You need insulated gonads of steel to get into a harness and let a helicopter fly you into a high voltage cable to service them. That’s precisely what the technicians from Air2 do for utilities companies nationwide. [ Air2 via Flightglobal ] More

You’re in a military helicopter and flying through enemy territory. Someone’s shooting at you, but you can’t retaliate or escape because you don’t know where the shots are coming from. Bet you wish you had HALTT, a gunshot location system . More

Hey, remember Taiyo’s voice controlled toy helicopter from last year? This is way cooler. Like, way cooler. It’s an autonomous quad-copter created by the Robust Robotics Group at MIT . It hovers and flies a bit like the AR.Drone that had us smitten at CES this past January, but this one has a lot more brains. It response to natural (though slowly delivered) language voice commands that look to be processed on an iPhone before being sent to the helo

Your average whirleybird is driven by a big motor in the middle, spinning the blades one way and, as per Newton, rotating the body of the craft the other. A tail rotor counteracts the force, but a more efficient solution is to have the rotors power themselves , which is exactly how the Dragonfly DF1 works. It has tiny, hydrogen-peroxide jets on the blade tips, spinning them up without pushing the body of the helo in the other way — though a small tail rotor is still needed to turn the craft. It’s much like the tech that propelled James Bond toward his waiting DB5 in Thunderball , but unlike that jetpack this copter can fly for up to 50 minutes.

Instead of harpooning a whale for samples, wouldn’t it be easier to just collect their snot using an R/C helicopter? More

A new feature that’s making its way onto all of HTC’s Android phones via its Sense overlay is the ” helicopter view ,” as they call it internally. It’s like Mac OS X’s Exposé function, letting you see all homescreens instantly. Recombu has shot a hands-on video of the Desire , which specs-wise is identical to the Nexus One, only with HTC Sense slicked over the top. It’s a quick look at what to expect, and how you’ll be accessing all those lovely homescreen widgets in the future.

The US Coast Guard has released their best videos from 2009, and this crewman emergency medical rescue mission—using a MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter over a moving nuclear US Navy submarine—just blew me away. Check them out in the gallery. The Coast Guard evacuated the crewman from a unnamed US Navy Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarine. The submarine was cruising through an undisclosed location off the the coast of Washington, on September 29, 2009. They called the Coast Guard at 5:50PM, and the Jayhawk helicopter intercepted the submarine at 7:12PM, picking up the crewman, and moving him to the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Oregon.

Holy friggin’ hell! I don’t know how I didn’t see this before, but apparently Norwegians eliminate hazardous rocks by having helicopters slam a huge swinging ball against a cliff. I really hope I don’t ever piss one of ‘em off. Is this really the most effective way to do this? [via Ace of Spades HQ ]

Holy friggin’ hell! I don’t know why I haven’t seen this before, but apparently Norwegians eliminate hazardous rocks by having helicopters slam huge swinging balls against cliffs. I really hope I don’t ever piss off a Norwegian. Geez! Is this really the most effective way to do this? [via Ace of Spades HQ ]

Roadside bombs are a a source of fear for both soldiers as well as their worried families at home. Thankfully the Pentagon is working on projects such as Yellow Jacket , unmanned helicopters which detect electromagnetic emissions from potential IEDs. As many IEDs, improvised explosive devices, are set off using a wireless signal, these drones will be able to survey areas for the electromagnetic emissions associated with receivers and provide an early warning to soldiers. No matter how silly the codename, this is one important project and I hope that it gets put into use as soon as possible. [ Aviation Week via Pop Sci ]