Airbus

When Ford Motor Co. chairman Bill Ford was asked at SXSW if we’d be seeing his company’s logo on a flying car anytime soon, his answer was simple: “No.” Flying car fever is gripping America’s tech-hungry population lately, as Dutch developer PAL-V announced in February that its Liberty, a three-wheel gyrocopter, is for sale and […]

Who says the era of the Airbus A380’s use is waning when clever minds can still find unique uses for the aircraft, or at least creations that look an awful lot like an A380? A select group of gardeners in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates city that doubles as home base to Emirates Airlines, think […]

Airbus, maker of airliners like the mammoth A380, also sees a market for smaller autonomous flying taxis using vertical takeoff and landing capabilities for short trips around big urban centers. The Airbus VTOL craft, carrying just a single person, would use environmentally friendly electric motors to spin the aircraft’s eight propellers. The eight propellers also […]

Fans of one of the most picturesque — and hair-raising — landings anywhere are lamenting the end of an era. Dutch carrier KLM will no longer fly the Boeing 747 to St. Maarten Airport. Beginning on October 30, the flights will be operated by the smaller, though still pretty cool, Airbus A330 instead. The landings […]

Airbus Group says it is developing the CityAirbus, an autonomous air taxi for individual passenger and cargo transport, scheduled to fly late next year. Launched in February, the vehicle is being developed by Airbus Helicopters. Studies of multi-passenger transport are also in the works. The vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) air taxi would use electric propulsion and multiple-ducted […]

Airbus caused a stir two years ago by announcing an ambitious plan to build a hybrid-electric four-seater for the U.S. light plane market dubbed the E-Fan 4.0, plus a smaller two-seat all-electric trainer called the E-Fan 2.0, both of which the company predicted would enter production before the decade was out. That idea has faded […]

The Airbus E-Fan 1.2, a new version of the aerospace giant’s vision for the future of general aviation flight, will make its U.S. debut next week at EAA AirVenture, highlighting a brand-new hybrid-electric propulsion system pioneered for the project with partner Siemens. This latest version of E-Fan features a gasoline engine that greatly extends the […]

The Perlan 2 atmospheric glider departed the U.S. this week, on a container ship no less, headed to El Calafate, Argentina, following six months of intensive flight testing in Minden, Nevada. Once it arrives in the Andes region, the aircraft will be reassembled to begin its high-altitude climate research mission. Lacking an engine that could […]

When we look down at the wheels of airplanes, we generally see something round. Imagine the surprise when the gate personnel at London Heathrow Airport identified one of the 22 wheels on an Airbus A380 was essentially a perfect square. The A380 had just landed at Heathrow, and the British Airways flight had arrived after […]

The rudder travel limiter of the Indonesia AirAsia Airbus A320 began acting up in January 2014. Attempts to fix it were unsuccessful, and failures became increasingly frequent. In the course of 74 flights between December 19 and December 27, 2014, the airplane’s electronic centralized aircraft monitoring system, or ECAM, reported more than 30 faults. Many […]