Search Results for: aircraft components inc

The Cessna 441 and 425 Conquest turboprops have been among the hottest turbine airplanes on the used market for several years. Both the higher flying, bigger and faster 441 Conquest II and the smaller PT6-powered 425 Conquest I have been selling for near their new prices, even though they are 23 or more years old. […]

In late November Eclipse Aviation filed for bankruptcy, and investors, suppliers, Eclipse 500 owners and order holders lost well over $1 billion. There has never been a financial failure of this scale in the entire history of general aviation. Eclipse investors have lost hundreds of millions, but individuals are also big losers. Anybody who had […]

Nature is divergent. Darwin in the Galapagos encountered an outpouring of species, no two precisely alike. Aeronautical engineering seems to go the other way. All the species in a given niche eventually resemble one another. It practically takes a specialist to distinguish one business jet from the next. It was not always so. The early […]

Diamond, which a year ago seemed to have little to worry about beyond building enough airplanes to meet the demand, is scurrying these days to deal with a variety of challenges, not the least of which is a sharp drop-off in orders due to the global financial crisis. There has been some good news, though. […]

If you’re historically inclined, you may be interested to know that the first swept-wing airplane appeared in 1907. It was built by J. W. Dunne, a gifted Irishman who also had some interesting ideas about the nature of Time. It had the distinction of being stable in all axes — uncapsizeable, in the boat-influenced language […]

When the FAA changed its weather reporting format to match the international metar standard several years ago many of us with more than a few years in the logbook scoffed. For one thing, what was a “metar” anyway? We had grown up, and grown old, with the sequence report that used to clatter out of […]

Oshkosh is the place to see and hear about new airplanes, many of which propose to revolutionize a category, or even create a new category of aircraft. The fact that virtually none succeed doesn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm of pilots, developers or investors. I have often said, and firmly believe, that to stay alive […]

Imagine an airplane — or house or car or spouse, for that matter — that you have loved for decades but over those years you have wished for some changes and improvements in key areas. The Hawker line of business jets has been admired by legions of pilots and passengers for more than 40 years, […]

Last year when Bend, Oregon, company Columbia Aircraft exhausted its last gasp efforts at getting enough cash to stay in business and declared bankruptcy, there was immediate speculation that Cessna would buy the company’s assets at auction. As it turned out, Cessna had been looking at that possibility for some time already. And by the […]

“It’s a one-G maneuver. It’s absolutely nonhazardous, but it’s very impressive.” So Tex Johnson explained himself to Boeing president Bill Allen after performing an impromptu barrel-roll in the 707 prototype before a Seattle gathering of IATA bigwigs. Equally impressive, but more subtle, was Bob Hoover’s demonstration, watchable on YouTube, that he could smoothly pour water […]