Also: ASTM Vertiport/Vertistop Standards, MQ-8 Fire Scout, SpaceX Dragon, New Shepard’s 23rd Flt
Airbus’s Zephyr 8 UAV, a high-flying critter borne aloft for months on end by vast wings and solar-powered batteries, has a wingspan of 82-feet, weighs a scant 165-pounds, and spent the summer of 2022—most of it, anyway—soaring over the American Southwest. Regrettably, the Zephyr 8’s summertime sojourn came to an unexpected and tragic end on 19 August, when, for reasons passing understanding, it fell from the Arizona sky just hours short of breaking the 64-day, 22-hour, 19-minute, 05-second continuous flight record set in 1959