Aircraft

Insufficient testing and a poor understanding of a novel lithium-ion battery design contributed to the grounding of Boeing’s 787 fleet last year after two separate fire and smoke incidents in January 2013, according to a National Transportation Safety Board report issued on Monday. Boeing, the FAA and the 787’s Japanese battery maker shared the blame […]

Cirrus Aircraft celebrated the maiden flight of the second certification flight test Vision SF50 jet, dubbed C1, from the company’s headquarters in Duluth, Minnesota. C1 joins the first production test airplane, C0, in the FAA certification program, anticipated to lead to first customer deliveries of the single-engine Cirrus jet next year. C1’s first flight took […]

If you attended the Flying Aviation Expo in Palm Springs, California, you may have noticed a Pilatus PC-12 NG on display. If you didn’t take a closer look, you may not have noticed that this was not any Pilatus — it had been modified for special missions. Called the PC-12 NG Spectre, the airplane was […]

The Solar Impulse team has completed its last test flights in Switzerland and has started to disassemble the Solar Impulse 2 (Si2) in preparation for shipping to Abu Dhabi, where the all-solar-powered airplane will take off on its round-the-world journey. The team expects to start the historic flight in early March. After the first Solar […]

TBM fliers from near and far descended on New Orleans recently for Daher Socata’s record-breaking 2014 TBM Owners and Pilots Association convention. A total of 107 TBM airplanes – nearly ¼ of the entire North American TBM fleet – flew in for the event, raising attendance three percent over last year’s figures. The more than […]

The General Aviation Manufacturers Association and Build A Plane are gearing up for the third installment of their Aviation Design Challenge, in which high schools will put their aviation and aerospace knowledge to the test and compete for the big prize. The Challenge aims to promote science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. The first […]

Remember that record flyover of 49 Van’s RVs at last season’s Chiefs-Raiders game in Kansas City? The FAA remembers too. In the wake of that sanctioned overflight, some pilots of Experimental-category airplanes are now receiving letters of investigation from the agency for other flights that may have run afoul of regulations. Formation flights over NFL […]

Drones once again made headlines last week after several airline pilots flying around John F. Kennedy International Airport, one of the busiest airports in the world with more than 400,000 annual aircraft movements, spotted at least one drone flying around the airport property at altitudes as high as 3,000 feet, according to a statement from […]

I picked up a 180 hp Piper Super Cub at the Aspen, Colorado, airport (KASE) and made a slight left turn to allow my friend Joe to pass me in his faster aircraft. As I climbed through about 300 feet, I pulled the power back to reduce fuel consumption—with the climb prop on the Cub, […]

A little more than two years after Gulfstream achieved certification for the ultra-long-range G650, an airplane that held the crown as the fastest civilian airplane in the world until Cessna’s Citation X+ reclaimed the spot this year, the Savannah, Georgia-based company announced it has delivered the 100th airplane in the series. That is a very […]