Flying on a Wing and a Half

Defense News Flying on a Wing and a Half: "If you can think fast enough and act fast enough, perhaps you, too, could fly an F/A-18 fighter jet with 60 percent of its right wing blown off.

A lot of pilots couldn't, said David Vos, senior director of Control Technologies at Rockwell Collins. But a computer algorithm that Vos helped create can.

It piloted a scaled-down F/A-18 this spring, and then kept it aloft and under control even after most of the right wing was intentionally blown off in midflight.

The computer succeeded where many human pilots would undoubtedly fail because it was able to react to the wing damage about 20 milliseconds after it occurred and because it 'knows everything there is to know about the plane,' Vos said."