BUFFALO, N.Y. Scores of commuter and regional airline pilots are lining up for a special treat, courtesy of the U.S. Congress: A 1-hr. 10-min. flight in an experimental Learjet 25B and a stomach-turning spin in the aerobatic Bonanza.

NEW YORK On any given day at Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport, airliners encounter wake turbulence, lose engines on takeoff and pitch wildly in wind shears—all from the safety of Delta Air Lines’ 26 full-motion flight simulators that tilt, hum and whir 24/7 at the airline’s Flight Operations Center.

WASHINGTON Military planners have long discussed the idea of using unmanned aircraft to protect troops and their installations, and several Pentagon efforts are finally turning that vision into reality. The Pentagon has been trying to improve protection of its troops for the past several years, initially spurred by the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. military personnel, and again four years later by the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

INDIAN SPRINGS AFB, NAV. The U.S. Air Force has produced great wartime results from its Predator unmanned aircraft and has even more sophisticated plans for the larger, faster Predator B it is ordering. But the service has created a bottleneck for innovation and improvement by consistently underfunding and undermanning the small unit that must test and evaluate all changes and improvements as the wing of unmanned aircraft here is developed.

WASHINGTON Controllers planned to command the missing Comet Nucleus Tour (Contour) spacecraft to reconfigure its antennas this week in another salvage bid, but the mission’s director gave only one in 10,000 odds that the probe could be contacted and controlled after falling silent following a critical solid rocket burn Aug. 15 that apparently went badly wrong with only about 2 sec. to go.

Cape Canaveral Experienced Boeing engineers believe the company has a morale problem with its workforce at Cape Canaveral and must focus more top level management leadership “on site” at the Cape to keep the Delta IV Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle on course as it approaches its Oct. 9 first launch.