http://www.techly.com.au/2015/03/11/nasa-future-aviation/

Al Bowers: We have one gentleman here who did some work in ground-collision
avoidance.

It turns out that almost half of the fatalities in airliners around the world
are caused by collision of a perfectly capable flying aircraft just flying into
the ground. In the United States we call it CFIT – controlled flight into
terrain.

He has come up with a piece of software that prevents that.

On aeroplanes that are fly-by-wire (pilots really hate it when we tell them
this) what happens is this software takes control away from the pilot, recovers
the aircraft to prevent a collision with the ground, and then returns control
back to the pilot.

Right now the only aircraft that it is flying on are F16s, and in the year that
it has been out it’s already saved two F16s and the pilots that were in them. In
both cases it was completely inadvertent on the part of the pilot, and the pilot
would have just ploughed right into the ground if this system hadn’t saved them
at literally the last second.

I could see where this could be standard issue on all airliners, and we would
see thousands of people that normally would have died would not.

This is one of the very fundamental technologies that could be very
ground-breaking, and I hope it succeeds, I would love to see it adopted by many,
many other places.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/Features/leaptech.html#.VQlzx-GrGfL

The arrival of a unique experimental demonstrator at NASA
Armstrong Flight Research Center on February 26 may herald a future in which
many aircraft are powered by electric motors. The Leading Edge Asynchronous
Propeller Technology (LEAPTech) project will test the premise that tighter
propulsion-airframe integration, made possible with electric power, will deliver
improved efficiency and safety, as well as environmental and economic benefits.
Over the next several months, NASA researchers will perform ground testing of a
31-foot-span, carbon composite wing section with 18 electric motors powered by
lithium iron phosphate batteries.