Stephen Pope

We’ve all heard the term, but what is bonus depreciation and how does it work? Normally, when a business purchases a piece of durable capital equipment such as a printing press, a backhoe or a corporate jet, that business is allowed to deduct the cost of the equipment from its taxable income, thereby reducing its […]

The number of private jets in service in the United States has increased more than tenfold since 1970, from fewer than 1,000 then to more than 11,000 today. The number is projected to double again by 2025, according to industry forecasts, as manufacturers experience a modest increase in sales and deliveries starting next year followed […]

Airlines this week diverted a handful of flights on polar routes to avoid communications disruptions from a solar radiation storm that scientists said was the strongest to hit the Earth since 2005. The geomagnetic storm caused minor disruptions for U.S. airlines, with Delta saying it altered the routes of some Asia-bound flights to more southerly […]

Textron CEO Scott Donnelly on Wednesday pointed to improving fourth-quarter performance at the company’s flagship aviation businesses – Cessna Aircraft and Bell Helicopter – for boosting its bottom line in slowly recovering economy. “We had a solid quarter with good execution especially at Cessna and Bell,” Donnelly said on a conference call with reporters. “We’re […]

I was surprised when I read recently that many new airline pilot job applicants struggle with decoding basic metar weather reports. It would seem to me that if you’ve done enough flying to reach the interview stage with a commercial carrier, you would have interpreted hundreds if not thousands of metars along the way. Maybe […]

Business jet manufacturers have again begun ramping up production, signaling the start of a turnaround after three difficult years marked by falling production rates, according to Rockwell Collins chairman and CEO Clay Jones. “We see a positive direction for the first time” since the downturn began, Jones said of business jet manufacturing, speaking to reporters […]

In the first concrete sign of a turnaround for bizjet maker Bombardier, the Montreal-based company said it delivered 163 airplanes in last year’s 11-month fiscal period, a slight increase from the year before, while also booking orders for 191 new airplanes – almost double the figure recorded in 2010. Last year’s improved performance was still […]

It wasn’t many years ago that the idea of using biofuels for flight was dismissed out of hand as a utopian fantasy. The conventional wisdom said we’d never be able to produce enough aviation biofuel to make a difference, and even if we could it wouldn’t matter — biomass-sourced fuel would wreak havoc on the […]

LightSquared, the company that’s seeking final FCC approval to build a nationwide 4G wireless network, claims that recent government testing showing its service interferes with GPS signals was “rigged.” The tests, carried out by Air Force Space Command on behalf of the government’s Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Executive Committee, concluded that the LightSquared’s proposed […]

Ever wished you could have synthetic-vision capability on your iPhone? Hilton Software, maker of the WingX Pro7 app for the Apple iPad, has just added support for the device, including 3-D synthetic-vision capability and optional AHRS and ADS-B integration. We haven’t had the chance to try it out yet, but company founder Hilton Goldstein says […]