An air tanker used to drop retardant on one wildfire in the Sierra Nevada crashed after taking off for a flight to a second blaze, killing all three crew members. The order for the flight to the second blaze was canceled around the time of the crash, officials said Tuesday.

The plane went down about a half-mile from the airport and burst into flame, Reno fire spokesman Steve Frady said.

The twin-engine P2V air tanker owned by Neptune Aviation of Missoula, had returned to the airport Monday after making one flight over a fire in California’s Hope Valley south of Lake Tahoe during the morning, said Marnie Bonesteel, a spokeswoman with the Sierra Front Wildfire Cooperators.

It was at least the third time a P2V owned by Neptune was involved in a fatal crash while fighting wildfires on government contract over the past 15 years. Neptune Aviation Chief Executive Officer Mark Timmons said he didn’t have any additional information on the crash and the P2V was proven to be extremely reliable, and the previous crashes were all attributed to pilot error.

The fire in the Hope Valley had forced the evacuation of campgrounds, two mountain retreats and about 20 homes on Sunday. Evacuation orders were lifted Monday afternoon, and the fire, estimated at 200 acres, was 50 percent contained as of Tuesday.

American Airlines sent some advisories to their 469 employees specifically working at their airports in five U.S cities telling they can lose their job by November while the air line continues to cut back on flights. 353 employees at Chicago O’Hare International Airport have received the notices. While the remaining notices were sent to the employees working for airlines based in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, in Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and in Columbus, Ohio.

The letters were sent to gate and ticket agents, ramp workers, automatic mechanics and airport-based management and support staff, American spokesperson Tami McLallen said in a story for Wednesday’s online edition of the Forth Wor Star-Telegram.

“The letters were sent to gate and ticket agents, ramp workers, automotive mechanics and airport-based management and support staff”, American Airlines spokeswoman Tami McLallen said.

Mark Burdette, American’s vice president of employee relations, said in a letter last week to the Transport Workers Union, that fewer people would be needed to operate the airline as the operating schedule is cut due to high oil pries and the softening economy. Airline officials hope to reduce the number of layoffs with a voluntary early retirement program.

Thanks to a new artificial intelligence system, a robot helicopter can teach itself how to fly and perform challenging stunts just by watching other helicopters do the same maneuvers. The autonomous helicopter is able to carry out a complete airshow of complex tricks on its own, according to its inventors.

The stunts are “by far the most difficult aerobatic maneuvers flown by any computer-controlled helicopter,” said Andrew Ng, a professor at Stanford University who is directing the research of graduate students Pieter Abbeel, Adam Coates, Timothy Hunter and Morgan Quigley.

The artificial intelligence helicopter, an off-the-shelf model other than its new brains, can perform traveling flips, rolls, loops, and stall-turns without pirouettes, just to name a few. It can even do the tic toc, where the helicopter hovers with a side to side motion while pointed straight up.

“I think the range of maneuvers they can do is by far the largest” in the autonomous helicopter field, said Eric Feron, a Georgia Tech professor who worked on autonomous helicopters while at MIT. “But what’s more impressive is the technology that underlies this work. In a way, the machine teaches itself how to do this by watching an expert pilot fly. This is amazing.”

A short clip of the helicopter can be viewed here.

John Sidney McCain III was born on August 29, 1936. He is the senior United States Senator from Arizona and presidential nominee of the Republican Party in the 2008 presidential election. Before entering politics, he was a naval aviator, flying ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers.

In 1967, while McCain was on his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam, his A-4E Skyhawk was shot down by a missile over Hanoi. He suffered from serious injuries, was captured as a prisoner of war by the North Vietnamese and was held for five and a half years, experiencing episodes of torture and refusing an out-of-sequence early repatriation offer. He was finally released from captivity on March 14, 1973.