Officials at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum displayed a new exhibit of military unmanned aerial vehicles representing each branch of service last Thursday.

Of the six UAVs on display, three artifacts came from the U.S. Air Force:

- MQ-1L Predator A
- RQ-3A Darkstar
- X-45A Joint Unmanned Combat Air System

“UAVs are the future of combat air forces,” said Dik Daso, the museum curator for modern military aircraft. “This generation is familiar with UAVs and most of what they see here they’ll recognize.”

Each of the UAVs in the exhibit is exceptional in its individual accomplishments. For example, the Predator in the display was one of the first three MQ-1s over Afghanistan after 9-11 (September 11, 2001). Additionally, it was the first Predator to launch a missile in combat.

The curator said the Predator on display flew 196 combat sorties, racking up more than 2,700 flight hours, about the same number of flying hours Mr. Daso accumulated as a pilot during his 20-year Air Force career.

For one museum patron, seeing the UAV exhibit was a welcome surprise.

“The display looks great and it’s amazing to see (the UAVs) in person,” said Chicago native John Perseghin, who was visiting the Air and Space Museum with his daughter’s class. “To me, it’s obvious we need these in our military. They’re important in doing things like reconnaissance without jeopardizing human lives.”

Mr. Daso said their goal is to tell museum patrons about the role UAVs play in modern warfare.

“We want to educate our visitors even more on what UAVs have done and what they currently do for us today,” he said. “We used unmanned aerial vehicles in World War II and Vietnam, but things like the Predator have utterly revolutionized the way our military fights. The UAVs in our display have significant combat histories and important stories to tell. That’s why they’re here.”

LONDON – British Airways PLC says it will raise it fuel surcharge on all flight. Prices for long haul flights will increase by $40 to $60 per round-trip.

BA says the increase reflect the high price of oil which flirted with $120 a barrel.

With the latest increase, the total surcharges on BA flights lasting more than nine hours will be about $315.

The price of short-haul flight will only increase by about $12 per round-trip which puts BA’s surcharge for short-haul flights at about $52 per round-trip.

An unusually large black hole was spotted exiting its home galaxy, kicked out after a huge cosmic merger took place.

The event was announced today and was seen for the very first time. Astronomers have came up with a theory that the resulting energy release could propel the new black hole from its parent galaxy out into space, though it was inevident since no one has found such an event. Stefanie Komossa of the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics, who was part of the team that made the new discovery and stated, “But we haven’t seen the actual merger event.”

Komossa and her team currently had detected the consequences of the merger, thus resulting to a black hole in the process of leaving its home galaxy. Komossa stated further:

“The consequence was that the merged black hole, the final product, the new black hole was expelled from the galaxy.”

Full details and the team’s results will be appearing in the May 10 issue of the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.