Tom Benenson

The Aerion SBJ, a Mach 1.6 business jet, has completed Phase One of its development program and the company is confi dent of its viability. A proprietary market survey of more than 1,100 “Global-class” operators confirmed a demand for 250 to 300 Aerion SBJs during the fi rst 10 years of production, according to Aerion. […]

I don’t often find myself in three-abreast seating on an airliner, but on a recent trip to Las Vegas, Nevada, it was unavoidable. So there I was in a window seat with a white-knuckled woman seated next to me and her macho husband on the aisle. As the airplane accelerated for takeoff, the wife clutched […]

It was just a rumor, but I liked the idea. I’d heard that the FAA was going to equip all the airplanes in the Washington, D.C., area with ADS-B and UAT so it could better monitor their movements. The rumor got legs from the unfortunate, apparently inadvertent, incursion by the Cessna 150 into the Washington […]

Robert Goyer was on a flight back from Syracuse when the controller called him. “Let me tell you about your situation,” the controller offered. But Robert already had a pretty good idea. He’d been “looking ahead” and knew there were weather doings on his trip back to White Plains’ Westchester County Airport. He’d been in […]

When a manufacturer can successfully meld form and function in a product’s design the results are invariably aesthetically and economically satisfying. In the mid-1980s, when MBB (Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm) began development of its BO 108, it had no idea how successfully the helicopter’s form would let it perform many missions. Initially, the BO 108 was intended as […]

Adam Aircraft has announced that it’s taking deposits for a limited time at a preferential price of $1.995 million on its six-seat, twin-engine Williams FJ33-powered A700 AdamJet. An initial deposit of $100,000 will lock in the preferential price and a delivery position. By mid-September the AdamJet prototype, which made its first flight on July 27, […]

“Are you sure you don’t need anything else?” Karen Anderson asked. “No. No, I’m fine. Really.” “But your bottled water’s gotten warm,” she said. “Let me get you a cold one?” It’s hard to resist an offer like that. She took the warm water bottle and made her way to the galley at the back […]

It’s not apocryphal. A candidate for the instrument rating went up with an examiner for his flight test. The examiner, after carefully covering the screens on the airplane’s dual Garmin 430s, asked the pilot to perform an NDB approach. With some difficulty, the instrument candidate was finally able to explain to the examiner that without […]

Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I think the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is out to get us. Somehow, the powers that be at the TSA have become convinced that, although small airplanes were not involved in the horrific attacks on the World Trade Center, they pose a serious risk to the country’s security. The evidence […]

It was a disparate group of musicians, artists, pilots and friends attending Craig Peyton’s art exhibit called “Environmental Forms.” As diverse as the members of the group were, they had one thing in common-their enthusiasm. It was contagious. The multimedia exhibit combined three of Craig’s loves-music, photography and aviation-and was composed of six video segments […]