Stephen Pope

Boeing on Tuesday was preparing to fly its experimental X-51A WaveRider, a scramjet-powered unmanned aircraft that is designed to travel at speeds above Mach 5 burning JP-5 jet fuel. The Air Force planned to transport the aircraft under the wing of a B-52 bomber from Edwards Air Force Base in California to an altitude of […]

A Saab 340 operated by Silver Airways on a scheduled flight to North Central West Virginia Airport (KCKB) on Tuesday night mistakenly landed at a much smaller airport in Fairmont, West Virginia (4G7), less than five miles away. The landing by the United Express-coded turboprop happened during Silver Airway’s first week of service to KCKB. […]

Continuing a strategy that more and more looks like a complete renewal of its product line, Eurocopter has revealed it is working on two new helicopter projects – the X6, a revamped model to be developed from the Super Puma family, and the X9, a project just now getting under way at the company’s factory […]

Glasair president and CEO Mikael Via has decided to leave the company after its recent sale to Jilin Hanxing Group, a China-based conglomerate, ending a tenure that saw a successful resurgence for the kitplane maker. Replacing Via at the helm of Glasair Aviation are its new president, Nigel Mott, previously the vice president of operations, […]

My trip home from Oshkosh last week offered an enlightening contrast between “old” and “new” aviation technologies, and a lesson in how best to integrate the two in the same cockpit. While my colleagues at Flying scored rides home in Citation and Falcon bizjets that I’m sure were outfitted with some fairly sophisticated gear, I […]

The Pilots Bill of Rights championed by Sen. James Inhofe (R – Okla.) has been signed into law, bringing with it a new era of transparency in which the FAA must expand legal protections for pilots by providing access to investigative reports and ATC recordings, and handing over evidence being used as the basis of […]

Icon Aircraft, the California developer of the Icon A5 amphibious light sport airplane, has enlisted Cirrus Aircraft to produce a “significant portion” of the composite airframes for the LSA. As part of the agreement announced on Monday, Cirrus will build the composite airframe components for the Icon A5 at its factory in Grand Forks, North […]

Investigators trying to determine what caused the deadly crash of a Sukhoi Superjet 100 in the jungle mountains of Indonesia say controllers cleared the airplane below the minimum safe altitude for the area minutes before the jet slammed into a mountain shrouded in low clouds. Sukhoi had planned a 30-minute demonstration flight on May 9 […]

Have you heard the term “sequestration” in the news lately? It’s a jargony description for the automatic, across-the-board budget cuts that are scheduled to take effect next year unless politicians work out a deal to slash the federal deficit. The FAA will be caught up in this fiscal belt-tightening, to the tune of more than […]

The FAA has issued a proposed final policy rule dealing with residential “through-the-fence” agreements for aircraft owners who live next to an airport and bring their airplanes from “hangar homes” onto airport property. The FAA had sought to eliminate such access on security and safety grounds, but the agency agreed to revisit the policy after […]