by Isabel Goyer

The Cirrus SR series of single-engine airplanes has been controversial since the beginning. The beginning, as some of you might recall, came in 1995 when Cirrus, which had before then been a kit manufacturer, announced the existence of “Hangar X,” the secret facility in which it was building its mysterious to-be-certified entry. When the mystery […]

When you look back at the historical arc of light general aviation, a few airplanes stand out as being so important that their introductions changed the way we flew and the way we looked at flying. At the certain risk of leaving out a few favorites, you can’t talk about the history of light aviation […]

(April 2011) WHILE APPLICATIONS FOR handheld devices have been an intriguing development for some time, the introduction of the iPad has absolutely changed the competitive marketplace in aviation. Dozens of apps, including capable suites from ForeFlight and X-Wing, have made the 10-inch portable from Apple into a must-have pilot pal. Sporty’s Pilot Shop, which helped […]

The taxi run-in between an Air France A380, the largest passenger airplane in the world, and a regional jet at JFK the other night should remind us all how easy it is to bend some metal when all you’re trying to do is get to the departure end of the runway. These taxi surprises of […]

The disappearance of Air France Flight 447 over the deep water Atlantic while en route from Rio to Paris on June 1, 2009, shocked the world and left a web of mysteries. What happened to bring the Airbus A330 with 228 people aboard down in the middle of the dark night? Theories, many of them […]

In an interview with British magazine T3, Virgin Galactic chairman Richard Branson again did what we love about him: he waxed optimistic about the future of private commercial space flight. The launch a decade ago of a civilian manned space program in the United States seemed at the time to be a starry-eyed and quixotic […]

_(__April 2011)_ BY NOW I HOPE YOU’VE heard of the plan by a company called LightSquared to install as many as 40,000 stations across the continental United States that would transmit on the frequency band directly adjacent to the one used by GPS. LightSquared’s plan is to create, using this quiet little corner of the […]

After the tornado at Sun ‘n Fun destroyed or heavily damaged several Husky aircraft that Aviat brought to the show, another was lost in a crash while being flown back to the Aviat factory in Afton, Wyoming, only days after Sun ‘n Fun ended. The crash was reported on by the Laramie Boomarang online edition. […]

In a coup reminiscent of Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes, John and Martha King completely surprised their 35th anniversary King Schools Sweepstakes winner. After the Kings were invited to explore the hangar and 1978 Piper Arrow belonging to Rodney Mullinax at the airport in Mount Vernon, Illinois, John King asked if Rodney had ever considered getting […]

As it works with the NTSB to determine the cause of the crash of a Gulfstream G650 flight test airplane, the company has decided to temporarily suspend flight activities for the remaining four flight test articles. In a press release issued on Wednesday, Pres Henne, senior vice president for programs, engineering and test for Gulfstream, […]