retired from the Air Force in 1998 as a Lieutenant General.

But today, as a Fellow and President of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Muellner told a group of journalists, scientists, and aerospace executives at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., that he’s frightened at the lack of progress in three key areas of U.S. aerospace: the energy efficiency of aircraft, reducing their environmental impacts, and replacing an aging workforce. While others spoke on the first two topics, Muellner focused on the workforce issue. “If we don’t deal with it,” he said, “there could be major, negative long-term impacts.”

After leaving the Air Force, Muellner worked for Boeing until last year, where he held several posts including chief of the company’s shadowy Phantom Works group. Muellner recalled that, at one point, a quarter of the engineers working for him were old enough to have retired all at once. “They didn’t, luckily,” he says, and continued working due to a deteriorating economy.

“How do we bring in younger people?” he asked. Then he attempted to answer his own question, arguing that we need to inspire kids at earlier ages in grammar school to study math and engineering. He lamented the incompetence of teachers, and quoted former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, a former AIAA President who also chaired the Aerospace Industries Association and the Defense Science Board, that two-thirds of science teachers and half of math teachers are not qualified to teach kids today. Colleges need to deal with nagging drop-out rates from engineering programs; the best way to accomplish this, says Muellner, is to offer more interesting coursework earlier. “I had my first aero[nautics] course as a junior, and not until second semester did we run engines,” he said. Finally, when these engineers move from college to the real world, he says, the aerospace industry, which loses about 14 percent of its young professionals on average—many of them to Wall Street—needs to keep them interested with rewarding work, solid feedback, and a healthy balance between job and family.

Muellner ended on a positive note, reminding the room that U.S. aerospace ended 2007 with a $60.6 billion positive trade balance. The Aerospace Industries Association reports this to be the largest positive trade balance of any U.S. manufacturing industry.