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Article: It's a bird! It's a spy plane!
- Article from:
- Chicago Sun-Times
- Article date:
- May 2, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1999 Chicago Sun-Times. (Hide copyright information)
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Talk about odd birds.
At some of America's most prestigious research organizations,
teams of expert engineers are hard at work building small avian
robots, machines that can fly through the air in nature's time-
honored manner: by flapping their wings.
It may not seem so, but this is a serious undertaking, part of a
$35 million Pentagon effort to build a new breed of spy plane that is
very small and utterly silent. The military planners behind these
"micro air vehicles" dream of a bird-like device capable of flapping
over the next hill on a battlefield, or around the next corner in
urban combat, and sending back a TV picture of what it sees. If
these small spies were available today, ...