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A synchronization gear, or a gun synchronizer, sometimes rather less accurately called an interrupter, is attached to the armament of a single-engine tractor-configuration aircraft so it can fire through the arc of its spinning propeller without bullets striking the blades. The idea presupposes a fixed armament directed by aiming the aircraft in which it is fitted at the target, rather than aiming the gun independently.

There are many practical problems, mostly arising from the inherently imprecise nature of an automatic gun's firing, the great (and varying) velocity of the blades of a spinning propeller, and the very high speed at which any gear synchronizing the two has to operate.

Design and experimentation with gun synchronization had been underway in France and Germany in 1913–1914, following the ideas of August Euler, who seems to have been the first to suggest mounting a fixed armament firing in the direction of flight (in 1910). However, the first practical—if far from reliable—gear to enter operational service was that fitted to the Eindecker monoplane fighters, which entered squadron service with the German Air Service in mid-1915. The success of the Eindecker led to numerous gun synchronization devices, culminating in the reasonably reliable hydraulic British Constantinesco gear of 1917. By the end of the war German engineers were well on the way to perfecting a gear using an electrical rather than a mechanical or hydraulic link between the engine and the gun, with the gun being triggered by a solenoid rather than by a mechanical "trigger motor".

From 1918 to the mid-1930s the standard armament for a fighter aircraft remained two synchronized rifle-calibre machine guns, firing forward through the arc of the propeller. During the late 1930s, however, the main role of the fighter was increasingly seen as the destruction of large, all-metal bombers, for which the "traditional" light armament was inadequate.

Since it was impractical to try to fit more than one or two extra guns in the limited space available in the front of a single-engine aircraft's fuselage, this led to an increasing proportion of the armament being mounted in the wings, firing outside the arc of the propeller. There were in fact some advantages in dispensing with centrally mounted guns altogether. Nevertheless, the conclusive redundancy of synchronization gears did not finally come until the introduction of jet propulsion and the absence of a propeller for guns to be synchronized with.

The Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP) program and the preceding Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) project worked to develop a nuclear propulsion system for aircraft. The United States Army Air Forces initiated Project NEPA on May 28, 1946. NEPA operated until May 1951, when the project was transferred to the joint Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)/USAF ANP. The USAF pursued two different systems for nuclear-powered jet engines, the Direct Air Cycle concept, which was developed by General Electric, and Indirect Air Cycle, which was assigned to Pratt & Whitney. The program was intended to develop and test the Convair X-6, but was cancelled in 1961 before that aircraft was built. The total cost of the program from 1946 to 1961 was about $1 billion.

Buran (Russian: Бура́н, IPA: [bʊˈran], meaning "Snowstorm" or "Blizzard"; GRAU index serial number: "11F35 K1") was the first spaceplane to be produced as part of the Soviet/Russian Buran programme. It is, depending on the source, also known as "OK-1K1", "Orbiter K1", "OK 1.01" or "Shuttle 1.01". Besides describing the first operational Soviet/Russian shuttle orbiter, "Buran" was also the designation for the entire Soviet/Russian spaceplane project and its orbiters, which were known as "Buran-class spaceplanes".

OK-1K1 completed one uncrewed spaceflight in 1988, and was destroyed in 2002 when the hangar it was stored in collapsed. The Buran-class orbiters used the expendable Energia rocket, a class of super heavy-lift launch vehicle.

The British Imperial Airship Scheme was a 1920s project to improve communication between Britain and the distant countries of the British Empire by establishing air routes using airships. This led to the construction of two large and technically advanced airships, the R100 and the R101. The scheme was terminated in 1931 following the crash of R101 in October 1930 while attempting its first flight to India.

The Tupolev Tu-144 (Russian: Tyполев Ту-144; NATO reporting name: Charger) is a retired jet airliner and commercial supersonic transport aircraft (SST). It was the world's first commercial SST (maiden flight – 31 December 1968), the second being the Anglo-French Concorde (maiden flight – 2 March 1969). The design was a product of the Tupolev design bureau, headed by Alexei Tupolev, of the Soviet Union and manufactured by the Voronezh Aircraft Production Association in Voronezh, Russia. It conducted 102 commercial flights, of which only 55 carried passengers, at an average service altitude of 16,000 metres (52,000 ft) and cruised at a speed of around 2,000 kilometres per hour (1,200 mph) (Mach 1.6).

The prototype's first flight was made on 31 December 1968, near Moscow from Zhukovsky Airport, two months before the first flight of Concorde. The Tu-144 first went supersonic on 5 June 1969 (Concorde first went supersonic on 1 October 1969), and on 26 May 1970 became the world's first commercial transport to exceed Mach 2. The aircraft used a new construction technique which resulted in large unexpected cracks, which resulted in several crashes. A Tu-144 crashed in 1973 at the Paris Air Show, delaying its further development. The aircraft was introduced into commercial service on 26 December 1975. In May 1978, another Tu-144 (an improved version, the Tu-144D) crashed on a test flight while being delivered. The aircraft remained in use as a cargo aircraft until 1983, when the Tu-144 commercial fleet was grounded. The Tu-144 was later used by the Soviet space program to train pilots of the Buran spacecraft, and by NASA for supersonic research until 1999, when the Tu-144 made its last flight (26 June 1999).

A ram air turbine (RAT) is a small wind turbine that is connected to a hydraulic pump, or electrical generator, installed in an aircraft and used as a power source. The RAT generates power from the airstream by ram pressure due to the speed of the aircraft.

Toss bombing (sometimes known as loft bombing, and by the U.S. Air Force as the Low Altitude Bombing System, LABS) is a method of bombing where the attacking aircraft pulls upward when releasing its bomb load, giving the bomb additional time of flight by starting its ballistic path with an upward vector.

The purpose of toss bombing is to compensate for the gravity drop of the bomb in flight, and allow an aircraft to bomb a target without flying directly over it. This is in order to avoid overflying a heavily defended target, or in order to distance the attacking aircraft from the blast effects of a nuclear (or conventional) bomb.

The Colditz Cock was a glider built by British prisoners of war for an escape attempt from Oflag IV-C (Colditz Castle) in Germany.

A Fu-Go (ふ号[兵器], fugō [heiki], lit. "Code Fu [Weapon]"), or fire balloon (風船爆弾, fūsen bakudan, lit. "balloon bomb"), was a weapon launched by Japan during World War II. A hydrogen balloon with a load varying from a 33 lb (15 kg) antipersonnel bomb to one 26-pound (12 kg) incendiary bomb and four 11 lb (5.0 kg) incendiary devices attached, it was designed as a cheap weapon intended to make use of the jet stream over the Pacific Ocean and drop bombs on American cities, forests, and farmland. Canada and Mexico reported fire balloon sightings as well.

The Japanese fire balloon was the first ever weapon possessing intercontinental range (the second being the Convair B-36 Peacemaker and the third being the R-7 ICBM). The Japanese balloon attacks on North America were at that time the longest ranged attacks ever conducted in the history of warfare, a record which was not broken until the 1982 Operation Black Buck raids during the Falkland Islands War.

The balloons were intended to instill fear and terror in the U.S., though the bombs were relatively ineffective as weapons of destruction due to extreme weather conditions.

Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) is a project of DARPA, a unit of the United States Department of Defense. Created in 2006, the unit's goal is the creation of tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis. After implantation, the "insect cyborgs" could be controlled by sending electrical impulses to their muscles. The primary application is surveillance. The project was created with the ultimate goal of delivering an insect within 5 meters of a target located 100 meters away from its starting point. In 2008, a team from the University of Michigan demonstrated a cyborg unicorn beetle at an academic conference in Tucson, Arizona. The beetle was able to take off and land, turn left or right, and demonstrate other flight behaviors. Researchers at Cornell University demonstrated the successful implantation of electronic probes into tobacco hornworms in the pupal stage.