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.
In 1941, Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold of the then-U.S. Army Air Corps, personally reviewed a jet engine patented by Sir Frank Whittle flying on a Gloster E.28/39 aircraft. Impressed by its design, Arnold arranged for a Whittle engine to be brought back to the U.S. and tasked General Electric…